The Alienist

CHAPTER 21

First of all,” Kreizler announced, as we came into our headquarters that night and began to settle ourselves at our desks, “I think we can finally dispense with one lingering uncertainty.” At the top right-hand corner of the chalkboard, under the ASPECTS OF THE CRIMES heading, sat the word ALONE, with a question mark after it—a question mark that Laszlo now removed. We were already relatively certain that our killer had no accomplices: no pair or team of confederates, we’d reasoned, could have engaged in such behavior for a period of years without some one of them revealing it. During the initial phase of the investigation the only catch to this theory had been the question of how one man on his own could have negotiated the walls and rooftops of the various disorderly houses and murder sites; Marcus, however, had taken care of that problem. Thus, while the use of the pronoun “I” in the letter was not conclusive in and of itself, it seemed, when taken in conjunction with these other facts, definitive evidence that a solitary man was at work.

We all nodded assent to this reasoning, and Kreizler went on: “Now, then—to the salutation. Why ‘My dear Mrs. Santorelli’?”

“Could be habit of form,” Marcus answered. “It would be consistent with his schooling.”

“‘My dear’?” Sara queried. “Wouldn’t schoolchildren learn just ‘dear’?”

“Sara’s right,” said Lucius. “It’s overly affectionate and informal. He knows his letter is going to devastate the woman, and he’s enjoying it. He’s playing with her, sadistically.”

“Agreed,” Kreizler said, underlining the word SADISM, which was already written on the right-hand side of the board.

“And I’d like to point out, Doctor,” Lucius added with conviction, “that this further demonstrates the nature of his hunting.” (Lucius had lately become firmly convinced that our killer’s apparent anatomical knowledge arose from his being an accomplished hunter, because of the stalking nature of many of his activities.) “We’ve already dealt with the blood-lust aspect—but the toying confirms something else, something beyond even blood-crazed hunting. It’s a sporting mentality.”

Laszlo weighed it. “Your argument is sound, Detective Sergeant,” he said, writing SPORTSMAN so that it bridged the CHILDHOOD and INTERVAL areas. “But I’ll need a bit more convincing”—he chalked on a question mark after the word—“given the prerequisite and its implications.”

The prerequisite for the killer’s being a sportsman, put simply, was a certain amount of leisure time in his youth, when he could have engaged in hunting not only for survival, but for pleasure, as well. This, in turn, implied either that he had an upper-class urban background (the upper being the only real leisure class in the city in those days before child labor laws, when even middle-class parents tended to work their offspring long hours), or that he had been brought up in a rural area. Each assumption would have narrowed our search significantly, and Laszlo needed to be completely certain of our reasoning before he would accept either of them.

“As for his opening statement,” Kreizler went on. “Aside from the pronounced emphasis on ‘lies’—”

“That word has been retraced several times,” Marcus cut in. “There’s a lot of feeling behind it.”

“Then lies are not a new phenomenon for him,” Sara extrapolated. “You get the feeling he’s all too familiar with dishonesty and hypocrisy.”

“And yet is still outraged by them,” Kreizler said. “Any theories?”

“It ties in with the boys,” I offered. “In the first place, they’re dressed up as girls—a kind of deceit. Also, they’re whores, and they’re supposed to be compliant—but we know that the ones he killed could be troublesome.”

“Good,” Kreizler said with a nod. “So he doesn’t like misrepresentation. Yet he’s a liar himself—we need an explanation for that.”

“He’s learned,” Sara said simply. “He’s been exposed to dishonesty, surrounded by it perhaps, and he does hate it—but he’s picked it up as a method of getting by.”

“And you only do that kind of learning once,” I added. “It’s the same thing as the violence: he saw it, he didn’t like it, but he learned it. The law of habit and interest, just like Professor James says—our minds work on the basis of self-interest, the survival of the organism, and our habitual ways of pursuing that interest become defined when we’re children and adolescents.”

Lucius had grabbed volume one of James’s Principles and leafed to a page: “‘The character has set like plaster,’” he quoted, holding a finger up, “‘never to soften again.’”

“Even if…?” Kreizler asked, drawing him out.

“Even if,” Lucius answered quickly, flipping a page and scanning it with his finger, “those habits become counterproductive in adulthood. Here: ‘Habit dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.’”

“A spirited reading, Detective Sergeant,” Kreizler observed, “but we need examples. We have postulated an original violent experience or experiences, perhaps sexual in nature”—Laszlo indicated a small blank square in the CHILDHOOD section of the board that was boxed off and subheaded THE MOLDING VIOLENCE AND/OR MOLESTATION—“which we suspect form the basis of his understanding and practice of such behavior. But what of the very strong emotions centered on dishonesty? Can we do the same?”

I shrugged. “Obviously, he might himself have been accused of it. Unjustly, in all likelihood. Perhaps frequently.”

“Sound,” Kreizler answered, chalking the word DISHONESTY, and then beneath it, BRANDED A LIAR, on the left-hand side of the board.

“And then there’s the family situation,” Sara added. “There’s a lot of lying that goes on in a family. Adultery is probably the first thing we think of, but—”

“But it doesn’t tie in to the violence,” Kreizler finished. “And I suspect that it must. Could the dishonesty apply to the violence—to violent incidents that were deliberately concealed and remained unacknowledged both inside and outside the family?”

“Certainly,” Lucius said. “And it would be all the worse if the image of the family was something very different.”

Kreizler smiled with real satisfaction. “Precisely. Then if we have an outwardly respectable father who at the very least beats his wife and children…”

Lucius’s face screwed up a bit. “I didn’t necessarily mean a father. It could have been anyone in the family.”

Laszlo waved him off. “The father would be the greatest betrayal.”

“Not the mother?” Sara said carefully. And there was more in the question than just the subject at hand: at that moment it seemed that she was trying to read Laszlo as much as the killer.

“There’s no literature to suggest it,” Kreizler answered. “The recent findings of Breuer and Freud on hysteria point to prepubertal sexual abuse by the father in nearly every case.”

“With all due respect, Dr. Kreizler,” Sara protested, “Breuer and Freud seem fairly confused about the meaning of their findings. Freud began by assuming sexual abuse as the basis for all hysteria, but recently he seems to have altered that view, and decided that fantasies concerning abuse may be the actual cause.”

“Indeed,” Kreizler acknowledged. “There is much that remains unclear in their work. I myself cannot accept the single-minded emphasis on sex—to the exclusion even of violence. But look at it from an empirical standpoint, Sara—how many households have you known that were ruled by dominating, violent mothers?”

Sara shrugged. “There is more than one kind of violence, Doctor—but I shall have more to say about that when we reach the end of the letter.”

Kreizler had already written VIOLENT BUT OUTWARDLY RESPECTABLE FATHER on the left-hand side of the board, and seemed ready, even anxious, to move on. “This entire first paragraph,” he said, slapping at the note. “Despite its deliberate misspellings, it has a consistent tone.”

“You get that immediately,” Marcus answered. “He’s already decided in his mind that there are a lot of people after him.”

“I think I know what you’re driving at, Doctor,” Lucius said, again rifling through the stack of books and papers on his desk. “One of the articles you gave us to read, the one you translated yourself…ah!” He yanked one set of papers free. “Here—Dr. Krafft-Ebing. He discusses ‘intellectual monomania,’ as well as what the Germans call ‘primäre Verrücktheit,’ and argues for replacing both terms with the word ‘paranoia.’”

Kreizler nodded as he wrote the word PARANOID on the INTERVAL section of the board: “Feelings, perhaps even delusions, of persecution that have taken root after some traumatic emotional experience or set of experiences, but which do not result in dementia—Krafft-Ebing’s admirably succinct definition, and it does seem to fit. I very much doubt that our man is in a deluded state as yet, but his behavior is probably quite antisocial, nevertheless. Which does not mean that we seek a misanthrope—that would be too simple.”

“Couldn’t the murders themselves satisfy the antisocial drive?” Sara asked. “Leaving him, the rest of the time, outwardly normal and—well, participatory, functional?”

“Perhaps even overly functional,” Kreizler agreed. “This will not be a man who, in the opinion of his neighbors, could slaughter children and claim to have eaten them.” Kreizler jotted these ideas down and then faced us again. “And so—we arrive at the second and even more extraordinary paragraph.”

“One thing it tells us right away,” Marcus pronounced. “He hasn’t traveled much abroad. I don’t know what he’s been reading, but widespread cannibalism hasn’t been seen in Europe lately. They’ll eat just about anything else, but not each other. Although you can never be quite sure about the Germans…” Marcus caught himself and glanced at Kreizler. “Oh. No offense intended, Doctor,” he said.

Lucius clapped a hand to his forehead, but Kreizler only smiled wryly. The Isaacsons’ idiosyncrasies no longer perplexed him in any way. “No offense taken, Detective Sergeant—you can, indeed, never be certain about the Germans. But if we accept that his travel has been limited to the United States, what are we to make of your theory that his mountaineering skills indicate a European heritage?”

Marcus shrugged. “First-generation American. The parents were immigrants.”

Sara drew a quick breath. “‘Dirty immigrants’!”

Kreizler’s face filled with gratification again. “Indeed,” he said, writing IMMIGRANT PARENTS on the left side of the chalkboard. “The phrase resounds with loathing, doesn’t it? It’s the kind of hatred that generally has a specific root, obscure though it may be. In this case, he probably had a troubled relationship with one or both parents early on, and eventually grew to despise everything about them—including their heritage.”

“Yet it’s his own heritage, too,” I said. “That might account for some of the savagery toward the children. It’s self-loathing, as if he’s trying to clean the dirt out of himself.”

“An interesting phrase, John,” Kreizler answered. “And one we shall return to. But there is one more practical question to be answered here. Given the hunting and the mountaineering, and now the supposition that he has not been abroad, can we say anything about the geographical background?”

“Same thing as before,” Lucius replied. “Either a rich city family, or the countryside.”

“Detective Sergeant?” Laszlo said to Marcus. “Would any one region be better than another for this training?”

Marcus shook his head. “You could learn it anywhere that had appreciable rock formations—which means a lot of places in the United States.”

“Hmmm,” Laszlo agreed, with some disappointment. “Not much help there. Let’s let it lie for now and go back to that second paragraph. The language itself would seem to support your theory concerning the ‘upper-zone flourishes’ of the handwriting, Marcus. This is indeed an imaginative tale.”

“That’s a hell of an imagination,” I said.

“True, John,” Kreizler answered. “Without doubt, excessive and morbid.”

Lucius snapped his fingers at that. “Wait,” he said, again going for his books. “I’m remembering something—”

“Sorry, Lucius,” Sara called, with one of her curling little smiles. “I’ve beaten you to it.” She held up an open medical journal. “This fits in with the dishonesty discussion, Doctor,” she went on. “In his article ‘A Schedule for the Study of Mental Abnormalities in Children,’ Dr. Meyer lists some of the warning signs for predicting future dangerous behavior—excessive imagination is one of them.” She read from the article, which had appeared in the Handbook of the Illinois Society for Child-Study in February of 1895: “‘Normally children can reproduce voluntarily all sorts of mental pictures in the dark. This becomes abnormal when the mental pictures become an obsession, i.e., cannot be suppressed. Especially pictures that create fear and unpleasant feelings are apt to become excessively strong.’” Sara emphasized the final sentence of the quotation: “‘Excessive imagination may lead to the construction of lies and the irresistible impulse to play them on others.’”

“Thank you, Sara,” Kreizler said. MORBID IMAGINATION then went up on both the CHILDHOOD and ASPECTS sections of the chalkboard, which puzzled me. To my request for an explanation Laszlo replied, “He may be writing this letter in his adulthood, John, but so distinctive an imagination does not spring to life in maturity. It’s been with him always—and Meyer is borne out here, incidentally, for this child did indeed become dangerous.”

Marcus was tapping a pencil into one hand thoughtfully. “Any chance this cannibalism business was a childhood nightmare? He says he’s read it. Any chance he read it then? The effect would have been greater.”

“Ask yourself a more basic question,” Laszlo answered. “What is the strongest force behind imagination? Normal imagination, but also and particularly the morbid?”

Sara had no trouble with that: “Fear.”

“Fear of what you see,” Laszlo pressed, “or of what you hear?”

“Both,” Sara answered. “But mostly what you hear—‘nothing is as terrible in reality,’ et cetera.”

“Isn’t reading a form of hearing?” Marcus asked.

“Yes, but even well-to-do children don’t learn to read until many years into childhood,” Kreizler answered. “I offer this only as a theory, but suppose the cannibalism story was then what it is now—a tale designed to terrify. Only now, rather than the terrorized party, our man is the terrorizer. As we’ve constructed him thus far, wouldn’t he find that immensely satisfying, even amusing?”

“But who told it to him?” Lucius asked.

Kreizler shrugged. “Who generally terrifies children with stories?”

“Adults who want them to behave,” I answered quickly. “My father had a story about the Japanese emperor’s torture chamber that had me up for nights, picturing every detail—”

“Excellent, Moore! My very point.”

“But what about—” Lucius’s words became a bit halting. “What about the—I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I still don’t know how to discuss certain things with a lady present.”

“Then pretend one isn’t,” Sara said, a bit impatiently.

“Well,” Lucius went on, no more comfortably, “what about the focus on the—buttocks?”

“Ah, yes,” Kreizler answered. “Part of the original story, do we think? Or a twist of our man’s invention?”

“Uhhh—” I droned, having thought of something but, like Lucius, unsure of how to phrase it in front of a woman. “The, uh—the—references, not only to dirt, but to—fecal matter—”

“The word he uses is ‘shit,’ ” Sara said bluntly, and everyone in the room, including Kreizler, seemed to spring a few inches off the floor for a second or two. “Honestly, gentlemen,” Sara commented with some disdain. “If I’d known you were all so modest I’d have stuck to secretarial work.”

“Who’s modest?” I demanded—not one of my stronger retorts.

Sara frowned at me. “You, John Schuyler Moore. I happen to know that you have, on occasion, paid members of the female sex to spend intimate moments with you—I suppose they were strangers to that kind of language?”

“No,” I protested, aware that my face was a bright red beacon. “But they weren’t—weren’t—”

“Weren’t?” Sara asked sternly.

“Weren’t—well, ladies!”

At that Sara stood up, put one hand to a hip, and with the other produced her derringer from some nether region of her dress. “I would like to warn you all right now,” she said tightly, “that the next man who uses the word ‘lady,’ in that context and in my presence, will be shitting from a new and artificially manufactured hole in his gut.” She put the gun away and sat back down.

The room was as quiet as the grave for half a minute, and then Kreizler spoke softly: “I believe you were discussing the references to shit, Moore?”

I gave Sara a rather injured and indignant glance—which she thoroughly ignored, the wretch—and then resumed my thought: “They seem connected—all the scatological references and the preoccupation with that part of the anato—” I could feel Sara’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my head. “And the preoccupation with the ass,” I finished, as defiantly as I could manage.

“Indeed they do,” Kreizler said. “Connected metaphorically as well as anatomically. It’s puzzling—and there’s not a great deal of literature on such subjects. Meyer has speculated on the possible causes and implications of nocturnal urinary incontinence, and anyone who works with children finds the occasional subject who is abnormally fixated on feces. Most alienists and psychologists, however, consider this a form of mysophobia—the morbid fear of dirt and contamination, which our man certainly seems to have.” Kreizler chalked the word MYSOPHOBIA up in the center of the board, but then stood away from it, looking dissatisfied. “There seems, however, more to it than just that…”

“Doctor,” Sara said, “I’ve got to urge you again to broaden your concepts of the mother and father in this case. I know your experience with children past a certain age is as extensive as anyone’s, but have you ever been closely involved with the care of an infant?”

“Only as a physician,” Kreizler answered. “And then rarely. Why, Sara?”

“It’s not a time of childhood that men figure greatly in, as a rule. Do any of you know men who have played a large part in raising children younger than, say, three or four?” We all shook our heads. I suspect that even if one of us had known such a man he would have denied it, just to keep the derringer out of sight. Sara turned back to Laszlo. “And when you find children with an abnormal fixation on defecation, Doctor, what form does it generally take?”

“Either an excessive urge or morbid reluctance. Generally.”

“Urge or reluctance to what?”

“To go to the toilet.”

“And how have they learned to go to the toilet?” Sara asked, keeping right after Kreizler.

“They’ve been taught.”

“By men, generally?”

Kreizler had to pause, at that. The line of questioning had seemed obscure at first, but now we could all see where Sara was going: if our killer’s rather obsessive concern with feces, buttocks, and the more generalized “dirt” (no subjects were, after all, mentioned more in the note) had been implanted in childhood, it was likely that contact with a woman or women—mother, nurse, governess, or what have you—had been involved in the process.

“I see,” Kreizler finally said. “I take it, then, that you have yourself observed the process, Sara?”

“Occasionally,” she replied. “And I’ve heard stories. A girl does. It’s always assumed that you’ll need the knowledge. The whole affair can be surprisingly difficult—embarrassing, frustrating, sometimes even violent. I wouldn’t bring it up, except that the references are so insistent. Doesn’t it suggest something out of the ordinary?”

Laszlo cocked his head. “Perhaps. I’m afraid I can’t consider such observations conclusive, however.”

“Won’t you at least consider the possibility that a woman—perhaps the mother, though not necessarily—has played a darker role than you’ve yet allowed?”

“I hope that I am not deaf to any possibilities,” Kreizler said, turning to the board but writing nothing. “However, I fear we have strayed too far into the realm of the barely plausible.”

Sara sat back, again disappointed at the result of her attempts to make Kreizler see another dimension in the imaginary tale of our killer. And I must confess, I was somewhat confused myself; after all, it had been Kreizler who had asked Sara to come up with such theories, knowing that none of us could. To dismiss her thoughts in such a manner seemed arbitrary at best, especially when those thoughts sounded (to the semitrained ear, at any rate) as well reasoned as his own hypotheses.

“The resentment of immigrants is repeated in the third paragraph,” Kreizler said, plowing on. “And then there is the reference to a ‘Red Injun.’ Other than another attempt to make us think him an ignoramus, what do we make of it?”

“The whole phrase seems important,” Lucius answered. “‘Dirtier than a Red Injun.’ He was looking for a superlative, and that’s what he came up with.”

Marcus pondered the question: “If we assume that the immigrant resentment is family-based, then he himself isn’t an Indian. But he must’ve had some kind of contact with them.”

“Why?” Kreizler asked. “Race hatred doesn’t require familiarity.”

“No, but the two usually do accompany each other,” Marcus insisted. “And look at the phrase itself—it’s fairly casual, as if he naturally associates filth with Indians and assumes everyone else does, too.”

I nodded, seeing his point. “That’d be out west. You don’t usually hear that kind of talk in the East—it’s not that we’re more enlightened, by any means, but too few people share the point of reference. What I mean is, if he’d said ‘dirtier than a nigger,’ you might guess the South, right?”

“Or Mulberry Street,” Lucius suggested quietly.

“True,” I acknowledged. “I’m not saying the attitude’s confined. After all, this could just be somebody who’s read too many Wild West stories—”

“Or someone with excessive imagination,” Sara added.

“But,” I went on, “it might work as a general indication.”

“Well, it’s the obvious implication,” Kreizler sighed, piquing me a bit. “But someone somewhere said that we must never overlook the obvious. What about it, Marcus—does the idea of a frontier upbringing appeal?”

Marcus thought it over. “It has attractions. First of all, it explains the knife, which is a frontier weapon. It also gives us the hunting, recreational and otherwise, without the need for a wealthy background. And while there’s plenty of terrain for mountaineering in the west, it’s concentrated in specific areas, which might help. There are whole communities of German and Swiss immigrants out there, too.”

“Then we shall mark it as a favored possibility,” Kreizler said, doing so on the board, “though we can go no farther for the time being. That takes us to the next paragraph, at which point our man finally gets down to specifics.” Kreizler picked up the note again, and then began to rub the back of his neck slowly. “On February eighteenth he spots the Santorelli boy. Having spent more time than I’d care to admit going over calendars and almanacs, I can tell you right away that February eighteenth was Ash Wednesday this year.”

“He mentions ashes on the face,” Lucius added. “That would mean that the boy went to church.”

“The Santorellis are Catholic,” Marcus added. “There aren’t many churches near Paresis Hall, Catholic or otherwise, but we could try checking a broader area. It’s possible someone will remember seeing Giorgio. He would have been fairly distinctive, especially in a church setting.”

“And it’s always possible that the killer got his first glimpse of him near the church,” I said. “Or even in it. If we get lucky, someone may have witnessed the meeting.”

“You two seem to have planned your weekend quite thoroughly,” Kreizler answered, at which Marcus and I, realizing that we’d proposed long days of footwork, frowned at each other. “Although,” Laszlo went on, “the use of the word ‘parading’ makes me doubt that they met very near a house of worship—particularly one in which Giorgio had just attended services.”

“It does suggest that the boy was hawking his wares,” I said.

“It suggests many things.” Laszlo thought for a moment, sounding the word: “‘Parading…’ It might fit with your idea that the man suffers from a disability or deformity of some kind, Moore. There’s a trace of envy in the word, as if he himself is excluded from such behavior.”

“I don’t quite see that,” Sara answered. “It sounds more—disdainful, to me. That could simply be due to Giorgio’s occupation, of course, but I don’t think so. There’s no pity or sympathy in the tone, only harshness. And a certain sense of familiarity, as with the lying.”

“Right,” I said. “It’s that lecturing tone you’d get from a schoolmaster who knows just what you’re up to because he was a boy once himself.”

“Then you’re saying he disdains an open display of sexual behavior, not because he was prevented from engaging in such activities himself, but precisely because he did engage in them?” Laszlo cocked his head and puzzled with the notion. “Perhaps. But wouldn’t the adults in his life have stifled such antics? And doesn’t that lead us back to the idea of envy, even if there’s no physical deformity?”

“But the issue must still have caused a scene, at least once,” Sara volleyed, “in order for such restrictions to have been laid down.”

Laszlo paused and then nodded. “Yes. Yes, you have a point, Sara.” That brought a small but satisfied smile to her face. “And then,” Kreizler continued, “whether he defied or submitted to the ban, the seed of future difficulty would have been planted. Good.” Kreizler made a few quick scribbles to this effect on the left-hand side of the board. “On, then, to the ashes and paint.”

“He puts the two together very easily,” Lucius said, “whereas, to the average observer, there’d appear to be some inconsistency—I’ll bet the priest at the service thought so.”

“It’s as if the one isn’t any better than the other,” Marcus added. “The tone remains pretty deprecating.”

“And that presents a problem.” Kreizler went to his desk and fetched a bound calendar, one that bore a cross on its cover. “On February eighteenth he saw Giorgio Santorelli for the first time, and I very much doubt that the encounter was accidental. The specificity suggests that he was out looking for just that type of boy on that day in particular. We have to assume, therefore, that the fact of its being Ash Wednesday is significant. In addition, the ashes, in tandem with the paint, seem to have heightened his reaction, which was essentially one of anger. That might suggest that he resented a boy-whore’s presuming to participate in a Christian rite—yet as the detective sergeants have noted, there is no sense of reverence for that rite in his language. Quite the contrary. I have not, to this point, believed that we are dealing with a man who suffers from a religious mania. The evangelical and messianic qualities that tend to mark such pathologies are not displayed, even in this note. And though my conviction in this regard has, admittedly, been a bit weakened by the schedule of the killings, the indications remain contradictory.” Kreizler studied the calendar hard. “If there were only some significance to the day Giorgio was killed…”

We knew what he was referring to. Laszlo’s recent investigation of the timings of the murders had revealed that all save one could be tied to the Christian calendar: January 1st marked the circumcision of Jesus and the Feast of Fools; February 2nd was the Purification of the Virgin Mary, or Candlemas Day; and Ali ibn-Ghazi had died on Good Friday. There had been holy days when no murders had taken place, of course—Epiphany, for instance, had passed without incident, as had the Five Wounds of Christ on February 20th. But if March 3rd, the date of the Santorelli killing, had possessed a Christian connotation, we could have been relatively certain that some kind of religious element was involved in our man’s timing. No such connotation existed, however.

“Then maybe we’re back to the theory of the lunar cycle,” Marcus said, bringing up a very old bit of folk wisdom that we’d spent a fair amount of time debating, which ran to the effect that behavior such as our killer’s was somehow connected to the waxing and waning of the moon, making it true “lunacy.”

“I still don’t like it,” Kreizler said with a wave of his hand, eyes ever on his calendar.

“The moon has been linked to other physical and behavioral shifts,” Sara said. “You’ll find a lot of women, for instance, who believe it controls the menstrual cycle.”

“And our man’s urges do seem to run according to a cycle of some kind,” Lucius agreed.

“So they do,” Kreizler replied. “But the suggestion of such an unprovable astrological influence on psychobiology draws us away from the ritualistic nature of the murders. The claimed cannibalism is a new and apparently distinct element of those rituals, I’ll admit. But the savagery has been consistently rising, and it was almost predictable that we should reach some such crescendo—although the absence of that particular feature in the ibn-Ghazi murder suggests he may have ventured into an area that, whatever his shocking statements in the note, was not truly to his liking.”

The conversation ground to a halt for a moment, and as it did an idea began to form in my mind. “Kreizler,” I said, carefully weighing my words, “let’s assume for a moment that we’re right about all this. You’ve said yourself that it seems to further reinforce the notion that there’s a religious element to the murders.”

Kreizler turned to me, weariness starting to show in his eyes. “It can be taken that way,” he said.

“Well, what about our two priests, then? We’ve already figured that their behavior could easily be seen as an attempt to protect someone. Suppose it’s one of their own?”

“Ahh,” Lucius said quietly. “You’re thinking of someone like that reverend in Salt Lake City, John?”

“Exactly,” I answered. “A holy man gone very wrong. One with a second, and secret, life. Suppose his superiors have gotten wind of what he’s doing, but they can’t locate him for some reason—maybe he’s gone into hiding. The potential for scandal would be enormous. And given the role that the Catholic and Episcopal churches play in the life of this city, the leaders of either group could easily get not only the mayor’s office but the richest men in town to help them conceal it. Until they can deal with it privately, I mean.” I sat back, rather proud of this bit of work, but waiting for Kreizler’s reaction. His continued silence didn’t seem a good sign; so I added, a bit uncomfortably, “It’s just a thought.”

“It’s a damned good thought,” Marcus judged, with an enthusiastic knock of his pencil against his desk.

“It might tie a lot of things together,” Sara agreed.

Kreizler finally began to react: a slow nod. “It might, indeed,” he said, as he scrawled INCOGNITO PRIEST? in the center of the board. “The traits of background and character that we have described could fit a man of the cloth as well as any other—and the fact of his being a priest offers an attractive alternative to a religious mania. These could be personal conflicts playing out according to a schedule that happens to be natural, even convenient, for him. A more vigorous investigation of those other two priests will doubtless shed further light on the subject.” Kreizler turned. “And that—”

“I know, I know,” I said, holding up a hand. “The detective sergeants and myself.”

“How splendid to be correctly anticipated,” Kreizler answered with a chuckle.

As Marcus and I briefly discussed our growing investigative chores for the next few days, Lucius glanced over the note again. “The next line,” he announced, “seems to get back to the notion of sadism. He decides to wait, and to see the boy several times before the murder—again, he’s toying with him, while all the time he knows what he’s going to do. It’s the sporting, sadistic hunter.”

“Yes, I fear there’s nothing new in that sentence—not until we reach the end.” Kreizler tapped his chalk on the board. “‘That place’—the only expression, other than ‘lies,’ which receives the upper case.”

“Hatred again,” Sara said. “Of Paresis Hall specifically, or of the general type of behavior practiced there?”

“Maybe both,” Marcus said. “After all, Paresis Hall caters to a very specific clientele—men who want boys who dress up like women.”

Kreizler kept tapping at the box marked THE MOLDING VIOLENCE AND/OR MOLESTATION. “We have returned to the core of the matter. This is not a man who hates all children, nor a man who hates all homosexuals—nor, for that matter, a man who hates all boy-whores who dress up like women. This is a man of very particular tastes.”

“But you still do consider him homosexual, don’t you, Doctor?” Sara asked.

“Only in the sense that the London Ripper could be called heterosexual,” Kreizler answered, “because his victims happened to be women. The issue is almost irrelevant—this note proves as much. He may be homosexual, and he may be a pedophile, but sadism is the predominant perversion, and violence seems far more characteristic of his intimate contacts than do sexual or amorous feelings. He may not even be able to distinguish between violence and sex. Certainly, any sense of arousal seems to translate quickly into violence. And that, I am sure, is a pattern that was established during these initial molding experiences. The antagonists in those episodes were without question male—that fact comes into play far more than any true homosexual orientation, when he’s selecting his victims.”

“Was it a man that committed those early acts, then?” Lucius asked. “Or maybe another boy?”

Kreizler shrugged. “A difficult question. But we know this—certain boys inspire in the killer a rage so deep he’s constructed his entire existence around its expression. Which boys? As Moore has pointed out, those who are—either in the killer’s eyes or in fact—deceitful, as well as insolent.”

Sara indicated the note with a nod of her head. “‘Saucy.’”

“Yes,” Kreizler answered. “We have been correct in that assumption. We have further postulated that he chooses violence as a form for expressing that rage because he learned to do so in some sort of domestic setting, quite probably from a violent father whose actions went unacknowledged and unpunished. What was the cause of that original violence, insofar as our killer understood it? We have speculated on that, too.”

“Wait,” Sara said, in a moment of realization. She looked up at Kreizler. “We’ve come full circle, haven’t we, Doctor?”

“We have indeed,” Kreizler replied, drawing a line from one side of the chalkboard to the other: from the killer’s traits to those of his victims. “Whether our man, in his youth, was a liar, sexually precocious, or generally so ill behaved that he required terrorizing in addition to beatings, he was in some fundamental way very much like the boys he is now killing.”

That, as they say, was a thought. If, by committing these murders, our killer was not only trying to destroy intolerable elements of the world around him, but also and more fundamentally parts of himself that he simply could not abide, then Kreizler might well be right about his entering a new and markedly more self-destructive phase; indeed, eventual self-destruction seemed, in this light, almost a certainty. But why, I asked Kreizler, should the man see those aspects of himself as so intolerable? And, if he did, why not simply change them?

“You said it yourself, Moore,” Laszlo replied. “We only do that sort of learning once. Or, to paraphrase our former teacher, this killer makes the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which he is fitted, and it is too late for him to begin again. In the remainder of this fourth paragraph he describes abducting the boy, using a highly imperative tone. Does he mention desire? No—he tells us that he ‘must.’ He must because those are the laws by which his world, disagreeable as it may be, has always functioned. He has become what Professor James calls a ‘mere walking bundle of habits,’ and to abandon those habits would, he fears, mean abandoning himself. You remember what we once said about Giorgio Santorelli—that he came to associate his psychic survival with the activities that caused his father to beat him? Our man is not so very different. He no doubt enjoys his murders as much or as little as Giorgio enjoyed his work. But for both of them those activities were, and are, vital, despite the deep self-loathing they may create—and which you have already detected in this note, Moore.”

Now, I’ll confess that I hadn’t been fully aware of just how many incisive statements I’d made that evening; but I was now having no trouble keeping up with Laszlo’s elaboration of them. “He gets back to that toward the end of the letter,” I said. “The remark about Giorgio being ‘unsoiled’ by him—the filth he despises is actually in him, a part of him.”

“And would be transmitted through the act of sex,” Marcus added. “So you’re right, Doctor—sex is not something he values or enjoys. It’s the violence that’s his goal.”

“Isn’t it possible that he isn’t even capable of sex?” Sara asked. “Given the kind of background we’re supposing, that is. In one of the treatises you gave us, Doctor, there’s a discussion of sexual stimulation and anxiety reactions—”

“Dr. Peyer, at the University of Zurich,” Kreizler said. “The observations grew out of his larger study of coitus interruptus.”

“That’s right,” Sara continued. “The implications seemed strongest for men who had emerged from difficult home lives. Persistent anxiety could result in a pronounced suppression of the libido, creating impotence.”

“Our boy’s pretty tender on that subject,” Marcus said, going to the note and reading from it. “‘I never fucked him, though I could have.’”

“Indeed,” Kreizler said, writing IMPOTENCE in the center of the board without hesitation. “The effect would only be to magnify his frustration and rage, producing ever more carnage. And that carnage emerges now as our most difficult puzzle. If these multilations are indeed personal rituals, unconnected to any definite religious theme other than dates, then regardless of whether he’s a priest or a plumber it becomes all the more important to understand the details, for they will be specific to him.” Kreizler went over to the note. “This document, I fear, gives us very little help along such lines.” Laszlo rubbed his eyes as he checked his silver watch. “And it’s quite late. I suggest we conclude.”

“Before we do that, Doctor,” Sara said, quietly but firmly, “I’d like to get back to one point concerning the adults in this man’s past.”

Kreizler nodded, with little or no enthusiasm. “The woman involved,” he sighed.

“Yes.” Sara stood up and walked to the chalkboard, pointing to its various divisions. “We’ve theorized that we have a man who, while still a child, was harassed, embarrassed, blamed, and finally beaten. I can’t contest the theory that the beatings were administered by a male hand. But the intimate nature of so many of the other aspects seems to me to suggest very strongly a woman’s rather sinister presence. Listen to his tone throughout the note, which, after all, is addressed to Mrs. Santorelli specifically—it’s defensive, badgered, even whining at moments, and obsessed with scatological and anatomical detail. It’s the voice of a boy who’s been scrutinized and humiliated regularly, who’s been made to feel that he himself is filth, without ever experiencing a place or person of refuge. If his character truly did form in his childhood, Dr. Kreizler, then I must repeat that the mother would be the far more likely culprit, in this regard.”

Kreizler’s face betrayed irritation. “If that were so, Sara, then wouldn’t massive resentment have been bred? And wouldn’t the victims be women, like the Ripper’s?”

“I don’t argue your reasoning with regard to the victims,” Sara answered. “I’m asking for a deeper look in another direction.”

“You seem to think,” Laszlo replied, a bit snappishly, “that I suffer from blinkered vision. I remind you that I do have some experience with these things.”

Sara studied him for a moment, and then quietly asked, “Why do you resist so strongly the notion of a woman’s active involvement in the formation?”

Laszlo suddenly rose, slammed a hand down on his desk, and shouted, “Because her role cannot have been active, damn it!”

Marcus, Lucius, and I froze for a moment, then exchanged uneasy glances. The rather shocking outburst, quite apart from being unwarranted, didn’t even seem to make sense, given Laszlo’s professional opinions. And yet it went on: “Had a woman been actively involved in this man’s life, at any point, we would not even be here—the crimes would never have happened!” Kreizler tried to regain an even keel, but only half-succeeded. “The whole notion is absurd, there is nothing in the literature to suggest it! And so I really must insist, Sara—we shall presume a record of feminine passivity in the formation and proceed to the issue of the mutilations! Tomorrow!”

As has hopefully become clear by now, Sara Howard was not the kind of woman to take such talk from any man, even one she admired and perhaps (in my opinion, at any rate) had still deeper feelings for. Her eyes went very thin at this last shot from Laszlo, and her voice was ice itself when she said:

“Since you appear to have decided this issue long ago, Doctor, it seems pointless to have asked me to research the subject.” I was a little worried that she’d go for the derringer, but she opted for her coat instead. “Perhaps you thought it would be an amusing way to keep me occupied,” she stormed on. “But I’ll tell you right now that I don’t need to be amused, cajoled, or otherwise mollycoddled—by any of you!”

And with that she was out the door. The Isaacsons and I traded more perturbed looks, but there was no need to say anything. We all knew that Sara had been right and Kreizler inexplicably, pigheadedly wrong. As Laszlo sighed and collapsed into his chair, it seemed for an instant that he might realize as much himself; but he did nothing more than ask us all to leave, claiming weariness. Then he fixed his eyes on the letter before him. The rest of us fetched our things and filed out, saying goodnight to Kreizler but receiving no reply.

Had the incident sparked no repercussions, I would hardly mention it here. True, it was the first real moment of discord we’d experienced at Number 808 Broadway, but it was inevitable that there should be a few, and no doubt we all would have gotten over it soon. But this sharp exchange between Kreizler and Sara did have repercussions: illuminating repercussions that not only revealed much that was unknown, even to me, about Kreizler’s past, but also lit our way toward a face-to-face encounter with one of the most disturbing criminals in the recent history of the United States.