The Alienist

CHAPTER 25

The idea of placing New York’s chief boy-pandering venues under careful scrutiny on those days when we thought our killer might strike originated with Lucius Isaacson. There was no denying that it would be a delicate piece of work. Every one of those bars and brothels could expect to lose a significant number of patrons if it became known that they were being watched. Cooperation from the proprietors was therefore highly unlikely: we’d have to position ourselves so as to elude both their notice and our killer’s. Lucius readily admitted that he didn’t have enough experience with such operations to chart a prudent course, so we summoned the one member of our band who we thought could provide expert advice: Stevie Taggert. Stevie had spent a good part of his criminal career robbing houses and flats, and the ways of surreptitious surveillance were known to him. I think the young man suspected he was in some kind of trouble when he walked into our headquarters that Saturday afternoon and found the rest of us seated in a semicircle and staring at him eagerly. And since Kreizler had often told Stevie that he should try to forget his criminal ways, it was doubly difficult to convince the suspicious boy to talk about such things. Once satisfied that we really did need his help, however, Stevie pursued the conversation with what seemed real enjoyment.

We had originally thought to place one member of our team outside each of the houses most likely to be visited: Paresis Hall, the Golden Rule, Shang Draper’s in the Tenderloin, the Slide on Bleecker Street, and Frank Stephenson’s Black and Tan, also on Bleecker, a dive that offered white women and children to black and Oriental men. But this plan, Stevie assured us as he chewed noisily on a thick piece of licorice, was badly flawed. First of all, we knew that the killer was traveling via rooftops: we would be more assured of success, and less likely to raise suspicions, if we attempted to intercept him on one of those high arenas. Furthermore, even discounting the quite physical opposition that we might run into from the house managers in the course of our efforts, there was the fact that the man we were hoping to catch was large and powerful: he could easily turn the tables and get the drop on us, given his familiarity with rooftop navigation. Stevie recommended placing two operatives at each site, which meant that we would not only have to enlist three more participants (Cyrus, Roosevelt, and Stevie himself eventually filled out the list) but also eliminate one location. According to Stevie, this last problem was easily solved; he found it extremely unlikely that our killer would venture into the Tenderloin, a noisy, crowded, brightly lit area that offered too many chances of being seen or apprehended. Nonchalantly taking a cigarette from a box on my desk and lighting it, Stevie said that we could therefore dispense with Shang Draper’s; and as he blew little rings of smoke, he went on to recommend that we gain access to the various rooftops involved by entering adjacent buildings under false pretenses. This would help to ensure that things seemed thoroughly natural to the killer when and if he showed up. Kreizler nodded in agreement, then plucked Stevie’s cigarette out of his mouth and crushed it on the floor. Disappointed, the boy went back to his licorice.

When to begin and end our surveillance was the next issue addressed. Would the murderer visit the chosen disorderly house on the eve of Ascension Day, and actually kill his victim during the small hours of the feast itself, or would he wait until the next night? His pattern suggested the latter, probably because, Kreizler explained, the anger which he felt (for whatever range of reasons) mounted throughout the daytime hours on the holidays selected, perhaps as he observed people going to and coming from holiday church services. Whatever the specific trigger, nightfall brought an unstoppable explosion. None of us could argue this reasoning; and so it was decided that we would position ourselves on Thursday night.

With the plan complete I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door. Marcus inquired as to my destination and I told him I was going down to the Golden Rule to see the boy Joseph and provide him with details of the killer’s appearance and method.

“Is that wise?” Lucius asked in a worried tone, as he stacked some papers on his desk. “We’re only five days away from putting this plan in motion, John. We don’t want to do anything that would complicate matters by changing the normal routines of those places.”

Sara looked puzzled. “Surely there’s nothing wrong with giving the boys every chance to avoid danger.”

“Of course,” Lucius answered quickly, “I’m not suggesting we put anybody in any more danger than we can avoid. It’s just that—well, we’ve got to set this trap carefully.”

“As always, the detective sergeant has a point,” Kreizler said, taking my arm and walking to the door with me. “Be careful how much you tell your young friend, Moore.”

“All I’m asking,” Lucius went on, “is that we not reveal the probable date of the next attack. We’re not even sure that that’s when it’s going to happen—but if it does, and if the boys have been alerted, the killer will almost certainly sense something. You can tell him anything else you feel is necessary.”

“A reasonable arrangement,” Kreizler decided, with a wave toward Lucius. Then, as I entered the elevator, Laszlo lowered his voice: “And remember, John, there’s a very good chance that, while you may be helping the boy by warning him, you may also put him at great risk if you’re seen in his company. Avoid it if you can.”

After walking to the Golden Rule I arranged to meet Joseph in a small billiard parlor around the corner. When he arrived I noticed that his face was quite rosy after being scrubbed free of the usual paint, a fact that touched me. I remembered that our first interaction had involved a similar cleaning of Joseph’s face; and I was struck by the thought that he hadn’t wanted me to see him all made up this time, either. Indeed, his entire manner did not seem that of a boy-whore, when he was dealing with me, but rather that of a young man who desperately needed an older male friend; or was I now suffering from Professor James’s famous fallacy, and allowing the way in which Joseph reminded me of my brother to influence my reading of the boy’s behavior?

Joseph ordered himself a short beer in a manner that suggested he’d done so many times before (and which ruled out my presuming to lecture him about the perils of alcohol). As we started to knock some ivory balls around a table casually, I told Joseph I had some new information about the man who’d killed Ali ibn-Ghazi, and I asked him to pay very close attention, so that he’d be able to pass the news on to his friends. Then I launched into a physical description:

The man was tall, I said, about six-foot-two, and very strong. He was capable of lifting a boy like Joseph, or someone even larger, without difficulty. Yet despite his size and strength, there was something wrong with him, something that he was very sensitive about. It was probably some part of his face; maybe his eyes. They might be injured, scarred, deformed in some way. Whatever the problem, he didn’t like it when people mentioned it or looked at it. Joseph said that he’d never noticed such a man, but that a lot of the Golden Rule’s customers hid their faces when they came in. I told him to watch for it in future, and went on to the subject of what the man might wear. Nothing fancy, I said, because he didn’t want to attract attention to himself. Also, he probably didn’t have much money, which meant that he couldn’t afford expensive clothes. It was likely, as Marcus had told Joseph during our last visit, that he would be carrying a large bag; inside that bag were tools he used to climb up and down walls, in order to reach the rooms of the boys he was after without being detected.

Then came the hard part: I told Joseph that the man was especially careful about not being seen because he’d been in all the houses like the Golden Rule before and might be very easy for some (maybe most) of the boys to identify. He might even be someone they knew and trusted, someone who’d helped them out, who’d tried to show them how to make new lives for themselves. A settlement or charity worker, perhaps—maybe even a priest. The main thing was that he didn’t look or sound like someone who could do the things he’d been doing.

Joseph kept track of all these details by ticking them off on his fingers, and when I’d finished he nodded and said, “Okay, okay, I’ve got it. But do you mind if I ask you something, Mr. Moore?”

“Fire away,” I answered.

“Well, then—how is it you know all these things about the guy, anyway?”

“Sometimes,” I said with a small laugh, “I’m a little confused about that, myself. Why?”

Joseph smiled, but also began to kick his legs nervously. “It’s only because—well, a lot of my friends, they didn’t believe me when I told them what you said last time. They didn’t see how anybody could know. Thought maybe I was making it up. And then, a lot of people are going around saying it isn’t even a person that’s doing it. Some kind of—ghost, or something. That’s what some people say.”

“Yes. I’ve heard. But you’ll be doing yourself a favor if you ignore that kind of talk. There’s a man behind it, all right. I can guarantee that, Joseph.” I rubbed my hands together. “Now, then—how about a game?”

Over the years I’ve heard people say that the game of billiards (three-cushion, pocket, or what have you) is nothing more or less than a fast way for a young man to go to the devil. But the way I saw it, a career as a professional gambler—that nightmare of so many mothers and fathers in this city—would’ve been nothing but a step up for this boy; and so for the next hour or so I taught him most of the tricks of the table that I knew: it was a pleasant time, jarred only by the occasional recollection of where Joseph would be heading when we parted company. There was nothing, however, for me to do about that: such boys were their own men.

It was nearly dark by the time I got back to our headquarters, which was still alive with activity. Sara was on the telephone with Roosevelt, attempting to explain that there was no one else we could trust to fill the eighth surveillance spot on Thursday night and that he would therefore have to come along. Normally, Theodore would have required no urging; but recently his troubles at Mulberry Street had multiplied. Two of the men who sat on the Board of Commissioners with him, along with the chief of police, had decided to side with Boss Platt and the antireform forces. Roosevelt was being scrutinized more closely than ever by his enemies, in the hope that he would commit some indiscretion that would justify his dismissal. He did agree to be part of the surveillance effort, ultimately; but he had real misgivings.

Kreizler and the Isaacsons, meanwhile, were engaged in another spirited discussion of our killer’s timing. Lucius had postulated that the one inconsistency in the man’s schedule—the killing of Giorgio Santorelli on March 3rd—could be accounted for by the deceptively mundane phrase “I decided to wait” in the note to Mrs. Santorelli. It was distinctly possible, the younger Isaacson elaborated, that the sighting and selection of a victim were as crucial in their own way to the murderer’s psychic satisfaction as the act of killing itself. Kreizler quite approved of this theory, and added that so long as the man experienced no interference with his intended goal—to murder the boy—he might even derive sadistic pleasure from the delay. This meant that the Santorelli killing could be made to fit the overall timing pattern, because the critical mental event had occurred on Ash Wednesday.

Laszlo and the Isaacsons parted company, however, over the question of whether the man struck on some holidays but not others because he was only angered by certain religious stories and events. Kreizler didn’t like this idea, because it got back to the notion of a religious maniac, a man obsessively, dementedly absorbed in the arcana of the Christian faith. Laszlo was still willing to consider the possibility that the man was (or at some point in his life had been) a priest; but he could not see any reason why, say, the tale of the Three Wise Men should not offer sufficient cause to kill, whereas the purification of the Virgin Mary apparently did. Marcus and Lucius protested that there had to be some reason why only certain holidays were selected, and Kreizler did agree; but he said that we simply hadn’t found the contextual key to that particular part of the puzzle yet.

There being no guarantee that our Ascension Day surveillance plan would produce any results, we all pursued alternate lines of inquiry during the days leading up to it. Marcus and I kept diligently after our priest theory, while Kreizler, Lucius, and Sara engaged in a new and promising activity: canvassing asylums throughout our own and various other parts of the country, by cable and in person, to see if any of them had treated a patient who matched our emerging portrait within the last fifteen years. Despite his firm conviction that our killer was sane, Kreizler hoped that the man’s idiosyncrasies had caused his commitment at some earlier point in his life. Perhaps when his secret taste for blood had first emerged he had committed some indiscretion that the average person (not to mention the average asylum superintendent) would have assumed was a symptom of some form of insanity. Whatever the exact circumstances, asylums kept fairly extensive records as a rule, and checking them seemed a prudent investment of time and energy.

On Ascension Eve we apportioned our responsibilities for the next night: Marcus and Sara, the latter carrying both her firearms, would take up watch on the roof of the Golden Rule; Kreizler and Roosevelt would man Paresis Hall, where Theodore’s authority would be sufficient to keep Biff Ellison in line if there was trouble; Lucius and Cyrus would cover the Black and Tan, Cyrus’s color offering a convenient explanation for their presence should such prove necessary; and Stevie and I would be just down Bleecker Street, atop the Slide. Positioned outside each of these houses would be several street arabs of Stevie’s acquaintance, who, without being told any details of the operation, could be dispatched to bring assistance from the other locations in the event something did happen at any one of them. Roosevelt thought that this task might be better served by policemen, but Kreizler vehemently opposed such an idea. Privately, Laszlo told me he suspected that any contact between officers of the law and the killer would result in the latter’s quick death, Theodore’s prohibitive orders notwithstanding. We had now experienced enough mysterious interference to know that there were forces far more powerful than Roosevelt at work, and those forces unquestionably had as their goal the complete suppression of the case. It was obvious that such a result could best be achieved through a quick dispatch of the apprehended suspect, which would circumvent the need for a trial with all its attendant publicity. Kreizler was determined to prevent this outcome, not only because it would be grievously criminal, but because it would eliminate any possibility of the killer’s being examined to learn his motives as well.

As it turned out, all our anxious anticipation of what might happen on Ascension Day was in vain, for the night passed without incident. We took up our various surveillance positions and spent the long, slow hours until six A.M. battling no greater enemy than boredom. As a result, the days that followed were full of more useless arguments over why the killer should have elected to strike on Good Friday but not on Ascension Day. There was a growing feeling, voiced first by Sara, that the coincidence of the holidays and the murders might be nothing more than that; but Marcus and I remained firmly committed to the idea that our killer’s calendar and that of the Christian faith were somehow connected, since this theory only helped our hypothesis about a rogue or defrocked priest being the killer. We urged that our interceptive sights be set on the next significant holiday—Pentecost, just eleven days after the Feast of the Ascension—and that we try to use the intervening time as productively as possible. Sad to say, though, Marcus and I ran into a brick wall with our priest research; and it began to seem that our entire theory might not be very much more than a well-reasoned waste of time.

Our teammates, on the other hand, did achieve some progress during the week before Pentecost: answers to the cables and letters that Sara, Lucius, and Kreizler had sent out to almost every reputable asylum in the country began to trickle in. Most of them were firmly negative, but a few offered hope, reporting that a man or men of the general physical stature that Kreizler had described, and characterized by at least some of the mental symptoms he’d noted, had been committed within their walls at some point during the past fifteen years. A few institutions even sent copies of case files along; and while none of these ultimately proved of any value, a brief note postmarked Washington, D.C., did create quite a stir one afternoon.

On that day I happened to be watching as Lucius strolled through the room, carrying a batch of the asylum letters and case files. He caught sight of something, then suddenly spun on his heels, dropped the pile of papers, and stared at Kreizler’s desk. His eyes went quite wide for a moment, and his forehead almost instantly began to perspire; but as he took out a handkerchief and began to mop the sweat away, his voice remained steady.

“Doctor—” he said to Laszlo, who was standing by the door talking with Sara. “This note from the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s—have you looked at it?”

“Only once,” Kreizler answered, crossing over to where Lucius stood. “It didn’t seem to offer very much.”

“Yes, that was what I thought.” Lucius picked up the letter. “The description’s awfully vague—the reference to ‘some sort of facial tic,’ for instance, might cover a lot of ground.”

Kreizler studied Lucius. “But, Detective Sergeant…?”

“But—” Lucius grappled with his thought. “Well, it’s the postmark, Doctor: Washington. St. Elizabeth’s is the federal government’s principal asylum for the insane, isn’t it?”

Kreizler paused for a moment; and then his black eyes jumped in their quick, electric way. “That’s right,” he said, quietly yet urgently. “But since they never mentioned the man’s background, I didn’t—” He knocked a fist against his forehead. “Fool!”

Laszlo made a dash for the telephone, and Lucius followed. “Given the legal situation in the capital,” Lucius said, “it would hardly represent an unusual case.”

“You’ve a mastery of understatement, Detective Sergeant,” Kreizler said. “There are several such cases every year, in the capital!”

Sara was walking toward them, drawn by the excitement. “Lucius? What is it, what’s struck you?”

“The postmark,” Lucius said again, slapping at the letter. “There’s a very troublesome little codicil to the Washington laws that deal with insanity and the involuntary commitment of patients to asylums. If the patient hasn’t actually been adjudicated insane in the District of Columbia but is confined to a Washington institution, he can apply for a writ of habeas corpus—and he stands an almost one hundred percent chance of being released.”

“Why’s that so troublesome?” I asked.

“Because,” Lucius said, as Kreizler attempted to get a telephone line through to Washington, “so many mental patients in that city, especially at St. Elizabeth’s, have been sent there from other parts of the country.”

“Oh?” Now it was Marcus’s turn to draw near. “Why’s that?”

Lucius took a deep breath, his own excitement mounting. “Because St. Elizabeth’s is the receiving hospital for soldiers and sailors who’ve been judged unfit for military duty. Unfit—because of mental illness.”

The slow, drifting way in which Sara, Marcus, and I had been approaching Lucius and Kreizler now became something of a stampede. “It didn’t occur to us at first,” Lucius explained, shying away from our advance, “because there’s no mention of the man’s background in the letter. Only descriptions of his appearance and his symptoms—delusions of persecution and persistent cruelty. But if he did, in fact, see military service and was sent to St. Elizabeth’s—well, there’s a chance, a slim but real chance that it’s—” Lucius paused, seemingly afraid to say the word: “him.”

The idea seemed a sound one; but our mood of hopefulness was fairly well dashed by Kreizler’s ’phone call. After being kept waiting for quite a while, he did finally manage to get the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s on the line, but the man treated Laszlo’s request for further information with the utmost contempt. Apparently, he knew all about the notorious Dr. Kreizler and felt the way many asylum superintendents did about my friend. Kreizler asked if there wasn’t some other member of the hospital staff who could look into the matter, to which the superintendent replied that his staff was severely overworked and had already lent “extraordinary” assistance in this matter. If Kreizler wanted to rummage through the hospital’s records, he could damned well come down to Washington and do so himself.

The difficulty was that Kreizler couldn’t just drop everything and shoot off to the capital—none of us could, for we were just a couple of days away from Pentecost. There was nothing to do but put the trip to Washington at the top of the list of things to be attended to after our next all-night vigil, then swallow our excitement and patiently focus on the immediate job to be done. Given the poor results that had attended our Ascension Day efforts, however, I couldn’t help feeling that such focus was going to prove somewhat difficult to achieve.

Nonetheless, when Pentecost Sunday (the feast celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles) arrived we all returned to our various nocturnal aeries and waited again for the appearance of our killer. I cannot say what the mood on the other three rooftops was; but for Stevie and myself, up above the Slide, boredom struck early. It being Sunday night fairly little noise echoed up from Bleecker Street, while the occasional grunt and hiss of the Sixth Avenue Elevated nearby evolved in quality from monotonous to somewhat lulling. Before long it was all I could do to stay awake.

At about twelve-thirty I glanced over to see Stevie quietly laying out a deck of cards in thirteen piles on the tar in front of him. “Solitaire?” I whispered.

“Jewish faro,” he answered, giving the criminal class’s name for the game of stuss, a particularly shady and complicated method of bilking suckers that I’d never been able to comprehend. Seeing a chance to fill this void in my gambling education, I crept over to sit by Stevie, and he quietly tried for the better part of an hour to explain the game to me. I absorbed none of it; and finally, frustrated as well as bored, I stood up and looked out at the city around us.

“This is useless,” I decided quietly. “He’s never going to show up.” I turned to look across Cornelia Street. “I wonder how the others are doing.”

The building that housed the Black and Tan—where Cyrus and Lucius had been posted—was just across the way, and looking beyond its cornice I could see the back of Lucius’s balding pate reflected in the moonlight. I laughed quietly and called it to Stevie’s attention.

“He oughta wear a hat,” Stevie laughed. “If we can see it, so can other people.”

“True,” I answered; and then, as the balding head moved to another spot on the roof and finally disappeared, my face screwed up in puzzlement. “Has Lucius grown since we started this investigation?”

“Must’ve been standing on the dividing wall,” Stevie answered, going back to his cards.

In such innocuous ways are disasters presaged. It was another fifteen minutes before a series of urgent shouts that I recognized to be Lucius’s started to blare across Cornelia Street; and when I looked over, the urgency and fear in the detective sergeant’s face were enough to make me immediately grab Stevie by the collar and head for the staircase. It was apparent even to my tired, bored brain that we’d had our first contact with the killer.