The Alienist

CHAPTER 26

Once on the sidewalk, Stevie and I dispatched our waiting contingent of street arabs to fetch Kreizler, Roosevelt, Sara, and Marcus, then sped across Cornelia Street to the Black and Tan. Making straight for the structure’s front door, we ran headlong into Frank Stephenson, who had been drawn out of his infamous brothel by Lucius’s shouts for assistance. Like most men of his profession, Stephenson employed plenty of muscle, and several of these thugs were standing on the stoop with him, blocking our entrance. I was in no mood, however, to go through the usual game of threat and counterthreat with them: I simply said that we were on police business, that there was a police officer on the roof, and that the president of the Board of Police Commissioners would be arriving soon. That litany was enough to get Stephenson and his boys out of the way, and in seconds Stevie and I were on the roof of the building.

We found Lucius crouching over Cyrus, who had suffered a nasty blow to the skull. A small pool of blood glittered on the tar beneath Cyrus’s head, while his half-open eyes were rolled frightfully up into their sockets and his mouth was producing strained wheezing sounds. Ever cautious, Lucius had brought some gauze bandages along with him, and was now carefully wrapping them around the top of Cyrus’s head, in an effort to stabilize what was at the very least a bad concussion.

“It’s my fault,” Lucius said, before Stevie and I had even asked any questions. Despite his firm concentration on what he was doing, there was deep remorse in Lucius’s voice. “I was having trouble staying awake, and went for coffee. I forgot that it was Sunday—it took longer to find some than I’d anticipated. I must’ve been gone for more than fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” I said, running to the back of the roof. “Could that have been enough time?” Looking down into the rear alleyway, I saw no signs of activity.

“I don’t know,” Lucius answered. “We’ll have to see what Marcus thinks.”

Marcus and Sara arrived a few minutes later, followed soon by Kreizler and Theodore. Pausing just long enough to check on Cyrus’s condition, Marcus produced a magnification lens and a small lantern, then quickly began searching various parts of the rooftop. Explaining that fifteen minutes would indeed have been enough time for a capable climber to get down and up the side of the building, Marcus kept rummaging around until he found some rope fibers that might or might not have been evidence of our killer’s presence. The only way to be sure was to find out from Frank Stephenson if any of his “workers” were missing. Backed up by Theodore, Marcus headed downstairs, while the rest of us stood around Lucius and Kreizler, who were both now at work on Cyrus’s head. Kreizler sent Stevie to tell the street arabs to fetch an ambulance from nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, although there was some question as to whether it was safe to move a man in Cyrus’s condition. After bringing him round with ammonia salts, however, Kreizler was able to learn that Cyrus still had feeling and movement in all his limbs, and Laszlo therefore felt certain that the bumpy ride up Seventh Avenue to the hospital, while uncomfortable, would do no further damage.

Kreizler’s concern for Cyrus’s safety was pronounced; before letting him slip back into semiconsciousness, however, Laszlo wafted more of the ammonia salts under his nose and urgently asked if he’d been able to see who’d struck him. Cyrus only shook his head and moaned pitiably, at which Lucius said that it was useless for Kreizler to press the issue: the wound on Cyrus’s head indicated that he’d been struck from behind, and had therefore probably never realized what was happening.

It took another half an hour for the ambulance from St. Vincent’s to arrive, enough time for us to learn that, in fact, a fourteen-year-old boy from the Black and Tan was not in his assigned room. The details were of a sort that was by now grimly familiar to all of us: the missing youth was a recently arrived German immigrant named Ernst Lohmann, who had not been seen leaving the premises and who had been working out of a chamber that had a window which opened onto the rear alley. According to Stephenson, the boy had requested the room especially that day; so in all likelihood the killer had planned the exodus in advance with his unwitting victim, though how long ago—hours or days—it was impossible to say. I’d told Marcus before he went downstairs that the Black and Tan was not particularly known for offering male whores who dressed up like women, and he’d questioned Stephenson on this point. Sure enough, the one boy in the house who handled such requests was Ernst Lohmann.

Finally, two uniformed ambulance attendants from St. Vincent’s appeared on the roof, carrying a folding stretcher. As they bore Cyrus carefully downstairs and then loaded him into the solemn black ambulance, which was pulled by an equally forbidding horse with blood-red eyes, I realized that a terrible death watch was now beginning: not for Cyrus, who though badly hurt would almost certainly recover fully, but for young Ernst Lohmann. After the ambulance had driven off, with Kreizler and Sara accompanying Cyrus to the hospital, Roosevelt turned to me, and I could see he’d reached the same conclusion.

“I don’t care what Kreizler says, John,” Theodore announced, setting his jaw and balling his fists. “This is a race against time and savagery now, and I’m going to use the force under my command.” I followed him as he rushed to Sixth Avenue to find a hansom. “The Ninth Precinct is closest. I shall make all arrangements from there.” He caught sight of an empty rig, and approached it. “We know the basic pattern—he’ll be making for the waterfront. I’ll have detachments search every foot of—”

“Roosevelt—wait.” I managed to grab his arm and pull him to a halt just as he was getting into the cab. “I understand your feelings. But for heaven’s sake, don’t reveal any details to your men.”

“Not reveal—good God, John!” His teeth started to click louder and his eyes danced with rage behind the spectacles. “Do you understand what’s happening? Why, at this very moment—”

“I know, Roosevelt. But it won’t help things to let the whole force in on it. Just say that there’s been a kidnapping, and that you have reason to suspect the criminals are trying to leave the city by boat or by bridge. It’s the best way to handle it, please believe me.”

Theodore took a big, strong breath into his broad chest, then nodded once. “Perhaps you’re right.” He slammed one fist into the other hand. “Blast all, this damned interference! But I’ll do as you say, John—provided you’ll stand aside and let me get to it!”

With a sharp crack of his horsewhip Roosevelt’s cabbie commenced a fast trip up Sixth Avenue, and I returned to the front of the Black and Tan. There a small and already surly crowd had gathered and was being told the details of the evening’s activities by Frank Stephenson. Technically speaking, the Black and Tan was in the territory of the Hudson Dusters, and Stephenson owed no allegiance to Paul Kelly; but the two men did know each other, and the job Stephenson did exciting that little crowd outside his house that night made me very suspicious that Kelly had foreseen the possibility that one of Stephenson’s boys might be snatched or killed, and had paid him handsomely to make the most of such an event. Stephenson let off a lot of angry statements to the effect that the police had been on the scene and had exercised neither caution nor diligence. The victim was too poor, he said, and entirely too foreign to warrant police interest; if people in such neighborhoods as their own wanted to prevent these kinds of things, they’d have to take matters into their own hands. Marcus, of course, had already identified himself to Stephenson as a police officer; and as the crowd’s mood grew uglier and an increasing number of threatening glances were thrown our way, the Isaacsons, Stevie, and I decided to retreat to our headquarters, where we would try to stay abreast of events through the rest of the night by telephone.

Such proved a lot trickier than it sounded. There was no one for us to ring up—Theodore would never take a call from us while he was in the company of regular police officers—and no one was likely to get in touch with our headquarters. At about four we did have word from Kreizler, who said that he and Sara had gotten Cyrus comfortably settled in a private room at St. Vincent’s and would be returning to our headquarters soon. Other than that, however, there was profound silence. Lucius, though very much relieved by Kreizler’s call, nonetheless felt profoundly guilty about all that had happened, and paced the floor rather frantically. Indeed, had it not been for Marcus I think we might all have slowly gone mad sitting there with nothing to do. But the taller Isaacson decided that if we couldn’t lend our bodies to the search we could at least use our minds, and, pointing to the large map of Manhattan, he suggested that we try to anticipate where the killer would go this time to perform his vicious ritual.

Yet even if we hadn’t been distracted by the thought that events were proceeding without our being able to affect them, I doubt that we would have gotten very far in this endeavor. True, we had a couple of fairly solid starting points: first, the assumption that the killer’s deep hatred of immigrants had resulted in the disposal of bodies at Castle Garden and the Ellis Island ferry; and, second, the belief that his preoccupation with the cleansing power of water had caused him to select two bridges and a water tower as sites for the other murders. But how could we extrapolate from these elements sufficiently to guess what site he would choose next? One suggestion was that he’d return to another bridge; and, if we assumed that he wouldn’t repeat himself in this regard, we were left with either the old High Bridge over the East River at the northern end of Manhattan (an aqueduct that carried Croton Reservoir water into the city) or the nearby Washington Bridge, which had opened a few years earlier. Marcus, however, realized that the killer probably knew that his pursuers were gaining ground on him. Based on the timing of his attack on Cyrus, for example, it seemed certain that it had been he who had put us under surveillance earlier in the evening rather than vice versa. A man who was paying that kind of attention to his antagonists’ activities would likely guess that we were anticipating his return to a favored type of locale and go elsewhere. For Marcus’s money, it was the killer’s hatred of immigrants that offered the best chance of revealing the probable next murder site; and, following this line of reasoning, the detective sergeant argued that the man would head for someplace like the docks belonging to those steamship lines that packed huge numbers of desperate foreigners into the lower decks of their vessels and brought them to America.

When we finally did get an answer to this deadly conundrum, it was so obvious as to make all of us feel quite ashamed. At about four-thirty, just as Kreizler was walking into our headquarters, Sara telephoned from Mulberry Street, where she’d gone to find out what was happening.

“They’ve had a message from Bedloe’s Island,” she said, as soon as I’d picked up the earpiece. “One of the night guards at the Liberty statue—he’s found a body.” My heart sank, and I said nothing. “Hello?” Sara said. “Are you on the line, John?”

“Yes, Sara. I’m here.”

“Then listen carefully, I can’t talk long. There’s already a pack of senior officers getting ready to head out there. The commissioner’s going with them, but he’s told me we mustn’t show ourselves. He says all he can do is try to prevent any coroners from examining the body before it’s sent to the morgue. He’ll try to get us in to see it there.”

“But the crime scene, Sara—”

“John, please don’t be thickheaded. There’s nothing anyone can do. We had our chance tonight and we botched it. Now we’ve got to get what we can, when we can, at the morgue. In the meantime—” Suddenly I heard loud voices in the background on the other end of the line: one of them I recognized as Theodore, another was unquestionably Link Steffens, and then there were several others I couldn’t place. “I’ve got to ring off, John. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve had word from the island.” With a click she was gone.

I gave the others the details, after which it took several minutes for everyone to absorb the fact that despite our weeks of research and days of preparation we’d been unable to prevent another murder. Lucius, of course, took it especially hard, believing himself responsible now not only for a friend’s cracked skull but for a boy’s death. Marcus and I tried to be sympathetic, but nothing we could say would console him. Kreizler, on the other hand, took a very unemotional line, and told Lucius that since the killer had been observing our efforts there was little doubt that he would eventually have found some way to stage a successful attack, if not on that night then on another. We were lucky, Laszlo declared, that Cyrus’s concussion had been the full extent of our casualties—Lucius could also have been laid out on that rooftop, the victim of more than just a nasty knock on the head. There was no time for self-recrimination, Kreizler concluded; Lucius’s keen mind and expertise, undiluted by guilt, were sorely needed. This little speech seemed to mean a great deal to Lucius, as much for its author as for its content, and he was soon composed enough to join our efforts to tabulate what, if anything, we’d learned that night.

Every move the killer had made confirmed our theories concerning his nature and methods—but the most important aspect of his behavior, so far as Kreizler was concerned, was his attention to our efforts and his attack on Cyrus. Why had he chosen to steal Ernst Lohmann away when he knew that we were watching? And, once committed to such a dangerous course of action, why had he only knocked Cyrus unconscious instead of killing him? The man was, after all, already certain to go to the gallows, if caught, and he could only hang once. Why take the chance that Cyrus might put up a fight, get a glimpse of his attacker during it, and then live to tell us about it? Kreizler wasn’t at all sure that we could answer these questions definitely; but it was at least clear that the man had enjoyed the evening’s sense of heightened risk. And since he knew that we were getting closer to him, perhaps letting Cyrus live was his way of urging us on: a defiant challenge, as well as a desperate plea.

Important as all this no doubt was, I could not keep my mind from wandering, as Kreizler spoke, to thoughts of what had occurred on Bedloe’s Island that night. Beneath Bartholdi’s great statue—which symbolized freedom to so many but was now, in my mind, an ironic emblem of our killer’s slavery to a murderous obsession—another boy had met a terrible and undeserved end. I tried to stifle the vague but powerful image of a youth I’d never seen, bound and on his knees beneath Lady Liberty, trusting fully in the man who was about to wring his neck, and then feeling sudden, brief, all-consuming horror at the realization that he had given his trust unwisely and was going to pay the fullest possible price for his mistake. Then, in rapid succession, other pictures flashed across my mind: first the knife, that fearsome instrument created to meet the dangers of a world very unlike New York; then the long, slow, careful movements of that blade through flesh, and the sharp, mean chops at the limbs; the blood, no longer propelled by the heart, flowing out onto the grass and rocks in leisurely, thick streams; and the sickening grind and squeak of sharp steel against the ocular orbits of the skull…There was nothing that resembled justice or humanity in it. Whatever Ernst Lohmann’s way of making a living, whatever his error in trusting a stranger, the penalty was too severe, the price too abominably high.

When my attention returned to the ongoing conversation, I heard Kreizler hissing in frustrated urgency:

“Something—there’s got to be something new that we’ve learned tonight.”

Neither Marcus, Lucius, nor I spoke; but Stevie, who was glancing at each of us uncertainly, seemed to have something to say, and finally piped up with: “Well, there is one thing, Doctor.” Kreizler turned to him expectantly. “He’s losing his hair.”

And then I remembered the head that we’d thought belonged to Lucius but which had sat atop a body far too tall to be the detective sergeant’s. “That’s right,” I said. “We saw him—good Christ, Stevie, for that one moment we were looking at him!”

“Well? Well?” Kreizler demanded. “Surely you noticed something else.”

I looked to Stevie, who only shrugged. Tearing my own memory of that one instant apart like a demon, I sought a forgotten detail, one overlooked moment when I’d clearly seen…nothing. The back of a balding head. That was all that had been visible.

Kreizler sighed in great disappointment. “Balding, eh?” he said, as he scratched the word on the chalkboard. “Well, I suppose it’s more than we knew yesterday.”

“It doesn’t seem much,” Lucius said. “Measured against a boy’s life.”

A few minutes later Sara finally telephoned again. The body of Ernst Lohmann was on its way to the morgue at Bellevue. The guard who’d found it, naturally, had witnessed no part of the killing, but had heard a sound just before he spotted the dead boy that could have been a steam launch drawing away from the island. Roosevelt had told Sara that he needed some time to get rid of the police officers that were with him; he thought that if we were to meet him at Bellevue at six-thirty he could make sure that we would be allowed to examine the body without interference. That left just over an hour; I decided to go home, bathe, and change my clothes before joining the others at the morgue.

I arrived at Washington Square to find my grandmother, thankfully and remarkably, still asleep. Harriet was up and about, though, and she offered to draw my bath. As she scurried up the stairs, I remarked on my grandmother’s sound slumber.

“Yes, sir,” Harriet said. “Ever since the news came she’s been much easier in her mind.”

“The news?” I said, in tired confusion.

“Sure you’ve heard, sir? About that horrible Dr. Holmes—it was in all the papers yesterday. I believe we still have the Times in the nook, if you’d like me to—”

“No, no,” I said, stopping her as she came back down the stairs. “I’ll get it. If you’ll just draw the bath, Harriet, I’ll be your servant for a lifetime.”

“Hardly necessary, Mr. John,” she answered, going up again.

I found the previous day’s Times in the copper and glass nook next to my grandmother’s favorite chair. The story was blazoned across the front page: HOLMES COOL TO THE END. The infamous “torture doctor” had been dispatched on a Philadelphia gallows, after confessing without remorse to the murder of twenty-seven additional people, mostly women he’d romanced and robbed. The drop had fallen at 10:12 A.M., and twenty minutes later he’d been pronounced dead. As added precautions—against what, the paper did not say—Holmes’s coffin had been filled with cement after he’d been laid in it, and then, when the box had been deposited in a ten-foot hole in an unnamed cemetery, another ton of cement had been poured in over it.

My grandmother still had not stirred when I left the house again for Bellevue; in fact, I later learned from Harriet that she slept until well past ten.