The Alienist

CHAPTER 35

With a short cry and a long curse Kreizler spun to the floor of the surrey. Knowing that we were still badly exposed, I forced him to jump out of the carriage and then crawl underneath it, where we both pressed ourselves close to the ground. Our driver, by contrast, walked out and into the open, for the apparent purpose of studying his dead horse. I urged the man to get down; but the evident loss of future revenue had made him blind to his present safety, and he continued to make a tempting target out of himself—until, that is, another report sounded and a bullet whined into the ground near his feet. Looking up and suddenly comprehending the danger he was in, the driver took to his heels and made for some thick woods fifty yards behind us, on the opposite side of the road from a stand of trees that seemed to be harboring our assailant.

As he continued to seethe and swear oaths, Kreizler also managed to get his jacket off, following which he instructed me on how to minister to his wound. It didn’t appear as serious as it was messy—the bullet had just nicked the muscles of his upper arm—and the most important thing was to stop the bleeding. After removing my belt I fashioned it into a tourniquet just above the bleeding gash, and then drew it tight. Tearing Laszlo’s shirtsleeve, I made it into a bandage, and soon the crimson flow had ebbed. When a bullet crashed into the wheel of the surrey, however, shattering one of the thick spokes, I was reminded of how soon we might have other injuries to address.

“Where is he?” Kreizler said, scanning the trees in front of us.

“I saw some smoke, just left of that white birch,” I answered, pointing. “Who is he, is what I want to know.”

“I fear we have entirely too many possibilities to choose from,” Kreizler replied, tightening his bandage a bit and groaning as he did. “Our adversaries from New York would be the most obvious choice. Comstock’s authority and influence are quite national.”

“Long-range assassins don’t really seem like Comstock’s style, though. Or Byrnes’s, for that matter. What about Dury?”

“Dury?”

“Maybe that realization about the twitch changed his attitude—he may think we’re crossing him.”

“But did he really seem a murderer,” Kreizler asked, folding his arm and cradling it, “for all his violent talk? Besides, he made it sound as though he’s a decent shot—unlike this fellow.”

That gave me a thought: “What about…him? Our killer? He could’ve followed us from New York. And if it is Japheth Dury, remember that Adam said he never really took to shooting.”

Kreizler considered the idea as he continued to scan the woods, then shook his head. “You’re being fanciful, Moore. Why follow us here?”

“Because he knew where we were going. He knows where his brother lives, and that talking to Adam could help us track him down.”

Laszlo’s head kept shaking. “It’s too fantastic. It’s Comstock, I tell you—”

Another gunshot suddenly cut through the air, and then a bullet tore large shards of wood out of the side of the surrey.

“Point well taken,” I said, in answer to the bullet. “We can argue about all this later.” I turned to study the woods behind us. “Looks like the driver made it to those trees all right. Do you think you can run with that arm?”

Kreizler groaned once sharply. “As easily as I can lie here, damn it!”

I grabbed Laszlo’s jacket. “When you get into the open,” I said, “try not to run in a straight line.” We both turned and crawled to the other side of the carriage. “Keep your movements irregular. Go on ahead, and I’ll follow in case you have trouble.”

“I’ve a rather unsettling feeling,” Kreizler said, scanning the fifty yards of open space, “that such trouble is likely to be permanent, in this case.” That thought seemed to strike Laszlo hard. Just as he was about to take flight, he stopped and fingered his silver watch, then handed it to me. “Listen, John—on the chance that—well, I want you to give this to—”

I smiled and pushed the watch back at him. “A rank sentimentalist, just as I always suspected. Go on, you can give it to her yourself—move!”

Fifty yards of supposedly open northeastern terrain can seem a lot more difficult to cover than you might imagine when the stakes of the run are mortal. Every little rodent hole, ditch, puddle, root, and stone between the carriage and the woods became an almost insurmountable obstacle, my pounding heart having robbed my legs and feet of their usual agility. I suppose it took Kreizler and me somewhere under a minute to run the fifty yards to safety; and though we were apparently menaced by only a single gunman who didn’t have anything like expert aim, it felt as though we were in a full-scale battle. The air around my head seemed alive with bullets, though I don’t think more than three or four shots were actually taken at us; and by the time I completed the escape, with branches lashing at my face as I propelled myself further and further into the wooded darkness, I was as close to incontinent as I hope ever to be.

I found Kreizler propped up against an enormous fir tree. His bandage and tourniquet had loosened, allowing a new flow of blood to stream down his arm. After retightening both dressings I draped his jacket around his shoulders, for it seemed that he was growing cold and losing color.

“We’ll stay parallel to the road,” I said quietly, “until we catch sight of some traffic. We’re not far from Brookline, and we can get a lift to the station from there.”

I got Laszlo up and helped him start through the thick woods, keeping one eye on the road so that we never lost track of it. When we came within sight of the buildings of Brookline I figured it was safe to come out of the woods and move at a faster clip. Soon after we had, an ice van came by and drew to a halt, its driver jumping down to ask what had befallen us. I made up a story about a carriage accident, prompting the man to offer us a ride as far as the Back Bay Station. This proved a doubly fortunate stroke, for several large pieces of ice from the van driver’s stock eased the pain in Kreizler’s arm.

By the time the Back Bay Station came into view it was almost five-thirty, and the afternoon sunlight had begun to take on an amber, hazy quality. I asked our driver to let us off near a small stand of scraggly pines some two hundred yards from the station itself, and after we’d gotten off the van and thanked the man for his help and his ice, which had almost completely checked the flow of blood from Kreizler’s arm, I hustled Laszlo into the shadowy darkness beneath the deep green boughs.

“I’m as enamored of nature as the next man, Moore,” Kreizler said in confusion. “But this hardly seems the time. Why didn’t we drive to the station?”

“If that was one of Comstock and Byrnes’s men back there,” I answered, picking a spot among the pine needles that offered a good view of the station house, “he’ll probably guess that this is our next move. He may be waiting for us.”

“Ah,” Laszlo noised. “I see your point.” He crouched down on the pine needles, then began rearranging his bandage. “So we wait here, and then board the train unseen when it arrives.”

“Right,” I answered.

Kreizler drew out his silver watch. “Almost half an hour.”

I glanced over at him pointedly and smiled a bit. “Just enough time for you to explain that schoolboy gesture with your watch back there.”

Kreizler looked away quickly, and I was surprised by the extent to which the comment seemed to embarrass him. “There is,” he said, returning my smile despite himself, “no chance that you’ll forget that incident, I suppose?”

“None.”

He nodded. “I thought not.”

I sat down near him. “Well?” I said. “Are you going to marry the girl or not?”

Laszlo shrugged a bit. “I have—considered it.”

I let my head fall with a quiet laugh. “My God…marriage. Have you—well, you know—asked her?” Laszlo shook his head. “You might want to wait until the investigation’s over,” I said. “She’ll be more likely to agree.”

Kreizler looked puzzled at that. “Why?”

“Well,” I answered simply, “she’ll have proved her point, if you know what I mean. And be more amenable to tying herself down.”

“Point?” Kreizler said. “What point?”

“Laszlo,” I answered, lecturing him a bit, “in case you haven’t noticed, this whole affair means rather a lot to Sara.”

“Sara?” he repeated in bewilderment—and by the way he said the name I realized just exactly how wrong I’d been since the very beginning.

“Oh, no,” I sighed. “It’s not Sara…”

Kreizler stared at me for a few more seconds, then leaned back, opened his mouth, and let out a deeper laugh than any I’d ever heard from him; deep, and irritatingly long.

“Kreizler,” I said contritely, after a full minute of this treatment. “Please, I hope you’ll—” He didn’t stop, however, at which annoyance began to come through in my voice. “Kreizler. Kreizler! All right, I’ve made a jackass out of myself. Now will you have the decency to shut up?”

But he didn’t. After another half-minute the laugh finally did begin to calm, but only because it was now causing some pain in his right arm. Holding that wounded limb, Laszlo continued to chuckle, tears appearing in his eyes. “I am sorry, Moore,” he finally said. “But what you must have been thinking—” And then another round of painful laughter.

“Well, what in hell was I supposed to think?” I demanded. “You’ve had enough time alone with her. And you said yourself—”

“But Sara has no interest in marriage,” Kreizler answered, finally getting himself under control. “She’s little enough interest in men at all—she’s constructed her entire life around the idea that a woman can live an independent, fulfilling existence. You ought to know that.”

“Well, it did cross my mind,” I lied, trying to salvage some vestige of dignity. “But the way that you were acting, it seemed as though—well, I don’t know how it seemed!”

“That was one of the first conversations I had with her,” Kreizler explained further. “There were to be no complications, she said—everything would be strictly professional.” Laszlo studied me as I pouted. “It must have been very trying for you,” he said, with another chuckle.

“It was,” I answered petulantly.

“You might’ve simply asked.”

“Well, Sara wasn’t the only one trying to be professional!” I protested, stamping a foot. “Though I can see now that I shouldn’t have bothered with any—” I suddenly stopped, my volume falling again. “Wait a minute. Just one minute. If it’s not Sara, then who in hell—” I turned slowly to Laszlo, and then he turned equally slowly to the ground: the explanation was all over his face. “Oh, my God,” I breathed. “It’s Mary, isn’t it?”

Kreizler looked toward the station, and then into the distance in the direction from which the train would approach us, as if searching for salvation from this inquisition. None came. “It’s a complicated situation, John,” he finally said. “I must ask you to understand and respect that.”

Too shocked to offer any commentary, I proceeded to sit mutely through Laszlo’s subsequent explanation of this “complicated situation.” Clearly there were aspects of the thing that disturbed him deeply: Mary had originally been a patient of his, after all, and there was always the danger that what she believed was affection for him was in reality a kind of gratitude and, worse still, respect. For this reason, Laszlo explained to me carefully, he’d tried very hard not to encourage her or to permit himself any reciprocal emotions when it had first become clear to him, almost a year earlier, how she felt. At the same time, he was anxious that I should understand how very much his and Mary’s mutual attraction had grown from beginnings that in many ways were perfectly natural.

When Kreizler first started to work with the illiterate and supposedly uncomprehending Mary, he quickly realized that he would not be able to communicate with her until he could establish a bond of trust. And he forged that bond by revealing to her what he now referred to ambiguously as his own “personal history.” Unaware that I currently knew more about his personal history than he’d ever told me, Kreizler didn’t realize how fully I understood his words. Mary had probably been, I speculated, the first person who ever heard the tale of Laszlo’s apparently violent relationship with his own father, and such a difficult disclosure would indeed have bred trust, and more: while Laszlo had only intended to encourage Mary to tell her own tale by telling his, he had, in fact, planted the seeds of an unusual sort of intimacy. That intimacy had survived into the period when Mary came to work for him, making life on Seventeenth Street far more interesting, not to mention perplexing, than it had ever been before. When it eventually became impossible for Kreizler to deny first that Mary’s feelings for him went beyond mere gratitude, and, second, that he was experiencing a similar attraction to her, he entered on a long period of self-examination, trying to determine if what he felt was not at heart a kind of pity for the unfortunate, lonely creature whom he’d taken under his roof. He only fully satisfied himself that it was not several days before our investigation burst in on his life. The case forced him to put off a resolution of his personal predicament; yet it also helped him clarify what form that resolution might take. For when it became clear that not only were the members of our team in physical danger, but his servants, as well, Kreizler experienced a desire to protect Mary that went far beyond the usual duties of a benefactor. At that point he decided that she should be told as little as possible about the case, and play no part in its prosecution: knowing that his enemies might come at him through the people he cared about, Laszlo hoped to safeguard Mary by making sure that, on the off chance some outsider found a way to communicate with her, she had no useful information to divulge. It hadn’t been until the morning of our departure for Washington that Kreizler had decided it might be time for his and Mary’s relationship to, as he rather awkwardly put it, “evolve.” He informed her immediately of this decision; and she watched him depart with tears in her eyes, fearful that something would happen to him while he was away and thus prevent their ever becoming more than master and servant.

As Kreizler finished his story, I heard the first whistle of the New York train in the eastern distance. Still stunned, I nonetheless began going over the events of recent weeks in my mind, trying to determine where it was that I had gone so wrong in my interpretation.

“It was Sara,” I finally said. “Since the beginning she’s been behaving like—well, I don’t know just what she’s been behaving like, but it’s been damned peculiar. Does she know?”

“I’m sure of it,” Kreizler answered, “though I’ve never told her. Sara seems to view everything around her as a test case on which to sharpen her detecting skills. I believe this little puzzle has been most entertaining for her.”

“Entertaining,” I said with a grunt. “And I thought it was love. I’ll bet she knew I was off on the wrong track. It’s just the kind of thing she’d do, let me go around thinking—well, you wait till we get back. I’ll show her what happens when you play that kind of game with John Schuyler—”

I stopped as the New York train appeared a mile or so down the tracks to our left, still moving at high speed toward the station.

“We can continue this on board,” I said, helping Kreizler up. “And rest assured we will continue it!”

After waiting for the train to come to a full, grunting halt outside the station, Kreizler and I began a quick trot across another rock- and ditch-riddled field toward the vehicle’s last car. We climbed onto the observation deck and then moved stealthily on inside, where I got Laszlo comfortably positioned in a rear seat. There was as yet no sign of the conductor, and we used the few minutes before our departure to neaten Kreizler’s bandage, and our general appearances, as well. I glanced out at the station platform every few seconds, trying to spot anyone whose demeanor might betray him for an assassin, but the only other people entraining were an elderly, well-to-do woman with a walking stick and her large, rather harried nurse.

“Looks as though we may have gotten a break,” I said, standing in the aisle. “I’ll just have a quick look up ahead and—”

My voice froze as my eyes turned to the rear door of the car. Two large forms had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on the observation deck; and although their attention was directed away from the train—they were arguing with a station official—I could see enough of them to recognize the two thugs who had chased Sara and me from the Santorellis’ flat.

“What is it, Moore?” Kreizler asked, eyeing me. “What’s happened?”

Knowing that in his current condition Laszlo wasn’t going to be much good in a confrontation of any kind, I tried to smile, and then shook my head. “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing at all. Don’t be so jumpy, Kreizler.”

We both turned at the sound of the elderly woman and her nurse entering the front door of our car. Though my stomach was alive with sudden dread, my mind was working reliably: “I’ll be right back,” I told Laszlo, and then I approached the newcomers.

“Excuse me,” I said, smiling and doing my best to be engaging. “May I be of some assistance in getting you settled, madam?”

“You may,” the old woman answered, in a tone that indicated she was very familiar with being waited on hand and foot. “This wretched nurse of mine is utterly useless!”

“Oh, surely not,” I answered, eyeing the walking stick that the woman was leaning on: it had a fine head of heavy silver, which was fashioned into the likeness of a swan. I seized the woman’s arm and guided her into a seat. “But there are limits,” I said, surprised at the old woman’s weight and ungainliness, “to even the best nurse’s capabilities.” The nurse gave me a smile, at that, and I took the opportunity to lay hold of the old woman’s stick. “If you’ll allow me to hold this, madam, I think we can—there!” With a loud groan the seat received its occupant, who let out a rush of air.

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “Oh, yes, that’s better. Thank you, sir. You are a gentleman.”

I smiled again. “A pleasure,” I said, walking away.

As I passed Kreizler he gave me a dumbfounded look. “Moore, what the devil—”

I indicated silence to him, then approached the rear door of the car, keeping my face to one side so that I couldn’t be seen from without. The two men were still arguing with the station attendant on the platform, about what I couldn’t tell; but when I looked down I saw that one of them held a rifle case. “He’ll have to go first,” I mumbled to myself; but before making any move I waited for the train to start rolling out of the station.

When that moment finally came I heard the two men outside yell some final, and fairly raw, insults at the stationman: in seconds they would turn and be inside. I took a deep breath, then opened the door quickly and quietly.

Not for nothing had I spend many seasons following the trials and tribulations of New York’s baseball Giants. During afternoons in Central Park I’d developed a healthy batting swing of my own, which I now exercised with the old woman’s cane across the neck and skull of the thug who held the rifle case. The man cried out, but before he could even clutch at the injury I’d put a hand between his shoulder blades and shoved him over the railing of the observation deck. Although the train was still moving fairly slowly, there was no chance of the man getting back on board—but I was still faced with the second thug, who screamed “What in hell?” as he spun on me.

Suspecting that his first instinct would be to go for my throat, I crouched down low and let him have the silver swan in the groin. The man doubled over for just an instant, and when he rose again he looked more infuriated than disabled by the blow. He threw a fist that glanced off my skull as I leaned out over the railroad tracks to avoid it. The train, I divined from a brief, somewhat dizzy glance downward, was picking up speed. Clumsy even for a man his size, the thug had stumbled when his blow failed to land securely, and as he tried to regain his balance I laid the swan across his cheek, although the move was cramped and didn’t prevent him from coming for me again. I held the stick up with both hands, but my opponent, anticipating another swing, raised his beefy arms to protect either side of his head. Then he grinned maliciously and moved forward.

“Now, you shit,” he grunted, and then he suddenly lunged. I had only one avenue of attack: leveling the stick at his throat, I shot its end into his Adam’s apple sharply, producing a sudden, choked cry and momentarily paralyzing the man. I quickly dropped the stick, grabbed hold of the roof of the deck, pulled myself up, and let the thug have a full kick with both feet. The blow sent him, too, over the railing, and into an embankment by the tracks. There he rolled to a halt, still clutching his throat.

Lowering myself back down I took a few deep, gasping breaths, then looked up to see Kreizler coming through the door.

“Moore!” he said, crouching by me. “Are you all right?” I nodded, still breathing hard, as Laszlo looked into the distance behind us. “Your condition certainly seems preferable to the state those two are in. However, if you’re able to walk I suggest you get back inside—that woman’s gone into hysterics. She thinks you’ve stolen her walking stick, and she’s threatening to send for the authorities when we reach our next stop.”

With my pulse finally beginning to calm, I straightened out my clothes, then picked up the walking stick and headed into the car. Stumbling a bit as I walked down the aisle, I approached the old woman.

“Here you are, madam,” I said, cordially if still a bit breathlessly. She drew back in fear. “I only wanted to admire it in the sunlight.”

The woman accepted the stick without saying anything; but as I walked back to my seat I heard her shriek and exclaim: “No—get it away! There’s blood on it, I tell you!”

Collapsing with a groan, I was joined by Kreizler, who offered me his flask. “I can only suppose that those were not men to whom you owe a gambling debt,” he said.

I shook my head and had a drink. “No,” I breathed. “Connor’s boys. More than that I can’t tell you.”

“Did they really intend to kill us, do you think?” Laszlo wondered. “Or simply to frighten us?”

I shrugged. “I doubt we’ll ever know. And frankly, I’d rather not talk about it just at the moment. Besides, we were in the midst of a very important discussion, before they butted in…”

The conductor soon appeared, and as we bought two tickets to New York from him, I began to cross-examine Laszlo about the whole Mary Palmer business, not because I had any trouble believing it—no one who’d ever met the girl would have had any trouble believing it—but because, on the one hand, it soothed my nerves, and, on the other, it disarmed Kreizler so thoroughly and refreshingly. All the dangers we’d faced that day, indeed all the grimness of our investigation generally, somehow shrank in significance as Laszlo very tenuously revealed his personal hopes for the future. It was an unfamiliar sort of conversation for him, and difficult in many ways; but never had I seen the man look or sound so completely human as he did on that train ride.

And never would I see him so again.