The Alienist

CHAPTER 42

It took the coroner at the Bellevue morgue better than six hours to determine that Joseph’s life had ended when someone jammed either a thin knife, such as a stiletto, or a large needle up under the base of his skull and into his brain. A night spent smoking cigarettes and pacing the hallways of the morgue did nothing for my ability to make sense of this information, when it finally came: I thought briefly of Biff Ellison, and of the quiet, efficient way he settled scores with a similar weapon; yet even in my shocked grief I couldn’t picture Ellison being responsible. Joseph wasn’t one of his boys, and even if Biff had had some new ax to grind with our investigation, such a murderous move would almost certainly have been preceded by an emphatic warning. So unless Byrnes and Connor had coerced Ellison into helping them (a possibility so unlikely as to be impossible), I could think of no explanation and no culprit, save one: Beecham. Somehow, he’d found a way to get close to the boy, despite all my warnings.

My warnings. As Joseph’s little body was wheeled out of one of the morgue’s autopsy rooms, it occurred to me for what must have been the thousandth time that it was meeting me that had brought the boy to such an unhappy end. I had tried to prepare him for every possible danger—but how could I have foreseen that the greatest of those dangers would be to speak to me in the first place? And now here I was at the morgue, telling the coroner that I’d arranged for a funeral and that everything was to be taken care of properly, as if it mattered whether the boy’s body was buried in a nice patch of Brooklyn ground or thrown into the tidal currents of the East River and pulled out to sea. Vanity, arrogance, irresponsibility—all through the night my mind had been pulled back to what Kreizler had said after Mary Palmer’s murder: that in our dash to defeat evil, we had only given it a wider field in which to run its own wretched course.

Lost in thoughts of Kreizler as I wandered out of the morgue and into the dawn, I was perhaps less surprised than I might otherwise have been to see my old friend sitting in his uncovered calash. Cyrus Montrose was in the driver’s seat and he offered a small, sympathetic inclination of his head when he saw me. Laszlo smiled and stepped down from the rig as I stumbled over.

“Joseph…,” I said, my voice cracking from the cigarettes and brooding silence of the night.

“I know,” Laszlo said. “Sara called. I thought you might need some breakfast.”

I nodded weakly and got into the carriage with him. Cyrus urged the horse Frederick forward with a quiet click of his tongue, and soon we were heading west on Twenty-sixth Street very slowly, though the traffic at that early hour was light.

After several minutes I leaned back and rested my head on the folded cover of the calash, sighing heavily and staring at the half-lit, cloudy sky. “It had to be Beecham.” I mumbled.

“Yes,” Laszlo answered quietly.

I turned my head toward him without picking it up. “But there was no mutilation. I couldn’t even see how he’d been killed, there was so little blood. Nothing but a small hole at the base of the skull.”

Laszlo’s eyes went thin. “Quick and clean,” he said. “This wasn’t one of his rituals. This was pragmatic. He killed the boy to protect himself—and to send a message.”

“To me?” I asked.

Kreizler nodded. “Desperate as he is, he won’t go easily.”

I began to shake my head slowly. “But how—how? I told Joseph, told him everything we’d learned. He knew how to identify Beecham. Hell, he called me yesterday afternoon, to double-check on the details.”

Kreizler’s right eyebrow arched. “Really? Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said in disgust, pulling out yet another cigarette. “Some friend of his had been approached by a man who wanted to take him away. To a—castle above the city, he said. Something like that. It did sound like it might’ve been Beecham, but the man had no facial spasms.”

Laszlo turned away, and spoke carefully: “Ah. Then you didn’t remember?”

“Remember?”

“Adam Dury. He told us that when Japheth was hunting, his spasms went away. I suspect that when he stalks these boys—” Seeing the effect his words were having on me, Kreizler cut his explanation short. “I’m sorry, John.”

I threw my unlit cigarette into the street and clutched my head with both hands. Of course he was right. Hunting, stalking, trapping, killing—they all calmed Beecham’s spirit, and that calm was reflected in his face. Whoever the boy, the street cruiser, that Joseph had referred to was, he might in fact have been accosted by our man. Joseph himself certainly had been. All because I had forgotten a detail…

Kreizler put a hand on my shoulder as the calash rolled on, and when I next looked up we’d come to a stop outside Delmonico’s. I knew that the restaurant wouldn’t be open for another hour or two, but I also knew that if any man could arrange an off-hours meal, it was Kreizler. Cyrus got down from the driver’s seat and helped me out of the carriage, saying softly, “There you go. Mr. Moore—get a little food in you.” I found my walking legs and followed Laszlo to the front door, which was opened by Charlie Delmonico. Something about the look in his enormous eyes told me that he knew all the details.

“Good morning, Doctor,” he said, in about the only tone of voice that I could’ve stood to have heard at just that instant. “Mr. Moore,” he went on, as we came inside. “I hope you will make yourselves entirely comfortable, gentlemen. If there is anything at all I can do…”

“Thank you, Charles,” Kreizler answered.

I touched the man’s elbow and managed to whisper, “Thanks, Charlie,” before we entered the dining room.

With unfailing psychological insight, Kreizler had selected for our breakfast the only place in New York where I might have been able to either collect myself or eat anything at all. Alone in the silent main dining room at Del’s, with the light that came through the windows soft enough to allow my shattered nerves to begin to heal, I actually managed to consume several bites of cucumber fillets, Creole eggs, and broiled squab. But even more important, I found that I was able to talk.

“Do you know,” I murmured, soon after we’d sat down, “that I was actually thinking—was it yesterday?—that I could still feel sympathy for the man, despite all he’d done. Because of the context of his life. I thought that I finally knew him.”

Kreizler shook his head. “You can’t, John. Not that well. You can come close, perhaps, close enough to anticipate him but in the end neither you nor I nor anyone else will be able to see just what he sees when he looks at those children, or feel precisely the emotion that makes him take up the knife. The only way to learn of such things would be…” Kreizler turned to the window with a faraway look. “Would be to ask him.”

I nodded weakly. “We found his flat.”

“Sara told me,” Laszlo said, shaking himself a bit. “You’ve done brilliantly, John. All of you.”

I scoffed at that. “Brilliantly…Marcus doesn’t think Beecham will come back to the place. And I’ve got to say that I agree now. The bloodthirsty bastard’s been a step ahead of us all the way.”

Kreizler shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“Did Sara tell you about the map?”

“Yes,” Laszlo said, as a waiter brought us two glasses of fresh tomato juice. “And Marcus has identified it—it’s a chart of the city’s water supply system. Apparently the entire network’s been refurbished over the last ten years. Beecham probably stole the map from the Public Records Office.”

I had a sip of juice. “The water supply system? What the hell does that point to?”

“Sara and Marcus have ideas,” Kreizler answered, taking some sautéed potatoes with artichoke hearts and truffles from a small platter. “I’m sure they’ll tell you.”

I looked right into those black eyes. “Then you’re not coming back?”

Kreizler glanced away quickly, evasively. “It isn’t possible, John. Not yet.” He tried to brighten as the Creole eggs arrived. “You’ve set your plan for Sunday—the Feast of the Baptist.”

“Yes.”

“It will be an important night for him.”

“I suppose.”

“The fact that he’s left his—his trophies behind indicates a crisis of some sort. By the way, the heart in the box? His mother’s, I suspect.” I only shrugged. “You realize, of course,” Laszlo went on, “that Sunday is the night of the benefit for Abbey and Grau at the Metropolitan?”

My jaw fell open and my eyes strained in disbelief. “What?”

“The benefit,” Kreizler said, almost cheerfully. “The bankruptcy has destroyed Abbey’s health, poor fellow. For that if for no other reason we must attend.”

“We?” I squeaked. “Kreizler, we’re going to be hunting a murderer, for God’s sake!”

“Yes, yes,” Laszlo answered, “but later. Beecham hasn’t struck before midnight thus far. There’s no reason to think he will on Sunday. So why not make the wait as pleasant as possible, and help Abbey and Grau at the same time?”

I dropped my fork. “I know—I’m losing my mind. You’re not actually saying any of this, you can’t be—”

“Maurel will be singing Giovanni,” Kreizler said enticingly, shoving some squab and eggs into his face. “Edouard de Reszke will be Leporello, and I hardly dare tell you who’s scheduled for Zerlina…”

I huffed once indignantly, but then asked, “Frances Saville?”

“She of the legs,” Kreizler answered with a nod. “Anton Seidl conducts. Oh, and Nordica sings Donna Anna.”

There was no doubt about it—he’d just described a truly memorable night of opera, and I was momentarily distracted by the prospect. But then a stabbing sensation hit my gut as a picture of Joseph came into my head, wiping out all fantasies about pleasant evenings. “Kreizler,” I said coldly, “I don’t know what’s happened that lets you sit here and talk so casually about the opera, as if people we both know hadn’t been—”

“There’s nothing casual in what I’m saying, Moore.” The black eyes went dead, and a cool but ferocious sort of determination hardened the voice: “I’ll make a deal with you—come with me to Giovanni, and I’ll rejoin the investigation. And we will end this affair.”

“You’ll rejoin?” I said, surprised. “But when?”

“Not before the opera,” Laszlo answered. I was about to protest, but he held up a firm hand. “I can’t be any more specific than that, John, so don’t ask me to. Just tell me—do you accept?”

Well, of course I did accept—what else was I going to do? Despite everything the Isaacsons, Sara, and I had achieved in recent weeks, Joseph’s murder had left me feeling profoundly doubtful about our ability to see the investigation through. The thought of Kreizler coming back was an enormous incentive to keep going, one that allowed me to get through an entire squab before we finally left Del’s and headed downtown. He was being mysterious, all right—but Laszlo wasn’t capricious about such things, and my money said that he had a good reason for shrouding his intentions. And so I promised to get my opera clothes cleaned, and then shook hands on the deal; though when I said how much I was looking forward to telling the others about the arrangement on my return to Number 808 Broadway, Kreizler requested that I not do so. Above all, I was to say nothing to Roosevelt.

“I don’t ask that out of bitterness,” Laszlo explained, as I got out of the calash at the northern end of Union Square. “Theodore has been decent and kind in recent days, and diligent in his search for Connor.”

“There’s still no sign of the man, however,” I said, having heard as much from Roosevelt.

Laszlo stared off, seeming oddly detached. “He’ll turn up, I suspect. And in the meantime”—he closed the small carriage door—“there are other things to attend to. All right, Cyrus.”

The calash rolled away, and I walked downtown.

When I arrived at our headquarters I found a note from Sara and the Isaacsons on my desk, saying that they’d gone home to get a few hours’ sleep, after which they planned to join the team of detectives that Theodore had assigned to watch Beecham’s building. I took advantage of their absence to stretch out on the divan and try to get some much-needed rest of my own, though the state I subsequently fell into could hardly have been called a sound sleep. Still, by noon I was feeling improved enough to go back to Washington Square, bathe, and change my clothes. Then I telephoned Sara. She informed me that the rendezvous at 155 Baxter Street was set for sundown, and that Roosevelt himself intended to log a few hours on watch. She said she’d pick me up in a cab, and then we both tried to get a little more rest.

As it turned out, Marcus was quite right about Beecham: by three A.M. Saturday morning there’d still been no sign of the man, and we all began to realize that he almost certainly wasn’t going to return to the flat. I told the others about what Kreizler had said concerning Beecham’s “trophies”—that if he’d left them behind it indicated some sort of climax to his murderous career was fast approaching—and this notion underlined for us all the importance of devising an ironclad plan for Sunday night. As per our agreement of several weeks earlier, Roosevelt was included in these deliberations, which we undertook Saturday afternoon at Number 808.

Roosevelt had never actually been to our headquarters before, and watching him take in all its intellectual and decorative oddities reminded me strongly of the morning I’d first woken up in the place after being drugged by Biff Ellison. As always with Theodore, curiosity soon became dominant over perplexity: He began to ask so many detailed questions about every object—from the big chalkboard to our small kitchen stove—that we didn’t get down to work for almost an hour after his arrival. The session was much like any of the dozens that had preceded it: we all threw out ideas, to be weighed and (usually) rejected, all the while trying to assemble solid hypotheses out of airy speculations. Yet this time I found myself watching the process through Roosevelt’s initially bewildered and later fascinated eyes, and thus seeing it from a very fresh perspective. And when he started to pound his fists on the arms of one of the Marchese Carcano’s chairs and let out exclamations of approval every time we satisfied ourselves that some bit of reasoning was sound, I gained a new appreciation for the work our team had done and was doing.

We were all agreed on one essential point: that Beecham’s map of the New York City water supply system bore some kind of relevance not to his past killings but to his upcoming one. While waiting for Theodore’s detectives on the night that we’d first discovered Beecham’s flat, Marcus had confirmed his initial theory that the map had been tacked on the wall only recently by making comparative analyses of the wall plaster in different parts of the place. Taking such elements as heat, moisture, and soot into account, Marcus had satisfied himself completely that the map had not been on the wall even as recently as the night of Ernst Lohmann’s murder.

“Splendid!” Theodore judged, giving Marcus a salute. “Precisely why I brought you boys onto the force—modern methods!”

Marcus’s conclusion was further backed up by several other factors. First, it was difficult to see what connection Bedloe’s Island, Bartholdi’s Liberty statue, or indeed any of the other murder sites to date might have had to the city’s water system. In addition, the overall notion of such a system, one of the primary purposes of which was to facilitate bathing, might easily have been metaphorically connected in Beecham’s mind to the figure of John the Baptist. Add to all this the fact that Beecham seemed to have been both taunting and pleading with us by leaving the map behind, and we felt confident in saying that the thing was somehow conceptually tied to the next killing. These details were accordingly entered on the chalkboard by Lucius.

“Bully,” Theodore pronounced as Lucius scribbled. “Bully! This is what I like—a scientific approach!”

None of us had the heart to tell the man that this particular part of our approach was a good deal less scientific than it might have appeared; instead, we took out any and all books we had that related to public works and buildings in Manhattan and embarked on a tour of the island’s water supply system.

Each of Beecham’s 1896 murders had occurred on the banks of a river, from which we had already deduced that the sight of a large body of water had become a vital emotional component of his murderous rituals. It was therefore important to focus our attention on those elements of the water system that were positioned close to the waterfronts. This didn’t leave us with many choices. In fact, it left us, we felt, with only one: the High Bridge Aqueduct and Tower, whose ten-foot pipes had brought clear upstate New York water across the East River and into Manhattan since the 1840s. True, if Beecham had selected High Bridge it would mean his first murder north of Houston Street; yet the simple fact that he had confined his slaughter to Lower Manhattan did not necessarily mean that he was completely unacquainted with the northern end of the island. And it was always possible that Beecham in fact intended to visit some less imposing site on his map—a water main juncture or the like—and was just hoping that we would jump at the more obvious and dramatic High Bridge interpretation.

“But what about the boy’s story?” Theodore asked, deeply frustrated that he could not be more involved in the speculative process. “The ‘castle that overlooks the city,’ and whatnot? Doesn’t that confirm your hypothesis?”

Sara pointed out that, while it might indeed confirm the hypothesis (for the High Bridge Tower, built to equalize water pressure in Manhattan’s inland reservoirs, did indeed resemble a tall castle turret), such confirmation did not necessarily mean that Beecham intended to take his victim there. We were dealing with an excessively perverse and devious mentality, Sara explained to Theodore, one who was well aware of our activities and who would get great pleasure from doing all he could to lead us down a false trail. Nonetheless, it was doubtful that Beecham was aware of our understanding of his need to be near water—indeed, he might not be aware of it himself, and High Bridge Tower therefore stood as the most promising location.

Roosevelt absorbed this information with keen interest, nodding and rubbing his jowl and finally clapping his hands together rather thunderously. “Well done, Sara!” he said. “I don’t know what your family would say if they could hear such talk, but by thunder, I’m proud of you!” So full of genuine affection and admiration were Theodore’s words that Sara forgave their slightly patronizing air and turned away with a satisfied smile.

Roosevelt became more intimately involved in the discussion when the time came to plan the actual disposition of police forces for Sunday night. He wanted to handpick the men who would watch the High Bridge Tower, he said, recognizing that it was a job requiring enormous tact—any sign of police activity, we all knew, and Beecham was likely to bolt. In addition to the High Bridge surveillance, Roosevelt intended to have all bridges and ferry stations closely scrutinized, and extra roundsmen would patrol the waterfronts on both the east and west sides at regular intervals. Finally, detective units would be assigned to all the same disorderly houses that we’d watched on the night of the Lohmann boy’s death, even though we had good reason to believe Beecham would be abducting his victim from another locale.

All that remained was to decide what part Sara, the Isaacsons, and I would play in the drama. The obvious choice was for us to join the surveillance group at the High Bridge Tower, at which point it became necessary for me to announce that I wouldn’t be able to do so until a late hour, as it was my intention to attend the opera with Kreizler. This brought instant expressions of incredulity to my teammates’ faces; but since I’d agreed not to reveal the exact terms of the bargain I’d struck with Laszlo, I could offer no plausible explanation for my behavior. Fortunately, before Sara and the Isaacsons could get a full head of baffled steam going, I got help from an unexpected source: Theodore, who, it turned out, was also planning to attend the benefit performance. Roosevelt explained that it was very unlikely that Mayor Strong would sanction calling out a large part of the police force to put in a night’s work on the boy-whore murders. But if Roosevelt were seen at a highly publicized society event, which would also be attended by the mayor and one or two of the other members of the Board of Commissioners, it would help to ensure that the night’s activities did not become a focus of attention. Theodore supported the idea of my going to the opera as well, saying it could only heighten such a misdirection of official scrutiny; besides, he said, repeating Kreizler’s logic, Beecham had never struck before midnight, and there was no reason to think he’d start now. Roosevelt and I could easily join the hunt once the opera was over.

Faced with this attitude on the part of their highest departmental superior, the Isaacsons reluctantly acquiesced. Sara, on the other hand, eyed me suspiciously, and pulled me aside when the others began to discuss further details of the police deployment.

“Is he up to something, John?” she asked, in a tone that indicated she’d brook no nonsense at this stage of the game.

“Who, Kreizler?” I said, hoping it sounded better than it felt. “No, I don’t think so. We made the plan some time ago.” Then a ruse: “If you really do think it’s a bad idea, Sara, I can easily tell him that—”

“No,” she answered quickly, but without looking convinced. “What Theodore says makes sense. And we’ll all be at the tower anyway, I can’t think why you’d be needed as well.” I bridled a bit at that, but discretion demanded I not show it. “Still,” Sara went on, “after three weeks without a word it seems odd that he’d choose tomorrow night to reappear.” Her eyes roamed around the room as her mind ran through possibilities. “Just let us know if it looks like he’s got a scheme.”

“Of course.” She scrutinized me skeptically again, and my eyes went wide. “Sara, why wouldn’t I tell you?”

She couldn’t answer that; I couldn’t answer that. Only one person knew the full set of reasons for my secrecy—and he wasn’t prepared to reveal them.

Important as it was that we all be well rested for Sunday’s undertakings, I felt it even more imperative that we return to the streets one more time Saturday night, in order to make at least a minimal effort to locate the young street cruiser that Joseph had mentioned to me. The odds of finding such a boy without either a name or a description were, admittedly, fairly long; and they only got longer as the night wore on. In addition to combing those Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, and Tenderloin blocks that were known to harbor such characters, we revisited all of the disorderly houses that proferred boy-whores. But in every one, we met with the same dumbfounded and usually dismissive response. We were looking for a boy, we’d say; a boy who worked the streets; a boy who might be planning to quit the game soon (even though we knew that if Beecham was following his pattern he would’ve told the boy to keep his departure quiet); and a boy who’d been a friend of Joseph, from the Golden Rule—yes, the same boy who’d been murdered. Whatever small chance we might’ve had of finding any leads was generally destroyed by this last statement: Everyone we interviewed figured that we were looking for Joseph’s killer, and no one wanted to be implicated or involved in any way. By midnight we had to accept it—if we were going to find the boy, we were going to find him with Beecham, hopefully before he’d been killed.

That thought was sobering enough to send us all on our respective ways home. It was now quite apparent that there was something very different about this latest prospect of facing Beecham, and it wasn’t simply the fact that we knew his name and a great deal about his history: it was the inescapable feeling that the confrontation that was almost upon us—and which had largely been arranged, even if unconsciously, by Beecham himself—might be far more dangerous for us than we’d ever suspected. True, we’d assumed since the beginning that a strong desire to be stopped was evident in Beecham’s behavior; but we now understood that that desire had a cataclysmic, even apocalyptic, side to it, and that his being “stopped” could very well entail great violence to those who performed the service. Yes, we would be armed, and together with our official auxiliaries we would outnumber him by tens and perhaps hundreds to one; yet in many ways this man had faced greater odds throughout his nightmarish life, and—simply by surviving—had beaten them. Then, too, the line on any race is not determined by the statistical record alone; it takes into account the intangibles of breeding and training as well. If one entered such factors into our current undertaking, the outlook changed dramatically, even given our side’s superior numbers and armaments—in fact, I was not at all sure that, thus calculated, the odds were not decidedly in Beecham’s favor.