The Alienist

CHAPTER 24

More swiftly than most men could have managed it even without being shackled, Pomeroy kicked the stool he’d been sitting on across the room and jammed it under the knob of the door, preventing entry from the hall outside.

“Don’t worry,” he said, still grinning. “I got no desire to cut you two up—I just want to have a little fun with that big idiot outside!” He turned away from us, laughed again, and called out: “Hey, Lasky! You ready to lose your job? When the warden sees what I done to these boys, he won’t let you guard the shithouse!”

Lasky cursed in reply and began pounding on the door. Pomeroy kept the shard of glass leveled in the general direction of our throats but made no more threatening move, just laughed harder and harder as the guard’s rage mounted. It wasn’t long before the door began to loosen on its hinges, and soon after that the stool fell away from the knob. In a noisy burst Lasky hurtled into the room, the door crashing to the floor as he did. After struggling to his feet he saw first that Kreizler and I were all right and next that Pomeroy was armed. Grabbing the wooden stool from where it lay, Lasky went after Jesse, who made only a halfhearted attempt to resist.

Throughout this encounter Kreizler displayed no apparent fear for our safety, but kept shaking his head slowly as if he knew exactly what was happening. Lasky soon had the shard of glass out of Pomeroy’s hands, after which he began to pummel the prisoner mercilessly with his fat fists. The fact that he couldn’t get at Jesse’s face seemed only to outrage him further, and the shots that he landed to the prisoner’s body became all the more savage. Yet even as Pomeroy cried out in pain, he continued to laugh—a wild kind of laughter, full of abandon and even, in some awful way, delight. I was utterly mystified and paralyzed; but Kreizler, after several minutes of this display, stepped forward and began to pull at Lasky’s shoulders.

“Stop it!” he shouted to the guard. “Lasky, for God’s sake, stop, you fool!” He kept yanking and tugging, but the huge Lasky was oblivious to his efforts. “Lasky! Stop, man, don’t you see, you’re doing what he wants! He’s enjoying it!”

The guard continued to pound away, and finally Kreizler, himself consumed by what seemed a sort of desperation, used the full weight of his body to shove Lasky away from Pomeroy. Surprised and enraged, Lasky got to his feet and took a hefty swing at Kreizler’s head, which Laszlo easily eluded. Seeing that the guard intended to keep coming after him, Kreizler balled his right hand into a fist and gave Lasky several quick shots that were vividly reminiscent of his very creditable stand against Roosevelt almost twenty years earlier. As Lasky reeled and fell back, Kreizler caught his breath and stood over him.

“It’s got to stop, Lasky!” he declared, in a voice so passionate that it made me rush over and stand between him and the prostrate guard, in order to prevent my friend from continuing his attack. Pomeroy lay on the floor, writhing in agony, trying to clutch his ribs with his shackled hands and still laughing grotesquely. Kreizler turned to him, breathing hard, and softly repeated:

“It’s got to stop.”

As Lasky’s head cleared, his eyes focused on Kreizler. “You son of a bitch!” He tried to get to his feet, but it was a struggle. “Help,” he gasped, spitting a little blood onto the floor. “Help! Guard in trouble!” His voice echoed out into the hall. “The old shower room! Help me, damn it!”

I could hear running feet coming toward us from what sounded like the far end of the building. “Laszlo, we’ve got to move,” I said quickly, knowing that we were now in very deep trouble: Lasky did not look like a man who would forgo revenge, especially if he had the aid of compatriots. Kreizler was still looking at Pomeroy, and I had to pull him out of the room. “Laszlo, damn you!” I said. “You’ll get us killed yet—pick up your feet and run!”

As we darted out the door Lasky made a dizzy lunge at us, but only succeeded in throwing himself back onto the floor. We passed four more guards in the cell block hallway, and I quickly told them that there’d been trouble between Lasky and Pomeroy and that the guard had been hurt. Seeing that Kreizler and I were uninjured, the guards sped on their way, while I forced Laszlo to make a dash past another group of uniformed men who stood in a confused huddle at the front gate. It didn’t take long for the guards inside to learn the truth of the situation, and soon they were howling threats as they chased after us. Fortunately, the old man we’d hired was still outside the prison gate with his rig, and by the time the pursuing guards appeared we were several hundred yards away from the place, making for the train station and—in my case, at least—praying that we wouldn’t have to wait long once we got there.

The first train to appear belonged to a small local line and was scheduled to make a dozen stops before it reached Grand Central; our predicament being what it was, however, we accepted the lengthy protraction of our trip and hopped on board. The cars were full of small-town travelers who evidently found our appearance shocking; and I must admit, if we looked half as much like fleeing outlaws as I felt, those good people were justified in their interpretation. In order to ease their anxiety, Kreizler and I went to the last of the train’s cars and stood outside its rear door on the observation platform. Watching the walls and chimneys of Sing Sing disappear into the black woods of the Hudson Valley as we sped away, I produced a small flask of whiskey, from which we both took deep pulls. When at last we could no longer see any part of the prison, we began to breathe easily again.

“You’ve got one hell of a lot of explaining to do,” I said to Laszlo, as we stood in the warm rush of air that blew back from the engine of the train. My feeling of relief was so pronounced that I could not suppress a smile, though I was quite serious about wanting answers. “You can start with why we came here.”

Kreizler took another pull from my flask, then studied it. “This is a particularly barbaric blend, Moore,” he said, avoiding my demand for information. “I’m a bit shocked.”

I drew myself up. “Kreizler…”

“Yes, yes, I know, John,” he replied, waving me to silence. “You’re entitled to some answers. But just where to begin?” Sighing once, Laszlo took another drink. “As I told you before, I spoke to Meyer earlier today. I gave him a complete outline of our work to date. I then told him about my—my exchange of words with Sara.” Grunting once shamefacedly, Laszlo kicked at the railing of the deck. “I really must apologize to her for that.”

“Yes,” I replied, “you must. What did Meyer say?”

“That he found Sara’s points concerning the role of a woman in the formation quite sound,” Kreizler answered, still a bit contrite. “I suddenly found myself arguing with him as I’d argued with Sara.” Taking another pull from the flask, Kreizler grunted again and murmured, “The fallacy, damn it all…”

“The what?” I asked, bewildered.

“Nothing,” Kreizler answered, with a shake of his head. “An aberration in my own thinking that has caused me to waste precious days. But it’s of no importance now. What is important is that as I thought the whole issue over this afternoon I found that both Meyer and Sara were right—there was powerful evidence that a woman had played an ominous role in the formation of our killer. His obsessive furtiveness, the particular breed of sadism, all such factors pointed toward the sort of conclusions that Sara had outlined. As I say, I tried to argue with Meyer, just as I’d argued with Sara, but then he brought up Jesse Pomeroy, and used my own twenty-year-old words to contradict what I was now saying. Pomeroy, after all, never even knew his own father, nor did he ever, so far as I have been able to tell, suffer excessive physical punishment as a child. Yet his was—and is—a personality in many ways similar to that of the man we seek. As you know, Pomeroy was steadfast in his unwillingness to discuss his mutilative activities at the time of his capture. I could only hope that time and solitary confinement had loosened his resolve. We were lucky there.”

I nodded, thinking back to Pomeroy’s statement. “What he said about his mother, and other children, and the scrutiny he was always under—do you think that’s really crucial?”

“I do, indeed,” Laszlo answered, his words starting to move at a characteristically quicker clip. “And so is his pronounced emphasis on the unwillingness of the people who inhabited his world to touch him. You remember what he said, about his own mother being unwilling to kiss his face? Quite probably the only physical contact with others that he ever knew as a boy was taunting or tormenting in nature. And from there we can draw a direct line to his violence.”

“How so?”

“Well, Moore, I’ll offer you yet another statement from Professor James. It’s a concept that he often brought up in class in the old days, and one which struck me like a thunderbolt the first time I read it in the Principles.” Laszlo turned to the sky and tried hard to remember the exact wording. “‘If all cold things were wet and all wet things cold, if all hard things pricked our skin, and no other things did so; is it likely that we should discriminate between coldness and wetness, and hardness and pungency respectively?’ As always, James wouldn’t see this idea through to its logical conclusion, in the dynamic realm of behavior. He discussed only functions, such as taste and touch—but everything I have ever seen indicates that it works dynamically, as well. Imagine it, Moore. Imagine that you had—because of disfigurement, cruelty, or some other misfortune—never known any human touch that was not stern or even harsh. How should you feel about it?”

I shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Rotten, I guess.”

“Perhaps. But in all likelihood you would not feel that it was extraordinary. Put it this way—if I say the word ‘mother’ to you, your mind will immediately run through a set of unconscious but entirely familiar associations based on experience. So will mine. And both of our sets of associations will doubtless be a mixture of the good and the bad, as will almost any person’s. But how many people will have a set of associations as uniformly negative as we know Jesse Pomeroy’s to be? Indeed, in Jesse’s case we can go beyond the limited concept of mother to the notion of humanity generally. Say the word ‘people’ to him and his mind leaps only to images of humiliation and pain, as routinely as if I were to say ‘train’ to you and you were to answer ‘movement.’”

“Is that what you meant when you told Lasky that Pomeroy was enjoying the beating he was getting?”

“It was. You may have noticed that Jesse deliberately constructed that entire event. It’s not hard to see why. Throughout his childhood he was surrounded by tormentors, and for the last twenty years virtually the only people he’s come into contact with have been men like Lasky. His experiences, both in prison and out, cause him to believe that interaction with his own species can only be adversarial and violent—he even compares himself empathetically to an animal in a menagerie. Such is his reality. That he will be beaten and berated, given his current circumstances, he knows; all he can do is attempt to set the terms of that abuse, to manipulate the participants into their actions as he once manipulated the children he tortured and killed. It’s the only kind of power or satisfaction—the only method of ensuring his psychic survival—he’s ever known, and he therefore employs it.”

As I smoked and struggled with this idea, I began to pace the deck. “But isn’t there something—well, something inside of him, inside of any person that would object to that kind of a situation? I mean, wouldn’t there be sadness or despair, even about his own mother? The desire to be loved, at least? Isn’t every child born with—”

“Be careful, Moore,” Kreizler warned as he lit a cigarette of his own. “You’re about to suggest that we’re born with specific a priori concepts of need and desire—an understandable thought, perhaps, were there any evidence to support it. The organism knows one drive from the beginning—survival. And yes, for most of us, that drive is somehow intimately bound up with the notion of a mother. But were our experiences terribly different—if the concept of mother suggested frustration and finally danger, rather than sustenance and nurturing—the instinct for survival would cause us to structure our outlook differently. Jesse Pomeroy experienced this. I now believe our killer did, too.” Laszlo drew heavily on his cigarette. “I can thank Pomeroy, for that. Meyer, as well. But most of all, I must thank Sara. And I intend to do so.”

Kreizler was true to that declaration. At one of the small towns we passed through on our way back to Grand Central he asked the station attendant if it would be possible to send what he assured the man was an urgent wire ahead to New York. The attendant agreed and Kreizler wrote out the message, which ordered Sara to meet us at Delmonico’s at eleven o’clock. Laszlo and I had no time to change for dinner once we reached the city, but Charlie Delmonico had seen us in far worse shape in our time, and when we arrived at Madison Square he made us feel as welcome as ever.

Sara was waiting at a table in the main dining room, one that looked out onto the park across Fifth Avenue and was as far from the other parties in the restaurant as possible. She expressed both concern for our safety—the wire had made her anxious—and then, once she saw that we were unharmed, great curiosity about our trip. Her manner with Kreizler, even before he offered her the promised set of apologies, was quite pleasant, and therefore odd: I wouldn’t say that Sara was the sort of person to hold a grudge, exactly, but once stung she was usually very wary of the guilty party. I tried hard, however, to ignore the strange chemistry between them, and kept my attention on the business before us.

Sara said that given what we’d learned from the Pomeroy visit we could now safely assume that our man was, like Jesse, extremely sensitive about his physical appearance. Such sensitivity, she said, more than explained the profundity of the anger toward children: being perpetually mocked and cast out during one’s early years would, obviously, produce a fury that time alone would not necessarily extinguish. Kreizler also tended toward the theory that our man was in some way physically deformed. I, however, having several weeks earlier been the first to advance such a theory, now warned both of them to be very careful about accepting it. We already knew that the man we were pursuing stood over six feet tall and could get up and down the sides of buildings by way of a simple rope while carrying an adolescent boy: if he was deformed, it could not be in his arms or his legs, or anywhere, really, save his face—and that would narrow our search down quite a bit. Kreizler said that, given this consideration, he was prepared to narrow things down still further by declaring that it was the killer’s eyes that were the location of his deformity. The man was concentrating on his victims’ ocular organs more carefully and consistently than even Pomeroy had done, a fact that Kreizler considered more than significant: it was, he said, decisive.

Throughout our meal Kreizler encouraged Sara to at last fully explain what sort of a woman she thought might have played the kind of sinister role in our killer’s life that she’d postulated a week earlier. Jumping right in, Sara said she believed that only a mother could have had the kind of profound impact that was evident in this case. An abusive governess or female relative might be harrowing for a child, but if that child had recourse to his natural mother for protection and consolation the effect would have been dramatically reduced. It was apparent to Sara that the man we were after had never known such recourse, a circumstance that could be explained in a number of ways; but Sara’s preferred theory was that the woman had not wished to bear children in the first place. She’d only done so, Sara speculated, because she’d either become pregnant or had been offered no other socially acceptable role to play by the particular world in which she lived. The end result of all this was that the woman had deeply resented the children she did bear, and for this reason Sara thought there was an excellent chance that the killer was either an only child or had very few siblings: childbearing was not an experience that the mother would have wanted to repeat many times. Any physical deformity in one of the children she did have would, of course, have heightened the mother’s already negative feelings toward that child, but Sara did not believe that deformity alone was enough to explain such a relationship. Kreizler agreed with her on this point, saying that while Jesse Pomeroy attributed all his difficulties with his mother to his appearance, there were certainly additional and deeper factors involved as well.

One conclusion was becoming increasingly clear from all this: it was unlikely that we were dealing with people who enjoyed the advantages of wealth. In the first place, wealthy parents are seldom obliged to cope with their children if they find them troublesome or undesirable. Then, too, a young woman of means in the 1860s (the period during which, we suspected, our killer had been born) could have devoted her life to pursuits other than motherhood, though such a choice would admittedly have prompted more criticism and comment at that time than it would have some thirty years later. Of course, an accidental pregnancy could happen to anyone, rich or poor; but the extreme sexual and scatological fixations displayed by our killer had suggested to Sara close scrutiny and frequent humiliation, and these in turn spoke of a life lived at very close quarters—the kind of life that poverty breeds. Sara was delighted to hear that Dr. Meyer had voiced the same thoughts during his conversation with Kreizler earlier that day; and she was even more delighted when Kreizler offered a very decent salute to her efforts as we drank some final glasses of port.

This moment of relaxed satisfaction passed quickly, however. Kreizler produced his small notebook and reminded us that there were just five short days till the Feast of the Ascension, the next significant date on the Christian calendar. It was now time, he said, for our investigation to dispense with an attitude of pure research and analysis and move toward a posture of engagement. We had gained a good general idea of what our killer looked like, as well as how, where, and when he would strike. We were ready at last to try to anticipate and prevent that next move. I felt a sudden flood of anxiety in the pit of my very full stomach at that statement, and Sara looked to be experiencing much the same sort of reaction. But we both knew that this development was inevitable; was, indeed, what we’d been actively working toward since the beginning. And so we stiffened our resolve as we left the restaurant and gave no voice to any sort of apprehension.

Once outside I felt a very meaningful tug on my arm from Sara. I turned to find her looking away from me, but in a way that clearly indicated that she wanted to talk. When Kreizler offered to share a hansom with her as far as Gramercy Park she declined, and as soon as he was gone she ushered me into Madison Square Park and under a gas lamp.

“Well?” I said, noticing that her aspect had become somewhat agitated. “This had better be important, Sara. It’s been a hell of an evening, and I’m—”

“It is important,” Sara answered quickly, producing a folded sheet of paper from her bag. “That is, I think it is.” Her brows came together and she seemed to be weighing something carefully before showing me the paper. “John, how much do you actually know about Dr. Kreizler’s past? His family, I mean.”

I was surprised by the topic. “His family? As much as anyone, I suppose. I visited them quite a bit when I was a boy.”

“Were they—were they, well, happy?”

I shrugged. “Always seemed to be. With good reason, too. His parents were about the most socially sought-after couple in town. You wouldn’t know it to see them now, of course. Laszlo’s father had a stroke a couple of years ago, and they stay pretty shut up. They have a house on Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue.”

“Yes,” Sara said quickly, surprising me again. “I know.”

“Well,” I went on, “back then they were always throwing big parties and introducing luminaries from all over Europe into New York society. It was quite a scene—we all loved going there. But why do you ask, Sara? What’s this all about?”

She paused, sighed, and then held the piece of paper out to me. “I’ve been trying all week to understand why he was sticking so stubbornly to the idea that a violent father and a passive mother raised our killer. I developed a theory, and went through the records of the Fifteenth Precinct to test it. This is what I found.”

The document was a report filed by one Roundsman O’Bannion, who, on a September night in 1862—when Laszlo was a boy of only six—had investigated a domestic disturbance at the Kreizler home. The yellowing report contained just a few details: it spoke of Laszlo’s father, apparently drunk, spending the night in the precinct house under a charge of assault (the charge was later dropped), and then of a local surgeon being brought to the Kreizler home to treat a young boy whose left arm had been badly shattered.

Conclusions weren’t hard to draw; given my lifelong acquaintance with Laszlo, however, as well as the image I’d always had of his family, my mind resisted them. “But,” I said, refolding the document absentmindedly, “but we were told that he fell…”

Sara let out a deep breath. “Apparently not.”

During a long pause I looked around at the park, somewhat stunned. Familiar conceptions die hard, and their passage can be damned disorienting; for a few moments the trees and buildings of Madison Square looked strangely different. Then an image of Laszlo as a boy suddenly flashed through my head, followed by another of his big, outwardly gregarious father and his vivacious mother. As I saw these faces and forms I simultaneously remembered the comment that Jesse Pomeroy had made during our visit to Sing Sing about chopping off people’s arms; and from there my mind leapt to a seemingly meaningless remark that Laszlo himself had made on the train ride home:

“‘The fallacy, damn it all,’” I whispered.

“What did you say, John?” Sara asked quietly.

I shook my head hard, trying to clear it. “Something Kreizler mentioned tonight. About how much time he’s wasted in the last few days. He spoke of ‘the fallacy,’ but I didn’t get the reference. Now, though…”

Sara gasped a little as she, too, realized the answer. “The psychologist’s fallacy,” she said. “In James’s Principles.”

I nodded. “The business about a psychologist getting his own point of view mixed up with his subject’s. That’s what’s had him in its grip.” A few more silent moments passed, and then I looked down at the report, feeling a sudden sense of practical urgency that made me put off the nearly impossible task of absorbing the full implications of the document. “Sara,” I said. “Have you discussed this with anyone else?” She shook her head slowly. “And do they know at headquarters that you took the report?” Another shake of the head. “But you’ve realized what it suggests?” She nodded this time and I reciprocated; then, slowly and deliberately, I tore the report into pieces, and set them on a patch of grass.

Pulling a box of matches from my pocket and striking one, I started to light the bits of paper, saying firmly, “No one is to know anything about this. Your own curiosity’s been satisfied, and if his behavior becomes erratic again, we’ll know why. But beyond that, no good can ever come of its getting out. Do you agree?”

Sara crouched by me and nodded once more. “I’d already decided the same thing.”

We watched the burning pieces of paper turn into flakes of smoking ash, both of us silently hoping that this would be the last we’d ever need to speak of the matter, that Laszlo’s behavior would never again warrant investigation into his past. But as it turned out, the unhappy tale so sketchily referred to in the now-incinerated report did surface again at a later point in our investigation, to cause a very real—indeed an almost fatal—crisis.