The Alienist

CHAPTER 19

There were snow flurries that night, and Easter morning saw the city covered by a light white powder. At nine A.M. the thermometer still had not climbed above forty degrees (it would do so later that day, but just barely and only for a few minutes), and I really was tempted to stay at home and in bed. But Lucius Isaacson had important news for us all, or so he said in a telephone call; and so, with the bells of Grace Church clanging and scores of bonneted worshipers crowding around and through its doors, I trudged back into the headquarters that I’d left only half a dozen hours earlier.

Lucius had spent the previous evening interviewing Ali ibn-Ghazi’s father, from whom he had learned almost nothing. The elder Ghazi had been determinedly reticent, especially after Lucius had shown him his badge. Initially, Lucius had thought his uncooperative behavior nothing more than the usual slum dweller’s method of dealing with the police; but then Ghazi’s landlord had told Lucius, as the latter left the building, that Ghazi had received a visit that afternoon from a small group of men—including two priests. His general description of them had matched that given by Mrs. Santorelli; but the landlord had further noticed that one of the priests wore the distinctive signet ring of the Episcopal Church. This meant that, however improbable it might have seemed, Catholics and Protestants were working together toward some end. The landlord was of no help in determining that end, for he was unable to say what the two priests had spoken to Ghazi about; but immediately after their departure Ghazi had settled a sizable back rent debt, in full and in large notes. Lucius would have given us this news the night before, but after leaving the Syrian ghetto he had made what he thought would be a brief stop at the morgue. Thinking to find out whether Ali’s body had been inspected by a coroner, and, if it had, what official judgment had been passed on the matter, Lucius had been kept waiting for nearly three hours. He’d finally been informed that Ali’s body had already been removed for burial; and the only copy of the coroner’s report, which the night officer at the morgue assured Lucius had been unusually brief, had been dispatched to Mayor Strong’s office.

It was impossible to say precisely what the two priests, the coroner, the mayor, or anyone else involved in these activities was up to; but obfuscation and the suppression of facts seemed the very least of it. The feeling that we faced a greater challenge than simply catching our killer—a feeling that had taken seed after Giorgio Santorelli’s murder—now began to grow and chafe at each of us.

Spurred on by that sinister irritant, our team assumed and maintained a quickened pace over the next week or so. Murder sites and disorderly houses were visited and revisited by the Isaacsons, who spent hours trying to discover new clues and days trying to coax new information out of anyone who might have seen or heard anything of importance. But they generally ran up against the same wall of interference that had silenced Ali ibn-Ghazi’s father. Marcus, for example, was anxious to put the watchman from Castle Garden to a much more severe test than he’d been able to do on the night of Ali’s death—but when he returned to the old fort he was told that the watchman had quit his job and departed from the city, leaving no indication as to his destination. It was safe to assume, we all agreed, that wherever the man had disappeared to, he had taken with him one of the impressive wads of money that the two unidentified priests were dispensing around town.

Kreizler, Sara, and I, meanwhile, pressed on with the job of fleshing out our imaginary man by using persons apprehended for similar crimes as points of reference. Sadly, there continued to be no shortage of these; if anything, their number only increased as the weather improved. At least one incident, bizarrely enough, was actually inspired by the weather: Kreizler and I investigated the case of one William Scarlet, who was apprehended in his home while attempting to kill his eight-year-old daughter with a hatchet. A police patrolman called to the scene had been Scarlet’s next target, and the entire neighborhood of Thirty-second Street and Madison Avenue had been kept awake for hours by the assailant’s crazed ravings. Both the daughter and the patrolman had escaped without serious injury, and when Scarlet was arrested his only explanation was that he’d been driven mad by a powerful thunderstorm that had swept through the city that night. Surprisingly enough, Kreizler could find very little to dispute this. Scarlet actually loved his daughter dearly, and in the past had always shown the utmost respect for the law. Though Laszlo was inclined to view the proceedings as the result of some deeply buried twist in Scarlet’s mental development, the possibility that the sound of loud thunder had driven him temporarily insane could not be decisively ruled out. Whatever the case, it was without doubt an example of passing violent paroxysm, and thus of little use to us.

On the very next day, Kreizler took Sara along to investigate the case of Nicolo Garolo, an immigrant living on Park Row, who had severely stabbed his sister-in-law and the woman’s three-year-old daughter after the little girl allegedly claimed that Garolo was trying to “hurt” her. “Hurt” in this case clearly indicated sexual assault, to Laszlo, and the fact that all the participants were immigrants was also intriguing. The familial connection, however, ultimately limited the relevance of the crime to our work, although Garolo’s sister-in-law did provide Sara with some interesting material for the construction of her imaginary women.

In addition to all this, there were the papers to go through, twice a day, in order to cull bits of useful information. This was a fairly indirect process, however, being as the New York papers had begun one by one to stop covering the boy-whore murders in the days following the Castle Garden affair. In addition, the citizens’ group that was supposed to have been organizing for an information-gathering visit to City Hall never materialized. In short, the brief flicker of interest in the case that had been displayed outside the immigrant ghettos following the ibn-Ghazi murder had been very effectively snuffed out, leaving the daily papers with nothing to offer us but reports of other killings from around the country. These we patiently studied in an effort to gain more elements that could be used in the elaboration of theories.

It was not uplifting work; for while New York might have been America’s leading center of violent crime, particularly of those varieties directed toward children, the rest of the United States was doing its part to keep national statistics high. There was, for example, the vagabond in Indiana (once interned in an asylum but recently released as sane) who killed the children of a woman who had hired him to do menial work; or the thirteen-year-old girl in Washington whose throat had been cut in Rock Creek Park for absolutely no reason that anyone could divine; and the reverend in Salt Lake City who murdered as many as seven girls and burned their remains in a furnace. We studied all these cases and many more—indeed, every day presented us with at least one incident or criminal to hold up against our developing portrait for comparison. Without doubt, most of these examples involved behavior of a paroxysmal nature: either alcohol- or drug-induced rages, which would pass with the return of sobriety, or temporary brain malfunctions (such as certain rare types of epileptic seizure), which would go into remission on their own. Occasionally, however, there was a case involving careful premeditation, and when the assessments of the mental examiners in such instances were published, or when reports on the trials of the culprits appeared, they sometimes provided small grains of genuine insight.

Even Kreizler’s servants were contributing to the quest for a solution, either through example or direct participation. I have already described my own speculations concerning Mary Palmer and the possible parallel between her case and ours. Those thoughts were duly weighed and their salient aspects recorded on the big chalkboard, although Mary herself was never consulted about them, as Laszlo continued to insist that she be told as little as possible about the case. Cyrus, on the other hand, had managed to get hold of much of the reading material that Kreizler had assigned to the rest of us, and he devoured it eagerly. He made no comments during meetings save when asked, but at those moments he often proved quite insightful. At one midnight conference, for instance, when we were speculating on the mental and physical condition of our murderer immediately after he’d committed his crimes, we suddenly came hard up against the fact that none of us had ever taken the life of another human being. We all knew, of course, that there was someone in the room who had, but none of us felt much like asking Cyrus for an experienced opinion—none of us, that is, except Kreizler, who had no trouble posing the question in simple, straightforward language. Cyrus answered in much the same way, confirming that after his act of violence he would have been capable of neither elaborate planning nor extensive physical exertion; but we were all surprised when he punctuated this statement with some interesting thoughts on Cesare Lombroso, the Italian sometimes supposed to be the father of modern criminology.

Lombroso had postulated the existence of a criminal “type” of human being (in essence a throwback to early, savage man), but Cyrus stated that he found such a theory implausible, given the wide range of motivations and behaviors he’d recently learned could be involved in criminal actions—including his own. Interestingly enough, Dr. H. H. Holmes, the mass murderer who was waiting to be hanged in Philadelphia, had stated during the course of his trial that he believed himself to be representative of Lombroso’s criminal type. Mental, moral, and physical degeneracy had accounted for his actions, Holmes claimed, and so his legal responsibility should of course be considered as diminished. The argument had gotten him nowhere in court; and after discussing his and other cases, we concluded that our killer’s work could no more be ascribed to evolutionary retrogression than could Holmes’s. In both subjects, the intellectual capacity demonstrated was simply too significant.

And then there was the day that young Stevie Taggert drove me down to meet the Isaacsons under the Brooklyn Bridge. Stevie had been continuing to run “errands” for me on a regular basis, and the process of keeping this activity hidden from Kreizler had forged something of a bond between us, one that permitted straightforward communication. At any rate, we received word one morning that two young girls playing under the Rose Street arch of the Brooklyn Bridge had come upon an abandoned wagon, the freight compartment of which contained a human skull, arm, and hand. Although the crime didn’t resemble our killer’s work in terms of style, the fact that the wagon had been left under a bridge recalled our man’s penchant for water and the structures near it, so we thought it worthwhile to take a look. The body parts, however, proved to be those of an adult, as well as utterly unidentifiable. And, since Marcus found no fingerprints on the wagon that matched those of our murderer, he and Lucius released the gruesome discovery into the care of the city’s chief coroner. In order to avoid questions, I departed in the calash before the men from the morgue arrived; and as we made our way back uptown, Stevie put a question to me:

“Mr. Moore, sir—about the man you’re looking for. I heard Dr. Kreizler say the other day that none of the dead boys had been—well, you know, sir, ‘assaulted.’ Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s been true so far, Stevie. Why?”

“It’s just that it makes me wonder, sir. Does that mean he ain’t a fag?”

I sat up at the frankness of the query—sometimes you had to work very hard to remember that Stevie was only twelve. “No, that doesn’t mean that he’s not a—a fag, Stevie. But the fact that his victims do the work they do doesn’t mean that he is one, either.”

“You figure maybe he just hates fags?”

“That may have something to do with it.”

We fought our way through the traffic on Houston Street, Stevie struggling with his emerging line of reasoning and seemingly oblivious to the whores, drug fiends, peddlers, and beggars that swarmed around us. “What I’m thinking, Mr. Moore, is that maybe he is a fag, and maybe he hates fags, too. Kinda like that guard who gimme such a hard time out on Randalls Island.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get you,” I said.

“Well, you know, in court, when I was up for cracking that guy’s skull, they tried to make me out for crazy, saying the guy had a wife and kids and all, so how could he be a fag? And in the Refuge House, if he caught two boys going at each other like that, brother, would he lay into ’em. But all the same, I wasn’t the first kid he tried it with. No, sir. So I figure maybe that’s why he had such a mean disposition—he never really knew, deep down, just what he was. Know what I mean, Mr. Moore?”

Remarkably enough, I did know what he meant. We’d had many long discussions at our headquarters concerning the sexual proclivities of our killer, and we would have many more before our work was done; yet Stevie had come close to crystallizing all our conclusions in that one statement.

There really wasn’t one of us whose brain wasn’t working overtime to come up with ideas and theories that would propel our investigation forward; but, as might be expected, no one was working harder than Kreizler. In fact, his exertions grew so continuous, and at times so excessive, that I began to worry about his physical and nervous health. After one twenty-four-hour period when he stayed at his desk with a stack of almanacs and a large sheet of paper bearing the four dates of the recent murders (January 1st, February 2nd, March 3rd, and April 3rd), trying to unlock the mystery of when our man chose to kill, Laszlo’s face became so pale and haggard that I ordered Cyrus to remove him to his home for some rest. I remembered Sara’s statement that Kreizler seemed to have some sort of personal stake in the work we were doing; and though I wanted to ask her for elaboration, I feared that such a conversation would only revive my tendency to speculate about their personal relationship, which was neither any of my business nor conducive to productive work on the case.

But a discussion became inevitable one morning, when Kreizler—fresh from a long night at his Institute, where there’d been trouble concerning a new student and her parents—set off without a break to do a mental competency assessment of a man who’d dismembered his wife on a homemade altar. Laszlo had lately been gathering evidence to support the theory that our murders were being conducted as bizarre rituals, during which the killer—much like a Mohammedan whirling dervish—used extreme yet fairly formalized physical action to bring about psychic relief. Kreizler based this idea on several facts: the boys were all strangled before they were mutilated, thus giving the killer complete control over the scene as he played it out; furthermore, the mutilations followed an extremely consistent pattern, centering on the removal of the eyes; and finally, every killing had occurred near water, and on a structure whose function arose from that same water. Other murderers were known to have viewed their grim deeds as personal rites, and Kreizler believed that if he could talk to enough of them he’d begin to understand how to read any messages that might be contained in the mutilations themselves. Such work, however, was especially hard on the nerves, even for an experienced alienist like Kreizler; add to this his general state of overworked exhaustion, and you produced a formula for trouble.

On the morning in question, Sara and I—just coming into Number 808 Broadway as Kreizler went out—happened to be watching as Laszlo tried to enter his calash and very nearly fainted. He shook the spell off with ammonia salts and a laugh, but Cyrus told us that this time it had been two days since he’d had anything like real sleep.

“He’ll kill himself if he doesn’t slow down,” Sara said, as the calash rolled off and we got into the elevator. “He’s trying to make up for the lack of clues and facts with effort. As if he can force an answer to this thing.”

“He’s always been that way,” I replied, shaking my head. “Even when we were boys, he was always at something, and always so deadly serious. It was somewhat amusing, in those days.”

“Well, he’s not a child now, and he ought to learn to take care of himself.” That was Sara’s tough side talking; it was a different tone that came through when she asked, with what seemed affected casualness and without looking at me, “Have there never been any women in his life, John?”

“There was his sister,” I answered, knowing that it wasn’t what she was driving at. “They used to be very close, but she’s married now. To an Englishman, a baronet or some such.”

With what I thought was effort, Sara remained dispassionate. “But no women—romantically, I mean?”

“Oh. Yes, well, there was Frances Blake. He met her at Harvard and for a couple of years it looked as though they might get married. I never saw it, myself—for my money she was something of a shrew. He seemed to find her charming, though.”

Sara’s most mischievous smile, that tiny curl of her upper lip, appeared. “Perhaps she reminded him of someone.”

“She reminded me of a shrew. Look, Sara, what do you mean when you say Kreizler seems as though he’s got some personal stake in this thing? Personal how?”

“I’m not quite sure, John,” she answered, as we walked into our headquarters and found the Isaacsons engaged in a vehement squabble over some evidential details. “But I can say this—” Sara lowered her voice, indicating that she didn’t wish to pursue the conversation in front of any of the others. “It’s more than just his reputation, and more than just scientific curiosity. It’s something old and deep. He’s a very deep man, your friend Dr. Kreizler.”

With that Sara drifted off to the kitchen to make herself some tea, and I was dragged into the Isaacsons’ argument.

Thus did we pass most of April, with the weather warming up, small pieces of information slowly but steadily falling into place, and questions about each other opening wider without being openly addressed. There would be time to explore such matters later, I kept telling myself—for now the work was what mattered, the job at hand, on which depended who knew how many lives. Focus was the key—focus and preparation, readiness to meet whatever could be hatched from the mind of the man we sought. I took this attitude confidently, feeling, after viewing two of his victims, that I’d seen the worst he had to offer.

But an incident that occurred at the end of the month presented my teammates and me with a new kind of horror, one born not of blood but of words—one that, in its own way, was as terrible as anything we’d yet encountered.