The Alienist

CHAPTER 41

As we came out of Harper’s building we ran headlong into the Isaacsons, who had found my note. Immediately repairing to Brübacher’s Wine Garden, the four of us went over what the account settler had said. Then we devised a plan for the evening. Our options were fairly straightforward: if we should locate Beecham we wouldn’t confront him, but rather telephone Theodore and have him send down several detectives—men whose faces would be unknown to Beecham—whom we’d set to work shadowing the man. Alternately, if we were able to find out where Beecham lived, but if for some reason he wasn’t in, we’d quickly search his place for evidence that might permit an immediate arrest. That much settled, we all drained our glasses and, at about eight-thirty, boarded a streetcar and began our expedition into Five Points.

The effect of that storied neighborhood has always been difficult to describe to the uninitiated. Even on a pleasant spring night like the one we moved through that Thursday, the place exuded a deep sense of mortal threat; yet that threat was not always or even usually exhibited in loud or aggressive ways, such as was the case in some other shady parts of the city. In the Tenderloin, for example, a general air of defiant carousing reigned, making encounters with drunken toughs out to demonstrate their prowess a routine matter. Yet such were little more than noisy displays, generally, and a murder in the Tenderloin was still a noteworthy event. Five Points was an entirely different breed of neighborhood. Oh, there were shouts and screams to be heard, all right; but they tended to drift out of buildings, or, if they did originate outside, to be quickly stifled. Indeed, I think the most disconcerting thing about the area around Mulberry Bend (the few blocks of the Bend itself were at that time being demolished, thanks to Jake Riis’s tireless campaigning) was the surprisingly low level of outward activity. The residents of the neighborhood spent most of their time crammed into the miserable shanties and tenements that lined the streets, or, more often, packed into the dives that occupied the ground and first floors of a remarkably large number of those squalid buildings. Death and despair did their work without fanfare in the Bend, and they did a lot of it: just walking down those lonely, decrepit streets was enough to make the sunniest of souls wonder about the ultimate value of human life.

I could see that Lucius was doing just that as we reached the address Harper had given us, Number 119 Baxter Street. A few dirt- and urine-covered stone stairs next to the building’s entrance led down to a doorway that, to judge by the laughs and groans floating out of it, was the entrance to the dive we’d been told Beecham frequented. I turned to Lucius, and found him anxiously scanning the dark streets around us.

“Lucius—you and Sara stay here,” I said. “We’ll need you to keep watch.”

He nodded once, producing a handkerchief and wiping his forehead. “Good,” he said. “Fine, I mean.”

“And if there’s any trouble do not show your badge,” I added. “It’s just an invitation to murder, down here.” As Marcus and I made for the steps, I eyed Lucius once more and then murmured into Sara’s ear, “Look after him, will you?” She smiled once at that, and though I could tell that she, too, was apprehensive, I knew that her aim would remain steady through whatever followed. Marcus and I went inside.

I don’t know precisely what the caves looked like that prehistoric men are said to have inhabited, but the average Five Points dive cannot have represented any great advancement—and the one we entered that night was nothing if not average. The ceiling was only eight feet or so from the dirt floor, since the space had originally been designed as a cellar for the storefront above. There were no windows: light was provided by four filthy kerosene lamps that hung above a like number of long, low tables arranged in two rows. At these tables sat and slept the customers, their differences of age, sex, and dress more than outweighed by their common air of drunken dementia. There were about twenty people in the place that night, though only three—a pair of men and a woman, the last groaning and cackling at the incomprehensible statements of the other two—showed any real signs of life. They examined us with looks of glassy hatred when we came in, and Marcus inclined his head toward me.

“I suppose,” he whispered, “that the key in here is to move slowly.”

I nodded, and then we wandered back to the “bar”—a plank resting on two ash barrels at the far end of the room. Immediately, two glasses of the substance from which such places took their name were placed in front of us. Stale beer was a flat, repellant mixture of the dregs that were collected from dozens of kegs in slightly more reputable houses—I paid for the drinks but made no move to touch mine, and Marcus pushed his glass aside.

The bartender who stood before us was about five and a half feet tall, with tawny hair, a matching mustache, and a typical look of slightly crazed resentment on his face.

“Don’ wan’ the drinks?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Information. About a customer.”

“Fuck,” the man snorted. “Ge’ out.”

I produced more money. “Just one or two questions.”

The man looked around anxiously and, seeing that the trio of relatively compos mentis customers were no longer watching us, slipped the money into his pocket. “Well?”

I shot the name Beecham over the bartender’s bow, producing no reaction; but when I went on to describe a tall man with a facial twitch, I could see by the heightened glimmer in the fellow’s sickly bright eyes that our friend Mitchell Harper had played straight with us.

“A block up,” the bartender mumbled. “Number 155. Top floor, inna back.”

Marcus looked at me dubiously, and the bartender caught it. “Seen it myself!” he insisted. “You frumma girl’s fam’ly?”

“Girl?” I said.

The bartender nodded. “Too’ a girl up there. Mother thought she’d been ’napped. Didn’ hurt her, though—but did near kill a man that mentioned it in here.”

I weighed that. “He drinks a lot?”

“Didn’ used to. Never unnerstood what he was doin’ here when he first showed up. Lately more, though.”

I looked to Marcus, who gave me a quick nod. After dumping some more money on the bar we turned to go, but the bartender grabbed my arm. “You heard nuthin’ from me,” he said urgently. “Tha’s no man to cross.” He bared several yellow and gray teeth. “Iss quite a pick he carries.”

Marcus and I started away again, leaving the bartender to drain the two glasses of stale beer he’d poured for us. Once more we exercised great care in walking by the near-dead bodies at the tables, and though one man by the door did turn and begin to urinate unconsciously on the floor as we passed, there didn’t seem anything personal in the act.

As Marcus stepped over the puddle of urine he murmured to me, “So Beecham’s drinking.”

“Yes,” I answered, opening the front door. “I remember Kreizler saying once that our man might be entering a final, self-destructive phase. Anybody who drinks in a joint like this has certainly done that.”

We got back outside to find Sara and Lucius looking just as anxious as we’d left them. “Come on,” I said quickly, leading the way north. “We’ve got an address.”

Number 155 Baxter Street was an unremarkable New York tenement, though in any other neighborhood the women and children who were hanging out its windows on that seasonable night would have been laughing or singing or at least screaming at one another. Here they simply sat with their heads in their hands, the youngest of them looking as worldly and tired as the oldest, and none of them exhibiting any interest in what occurred on the street. A man who I placed at about thirty was seated on the stoop, swinging a nightstick that looked to be authentic police issue. It wasn’t difficult to judge, after getting a glimpse of the man’s blow-twisted features and surly grin, just how he’d laid hands on the trophy. I mounted the stoop, and the end of the nightstick poked my chest just hard enough to stop me from going further.

“Business?” the crooked-faced man said, his breath reeking of camphor-laced liquor.

“We’re here to see a resident,” I answered.

The man laughed. “Don’t git gay wit me, swell. Business?”

I paused before answering. “Who are you supposed to be?”

The laugh died. “I’m supposed to be da mug what watches dis building—for da landlord. So don’t git gay wit me, boy, less youse wanna taste dis sap.” He was speaking in the Bowery slang long since immortalized by the city’s toughs, a language that was always a little difficult to take seriously; still, I didn’t like the look of the nightstick, and went for my billfold once again.

“Top floor,” I said, holding some money out. “In the back. Anybody home?”

The man’s grin returned. “Oh!” he said, taking the cash. “Youse mean old—” He suddenly began to blink, and then to comically contort his right jaw, cheek, and eye. Apparently unsatisfied with the results of this performance, he heightened its effect by tugging at his head with his hands. Pleased with this additional effort, he began to laugh loud. “Nah, he ain’t dere,” he finally said. “Never dere, not nights. During da day, sometimes, but not nights. You can check da roof, mebbe he’s up dere. Likes it up dere, does dat boid.”

“What about his flat?” I said. “Maybe we’d like to wait for him there.”

“Mebbe it’s locked,” the fellow answered with another grin. I held out still more money. “Den agin, mebbe it ain’t.” The man started into the building. “Ain’t cops, is youse?”

“I’m not paying you to ask questions,” I answered.

The man gave my words something that approached consideration, then nodded. “Okay. Come on wit me—but keep it quiet, right?”

We all nodded and followed the man inside. The building’s long, darkened staircase was redolent with the usual stenches of rotting refuse and human waste, and at its foot I paused to let Sara get in front of me.

“A world away from Mrs. Piedmont’s,” she whispered as she passed.

We got up the six flights of stairs without incident, and then our guide knocked on one of four doors that branched off a small landing. After getting no reply, he held up a finger. “Wait here a minute,” he said, and then he loped up the final flight of stairs to the roof. In seconds he was back, looking more relaxed. “All clear,” he announced, taking a large ring of keys from his hip pocket and unlocking the door he’d knocked on. “Hadda make sure he weren’t around. He’s a touchy one, old—” Instead of saying a name, the man began to contort his face again, which gave him another laugh. Finally, we entered the flat.

A kerosene lamp sat on a shelf by the door, and I lit it. The space that slowly became visible was essentially one narrow hallway, perhaps thirty feet in overall length, in the middle of which had been built a small partition and a doorway with a transom over it. Two recently cut chinks in the side walls were the flat’s only connections to the outside world, offering limited, bleak views across narrow airshafts into similar gaps in the walls of neighboring flats. A small stove was set up against the partition, though there were apparently no sanitary facilities, other than a rusted bucket. Only a few pieces of furniture could be seen from the front door: a plain old desk and chair on the near side of the partition, and beyond it the foot of a bed. Coats of thick, cheap paint had chipped and peeled away from the walls, revealing one another and creating the overall impression of a brown stain such as one might find at the bottom of a commode.

In this place lived the being who had once been Japheth Dury and was now the murderer John Beecham; and within this spare little hole there had to be clues, difficult as they might be to see. Without speaking, I indicated the far end of the flat to the Isaacsons; they each nodded, then proceeded past the partition and into that area. Sara and I took a few tentative steps toward the old desk, while our guide remained alertly at the front door.

Our entire search could not have taken more than five minutes, so small and sparsely furnished was the place. The old desk had three drawers that Sara began to check in the near-darkness, putting her hands in each to make sure she missed nothing. Above the desk, tacked to the crumbling wall, was some sort of a map. Leaning over to study it, I noticed a peculiar feeling under my hands: picking them up, I discovered that the top of the desk had been deeply carved into a monotonous series of unembellished grooves. Putting my hands back down I looked at the map again: I was able to recognize the outline of Manhattan, but the marks that had been drawn over that outline were strange to me: a series of straight, intersecting lines with arcane numbers and symbols scribbled in at various points. I was about to put my head closer when I heard Sara say:

“Here. John.”

Looking down I saw her remove a small wooden box from the bottom drawer. She placed it on the grooved desktop rather fearfully, then stood away.

Affixed to the lid of the box was an old daguerreotype, very similar in style and composition to the Civil War work of the eminent photographer Mathew Brady. Based on the picture’s aged and battered condition I judged it to be of about the same vintage as Brady’s work. The image displayed was that of a dead white man: scalped, eviscerated, and emasculated, with arrows protruding from his arms and legs. His eyes were missing. There were no identifying marks on the picture, but it was obviously one of the Reverend Victor Dury’s creations.

The box on which the daguerreotype was mounted was closed tightly, but there seemed to be an aroma emanating from it—the same sort of aroma that’d been present in Beecham’s room at Mrs. Piedmont’s: rotting animal flesh. My heart sank as I laid hold of the thing, although before I could open it I heard Marcus’s voice:

“Oh, no. God, how…”

Then there were bustling sounds, and Marcus stumbled out to where Sara and I were standing. Even in the lamplight I could see that he was pale—a surprising condition, given that I’d watched the man calmly photograph scenes that would’ve turned most people’s stomachs. In a few seconds Lucius followed him in, bearing something in his arms.

“John!” Lucius called in quiet urgency. “John, it—it’s evidence! Good lord, I think we’ve got a straight murder investigation now!”

“Aw, shit,” said our man at the door. “Then youse is cops?”

Without answering I struck a match and held it high as I approached Lucius. Just as I focused in on the object in his arms, Sara let out a short cry and then clamped a hand over her mouth, spinning away.

Lucius was holding an enormous glass jar. Inside it, preserved in a substance that I could only suppose to be formaldehyde, were human eyes. Some still trailed their ganglia of optic nerves, and some were smoothly round; some were fresh, others milky and obviously aged; some were blue in color, some were brown, and others were hazel, gray, and green. But it was not the discovery or condition of the eyes, I now understood, that had stunned Marcus—it was their number. For these were not the ten eyes of our five murdered boys, nor even the fourteen eyes of the boys plus the Zweig children; these were the dozens—the dozens—of eyes of more than a score of victims. And all of them were gaping through the curved glass in what seemed silent accusation, pathetically begging to know what had taken us so very long…

In a moment my own eyes wandered back to the small box that Sara had found, which I now opened slowly. The stench of decay that wafted up was not so strong as I expected, allowing me to study the receptacle’s strange contents without difficulty. But I could make no sense of what I saw: A small, red-black piece of what looked like desiccated rubber.

“Lucius?” I said softly, holding it out toward him.

Setting the large jar down on the desk, Lucius took the box over by the front door and held it under the kerosene lamp. Our guide looked over his shoulder as the detective sergeant studied the contents.

“Shit?” the man with the nightstick said. “Sure enough smells like shit.”

“No,” Lucius answered evenly, eyes ever on the box. “It is, I believe, the preserved remnants of a human heart.”

That was enough to give even a Five Points thug pause, and our guide turned away and into the hall with a look of utter consternation on his face. “Who da hell are you people?” he breathed.

I kept my eyes on Lucius. “A heart? Is it the Lohmann boy’s?”

He shook his head. “Too old. This has been in here for a very long time. It looks as though it may even have been coated with something, a varnish of some kind.”

I turned to Sara, who was taking deep breaths and standing with her arms wrapped around her midsection. Touching her shoulder I said, “All right?”

She nodded once quickly. “Yes. Fine.”

My eyes went to Marcus. “You?”

“I think so. Will be, at any rate.”

“Lucius—” I waved the shorter Isaacson over. “Someone’s got to check that stove. Can you manage it?”

Lucius bobbed his head certainly: though he’d been apprehensive on the street, he was all business in this situation. “Let me borrow a match.” I gave him the little box from my pocket.

The rest of us listened as he went to the grimy black chunk of iron that stood against the partition. A few pieces of firewood were in a bin next to the thing, and a greasy roasting pan sat on top of it. Someone had apparently been cooking. Lucius struck a match, took a preparatory but calm breath, then pulled the door of the oven cavity open. I closed my eyes as he held the match inside; in another fifteen seconds, I heard the thing bang closed again.

“Nothing,” Lucius announced. “Grease, a charred potato—nothing else.”

I let out a lot of air and tapped Marcus’s shoulder. “What do you make out of this?” I said, pointing to the map of Manhattan on the wall.

Marcus studied it carefully. “Manhattan,” he said quickly. Then, after a few more seconds: “Looks like a surveyor’s map of some kind.” He poked at the spots where the map had been tacked to the wall, then pulled the tacks out. “Plaster hasn’t discolored. It was put up fairly recently, I’d say.”

Lucius rejoined us, and then we all stood in a tight circle away from the box and the jar that sat on the desk.

“That’s all that was in the back?” I asked the Isaacsons.

“That’s all,” Marcus said. “No clothes, nothing. If you ask me, he’s gone.”

“Gone?” Sara echoed.

Marcus nodded in disappointment. “Could be he knew we were closing in. But it certainly doesn’t look like he’s coming back.”

“But why would he leave,” Sara asked, “without taking all that—evidence?”

Marcus shook his head. “Maybe he doesn’t think it is evidence. Or maybe he was in a hurry. Or maybe…”

“Or maybe,” I said, voicing what we all were thinking, “he wanted us to find it.”

As we stood absorbing that idea, I noticed our guide straining to get a look at the jar on the desk, and moved to block his view with my body. Then Lucius spoke up: “That may be true, but we’ve still got to watch this place, in case he does come back. We should tell the commissioner to send other men down—because, like I say, we can treat this as a straight murder investigation now.”

“Do you think there’s enough evidence to make a charge stick?” Sara asked softly. “I know this sounds awful, but those aren’t necessarily the eyes of our victims.”

“No,” Lucius answered. “But unless he’s got one hell of an explanation for whose they are, I think any jury in the city will convict—especially if we fill in the background with what we know.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Sara and I will get up to Mulberry Street and tell Roosevelt to assign men to watch this building day and night. Lucius, you and Marcus will have to stay here until that relief comes. What have you got for weapons?” Marcus just shook his head, but Lucius produced the same service revolver that I’d seen him with at Castle Garden, after the ibn-Ghazi murder. “Fine,” I said. “While you’re waiting, Marcus, see what kind of sense you can make of that map. And remember one thing—” I ran my voice down to a whisper. “No badges. Not until you’ve got some support. It wasn’t too long ago that cops wouldn’t even come into this neighborhood, their chances of getting out were so bad.”

The Isaacsons both nodded, and then Sara and I went out into the hallway, stopping when the man with the nightstick stepped in front of us. “Now suppose youse tell me what’s all dis about an investigation? Is you cops or ain’t you?”

“This is a—private matter,” I answered. “My friends are staying—to wait for the resident.” I automatically went for my billfold and produced ten dollars. “You can just act like you never saw them.”

“For ten bucks?” the man said with a nod. “For ten bucks I’d forget me own muddah’s face.” He cackled once. “Not dat I remember it, ta begin wit!”

Sara and I got outside quickly, and started to walk quietly north and then west, hoping to catch a streetcar at Broadway without any trouble. This would be the trickiest part of our journey, though I didn’t want to tell her as much: there were only two of us now, and one of those two was a woman. In the sixties or seventies any Five Points gang worth its salt would have laid me out and had their way with Sara before we’d gotten a block from Baxter Street. I was just praying that, with dissipation having replaced violence as the neighborhood’s chief pastime in recent years, we’d be able to squeak out unnoticed.

Remarkably, we did. By nine forty-five we were on our way up Broadway, and just a few minutes later our streetcar crossed Houston Street and we jumped off. Unconcerned, now, with whether or not we were spotted together at headquarters, Sara and I rushed into the building as soon as we reached it, then bulled our way up and into Theodore’s office, which was empty. A detective told us that the president had gone home for dinner but was expected back soon—the half-hour wait that followed was maddening. When Theodore did arrive he was a bit alarmed to find us present, but on hearing our news he came alive and began barking orders throughout the second-floor hallway. As he did, a thought occurred to me, and I motioned to Sara, indicating the staircase.

“The note,” I explained, as we went downstairs and toward the front door. “The letter to Mrs. Santorelli—if we can confront Beecham with that, it may help break him down.”

Sara liked the idea, and once outside on Mulberry Street we grabbed a hansom and made for Number 808 Broadway. I wouldn’t call our mood exactly ebullient as we dashed north, but we were quietly alive to the real possibilities of the moment, enough so that our cab ride seemed to take an eternity.

When we entered Number 808 I was moving so fast that I failed to notice, and nearly tripped over, a rather large gunnysack that someone had left in the vestibule. Crouching down I saw a tag attached to the closed top of the bag: NR. 808 B’WAY—6TH FLOOR. I glanced up at Sara and saw that she, too, was examining the sack and the tag.

“You haven’t been ordering produce, have you, John?” she asked, a bit wryly.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I answered. “Must be something for Marcus and Lucius.”

I studied the sack for a few more seconds, then shrugged and reached down to undo the twine that bound its mouth. The cord was twisted into a complex knot, however, so I pulled out a penknife and slit the thick fabric of the bag from top to bottom.

Out onto the floor, like so much meat, fell Joseph. There were no obvious marks on his body, but the pallor of his skin made it instantly clear that he was dead.