The Alienist (2 page)

“That’s little Stevie Taggert, ain’t it?” he said, speaking with a pronounced brogue. “You don’t suppose the commissioner’s called me all this way to box your ears for ya, do ya, Stevie, ya little shit?”

I stepped down from the carriage and approached Stevie, who shot the sergeant a sullen glance. “Pay no mind, Stevie,” I said, as sympathetically as possible. “Stupidity goes with the leather helmet.” The boy smiled a bit. “But I wouldn’t mind your telling me what I’m doing here.”

Stevie nodded to the northern watchtower, then pulled a battered cigarette out of his pocket. “Up there. The doctor says you’re to go up.”

I started for the doorway in the granite wall, but Stevie stayed by the horse. “You’re not coming?”

The boy shuddered and turned away, lighting the cigarette. “I seen it once. And if I never see such again I’ll be done right. When you’re ready to get back home, Mr. Moore, I’ll be right here. Doctor’s instructions.”

I felt increased apprehension as I turned and headed for the doorway, where I was stopped by the arm of the police sergeant. “And who might you be, with the young Stevepipe driving you around past all respectable hours? This is a crime scene, y’know.” I gave the man my name and occupation, at which he grinned and showed me an impressive gold tooth. “Ah, a gentleman of the press—and the
Times,
no less! Well, Mr. Moore, I’ve just arrived myself. Urgent call, apparently no other man they could trust. Spell it F-l-y-n-n, sir, if you will, and don’t go labeling me no roundsman. Full sergeant. Come on, we’ll head up together. Mind you behave, young Stevie, or I’ll have you back on Randalls Island faster’n spit!”

Stevie turned back to the horse. “Why don’t you go chase yourself,” the boy mumbled, just loud enough for the sergeant to hear. Flynn spun with a look of lethal anger, but, remembering my presence, checked himself. “Incorrigible, that one, Mr. Moore. Can’t imagine what a man like you’s doing in his presence. Need him as a contact with the underworld, no doubt. Up we go, sir, and mind, it’s dark as the pit in here!”

So it was. I stumbled and tripped my way up a rough flight of stairs, at the top of which I could make out the form of another leatherhead. The cop—a roundsman from the Thirteenth Precinct—turned on our approach and then called to someone else:

“It’s Flynn, sir. He’s here.”

We came out of the stairs into a small room littered with sawhorses, planks of wood, buckets of rivets, and bits of metal and wiring. Wide windows gave a full view of the horizon in every direction—the city behind us, the river and the partially completed towers of the bridge before us. A doorway led out onto the walkway that ran around the tower. Near the doorway stood a slit-eyed, bearded sergeant of detectives named Patrick Connor, whom I recognized from my visits to Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street. Next to him, looking out over the river with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking on the balls of his feet, was a much more familiar figure: Theodore.

“Sergeant Flynn,” Roosevelt said without turning. “It’s ghastly work that has prompted our call, I’m afraid. Ghastly.”

My discomfort suddenly heightened when Theodore spun to face us. There was nothing unusual in his appearance: an expensive, slightly dandy checked suit of the kind that he fancied in those days; the spectacles that were, like the eyes behind them, too small for his tough, square head; the broad mustache bristling below the wide nose. Yet his visage was excessively odd, nonetheless. Then it occurred to me: his teeth. His numerous, usually snapping teeth—they were nowhere in sight. His jaws were clamped shut in what seemed passionate anger, or remorse. Something had shaken Roosevelt badly.

His dismay seemed to grow when he saw me. “What—Moore! What in thunder are you doing here?”

“I’m glad to see you, too, Roosevelt,” I managed through my nervousness, extending a hand.

He accepted it, though for once he didn’t loosen my arm from its socket. “What—oh, I am sorry, Moore. I—delighted to see you, of course, delighted. But who told you—?”

“Told me what? I was abducted and brought here by Kreizler’s boy. On his orders, without so much as a word of explanation.”

“Kreizler!” Theodore murmured in soft urgency, glancing out the window with a confounded and even fearful look that was not at all typical of him. “Yes, Kreizler’s been here.”

“Been? Do you mean he’s gone?”

“Before I arrived. He left a note. And a report.” Theodore revealed a piece of paper clutched in his left hand. “A preliminary one, at any rate. He was the first doctor they could find. Although it was quite hopeless…”

I took the man by the shoulder. “Roosevelt. What is it?”

“To be sure, Commissioner, I wouldn’t mind knowing meself,” Sergeant Flynn added, with quaint obsequiousness that was repellant. “We get little enough sleep at the Fifteenth, and I’d just as soon—”

“Very well,” Theodore said, steeling himself. “How are your stomachs, gentlemen?”

I said nothing, and Flynn made some absurd joke about the wide range of grisly sights he’d encountered in his life; but Theodore’s eyes were all hard business. He indicated the door to the outer walkway. Detective Sergeant Connor stepped aside and then Flynn led the way out.

My first thought on emerging, despite my apprehension, was that the view from the walkway was even more extraordinary than that from the tower windows. Across the water lay Williamsburg, once a peaceful country town but now rapidly becoming a bustling part of the metropolis that was destined, within months, to officially evolve into Greater New York. To the south, again, the Brooklyn Bridge; in the southwestern distance the new towers of Printing House Square, and below us the churning, black waters of the river—

And then I saw it.

CHAPTER 3

O
dd, how long it took my mind to make any sense of the image. Or perhaps not; there was so much so very wrong, so very out of place, so…distorted. How could I have expected myself to grasp it quickly?

On the walkway was the body of a young person. I say “person” because, though the physical attributes were those of an adolescent boy, the clothes (little more than a chemise that was missing a sleeve) and facial paint were those of a girl. Or, rather, of a woman, and a woman of dubious repute at that. The unfortunate creature’s wrists were trussed behind the back, and the legs were bent in a kneeling position that pressed the face to the steel of the walkway. There was no sign of any pants or shoes, just one sock hanging pathetically from a foot. But what had been done to the body…

The face did not seem heavily beaten or bruised—the paint and powder were still intact—but where once there had been eyes there were now only bloody, cavernous sockets. A puzzling piece of flesh protruded from the mouth. A wide gash stretched across the throat, though there was little blood near the opening. Large cuts crisscrossed the abdomen, revealing the mass of the inner organs. The right hand had been chopped neatly off. At the groin there was another gaping wound, one that explained the mouth—the genitals had been cut away and stuffed between the jaws. The buttocks, too, had been shorn off, in what appeared large…one could only call them carving strokes.

In the minute or two that it took me to note all these details the vista around me faded into a sea of indistinguishable blackness, and what I thought was the churning progress of a ship turned out to be my own blood in my ears. With the sudden realization that I might be sick, I spun to grasp the railing of the walkway and hung my head out over the water.

“Commissioner!” Connor called, stepping out of the watchtower. But it was Theodore who got to me first, in a quick bound.

“Easy, now, John,” I heard him say, as he supported me with that wiry yet remarkably strong boxer’s frame of his. “Breathe deeply.”

As I followed his instructions I heard a long, trailing whistle from Flynn, who continued to stare at the body. “Well, now,” he said, addressing the corpse without sounding particularly concerned. “Somebody has done for you, young Giorgio-called-Gloria, haven’t they? You’re a hell of a mess.”

“Then you do know the child, Flynn?” Theodore said, leaning me against the wall of the watchtower. Steadiness was returning to my head.

“That I do, Commissioner.” Flynn seemed in the dim light to be smiling. “Though it was no child, this one, not if childhood be judged by behavior. Family name Santorelli. Must’ve been, oh, thirteen years old, or thereabouts. Giorgio, it was called originally, and since it began working out of Paresis Hall, it called itself Gloria.”

“‘It’?” I said, wiping cold sweat from my forehead with the cuff of my coat. “Why do you call him ‘it’?”

Flynn’s smile became a grin. “Sure, and what would you call it, Mr. Moore? It warn’t no male, not to judge by its antics—but God didn’t create it female, teither. They’re all its to me, that breed.”

Theodore’s hands went forcefully to his hips, the fingers curling up into fists—he’d taken the measure of Flynn. “I’m not interested in your philosophical analysis of the situation, Sergeant. Whatever else, the boy was a child and the child has been murdered.”

Flynn chuckled and glanced again at the body. “No arguing
that,
sir!”

“Sergeant!” Theodore’s voice, always a little too rasping and shrill for his appearance, scratched a little more than usual as he barked at Flynn, who stood up straight. “Not another word out of you, sir, unless it’s to answer my questions! Understood?”

Flynn nodded; but the cynical, amused resentment that all longtime officers in the department felt for the commissioner who in just one year had stood Police Headquarters and the whole chain of departmental command on its ear remained evident in the slightest curl of his upper lip. Theodore could not have missed it.

“Now then,” Roosevelt said, his teeth clicking in that peculiar way of theirs, cutting each word out of his mouth. “You say the boy was called Giorgio Santorelli, and that he worked out of Paresis Hall—that’s Biff Ellison’s establishment on Cooper Square, correct?”

“That’d be the one, Commissioner.”

“And where would you guess that Mr. Ellison is at this moment?”

“At this—? Why, in the Hall itself, sir.”

“Go there. Tell him I want him at Mulberry Street tomorrow morning.”

For the first time, Flynn looked concerned. “Tomorrow—now, begging your pardon, Commissioner, but Mr. Ellison’s not the sort of man to take that kind of a summons sweetly.”

“Then arrest him,” Theodore said, turning away and staring out at Williamsburg.

“Arrest him? Sure, Commissioner, if we arrested every owner of a bar or disorderly house that harbors boy-whores, just because one gets roughed up or even murdered, why, sir, we’d never—”

“Perhaps you would like to tell me the real reason for your resistance,” Theodore said, those busy fists of his starting to flex behind his back. He walked right up and put his spectacles in Flynn’s face. “Is Mr. Ellison not one of your primary sources of graft?”

Flynn’s eyes widened, but he managed to draw himself up haughtily and affect wounded pride. “Mr. Roosevelt, I’ve been on the force for fifteen years, sir, and I think I know how this city works. You don’t go harassing a man like Mr. Ellison just because some little piece of immigrant trash finally gets what’s coming to it!”

That was all, and I knew that was all—and it was fortunate for Roosevelt that I did, for had I not shot over at just that moment to grab his arms he would certainly have beaten Flynn into a bloody pulp. It was a struggle, though, to keep hold of those strong arms. “No, Roosevelt, no!” I whispered in his ear. “It’s what his kind want, you know that! Attack a man in uniform and they’ll have your head, there’ll be nothing the mayor can do about it!”

Roosevelt was breathing hard, Flynn was once again smiling, and Detective Sergeant Connor and the roundsman were making no move toward physical intervention. They knew full well that they were precariously positioned at that moment between the powerful wave of municipal reform that had swept into New York with the findings of the Lexow Commission on police corruption a year earlier (of which Roosevelt was a strong exponent) and the perhaps greater power of that same corruption, which had existed for as long as the force and was now quietly biding its time, waiting until the public wearied of the passing fashion of reform and sank back into business as usual.

“A simple choice for you, Flynn,” Roosevelt managed, with dignity that was notably unimpaired for a man so full of rage. “Ellison in my office or your badge on my desk. Tomorrow morning.”

Flynn gave up the struggle sullenly. “Sure.
Commissioner.
” He spun on his heel and headed back down the watchtower steps, mumbling something about a “damned society boy playing at policeman.” One of the cops who had been positioned below the tower then appeared, to say that a coroner’s wagon had arrived and was ready to haul the body away. Roosevelt told them to wait a few minutes and then dismissed Connor and the roundsman as well. We were now alone on the walkway, except for the ghoulish remains of what had once been, apparently, another of the many desperately troubled young people who every season were spat up by the dark, miserable tenement ocean that stretched away from us to the west. Forced to use whatever means they could—and Giorgio Santorelli’s had been the most basic—to survive on their own, such children were more
completely
on their own than anyone unfamiliar with the New York City ghettos of 1896 could possibly imagine.

“Kreizler estimates that the boy was killed earlier tonight,” Theodore said, glancing at the sheet of paper in his hand. “Something about the temperature of the body. So the killer may still be in the area. I have men combing it. There are a few other medical details, and then this message.”

He handed the paper to me, and on it I saw scrawled in Kreizler’s agitated block hand: “ROOSEVELT: TERRIBLE ERRORS HAVE BEEN MADE. I WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE MORNING, OR FOR LUNCH. WE SHOULD BEGIN—THERE IS A TIMETABLE.” I tried for a moment to make sense of it.

“It’s fairly tiresome of him to be so cryptic” was the only conclusion I could reach.

Theodore managed a chuckle. “Yes. I thought so, too. But I think I understand, now. It was examining the body that did it. Do you have any idea, Moore, how many people are murdered in New York every year?”

“Not really.” I gave the corpse another curious glance, but jerked my head back around when I saw the cruel way in which the face was pressed to the steel walkway—so that the lower jaw was pushed at a grotesque sidelong angle away from the upper—and the black-red holes that had once been eyes. “If I were to guess I’d say hundreds. Perhaps one or two thousand.”

“So would I,” Roosevelt answered. “But I, too, would only be guessing. Because we don’t even pay attention to most of them. Oh, the force bends every effort if the victim is respectable and well-to-do. But a boy like this, an immigrant who turned to the flesh trade—I’m ashamed to say it, Moore, but there’s no precedent for looking into such a case, as you could see in Flynn’s attitude.” His hands went to his hips again. “But I’m getting tired of it. In these vile neighborhoods husbands and wives kill each other, drunkards and dope fiends murder decent working people, prostitutes are slaughtered and commit suicide by the score, and at most it’s seen as some sort of grimly amusing spectacle by outsiders. That’s bad enough. But when the victims are children like this, and the general reaction is no different than Flynn’s—by God, I get to feeling warlike with my own people! Why, already this year we’ve had three such cases, and not so much as a whisper from the precincts or the detectives.”

“Three?” I asked. “I only know about the girl at Draper’s.” Shang Draper ran a notorious brothel at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, where customers could purchase the favors of children (mostly girls, but the occasional boy as well) between the ages of nine and fourteen. In January a ten-year-old girl had been found beaten to death in one of the brothel’s small paneled rooms.

“Yes, and you only know of
that
one because Draper had been slow with his graft payments,” Roosevelt said. The bitter battle against corruption waged by the current mayor, Colonel William L. Strong, and lieutenants such as Roosevelt had been courageous, but they had not succeeded in eradicating the oldest and most lucrative of police activities: the collection of graft from the operators of saloons, concert halls, disorderly houses, opium dens, and every other palace of vice. “Someone in the Sixteenth Precinct, I still don’t know who, made the most of that story to the press as a method of turning the screws. But the other two victims were boys like this, found in the streets and therefore useless in trying to pressure their panderers. So the stories went untold…”

His voice faded into the slap of the water below us and the steady rush of the river breeze. “Were they both like this?” I asked, watching Theodore watch the body.

“Virtually. Throats cut. And they’d both been gotten at by the rats and birds, like this one. It didn’t make an easy sight.”

“Rats and birds?”

“The eyes,” Roosevelt answered. “Detective Sergeant Connor puts that down to rats, or carrion pickers. But the rest of this…”

There hadn’t been anything in the papers about these other two killings, although there was nothing surprising about that. As Roosevelt had said, murders that appeared insoluble and that occurred among the poor or outcast were barely recorded, much less investigated, by the police; and when the victims were members of a segment of society that was not generally acknowledged to exist, then the chances of public awareness shrank from slim to none. I wondered for a moment what my own editors at the
Times
would have done if I’d suggested running a story about a young boy who made his living painting himself like a female whore and selling his body to grown men (many of them ostensibly respectable men), who was horribly butchered in a dark corner of the city. I would have been lucky to escape with a dismissal; forced internment at the Bloomingdale Asylum would have been the more likely result.

“I haven’t spoken to Kreizler in years,” Roosevelt mused at length. “Although he sent me a very decent note when”—for a moment his words became awkward—“that is, at a very difficult time.”

I understood. Theodore was referring to the death of his first wife, Alice, who had passed away in 1884 after giving birth to their daughter, who bore the same name. His loss that day had been doubly staggering, for his mother had died within hours of his wife. Theodore had dealt with the tragedy typically, sealing off the sad, sacrosanct memory of his bride, and never mentioning her again.

He tried to rouse himself, and turned to me. “Still, the good doctor must have called you here for a reason.”

“I’m deuced if I can see it,” I replied with a shrug.

“Yes,” Theodore said with another affectionate chuckle. “As inscrutable as any Chinaman, our friend Kreizler. And perhaps, like him, I’ve been among the strange and awful too long, these past months. But I think I may be able to divine his purpose. You see, Moore, I’ve had to ignore all the other killings like this one, because there’s no desire to investigate them in the department. Even if there were, none of our detectives is trained to make sense of such butchery. But this boy, this horrible, bloody mess—justice can only be blind so long. I’ve a scheme, and I think Kreizler has a scheme—and I think
you’re
the one to bring us together.”

“Me?”

“Why not? Just as you did at Harvard, when we all met.”

“But what am I supposed to do?”

“Bring Kreizler to my office tomorrow. Late morning, as he says. We’ll share thoughts and see what can be done. But mind you, be discreet—as far as anyone else is concerned, it’s a social reunion of old friends.”

“Damn it, Roosevelt,
what
is a social reunion of old friends?”