The Alienist

CHAPTER 47

Almost twenty-four hours later, as I was stumbling home after a meal at Delmonico’s that would have slowed down a regiment of cavalry and their horses, I stopped at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to buy an early edition of the Tuesday Times. Walking on down the avenue as I scanned the paper, I found myself once more under the watchful eye of Colonel Waring’s helmeted young street cleaners, who were just waiting for me to drop some shred of newsprint. I ignored them, however, and continued my search, finally locating what I was looking for in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page.

That morning the custodian at the Bellevue morgue had made a gruesome discovery. Wrapped in a tarp and deposited near the back door of the building was the body of a muscular adult male who in life had stood over six feet tall. Because the body was not clothed, there were no identifying documents to be found. A single bullet wound to the chest was the apparent cause of death; but the body had sustained further damage, as well. Specifically, the top of the skull had been removed and the brain apparently dissected in a way that, the morgue staff said, indicated an expert hand. A brief note had been found pinned to the tarp, claiming that this was the body of the man responsible for the boy-whore murders—or, as the Times put it, “the deaths of the several forlorn young boys known to have been in the employ of houses too sordid to be mentioned in these pages.” Inquiries made of Commissioner Roosevelt (whom I’d spoken to that afternoon by telephone) had confirmed that the murderer had indeed been killed while trying to continue his horrifying work. For various important but unexplained reasons, the commissioner said, he was not at liberty to reveal either the killer’s name or any details of his death; but the public should know that members of the Division of Detectives had been involved, and that the case was most decidedly closed.

On finishing the story I looked around the avenue and gave out with a long, satisfying holler.

I can still feel that sense of relish as I look back across almost twenty-three years. Kreizler and I are old men now, and New York is a very different place—as J. P. Morgan told us the night we visited him in his Black Library, the city, like the country generally, was on the verge of a tumultuous metamorphosis in 1896. Thanks to Theodore and many of his political allies, we have been transformed into a great power, and New York is more than ever the crossroads of the world. The crime and corruption that are still the firm foundations of city life have taken on ever more businesslike trappings—Paul Kelly, for example, has gone on to become an important leader of organized labor. True, children still die at the hands of depraved adults while plying the skin trade, and unidentified bodies are occasionally found in peculiar places; but to the best of my knowledge, a menace of John Beecham’s stripe has not been seen again in this city. It is my abiding hope that such creatures do not appear very often; Kreizler, of course, suspects that such faith is utterly self-deluding.

I’ve seen a great deal of Lucius and Marcus Isaacson during the last twenty-three years, and even more of Sara; all of them have pursued their careers in criminal detection with single-minded devotion and brilliant results. There have even been occasions when we’ve had cause to investigate some little matter together, undertakings that collectively form the chain of my most memorable experiences. But nothing, I suppose, will ever be quite like the hunt for Beecham. Perhaps with Roosevelt’s passing, that achievement will finally gain public appreciation; if nothing else, it serves as a singular reminder that, beneath all his theatrical bluster, Theodore possessed a heart and a mind expansive enough to have made such an unprecedented undertaking possible.

Oh, and a note to those who may be curious about the fates of Cyrus Montrose and Stevie Taggert: Cyrus eventually married, and brought his wife to work for Kreizler. The couple have several children, one of whom is currently enrolled at the Harvard Medical School. As for young Stevie, on attaining adulthood he borrowed some money from Kreizler and opened a tobacconist’s shop across the street from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the new Flatiron Building. He’s done well, and in the past fifteen years I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without a cigarette in his mouth.

Just three years after the Beecham case, the Croton Reservoir—having been outmoded by a new water system constructed after Boss Platt consummated his Greater New York scheme—was demolished to make room for the main headquarters of that most marvelous of all philanthropical endeavors, the New York Public Library. Having seen a notice in the Times announcing the demolition, I went over to take a look at the work during my lunch hour one day. The task of tearing the reservoir down had begun at the southern wall, on top of which we had faced the final challenge of our investigation, and which was now being knocked away to expose an enormous man-made crater one block wide and two blocks long. The structure didn’t look like much, all laid open to view that way; it was hard to believe that it had ever been strong enough to withstand the fantastic pressure exerted by millions of gallons of water.