The Alienist

CHAPTER 39

We entered a world of files.

Both of the floors occupied by the Census Bureau were lined with wooden filing cabinets that ran right up to the ceiling and blocked every window. Mobile ladders ran on tracks around the walls of each floor’s four rooms, and a desk sat in the center of every chamber. Harsh electrical lights with metal shades were suspended from the ceilings, throwing their glare onto floors composed of bare wood. It was a place without feeling or personality of any kind—a worthy home, in short, for bare, inhuman statistics.

The first occupied desk that Sara and I found was on the third floor. At it sat a fairly young man who wore a banker’s visor and an inexpensive but particularly well-pressed suit, the jacket of which was slung over his plain, straight-backed chair. Cuff protectors covered the lower portions of the man’s white, starched shirtsleeves, protecting those portions of the garment as the thin, sallow hands protruding from them attacked a folder full of forms.

“Excuse me?” I said, approaching the desk slowly.

The man looked up sourly. “Official hours are over.”

“Of course,” I answered quickly, recognizing an incorrigible bureaucrat when I saw one. “Had this been official business, I would have come at a more appropriate hour.”

The man eyed me up and down, then glanced at Sara. “Well?”

“We’re with the press,” I answered. “The Times, actually. My name is Moore, and this is Miss Howard. I wonder if Mr. Murray is still in?”

“Mr. Murray never leaves the office before six-thirty.”

“Ah. Then he’s still here.”

“He may not want to see you,” the young man said. “The members of the press weren’t exactly helpful last time around.”

I considered the statement, then asked, “You mean in 1890?”

“Of course,” the man answered, as if every organization in the world operated on a ten-year schedule. “Even the Times made ridiculous allegations. After all, we can’t be responsible for every bribe and falsified report, can we?”

“Naturally not,” I said. “Mr. Murray would be—”

“Superintendent Porter, the national chief, actually had to resign in ’93,” the man went on, still glowering at me with an injured, accusing look. “Did you know that?”

“Actually,” I answered, “I’m a police reporter.”

The man removed his cuff protectors. “I only mention it,” he continued, eyes burning at the center of the shadow thrown on his face by the banker’s visor, “to show that the main problems were in Washington, not here. No one in this office had to resign, Mr. Moore.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, forbearance becoming an ever more difficult task, “but we’re in a bit of a hurry, so if you could just point me toward Mr. Murray…”

“I’m Charles Murray,” the man answered flatly.

Sara and I glanced at each other quickly, and then I let out a perhaps impolitic sigh, realizing what we were up against with this fellow. “I see. Well, Mr. Murray, I wonder if you might be able to check your employment records for the name of a man we’ve been trying to find.”

Murray eyed me from under his visor. “Identification?” I handed him some and he leveled it just a few inches from his face, as if he were checking a piece of counterfeit currency. “Hmm,” he noised. “I suppose it’s all right. Can’t be too careful, though. Anyone might come in here and claim to be a newspaperman.” He handed it back to me, and then turned to Sara. “Miss Howard?”

Sara’s face went blank as she scrambled for an answer. “I’m afraid I have no credentials, Mr. Murray. I serve in a secretarial capacity.”

Murray didn’t look entirely satisfied with that, but he nodded once and turned back to me. “Well?”

“The man we’re looking for,” I said, “is called John Beecham.” The name brought no change at all in Murray’s impassive expression. “He’s just over six feet tall, with thinning hair and a bit of a facial tic.”

“A bit of one?” Murray said evenly. “If he’s got a bit of a facial tic, Mr. Moore, I wouldn’t like to see an entire one.”

Again I had that feeling that had swept into me in Adam Dury’s barn: the coursing, exultant burn that accompanied the twin realizations that we were on the trail and the trail was still warm. I gave Sara a quick glance, noting that her first experience of that feeling was proving as difficult to control as mine had been.

“Then you know Beecham?” I asked, my voice quavering a bit.

Murray nodded once. “Or rather I did know him.”

Cold disappointment poured over my hot sensation of triumph for an instant. “He doesn’t work for you?”

“He did,” Murray answered. “I dismissed him. Last December.”

Hope surged again. “Ah. And how long had he been here?”

“Is he in some sort of trouble?” Murray asked.

“No, no,” I said quickly, realizing that I hadn’t bothered, in my enthusiasm, to work out a plausible cover story for my questions. “I—that is, it’s his brother. He may be involved in a—a—land speculation scandal. I thought Mr. Beecham might be able to help us find him, or would at least care to make a statement.”

“Brother?” Murray queried. “He never mentioned a brother.” I was about to reply to this remark with another fabrication, when Murray went on: “Not that that’s any indication. Not a talkative man, John Beecham. I never knew much about him—certainly nothing about his private affairs. Always a very proper, respectable person. Which was why I found it remarkable…” Murray’s voice trailed off and he tapped a long, bony finger on his chair for a few seconds as he examined first me and then Sara again. Finally he stood up, went to one of the rolling ladders, and sent it down its track to the far end of the room with a sudden, hard shove. “He was hired in the spring of 1890,” Murray called, as he followed and then mounted the ladder. Pulling out one wooden drawer near the ceiling, he ran through it for a file. “Beecham applied for a job as an enumerator.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“An enumerator,” Murray answered, coming back down the ladder with a large envelope in one hand. “The men who do the actual counting and interviewing for the census. I hired nine hundred such men in June and July of 1890. Two weeks’ work, twenty-five dollars a week. Each man was required to fill out an application.” Opening the envelope, Murray pulled out a folded paper and handed it to me. “Beecham’s,” he said.

Trying to disguise my eagerness, I scanned the document as Murray summarized it: “He was quite qualified—just the sort of man we look for, actually. University education, unmarried, good references—all powerful recommendations.”

And so they would have been, I thought as I studied the document, had they been even remotely legitimate. The information before my eyes represented a litany of lies and an impressive set of forgeries; provided, of course, that there weren’t two John Beechams with chronic facial spasms roaming around the United States. (I wondered for a moment how high Alphonse Bertillon’s system of anthropometry would have put those odds.) Sara was looking over my shoulder at the application, and when I turned to her she nodded as if to acknowledge that she, too, had drawn the obvious conclusion from it: that in 1890, as before and after that year, Beecham was sharpening his talent for elaborate deception.

“You’ll see his address at the head of the form,” Murray continued. “At the time I dismissed him, he was still living in the same rooms.”

At the top of the sheet was written, in a hand that I recognized from the note we’d studied weeks earlier, “23 Bank Street”—near the center of Greenwich Village. “Yes,” I said slowly. “Yes, I see. Thank you.”

Looking somewhat perturbed by Sara’s and my continued interest in the application, Murray plucked the thing out of my hands and slipped it back into the large envelope. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Else?” I answered. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Murray.”

“Good evening, then,” he said, sitting back down and pulling on his cuff protectors.

Sara and I moved to the door. “Oh,” I said, doing my best to feign an afterthought. “You say you dismissed Beecham, Mr. Murray. Might I inquire why, if he was so well qualified?”

“I don’t trade in gossip, Mr. Moore,” Murray answered coldly. “Besides, your business is with his brother, is it not?”

I tried another tack: “I trust he didn’t do anything untoward while he was working in the Thirteenth Ward?”

Murray grunted once. “If he had, I hardly would have promoted him from enumerator to office clerk and kept him on for another five years—” Murray caught himself and jerked his head up. “Just a minute. How did you know he was assigned to the Thirteenth Ward?”

I smiled. “It’s of no consequence. Thank you, Mr. Murray, and good evening.”

Grabbing Sara by the wrist, I started back down the stairs quickly. I could hear Murray’s chair backing up, and then he appeared at the stairway door.

“Mr. Moore!” he called angrily. “Stop, sir! I demand to know how you knew that information! Mr. Moore, do you hear—”

But we were already out the door. I kept a firm grip on Sara’s wrist as we headed west, though it wasn’t necessary for me to pull her along—she was moving at a quick, exuberant pace, and by the time we reached Fifth Avenue she had started to laugh out loud. As we came to a halt and waited for a gap in the evening traffic on the avenue to appear, Sara suddenly threw her arms around my neck.

“John!” she said breathlessly. “He’s real, he’s here—my God, we know where he lives!”

I returned her embrace, though there was caution in my voice: “We know where he lived. It’s June now—he was dismissed in December. Six months without a job may have changed a lot of things—his ability to pay rent in a decent neighborhood, for one.”

“But he could’ve gotten another job,” Sara said, her jubilation fading a bit.

“Let’s hope so,” I answered, as the traffic in front of us thinned. “Come on.”

“But how?” Sara called as we stepped into the avenue. “How did you think of it? And what was all that about the Thirteenth Ward?”

As we kept marching farther west toward Bank Street, I explained my line of reasoning to Sara. The 1890 census, I’d remembered hearing from friends of mine who’d reported on it, had indeed been the cause of a great scandal in New York (and the nation generally) when it was conducted during the summer and fall of that year. The chief causes of said scandal had been, not surprisingly, the city’s political bosses, whose power stood to be affected by the results of the count and who had tried to influence every stage of the proceedings. Many of the nine hundred men who’d shown up at Charles Murray’s Eighth Street offices to apply for positions as enumerators in July of 1890 had been agents of either Tammany Hall or Boss Platt, and they had been instructed by their superiors to tailor their returns so as to ensure that congressional districts loyal to their respective political parties weren’t redrawn in a way that would cause them to lose power in state and national affairs. Sometimes this had meant inflating the count of a given district, a job that entailed manufacturing the vital statistics and backgrounds of nonexistent citizens. For enumerators, apparently, were far more than simple numbers men: their work entailed careful interviews with a cross section of their subjects, the purpose being to determine not only how many citizens the nation had but also what sorts of lives they led. These interviews included personal questions that might, as one of my colleagues at the Times had put it in an article, “under other circumstances have seemed quite impertinent.” The flood of false information that had come into Superintendent Murray’s office from Democratic and Republican agents had been perforce imaginative and often impossible to distinguish from real returns. Such behavior hadn’t been confined to New York, as I say, though as usual New York had taken the trend to almost absurd extremes. As a result, the work of assembling the final report in Washington had been greatly delayed. The original overall head of the project (the Superintendent Porter whom Murray had mentioned) had resigned in 1893, and the census was completed by his successor, C. D. Wright—but there was really no way to tell, even then, how reliable the final product was.

Enumerators had received their assignments according to congressional districts, which in New York had been subdivided according to wards. My question to Murray about Beecham and the Thirteenth Ward had, I told Sara, been a guess: I knew that Benjamin and Sofia Zweig had lived in that ward, and I was going on the theory that Beecham had met them while working in the area, perhaps even while interviewing their family for the census. Fortunately, my guess had paid off, though we were still in the dark as to exactly why Murray had dismissed our man.

“It doesn’t seem likely that Beecham was involved in falsifying returns,” Sara said, as we hustled up Greenwich Avenue toward Bank Street. “He’s not the type to get involved in politics—and besides, the census was already completed. But if not that, then what?”

“We can send the Isaacsons back to find out tomorrow,” I answered. “Murray seems like the kind of man who’ll respond to a badge. Though if you asked me to post odds right now I’d give you twelve to one that it’s got something to do with children. Maybe someone finally came forward with a complaint—not necessarily anything violent, but something seamy, all the same.”

“It does seem likely,” Sara said. “You remember the remark Murray made when he was discussing how respectable Beecham seemed? And how that made him find whatever it was so ‘remarkable’?”

“Exactly,” I answered. “There’s an unpleasant little tale in there somewhere.”

We’d reached Bank Street and turned left. A typical series of Greenwich Village blocks opened up before us, tree- and townhouse-lined until they closed in on the Hudson River, where trucking stations and warehouses took over. The stoops and cornices of the town houses were a picture of quaint monotony, and as we passed by each residence we could see into the relatively low-standing parlors of the comfortable middle-class families who inhabited the neighborhood. Number 23 Bank Street was only a block and a half from Greenwich Avenue, but as we covered that distance Sara’s and my hopes had time to rise high nonetheless. When we reached the building, however, disappointment crashed down hard.

In one corner of the parlor window was a small, very tasteful sign: ROOM TO LET. Sara and I exchanged sobered looks, then made our way up the steps of the building to the narrow front door. There was a small brass bell handle on the right side of the frame, and I pulled it. Silently, Sara and I stood and waited for several minutes; then we finally heard shuffling footsteps and an old woman’s voice:

“No, no, no. Get away—go on, now.”

It was difficult to tell whether or not the order was being directed at us; but when several bolts on the door were noisily thrown, I began to suspect that it was not. The door finally opened, and we were faced by a small, white-haired crone in a faded blue dress of a style dating back to the seventies. She was missing several teeth, and there were wiry white hairs protruding from her jaw at several points. Her eyes were lively, though they did not bespeak a particularly clear mind. She was about to say something to us when a small orange cat appeared at her feet. She kicked the creature lightly back into the house.

“No, I said!” the old woman scolded. “These people have nothing to say to you—any of you!” At that point I became aware of some rather loud mewing coming from inside—by my reckoning, the work of at least half a dozen cats. The woman looked up at me brightly. “Yes? Did you want to inquire about the room?”

The question put me at a momentary loss; fortunately, Sara stepped into the breach by introducing first herself and then me. “The room, ma’am?” Sara continued, following the introductions. “Not precisely—rather, about its former occupant. Mr. Beecham has, I believe, moved?”

“Oh, yes,” the woman answered, as another cat appeared at the door. This one, a gray-striped thing, managed to get to the top of the stoop. “Here!” the woman said. “Peter! Oh, do catch him, will you, Mr. Moore?” I bent down, snatched the cat up, and then gave him a little scratch under the chin before returning him to the woman. “Cats!” she said. “You wouldn’t think that they’d be so anxious to disappear!”

Sara cleared her throat. “Yes, indeed, Mrs…. Mrs….?”

“Piedmont,” the woman answered. “And it’s only the eight that I actually let into the house—the other fifteen are required to stay in the yard, or I become very cross with them.”

“Of course, Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said. “Only the eight—a perfectly reasonable number.” Mrs. Piedmont nodded in satisfaction, and Sara asked, “As for Mr. Beecham…?”

“Mr. Beecham?” the woman answered. “Yes. Very polite. Very prompt. And never drank. Not a favorite of the cats, of course—not much of a man for animals at all, really, but—”

“Did he leave a forwarding address, by any chance?” Sara cut in.

“He couldn’t,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “He had no idea where he was going. He thought perhaps Mexico, or South America. He said there were opportunities for men of initiative there.” The woman caught herself, and then opened the door a bit wider. “I am sorry,” she said, “you must forgive me. Please do come in.”

With a slight roll of my eyes I followed Sara through the door, knowing that every nugget of hard information we might get out of the charming Mrs. Piedmont was likely to be accompanied by five or ten minutes of useless babbling. My enthusiasm was further dampened when she led us into her very primly furnished but aged and dusty parlor. Everything in the room, from chairs and settees to a large collection of Victorian knickknacks, seemed on the verge of disintegrating quietly into dust. In addition, the unmistakable odor of cat urine and feces permeated the entire house.

“Cats,” Mrs. Piedmont said merrily as she sat down in a high-armed chair. “Wonderful companions, but they will run off. Quite disappear, without so much as a word!”

“Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said indulgently, “we really are most anxious to find Mr. Beecham. We’re—old friends of his, you see—”

“Oh, but you can’t be,” Mrs. Piedmont said, her face scowling a bit. “Mr. Beecham had no friends. He said so. He always said so. ‘He travels swiftest who travels alone, Mrs. Piedmont,’ he would tell me in the morning, and then it was off to the shipping office.”

“Shipping office?” I said. “But surely—”

Sara touched my hand to silence me, then smiled as several cats wandered into the room from the hallway. “Of course,” she said. “The shipping office. A very enterprising man.”

“Indeed,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “Oh, and there’s Lysander,” she went on, pointing to one of the cats, who was mewing profusely. “I haven’t seen him since Saturday. Cats! They do disappear…”

“Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said, still showing remarkable patience, “how long did Mr. Beecham live with you?”

“How long?” The old girl began to chew at a finger as she cogitated. “Why, nearly three years, all in all. Never a complaint, always on time with his rent.” She frowned. “But a somber sort of a man, really. And he never ate! Never ate that I saw, that is. Always working, day and night—though I suppose he must’ve eaten sometime, mustn’t he?”

Sara smiled again and nodded. “And do you know why he left?”

“Well,” Mrs. Piedmont said simply. “The failure.”

“Failure?” I said, hoping for a clue.

“His shipping line,” came the reply. “The great tempest off the China coast. Oh, those poor seamen. Mr. Beecham gave all the money he had left to their families, you know.” A bony hand went up confidentially. “If you see a small calico lady come through, Miss Howard, do tell me. She didn’t come down for breakfast, and they will disappear.”

Mean as it may sound, I was about ready to wring Mrs. Piedmont’s neck, along with those of her blasted cats; but Sara stayed the course, inquiring congenially, “Did you ask Mr. Beecham to leave, then?”

“I should say not,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “He went of his own accord. He told me he had no money to pay his rent, and he didn’t intend to stay where he couldn’t pay his way. I offered to give him a few weeks’ grace, but he wouldn’t have it. I remember that day very well—a week before Christmas. It was about the time that little Jib disappeared.”

I groaned quietly as Sara asked, “Jib? A cat?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Piedmont answered dreamily. “Just—disappeared. Never a word. They have their own affairs to attend to, cats.”

As my eyes wandered to the floor, I noticed that several more of Mrs. Piedmont’s charges had noiselessly entered the room, and that one of them was attending to its own affairs in a shadowy corner. I nudged Sara, indicating the upstairs impatiently.

“Do you think we might have a look at the room?” Sara asked.

Mrs. Piedmont came back from her daydream with a smile, and looked at us as though we’d only just entered. “Then it’s the room you’re interested in?”

“We may be.”

That set off a new round of chatter as we headed out of the parlor and up the staircase, the ancient green wallpaper of which was peeling and torn. The room that Beecham had rented was on the third floor, which, climbing at Mrs. Piedmont’s pace, seemed to take an eternity to reach. By the time we finally did, all eight of the house cats had already collected around the door, and were mewing away. Mrs. Piedmont unlocked the room and then we entered.

The first thing that struck me was that the cats didn’t follow us in. As soon as the door opened their mewing stopped, and then they sat at the threshold, looking momentarily concerned before they shot off down the stairs. With their departure I turned to survey the chamber, and quickly caught a trace of something in the air: the smell of decay. It was nothing like the stench of feline waste, nor did it match the familiar aromas of old age and antiques that marked the parlor. This was more pungent. A dead mouse, or some such, I finally decided, and when Sara wrinkled her nose sourly I knew that she’d caught it, too. Thinking nothing more of it for the moment, I finally fixed my attention on the room.

I needn’t have bothered. It was a spare, empty chamber, with a window that looked out over Bank Street. There were no furnishings other than an old four-poster bed, an equally aged wardrobe, and a plain set of drawers. A washbasin sat on a large doily atop the drawers, along with a matching pitcher; other than that, the room was absolutely empty.

“Just as he found it, is how he left it,” Mrs. Piedmont said. “He was that way, Mr. Beecham.”

Under the guise of deciding whether or not we wanted to rent the room, Sara and I went through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, without finding any trace of human activity. There was simply nothing in the ten-by-twenty-foot confines of that chamber that would have made you believe that it had ever been inhabited by anyone, much less by a tortured soul whom we suspected of having done away with at least half a dozen children in a bizarre and brutal fashion. The lingering scent of decay in the air only reinforced this conclusion. Eventually Sara and I told Mrs. Piedmont that, though it was indeed a lovely little room, it was nonetheless too small for our purposes. Then we turned to go back downstairs.

Sara and our hostess, who once again began blathering about her cats, had already reached the staircase when I caught sight of something just inside the door of Beecham’s room: a few small stains on the bland, striped wallpaper. They were of a brownish hue, and in a pattern that indicated that whatever the substance was—and it could easily have been blood—it had hit the wall in a hard splatter. Following the path of the stain, I arrived at the bed; and, seeing as Mrs. Piedmont was now out of sight, I pulled the mattress up to have a look.

A stench hit me, suddenly and hard. It was identical to that which I’d detected on entering the room, only of an increased strength that immediately made me close my eyes, cover my mouth, and want to retch. I was about to drop the mattress again when my eyes opened long enough to catch sight of a small skeleton. A furry hide was stretched over the bones, though in some spots the hide had rotted away, revealing the dried remains of inner organs. Old, rotting string was wound around the four legs of the skeleton at the feet, and next to the rear legs lay several sections of jointed bone, almost like tiny vertebrae—a tail, I realized, that’d been cut into pieces. The creature’s skull, barely covered by a few small patches of skin and fur, lay some eight inches from the rest of the skeleton. Both the mattress and the spring beneath it bore broad stains of a color that matched the splotches on the wall.

I finally let go of the mattress, then jumped out into the hall and took out a handkerchief, dabbing at my face. Resisting one more urge to vomit, I took a few deep breaths and stood at the top of the stairs, trying to determine if I felt sound enough to navigate them.

“John?” I heard Sara call from downstairs. “Are you coming?”

The first flight of stairs was a bit tricky, but by the second I was doing much better; and when I reached the front door of the house, where Mrs. Piedmont was standing in the midst of her mewing cats, holding Sara’s hand, I even managed to arrange a smile. I thanked Mrs. Piedmont quickly and then stepped out into the cloudless night, the air of which seemed especially clean given what I’d been breathing inside.

Sara followed me, still talking to Mrs. Piedmont, and then the same gray-striped cat bounded out onto the stoop. “Peter!” Mrs. Piedmont cried. “Miss Howard, could you…?” Sara already had the animal in her arms, and she handed it to Mrs. Piedmont with a smile. “Cats!” Mrs. Piedmont said one more time, and then she called more goodbyes and closed the door.

Sara came down the steps and joined me, her smile shrinking as she studied my face. “John?” she said. “You’ve gone pale, what is it?” She stood still and then grabbed my arm. “You found something up there—what was it?”

“Jib,” I answered, wiping my face again with my handkerchief.

Sara’s face screwed up. “Jib? The cat? What in the world are you talking about?”

“Let me put it this way,” I said, taking her arm and starting the walk back toward Broadway. “Regardless of what Mrs. Piedmont may say, cats do not just disappear.”