The Alienist (32 page)

As it turned out, all our anxious anticipation of what might happen on Ascension Day was in vain, for the night passed without incident. We took up our various surveillance positions and spent the long, slow hours until six
A.M
. battling no greater enemy than boredom. As a result, the days that followed were full of more useless arguments over why the killer should have elected to strike on Good Friday but not on Ascension Day. There was a growing feeling, voiced first by Sara, that the coincidence of the holidays and the murders might be nothing more than that; but Marcus and I remained firmly committed to the idea that our killer’s calendar and that of the Christian faith were somehow connected, since this theory only helped our hypothesis about a rogue or defrocked priest being the killer. We urged that our interceptive sights be set on the next significant holiday—Pentecost, just eleven days after the Feast of the Ascension—and that we try to use the intervening time as productively as possible. Sad to say, though, Marcus and I ran into a brick wall with our priest research; and it began to seem that our entire theory might not be very much more than a well-reasoned waste of time.

Our teammates, on the other hand, did achieve some progress during the week before Pentecost: answers to the cables and letters that Sara, Lucius, and Kreizler had sent out to almost every reputable asylum in the country began to trickle in. Most of them were firmly negative, but a few offered hope, reporting that a man or men of the general physical stature that Kreizler had described, and characterized by at least some of the mental symptoms he’d noted, had been committed within their walls at some point during the past fifteen years. A few institutions even sent copies of case files along; and while none of these ultimately proved of any value, a brief note postmarked Washington, D.C., did create quite a stir one afternoon.

On that day I happened to be watching as Lucius strolled through the room, carrying a batch of the asylum letters and case files. He caught sight of something, then suddenly spun on his heels, dropped the pile of papers, and stared at Kreizler’s desk. His eyes went quite wide for a moment, and his forehead almost instantly began to perspire; but as he took out a handkerchief and began to mop the sweat away, his voice remained steady.

“Doctor—” he said to Laszlo, who was standing by the door talking with Sara. “This note from the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s—have you looked at it?”

“Only once,” Kreizler answered, crossing over to where Lucius stood. “It didn’t seem to offer very much.”

“Yes, that was what I thought.” Lucius picked up the letter. “The description’s awfully vague—the reference to ‘some sort of facial tic,’ for instance, might cover a lot of ground.”

Kreizler studied Lucius. “
But,
Detective Sergeant…?”

“But—” Lucius grappled with his thought. “Well, it’s the postmark, Doctor: Washington. St. Elizabeth’s is the federal government’s principal asylum for the insane, isn’t it?”

Kreizler paused for a moment; and then his black eyes jumped in their quick, electric way. “That’s right,” he said, quietly yet urgently. “But since they never mentioned the man’s background, I didn’t—” He knocked a fist against his forehead. “Fool!”

Laszlo made a dash for the telephone, and Lucius followed. “Given the legal situation in the capital,” Lucius said, “it would hardly represent an unusual case.”

“You’ve a mastery of understatement, Detective Sergeant,” Kreizler said. “There are several such cases every
year,
in the capital!”

Sara was walking toward them, drawn by the excitement. “Lucius? What is it, what’s struck you?”

“The postmark,” Lucius said again, slapping at the letter. “There’s a very troublesome little codicil to the Washington laws that deal with insanity and the involuntary commitment of patients to asylums. If the patient hasn’t actually been adjudicated insane in the District of Columbia but is confined to a Washington institution, he can apply for a writ of
habeas corpus
—and he stands an almost one hundred percent chance of being released.”

“Why’s that so troublesome?” I asked.

“Because,” Lucius said, as Kreizler attempted to get a telephone line through to Washington, “so many mental patients in that city, especially at St. Elizabeth’s, have been sent there from other parts of the country.”

“Oh?” Now it was Marcus’s turn to draw near. “Why’s that?”

Lucius took a deep breath, his own excitement mounting. “Because St. Elizabeth’s is the receiving hospital for soldiers and sailors who’ve been judged unfit for military duty. Unfit—because of mental illness.”

The slow, drifting way in which Sara, Marcus, and I had been approaching Lucius and Kreizler now became something of a stampede. “It didn’t occur to us at first,” Lucius explained, shying away from our advance, “because there’s no mention of the man’s background in the letter. Only descriptions of his appearance and his symptoms—delusions of persecution and persistent cruelty. But if he did, in fact, see military service and was sent to St. Elizabeth’s—well, there’s a chance, a slim but real chance that it’s—” Lucius paused, seemingly afraid to say the word: “him.”

The idea seemed a sound one; but our mood of hopefulness was fairly well dashed by Kreizler’s ’phone call. After being kept waiting for quite a while, he did finally manage to get the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s on the line, but the man treated Laszlo’s request for further information with the utmost contempt. Apparently, he knew all about the notorious Dr. Kreizler and felt the way many asylum superintendents did about my friend. Kreizler asked if there wasn’t some other member of the hospital staff who could look into the matter, to which the superintendent replied that his staff was severely overworked and had already lent “extraordinary” assistance in this matter. If Kreizler wanted to rummage through the hospital’s records, he could damned well come down to Washington and do so himself.

The difficulty was that Kreizler couldn’t just drop everything and shoot off to the capital—none of us could, for we were just a couple of days away from Pentecost. There was nothing to do but put the trip to Washington at the top of the list of things to be attended to after our next all-night vigil, then swallow our excitement and patiently focus on the immediate job to be done. Given the poor results that had attended our Ascension Day efforts, however, I couldn’t help feeling that such focus was going to prove somewhat difficult to achieve.

Nonetheless, when Pentecost Sunday (the feast celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles) arrived we all returned to our various nocturnal aeries and waited again for the appearance of our killer. I cannot say what the mood on the other three rooftops was; but for Stevie and myself, up above the Slide, boredom struck early. It being Sunday night fairly little noise echoed up from Bleecker Street, while the occasional grunt and hiss of the Sixth Avenue Elevated nearby evolved in quality from monotonous to somewhat lulling. Before long it was all I could do to stay awake.

At about twelve-thirty I glanced over to see Stevie quietly laying out a deck of cards in thirteen piles on the tar in front of him. “Solitaire?” I whispered.

“Jewish faro,” he answered, giving the criminal class’s name for the game of stuss, a particularly shady and complicated method of bilking suckers that I’d never been able to comprehend. Seeing a chance to fill this void in my gambling education, I crept over to sit by Stevie, and he quietly tried for the better part of an hour to explain the game to me. I absorbed none of it; and finally, frustrated as well as bored, I stood up and looked out at the city around us.

“This is useless,” I decided quietly. “He’s never going to show up.” I turned to look across Cornelia Street. “I wonder how the others are doing.”

The building that housed the Black and Tan—where Cyrus and Lucius had been posted—was just across the way, and looking beyond its cornice I could see the back of Lucius’s balding pate reflected in the moonlight. I laughed quietly and called it to Stevie’s attention.

“He oughta wear a hat,” Stevie laughed. “If we can see it, so can other people.”

“True,” I answered; and then, as the balding head moved to another spot on the roof and finally disappeared, my face screwed up in puzzlement. “Has Lucius
grown
since we started this investigation?”

“Must’ve been standing on the dividing wall,” Stevie answered, going back to his cards.

In such innocuous ways are disasters presaged. It was another fifteen minutes before a series of urgent shouts that I recognized to be Lucius’s started to blare across Cornelia Street; and when I looked over, the urgency and fear in the detective sergeant’s face were enough to make me immediately grab Stevie by the collar and head for the staircase. It was apparent even to my tired, bored brain that we’d had our first contact with the killer.

CHAPTER 26

O
nce on the sidewalk, Stevie and I dispatched our waiting contingent of street arabs to fetch Kreizler, Roosevelt, Sara, and Marcus, then sped across Cornelia Street to the Black and Tan. Making straight for the structure’s front door, we ran headlong into Frank Stephenson, who had been drawn out of his infamous brothel by Lucius’s shouts for assistance. Like most men of his profession, Stephenson employed plenty of muscle, and several of these thugs were standing on the stoop with him, blocking our entrance. I was in no mood, however, to go through the usual game of threat and counterthreat with them: I simply said that we were on police business, that there was a police officer on the roof, and that the president of the Board of Police Commissioners would be arriving soon. That litany was enough to get Stephenson and his boys out of the way, and in seconds Stevie and I were on the roof of the building.

We found Lucius crouching over Cyrus, who had suffered a nasty blow to the skull. A small pool of blood glittered on the tar beneath Cyrus’s head, while his half-open eyes were rolled frightfully up into their sockets and his mouth was producing strained wheezing sounds. Ever cautious, Lucius had brought some gauze bandages along with him, and was now carefully wrapping them around the top of Cyrus’s head, in an effort to stabilize what was at the very least a bad concussion.

“It’s my fault,” Lucius said, before Stevie and I had even asked any questions. Despite his firm concentration on what he was doing, there was deep remorse in Lucius’s voice. “I was having trouble staying awake, and went for coffee. I forgot that it was Sunday—it took longer to find some than I’d anticipated. I must’ve been gone for more than fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” I said, running to the back of the roof. “Could that have been enough time?” Looking down into the rear alleyway, I saw no signs of activity.

“I don’t know,” Lucius answered. “We’ll have to see what Marcus thinks.”

Marcus and Sara arrived a few minutes later, followed soon by Kreizler and Theodore. Pausing just long enough to check on Cyrus’s condition, Marcus produced a magnification lens and a small lantern, then quickly began searching various parts of the rooftop. Explaining that fifteen minutes would indeed have been enough time for a capable climber to get down and up the side of the building, Marcus kept rummaging around until he found some rope fibers that might or might not have been evidence of our killer’s presence. The only way to be sure was to find out from Frank Stephenson if any of his “workers” were missing. Backed up by Theodore, Marcus headed downstairs, while the rest of us stood around Lucius and Kreizler, who were both now at work on Cyrus’s head. Kreizler sent Stevie to tell the street arabs to fetch an ambulance from nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, although there was some question as to whether it was safe to move a man in Cyrus’s condition. After bringing him round with ammonia salts, however, Kreizler was able to learn that Cyrus still had feeling and movement in all his limbs, and Laszlo therefore felt certain that the bumpy ride up Seventh Avenue to the hospital, while uncomfortable, would do no further damage.

Kreizler’s concern for Cyrus’s safety was pronounced; before letting him slip back into semiconsciousness, however, Laszlo wafted more of the ammonia salts under his nose and urgently asked if he’d been able to see who’d struck him. Cyrus only shook his head and moaned pitiably, at which Lucius said that it was useless for Kreizler to press the issue: the wound on Cyrus’s head indicated that he’d been struck from behind, and had therefore probably never realized what was happening.

It took another half an hour for the ambulance from St. Vincent’s to arrive, enough time for us to learn that, in fact, a fourteen-year-old boy from the Black and Tan was not in his assigned room. The details were of a sort that was by now grimly familiar to all of us: the missing youth was a recently arrived German immigrant named Ernst Lohmann, who had not been seen leaving the premises and who had been working out of a chamber that had a window which opened onto the rear alley. According to Stephenson, the boy had requested the room especially that day; so in all likelihood the killer had planned the exodus in advance with his unwitting victim, though how long ago—hours or days—it was impossible to say. I’d told Marcus before he went downstairs that the Black and Tan was not particularly known for offering male whores who dressed up like women, and he’d questioned Stephenson on this point. Sure enough, the one boy in the house who handled such requests was Ernst Lohmann.

Finally, two uniformed ambulance attendants from St. Vincent’s appeared on the roof, carrying a folding stretcher. As they bore Cyrus carefully downstairs and then loaded him into the solemn black ambulance, which was pulled by an equally forbidding horse with blood-red eyes, I realized that a terrible death watch was now beginning: not for Cyrus, who though badly hurt would almost certainly recover fully, but for young Ernst Lohmann. After the ambulance had driven off, with Kreizler and Sara accompanying Cyrus to the hospital, Roosevelt turned to me, and I could see he’d reached the same conclusion.

“I don’t care what Kreizler says, John,” Theodore announced, setting his jaw and balling his fists. “This is a race against time and savagery now, and I’m going to use the force under my command.” I followed him as he rushed to Sixth Avenue to find a hansom. “The Ninth Precinct is closest. I shall make all arrangements from there.” He caught sight of an empty rig, and approached it. “We know the basic pattern—he’ll be making for the waterfront. I’ll have detachments search every foot of—”

“Roosevelt—wait.” I managed to grab his arm and pull him to a halt just as he was getting into the cab. “I understand your feelings. But for heaven’s sake, don’t reveal any details to your men.”

“Not reveal—good God, John!” His teeth started to click louder and his eyes danced with rage behind the spectacles. “Do you understand what’s happening? Why, at this very moment—”

“I know, Roosevelt. But it won’t help things to let the whole force in on it. Just say that there’s been a kidnapping, and that you have reason to suspect the criminals are trying to leave the city by boat or by bridge. It’s the best way to handle it, please believe me.”

Theodore took a big, strong breath into his broad chest, then nodded once. “Perhaps you’re right.” He slammed one fist into the other hand. “Blast all, this damned interference! But I’ll do as you say, John—provided you’ll stand aside and let me get to it!”

With a sharp crack of his horsewhip Roosevelt’s cabbie commenced a fast trip up Sixth Avenue, and I returned to the front of the Black and Tan. There a small and already surly crowd had gathered and was being told the details of the evening’s activities by Frank Stephenson. Technically speaking, the Black and Tan was in the territory of the Hudson Dusters, and Stephenson owed no allegiance to Paul Kelly; but the two men did know each other, and the job Stephenson did exciting that little crowd outside his house that night made me very suspicious that Kelly had foreseen the possibility that one of Stephenson’s boys might be snatched or killed, and had paid him handsomely to make the most of such an event. Stephenson let off a lot of angry statements to the effect that the police had been on the scene and had exercised neither caution nor diligence. The victim was too poor, he said, and entirely too foreign to warrant police interest; if people in such neighborhoods as their own wanted to prevent these kinds of things, they’d have to take matters into their own hands. Marcus, of course, had already identified himself to Stephenson as a police officer; and as the crowd’s mood grew uglier and an increasing number of threatening glances were thrown our way, the Isaacsons, Stevie, and I decided to retreat to our headquarters, where we would try to stay abreast of events through the rest of the night by telephone.

Such proved a lot trickier than it sounded. There was no one for us to ring up—Theodore would never take a call from us while he was in the company of regular police officers—and no one was likely to get in touch with our headquarters. At about four we did have word from Kreizler, who said that he and Sara had gotten Cyrus comfortably settled in a private room at St. Vincent’s and would be returning to our headquarters soon. Other than that, however, there was profound silence. Lucius, though very much relieved by Kreizler’s call, nonetheless felt profoundly guilty about all that had happened, and paced the floor rather frantically. Indeed, had it not been for Marcus I think we might all have slowly gone mad sitting there with nothing to do. But the taller Isaacson decided that if we couldn’t lend our bodies to the search we could at least use our minds, and, pointing to the large map of Manhattan, he suggested that we try to anticipate where the killer would go this time to perform his vicious ritual.

Yet even if we hadn’t been distracted by the thought that events were proceeding without our being able to affect them, I doubt that we would have gotten very far in this endeavor. True, we had a couple of fairly solid starting points: first, the assumption that the killer’s deep hatred of immigrants had resulted in the disposal of bodies at Castle Garden and the Ellis Island ferry; and, second, the belief that his preoccupation with the cleansing power of water had caused him to select two bridges and a water tower as sites for the other murders. But how could we extrapolate from these elements sufficiently to guess what site he would choose next? One suggestion was that he’d return to another bridge; and, if we assumed that he wouldn’t repeat himself in this regard, we were left with either the old High Bridge over the East River at the northern end of Manhattan (an aqueduct that carried Croton Reservoir water into the city) or the nearby Washington Bridge, which had opened a few years earlier. Marcus, however, realized that the killer probably knew that his pursuers were gaining ground on him. Based on the timing of his attack on Cyrus, for example, it seemed certain that it had been
he
who had put
us
under surveillance earlier in the evening rather than vice versa. A man who was paying that kind of attention to his antagonists’ activities would likely guess that we were anticipating his return to a favored type of locale and go elsewhere. For Marcus’s money, it was the killer’s hatred of immigrants that offered the best chance of revealing the probable next murder site; and, following this line of reasoning, the detective sergeant argued that the man would head for someplace like the docks belonging to those steamship lines that packed huge numbers of desperate foreigners into the lower decks of their vessels and brought them to America.

When we finally did get an answer to this deadly conundrum, it was so obvious as to make all of us feel quite ashamed. At about four-thirty, just as Kreizler was walking into our headquarters, Sara telephoned from Mulberry Street, where she’d gone to find out what was happening.

“They’ve had a message from Bedloe’s Island,” she said, as soon as I’d picked up the earpiece. “One of the night guards at the Liberty statue—he’s found a body.” My heart sank, and I said nothing. “Hello?” Sara said. “Are you on the line, John?”

“Yes, Sara. I’m here.”

“Then listen carefully, I can’t talk long. There’s already a pack of senior officers getting ready to head out there. The commissioner’s going with them, but he’s told me we mustn’t show ourselves. He says all he can do is try to prevent any coroners from examining the body before it’s sent to the morgue. He’ll try to get us in to see it there.”

“But the crime scene, Sara—”

“John, please don’t be thickheaded. There’s nothing anyone can do. We had our chance tonight and we botched it. Now we’ve got to get what we can, when we can, at the morgue. In the meantime—” Suddenly I heard loud voices in the background on the other end of the line: one of them I recognized as Theodore, another was unquestionably Link Steffens, and then there were several others I couldn’t place. “I’ve got to ring off, John. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve had word from the island.” With a click she was gone.

I gave the others the details, after which it took several minutes for everyone to absorb the fact that despite our weeks of research and days of preparation we’d been unable to prevent another murder. Lucius, of course, took it especially hard, believing himself responsible now not only for a friend’s cracked skull but for a boy’s death. Marcus and I tried to be sympathetic, but nothing we could say would console him. Kreizler, on the other hand, took a very unemotional line, and told Lucius that since the killer had been observing our efforts there was little doubt that he would eventually have found some way to stage a successful attack, if not on that night then on another. We were lucky, Laszlo declared, that Cyrus’s concussion had been the full extent of our casualties—Lucius could also have been laid out on that rooftop, the victim of more than just a nasty knock on the head. There was no time for self-recrimination, Kreizler concluded; Lucius’s keen mind and expertise, undiluted by guilt, were sorely needed. This little speech seemed to mean a great deal to Lucius, as much for its author as for its content, and he was soon composed enough to join our efforts to tabulate what, if anything, we’d learned that night.

Every move the killer had made confirmed our theories concerning his nature and methods—but the most important aspect of his behavior, so far as Kreizler was concerned, was his attention to our efforts and his attack on Cyrus. Why had he chosen to steal Ernst Lohmann away when he knew that we were watching? And, once committed to such a dangerous course of action, why had he only knocked Cyrus unconscious instead of killing him? The man was, after all, already certain to go to the gallows, if caught, and he could only hang once. Why take the chance that Cyrus might put up a fight, get a glimpse of his attacker during it, and then live to tell us about it? Kreizler wasn’t at all sure that we could answer these questions definitely; but it was at least clear that the man had enjoyed the evening’s sense of heightened risk. And since he knew that we were getting closer to him, perhaps letting Cyrus live was his way of urging us on: a defiant challenge, as well as a desperate plea.