The Alienist

CHAPTER 23

Sing Sing’s main block ran parallel to the Hudson, with several out-buildings, shops, and the two-hundred-cell women’s jail running perpendicular to it and toward the riverfront. A series of tall chimneys rose out of various buildings on the grounds and completed the image of a very dreary factory, one whose principal product, by that point in its history, was human misery. Convicts shared cells originally designed for individual prisoners, and the little maintenance work that was done in the place was not enough to counteract the powerful forces of decrepitude: the sights and smells of decay were everywhere. Even before we passed through the main gate, Kreizler and I could hear the monotonous sound of marching feet echoing out of the yard, and while this unhappy tramp was no longer punctuated by the crack of the cat—lashing had been outlawed in 1847—the ominous wooden clubs worn by the guards left no doubt about the primary method of maintaining discipline in the place.

The guard Lasky, an enormous, ill-shaved man of appropriately black temperament, eventually appeared, and after following him through the stone pathways and patchy grass borders of the yard we entered the main cell block. In one corner near the door several prisoners wearing iron and wood yokes that held their arms up and away from their bodies were being angrily berated by a group of guards, whose dark uniforms were no more tidy than our man Lasky’s and whose dispositions seemed, if anything, worse. As we entered the cell block proper, a sudden shout of pain shook Kreizler and me: inside one of the little four-by-eight-foot chambers more guards were going at one prisoner with a “hummingbird,” an electrical device that administered painful shocks. Both Kreizler and I had seen all this before, but familiarity did not breed acceptance. As we kept moving, I glanced at Laszlo once and saw my own reaction reflected in his face: given such a penal system, the high rate of recidivism in our society was really no mystery at all.

Jesse Pomeroy was being held all the way at the other end of the block, making it necessary for us to walk past dozens more cells full of faces that displayed an enormous range of emotions, from the deepest anguish and sorrow to the most sullen rage. As the rule of silence was enforced at all times we heard no distinct human voices, only an occasional whisper; and the echo of our own steps throughout the cell block, combined with the unceasing scrutiny of the prisoners, soon became almost maddening. When we reached the end of the building we entered a small, dank hallway that led into a tiny room with no real windows, just small chinks in the stone walls near the ceiling. Jesse Pomeroy was sitting in a strange sort of wooden stall inside this room. The stall had water pipes coming out of its top, but its interior was, so far as I could tell, bone dry. After a few seconds of puzzling with it, I realized what the thing was: an infamous “ice water bath,” in which particularly ill-behaved prisoners had formerly been doused with pressurized freezing water. The treatment had resulted in so many deaths from shock that it had been outlawed decades earlier. Apparently, though, no one had ever bothered to dismantle the contraption; no doubt the guards still found even the threat of such torment effective.

Pomeroy was wearing a heavy set of shackles on his wrists, and an iron “collar cap” rested on his shoulders and surrounded his head. This latter device, a grotesque punishment for particularly unruly prisoners, was a two-foot-high barred cage, and its weight, equal to that of the prisoner’s head, offered unending discomfort that drove many victims to the verge of madness. Despite both the shackles and the collar cap, however, Jesse had a book in his hand and was quietly reading. When he looked up at us I took careful note of the pocked skin of his face, the ugly disfigurement of his upper lip (which was barely covered by a stringy, weak mustache), and finally his milky, repulsive left eye. It was quite apparent why we’d come.

“Well!” he said quietly, getting to his feet. Even though Jesse was in his thirties and wearing the tall cage around his head, he was short enough to be able to stand inside the old stall. A smile came onto his ugly mouth, one that displayed the peculiar blend of suspicion, surprise, and satisfaction common to convicts who receive unexpected visitors. “Dr. Kreizler, if I’m not very much mistaken.”

Kreizler managed a smile that seemed quite genuine. “Jesse. It’s been a long time, I’m surprised you remember me.”

“Oh, I remember you, all right,” Pomeroy answered, in a boyish tone that was nonetheless laced with threat. “I remember all of you.” He studied Laszlo for another second, then turned suddenly to me. “But I’ve never seen you before.”

“No,” Kreizler said, before I could answer. “You haven’t.” Laszlo turned to our guide, who was looking very put-upon. “All right, Lasky. You can wait outside.” Kreizler handed him a large wad of money.

Lasky’s face achieved something like a pleased look, though he only said “Yes, sir,” before turning to Pomeroy. “You watch yourself, Jesse. Bad as you’ve had it today, it could still get worse.”

Pomeroy didn’t acknowledge that statement, but kept on watching Kreizler as Lasky departed. “Pretty hard to get an education in this place,” Jesse said, after the door had closed. “But I’m trying. I figure maybe that’s where I went wrong—no education. I taught myself Spanish, you know.” He continued to sound very much like the young man he’d been twenty years ago.

Laszlo nodded. “Admirable. I see you’re wearing a collar cap.”

Jesse laughed. “Ahh—they claim I burned a guy’s face with a cigarette while he was sleeping. They say I stayed up all night, making an arm out of wire just so’s I could reach him with the butt through the bars. But I ask you—” He turned my way, the milky eye floating aimlessly in his head. “Does that sound like me?” A small laugh escaped him, pleased and mischievous—again just like a young boy’s.

“I gather, then, that you’ve grown tired of skinning rats alive,” Kreizler said. “When I was here several years ago, I heard that you’d been asking other prisoners to catch them for you.”

Still another chuckle, this one almost embarrassed. “Rats. They do squirm and squeal. Bite you pretty good, too, if you’re not careful.” He displayed several small but nasty scars on his hands.

Kreizler nodded. “As angry as you were twenty years ago, eh, Jesse?”

“I wasn’t angry twenty years ago,” Pomeroy answered, without losing his grin. “I was crazy. You people were just too stupid to figure that out, is all. What the hell are you doing here, anyway, Doc?”

“Call it a reassessment,” Kreizler answered cagily. “I sometimes like to drop in on old cases, to measure their progress. And since I had business in the prison, anyway—”

For the first time Pomeroy’s voice became deadly serious. “Don’t play games with me, Doc. Even with these cuffs on I could have your eyes out before Lasky gets through that door.”

Kreizler’s face lit up a bit at that, but his tone remained cool. “I suppose you’d consider that another demonstration of your insanity?”

Jesse chuckled. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I didn’t twenty years ago,” Kreizler answered with a shrug. “You mutilated the eyes of both the children you killed, as well as those of several you tortured. But I saw no madness in it—it was quite understandable, actually.”

“Oh?” Pomeroy turned playful again. “How’s that?”

Kreizler paused a moment, then leaned forward. “I’ve yet to see a man driven truly insane by simple envy, Jesse.”

Pomeroy’s expression went blank, and he shot a hand toward his face so quickly that it banged against the bars of the collar cap painfully. Tightening both hands into fists he seemed on the verge of springing up, and I got ready for trouble; but then he just laughed it off. “Let me tell you something, Doc—if you paid for that education of yours, you got took. You figger just because I got a bum eye I’d go around fixing people with two good ones? Not likely. Look at me—I’m a catalogue of Mother Nature’s mistakes. How come I never cut anybody’s mouth up, or carved the skin off their faces?” It was Jesse’s turn to lean closer. “And if it’s just envy, Doc, how come you ain’t out chopping off people’s arms?”

I turned quickly to Kreizler, and could see that he hadn’t been ready for such a remark. But he’d long ago learned to control his reactions to anything a subject might say, and he only blinked once or twice without taking his eyes from Pomeroy. Jesse, however, was able to read into those blinks, and he sat back with a satisfied grin.

“Yeah, you’re smart, all right,” he chuckled.

“Then the mutilation of the eyes meant nothing,” Kreizler said; and looking back I can see that he was maneuvering carefully. “Simply random acts of violence.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Doc.” Pomeroy’s voice took on a warning edge again. “We been through that, a long time ago. All I’m saying is I didn’t have a sane reason to do it.”

Kreizler cocked his head judiciously. “Perhaps. But, since you’re unwilling to state what reason you did have, the argument is pointless.” Laszlo got up. “And, as I’ve a train to catch back to New York—”

“Sit down.” The violence embodied in the command was almost palpable; but Kreizler nonetheless made a pointed show of being unimpressed. Pomeroy grew uneasy at that. “I’ll only tell you this once,” Jesse went on urgently. “I was crazy then, but I ain’t crazy anymore—which means that, when I think back to it now, I can see everything pretty clear. There wasn’t any sane reason for me to do what I did to them kids. I just—it was just more than I could stand, that’s all, and I had to stop it.”

Laszlo knew that he was close. As a further inducement he sat back down, and then spoke very softly. “Had to stop what, Jesse?”

Pomeroy looked up at the small chink in the top of the blank stone wall, through which a few stars were now visible. “The staring,” he mumbled, in an altogether new and detached tone of voice. “The watching. All the time, the watching. That had to stop.” He turned our way again, and it seemed to me there were tears in his good eye; his mouth, however, had curled into a smile again. “You know, I used to go to the menagerie—in town? This was when I was real small. And it used to occur to me that everything those animals did, people were watching them. Just staring at them, with those dumb, blank faces, bug-eyed and hang-jawed—especially the kids, because they were too stupid to know any better. And those goddamned animals would look back, and you could see they was mad, God damn me, ferocious was the word, all right. All they wanted was to rip those people apart, just to get them to knock it off. Pacing back and forth, back and forth, thinking that if they could get out for just one minute they’d show ’em what you get when you never leave a thing alone. Well, I might not’ve been in a cage, Doc, but those dumb damned eyes was everywhere around me, all the same, ever since I could remember. Staring, watching, all the time, everywhere. You tell me, Doc, you tell me if that ain’t enough to drive somebody crazy. And when I got big enough, and I’d see one of those dumb little bastards standing there, licking a piece of candy with his eyes popping out of his head—well, Doc, the fact is, I wasn’t in no cage back then, so there wasn’t nothing to stop me from doing what needed to be done.”

Pomeroy made no move after he’d stopped talking, but sat stone still and waited for a reaction from Kreizler.

“You say it was always that way, Jesse,” Laszlo said. “For as long as you can remember? With everyone you knew?”

“Everyone but my dad,” Pomeroy answered, with a humorless, almost pitiable laugh. “He must’ve got so tired of looking at me he ran off. Not that I know—I don’t remember him at all. But it’s what I figured, based on how my mama used to act.”

Again, Kreizler’s face danced with anticipation for the briefest of instants. “And how was that?”

“That was like—this!” In a flash Jesse was up and holding his caged head just a couple of feet away from Laszlo’s face. I got to my feet, but Jesse made no further move forward. “Tell your bodyguard he can set down, Doc,” he said, his good eye locked on Kreizler. “I’m just giving you a demonstration. Always like this, was how it seemed to me. Every minute, watching me, what for I couldn’t tell you. For my own good, she used to say, but she didn’t act like it.” The collar cap was weighing heavy on Jesse’s outstretched neck, and he finally turned away. “Yeah, she sure took an interest in this old face of mine.” The dead laugh came back. “Never wanted to kiss it, though, I can tell you!” Something seemed to strike him, and he paused quietly, again looking up at the chink in the wall. “That first boy I went after, I made him kiss it. He didn’t want to, but after I—well. He did it.”

Laszlo waited a few seconds before asking: “And the man whose face you burned today?”

Jesse spat at the floor through the bars of the collar cap. “That idiot—the same damned thing! Just couldn’t keep his eyes to himself, I musta told him twenty goddamned times to—” Catching himself, Pomeroy suddenly spun on Kreizler, with real fear in his face; then the fear quickly vanished, and that lethal smile came back. “Whup. Looks like I shot it to hell, didn’t I? Fine piece of work, Doc.”

Laszlo stood up. “It was none of my doing, Jesse.”

“Yeah,” Pomeroy laughed. “Maybe you’re right. As long as I live, I’ll never know how you get me to talking that way. If I had a hat, I’d tip it. But, since I don’t—”

In one fast move Pomeroy bent over, grabbed a gleaming object out of one of his boots, and held it out toward us menacingly. Tightening his body he stood on his toes, ready to spring forward. I backed up instinctively against the wall behind me, and Kreizler did likewise, though more slowly. As a series of wet chortles came out of Pomeroy’s mouth, I looked closer to see that his weapon was a long shard of thick glass, wrapped at one end with a bloodstained rag.