The Alienist (17 page)

As March turned to April, it did. At 1:45
A.M
. on a Saturday, I was dozing in my room at my grandmother’s house with my copy of the second volume of Professor James’s
Principles
resting rather uncomfortably across my face. That afternoon I’d begun a noble effort to tackle James’s thoughts on “Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience” at Number 808 Broadway but had been distracted by the entrance of Stevie Taggert, who’d torn a list of the following day’s entries at the new Aqueduct racing park on Long Island from a late city edition of the
Herald
and wanted some advice on handicapping from me. I’d lately been employing Stevie as a runner to my betting agent (unbeknownst to Kreizler, of course) and the boy had quite taken to the sport of kings. I’d encouraged him not to bet his own money unless and until he really knew what he was doing; but with his background that hadn’t taken long. At any rate, when the telephone rang that night, I was in the midst of a deep sleep brought on by hours of thick reading. I bolted directly upright at the sound of the bell and sent the volume of James slamming against the opposite wall. The telephone clanged again as I got into my robe, and once more before I dashed through the hallway clumsily and picked the receiver up.

“Blank slate,” I mumbled in a sleepy rush, assuming that the caller was Sara.

It was. “Excuse me?” she answered.

“What we were talking about this afternoon,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Is the mind a blank slate at birth, or do we have innate knowledge of certain things? My money’s on the blank slate.”

“John, be quiet for a moment.” Her voice was tinged with anxiety. “It’s happened.”

That roused me. “Where?”

“Castle Garden. The Battery. The Isaacsons are getting their camera and other equipment ready. They have to arrive before the rest of us, so that the officer who was first on the scene can be dismissed. Theodore’s there now, making sure it goes smoothly. I’ve already called Dr. Kreizler.”

“Right.”

“John—”

“Yes?”

“I’ve never—I’m the only one who’s never—how bad will it be?”

What could I say? There were only practicalities to consider. “You’ll want ammonia salts. But try not to worry too much. We’ll all be there. Pick me up in a cab, we’ll go together.”

I heard her breathe deeply once. “All right, John.”

The same outer object may suggest either of many realities formerly associated with it—for in the vicissitudes of our outer experience we are constantly liable to meet the same thing in the midst of differing companions.

William James,
The Principles of Psychology

Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others;
whatever seemed wrong to me,
others approved of.
I ran into feuds wherever I found myself,
I met disfavor wherever I went;
if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery;
so I had to be called “Woeful”:
Woe is all I possess.

Wagner,
Die Walküre

CHAPTER 14

B
y the time Sara reached Washington Square in a hansom, she’d dispatched many of her fears and replaced them with tough determination. Seemingly oblivious of several trivial questions I asked as we charged down the granite slab pavement of Broadway, she sat staring straight ahead, impassively focused on—what? She would not say, and it was impossible to assume with any certainty. My suspicion, however, was that she was preoccupied with that great guiding goal of her life, to prove that a woman could be a capable, effective police officer. Sights such as the one we were moving toward that night would become a regular part of Sara’s professional duties if her career hopes were one day realized—she was quite aware of that. Submission to the sort of faintheartedness that was expected of her sex would therefore have been doubly unbearable and inexcusable, because it would have borne implications far beyond her personal ability to stomach savage bloodshed. And so she gazed at the back of our laboring horse and said barely a word, using every mental power she possessed to ensure that when the time came she would conduct herself as well as any seasoned detective.

All of which stood in some contrast to my own attempts to ease apprehension with idle chatter. By the time we reached Prince Street I’d gotten pretty tired of my own nervous voice; and by Broome I was just about ready to give up all attempts at communication in favor of watching the whores and their marks come out of the concert halls. On one corner a Norwegian sailor, so drunk he was drooling a river of spit down onto the front of his uniform, was being propped up by two dancers while a third slowly and brazenly went through his pockets. It wasn’t an uncommon sort of sight; but on this night it planted a thought in my head.

“Sara,” I said, as we crossed Canal Street and clattered on toward City Hall. “Have you ever been to Shang Draper’s?”

“No,” she answered quickly, her breath condensing in the frigid air. April, as always in New York, had brought precious little respite from the biting cold of March.

It wasn’t much of an opening for conversation, but I took it. “Well, it’s just that the average whore who works a disorderly house knows more ways to shake down a mark than I could probably list—and the children who work in a place like Draper’s, or Paresis Hall, for that matter, are as sharp as any adults. What if our man’s one of those marks? Suppose he was cheated one time too many and now he’s out to settle the score? It was always a theory in the Ripper killings.”

Sara shifted the heavy blanket that covered our laps, still not exactly what I’d call interested. “I suppose it might be possible, John. What makes you think of it now?”

I turned to her. “Those three years, between the Zweigs and our first murder this past January—what if our theory, that there were other bodies and that they’re well hidden, is wrong? What if he didn’t commit any other murders in New York—because he wasn’t here?”

“Wasn’t here?” Sara’s tone became more animated. “You mean, he took a trip? Left town?”

“What if he had to? A sailor, for instance. Half the marks in places like Draper’s or Ellison’s are seamen. It might make sense. If he were a regular customer, he wouldn’t have aroused any suspicion—he might even have known the boys.”

Sara thought it over, then nodded. “It’s not bad, John. It would certainly allow him to come and go without being noticed. Let’s see what the others think when we…” Her speech hitched up a bit, and then she turned back toward the street, anxious again. “When we get there.”

Things grew quiet inside the hansom once more.

Castle Garden sits in the heart of Battery Park, and to get to it we had to travel to the base of Broadway and beyond. That meant a fast trip through the pastiche of architectural styles that made up the publishing and financial districts of Manhattan in those days. On first glance, it was always a bit odd to see structures like the
World
Building and the dozen-storied National Shoe and Leather Bank looming (or at least, in those days before the Woolworth and Singer towers, they
seemed
to be looming) over such squat, ornate Victorian monuments as the Old Post Office and the headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. But the longer one was exposed to the neighborhood, the more one detected a common quality among all these buildings that overrode any stylistic variance: wealth. I had spent much of my childhood in this part of Manhattan (my father ran a moderately sized investment house) and from an early age I’d been struck by the fantastic activity that surrounded the getting and keeping of money. This activity could be alternately seductive and repellant; but by 1896 it was unarguably New York’s strongest reason for being.

I felt this undercurrent of enormous power again that night, even though the district was dark and dormant at two-thirty in the morning; and as we passed the graveyard at Trinity Church—where the father of the American economic system, Alexander Hamilton, lay buried—I found myself smiling bemusedly and thinking: He’s audacious, all right. Whoever our quarry was, and whatever the personal turmoil that was propelling him, he was no longer confining his activities to the less respectable parts of town. He had ventured into this preserve of the wealthy elite and dared to leave a body in Battery Park, within easy sight of the offices of many of the city’s most influential financial elders. Yes, if our man was in fact sane, as Kreizler so passionately believed, then this latest act was not only barbarous but audacious, in that peculiar way that has always produced a mixture of horror and grudging acknowledgment in natives of this city.

Our hansom released us at Bowling Green, and we crossed over to enter Battery Park. Kreizler’s calash stood at the curb on Battery Place, with Stevie Taggert aboard and huddled in a large blanket.

“Stevie,” I said. “Keeping an eye out for the precinct boys?”

He nodded and shivered. “And staying away from that,” he said, nodding toward the interior of the park. “It’s a awful business, Mr. Moore.”

Inside the park, a very few arc lights directed us along a straight path toward the prodigious stone walls of Castle Garden. Formerly a heavily armed fort called Castle Clinton, the structure had been built to guard New York during the War of 1812, after which it was turned over to the city and converted into a covered pavilion that saw years of use as an opera house. In 1855 it was transformed again, into New York’s immigration station; and before Ellis Island usurped that role in 1892, no fewer than seven million transplanted souls had passed through the old stone fort in Battery Park. City officials had recently been casting around for some new use to make of the thing, and had decided on housing the New York Aquarium inside its round walls. That remodeling was now under way, and the telltale signs of construction greeted Sara and me even before we could clearly make out the fort’s walls against the night sky.

Under those walls we found Marcus Isaacson and Cyrus Montrose standing over a man who wore a long greatcoat and had a wide-brimmed hat clutched tightly in his hands. There was a badge pinned to the man’s coat, but at the moment he looked anything but authoritative: He was seated on a pile of cut boards, holding his pale face over a bucket and breathing hard. Marcus was trying to ask him some questions, but the fellow was clearly in some kind of shock. We approached, and both Cyrus and Marcus nodded our way.

“The watchman?” I asked.

“Yes,” Marcus answered. His voice was energized but tightly controlled. “He found the body at about one o’clock, on the roof. Apparently he makes his rounds every hour or so.” Marcus leaned over the man. “Mr. Miller? I’m going back upstairs. Take your time, come back up when you’re ready. But under no circumstances are you to leave. All right?” The man looked up, his dark, grizzled features full of horror, and nodded blankly. Then he quickly bent over the bucket again, though he didn’t retch. Marcus turned to Cyrus. “Make sure he stays put, will you, Cyrus? We need a lot more answers than we’ve gotten.”

“All right, Detective Sergeant,” Cyrus answered, and then Marcus, Sara, and I went through the mammoth black gates of Castle Garden.

“The man’s a wreck,” Marcus said, jerking his head back toward the watchman. “All I’ve gotten out of him is a passionately sworn statement that at twelve-fifteen the body was not where it is now, and that these front doors were bolted. The rear doors were chained, I’ve checked them—no sign of tampering with the locks. I’m afraid it’s all very reminiscent of the Paresis Hall situation, John. No way in or out, but someone managed it all the same.”

The renovation of the interior walls of Castle Garden was only half-finished. On the floor space between all the lathing, plaster, and paint sat a series of huge glass water tanks, some under construction, some finished but unfilled, and some already housing their designated occupants: various species of exotic fish, whose wide eyes and skittish movements seemed all too appropriate, given what had occurred in their new home that night. Flashes of silver and brilliantly colored scales caught the light of a few dim worklamps that were on, increasing the eerie impression that the fish were a terrified audience searching for a way out of this place of death and back to those deep, dark regions where men and their brutal ways were unknown.

We climbed an old staircase in one wall of the fort, eventually emerging above the shell that had been built over the old ramparts to cover the formerly open central yard. A decagonal turret with two windows in each face stood at the center of the roof, which offered a commanding view of New York harbor and Bartholdi’s still-new statue of Lady Liberty out on Bedloe’s Island.

Near the edge of the roof closest to the waterfront were Roosevelt, Kreizler, and Lucius Isaacson. Next to them stood a large, boxy camera on a wooden tripod, and lying in front of the camera, bathed in the light of another worklamp, was the cause of our coming together. The blood was visible even from a distance.

Lucius’s attention was fixed on the body, but Kreizler and Roosevelt were facing away and talking very heatedly. When Kreizler saw us emerge from the staircase he came directly over, Roosevelt following behind and shaking his head. Marcus moved to the camera as Laszlo addressed Sara and me.

“Based on the condition of the body,” Kreizler said, “there would seem to be little doubt. It’s our man’s work.”

“A roundsman from the Twenty-seventh Precinct was first on the scene,” Theodore added. “He says he can remember seeing the boy regularly at the Golden Rule, though he doesn’t recall any name.” (The Golden Rule Pleasure Club was a disorderly house on West Fourth Street that specialized in boy-whores.)

Kreizler put his hands on Sara’s shoulders. “It’s not an easy sight, Sara.”

She nodded. “I didn’t expect it to be.”

Laszlo studied her reactions carefully. “I’d like you to assist the detective sergeant with his postmortem—he’s aware of your training as a nurse. It won’t be long before the precinct investigators arrive, and there’s much for each of us to do before then.”

Sara nodded again, breathed once deeply, and moved toward Lucius and the body. Kreizler began to speak to me, but I put him off for a moment and trailed a few steps behind Sara as she moved toward the glowing hemisphere of electric light in the corner of the rooftop.

The body was that of an olive-skinned boy, with delicate Semitic features and thick black hair on the right side of his head. On the left side, a large section of scalp had been torn away, revealing the slick surface of the skull. Other than that, the mutilations seemed to be identical to those that had marked Giorgio Santorelli (except that the injuries to the buttocks had not been repeated): the eyes were missing, the genitals had been cut off and stuffed in the mouth, the torso was crisscrossed by deep lacerations, the wrists were bound, and the right hand had been severed and apparently removed from the scene. As Kreizler had said, there seemed little doubt about who was responsible. It was all as distinctive as a signature. That same terrible sense of pathos that I’d felt on the Williamsburg Bridge anchor—prompted not only by the age of the victim but as well by the cruel way in which the body was trussed and pushed to the ground—returned to steal my breath and rattle what seemed every bone in my body.

I watched Sara carefully without moving closer, ready to assist if she should be overcome, but not wishing her to think that I expected her to be. Her eyes, as they took in the sight, went wide and her head shook, quickly and quite visibly. She clasped her hands together tightly, took another deep breath, and then stood by Lucius.

“Detective Sergeant?” she said. “Dr. Kreizler says I’m to assist you.”

Lucius looked up, impressed at Sara’s composure, and then wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Yes. Thank you, Miss Howard. We’ll begin with the injury to the scalp…”

I headed back to Kreizler and Roosevelt. “That’s one gutsy girl,” I said with a shake of my head, but neither of them acknowledged the remark.

Kreizler slapped a newspaper on my chest and spoke bitterly. “Your friend Steffens has written quite an article for the morning edition of the
Post,
John. How,
how
could anyone be so stupid?”

“There’s no excuse,” Roosevelt said glumly. “I can only think that Steffens considered the story fair game, so long as he didn’t reveal your involvement in the case, Doctor. But I’ll have him in my office first thing this morning and, by thunder, I’ll make the situation clear to him!”

Prominently displayed on the
Post
’s front page was an article announcing that the Zweig killings and the Santorelli murder were now believed by “high police officials” to be the work of the same man. The article made less out of the apparently unusual nature of the killer than out of the fact that the link to the Zweigs demonstrated that the “ghoulish fiend” was not drawn exclusively to child prostitutes: It was now clear, Steffens declared in his best rabble-rousing style, that “no children are safe.” There were other sensational details, as well: Santorelli, it was stated, had been “assaulted” before his death (in fact, Kreizler had found no evidence of sexual violation), and in some quarters of the city the murders were being talked of as the work of a supernatural creature—though “the infamous Ellison and his cohorts” made “far more promising suspects.”