The Alienist (51 page)

“Aw, shit,” said our man at the door. “Then youse
is
cops?”

Without answering I struck a match and held it high as I approached Lucius. Just as I focused in on the object in his arms, Sara let out a short cry and then clamped a hand over her mouth, spinning away.

Lucius was holding an enormous glass jar. Inside it, preserved in a substance that I could only suppose to be formaldehyde, were human eyes. Some still trailed their ganglia of optic nerves, and some were smoothly round; some were fresh, others milky and obviously aged; some were blue in color, some were brown, and others were hazel, gray, and green. But it was not the discovery or condition of the eyes, I now understood, that had stunned Marcus—it was their number. For these were not the ten eyes of our five murdered boys, nor even the fourteen eyes of the boys plus the Zweig children; these were the dozens—the
dozens
—of eyes of more than a score of victims. And all of them were gaping through the curved glass in what seemed silent accusation, pathetically begging to know what had taken us so very long…

In a moment my own eyes wandered back to the small box that Sara had found, which I now opened slowly. The stench of decay that wafted up was not so strong as I expected, allowing me to study the receptacle’s strange contents without difficulty. But I could make no sense of what I saw: A small, red-black piece of what looked like desiccated rubber.

“Lucius?” I said softly, holding it out toward him.

Setting the large jar down on the desk, Lucius took the box over by the front door and held it under the kerosene lamp. Our guide looked over his shoulder as the detective sergeant studied the contents.

“Shit?” the man with the nightstick said. “Sure enough
smells
like shit.”

“No,” Lucius answered evenly, eyes ever on the box. “It is, I believe, the preserved remnants of a human heart.”

That was enough to give even a Five Points thug pause, and our guide turned away and into the hall with a look of utter consternation on his face. “Who da hell
are
you people?” he breathed.

I kept my eyes on Lucius. “A heart? Is it the Lohmann boy’s?”

He shook his head. “Too old. This has been in here for a very long time. It looks as though it may even have been coated with something, a varnish of some kind.”

I turned to Sara, who was taking deep breaths and standing with her arms wrapped around her midsection. Touching her shoulder I said, “All right?”

She nodded once quickly. “Yes. Fine.”

My eyes went to Marcus. “You?”

“I think so. Will be, at any rate.”

“Lucius—” I waved the shorter Isaacson over. “Someone’s got to check that stove. Can you manage it?”

Lucius bobbed his head certainly: though he’d been apprehensive on the street, he was all business in this situation. “Let me borrow a match.” I gave him the little box from my pocket.

The rest of us listened as he went to the grimy black chunk of iron that stood against the partition. A few pieces of firewood were in a bin next to the thing, and a greasy roasting pan sat on top of it. Someone had apparently been cooking. Lucius struck a match, took a preparatory but calm breath, then pulled the door of the oven cavity open. I closed my eyes as he held the match inside; in another fifteen seconds, I heard the thing bang closed again.

“Nothing,” Lucius announced. “Grease, a charred potato—nothing else.”

I let out a lot of air and tapped Marcus’s shoulder. “What do you make out of this?” I said, pointing to the map of Manhattan on the wall.

Marcus studied it carefully. “Manhattan,” he said quickly. Then, after a few more seconds: “Looks like a surveyor’s map of some kind.” He poked at the spots where the map had been tacked to the wall, then pulled the tacks out. “Plaster hasn’t discolored. It was put up fairly recently, I’d say.”

Lucius rejoined us, and then we all stood in a tight circle away from the box and the jar that sat on the desk.

“That’s all that was in the back?” I asked the Isaacsons.

“That’s all,” Marcus said. “No clothes, nothing. If you ask me, he’s gone.”

“Gone?” Sara echoed.

Marcus nodded in disappointment. “Could be he knew we were closing in. But it certainly doesn’t look like he’s coming back.”

“But why would he leave,” Sara asked, “without taking all that—
evidence
?”

Marcus shook his head. “Maybe he doesn’t think it
is
evidence. Or maybe he was in a hurry. Or maybe…”

“Or maybe,” I said, voicing what we all were thinking, “he wanted us to find it.”

As we stood absorbing that idea, I noticed our guide straining to get a look at the jar on the desk, and moved to block his view with my body. Then Lucius spoke up: “That may be true, but we’ve still got to watch this place, in case he does come back. We should tell the commissioner to send other men down—because, like I say, we can treat this as a straight murder investigation now.”

“Do you think there’s enough evidence to make a charge stick?” Sara asked softly. “I know this sounds awful, but those aren’t necessarily the eyes of our victims.”

“No,” Lucius answered. “But unless he’s got one hell of an explanation for whose they
are,
I think any jury in the city will convict—especially if we fill in the background with what we know.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Sara and I will get up to Mulberry Street and tell Roosevelt to assign men to watch this building day and night. Lucius, you and Marcus will have to stay here until that relief comes. What have you got for weapons?” Marcus just shook his head, but Lucius produced the same service revolver that I’d seen him with at Castle Garden, after the ibn-Ghazi murder. “Fine,” I said. “While you’re waiting, Marcus, see what kind of sense you can make of that map. And remember one thing—” I ran my voice down to a whisper. “No badges. Not until you’ve got some support. It wasn’t too long ago that cops wouldn’t even come into this neighborhood, their chances of getting out were so bad.”

The Isaacsons both nodded, and then Sara and I went out into the hallway, stopping when the man with the nightstick stepped in front of us. “Now suppose youse tell me what’s all dis about an investigation? Is you cops or ain’t you?”

“This is a—private matter,” I answered. “My friends are staying—to wait for the resident.” I automatically went for my billfold and produced ten dollars. “You can just act like you never saw them.”

“For ten bucks?” the man said with a nod. “For ten bucks I’d forget me own muddah’s face.” He cackled once. “Not dat I remember it, ta begin wit!”

Sara and I got outside quickly, and started to walk quietly north and then west, hoping to catch a streetcar at Broadway without any trouble. This would be the trickiest part of our journey, though I didn’t want to tell her as much: there were only two of us now, and one of those two was a woman. In the sixties or seventies any Five Points gang worth its salt would have laid me out and had their way with Sara before we’d gotten a block from Baxter Street. I was just praying that, with dissipation having replaced violence as the neighborhood’s chief pastime in recent years, we’d be able to squeak out unnoticed.

Remarkably, we did. By nine forty-five we were on our way up Broadway, and just a few minutes later our streetcar crossed Houston Street and we jumped off. Unconcerned, now, with whether or not we were spotted together at headquarters, Sara and I rushed into the building as soon as we reached it, then bulled our way up and into Theodore’s office, which was empty. A detective told us that the president had gone home for dinner but was expected back soon—the half-hour wait that followed was maddening. When Theodore did arrive he was a bit alarmed to find us present, but on hearing our news he came alive and began barking orders throughout the second-floor hallway. As he did, a thought occurred to me, and I motioned to Sara, indicating the staircase.

“The note,” I explained, as we went downstairs and toward the front door. “The letter to Mrs. Santorelli—if we can confront Beecham with that, it may help break him down.”

Sara liked the idea, and once outside on Mulberry Street we grabbed a hansom and made for Number 808 Broadway. I wouldn’t call our mood exactly ebullient as we dashed north, but we were quietly alive to the real possibilities of the moment, enough so that our cab ride seemed to take an eternity.

When we entered Number 808 I was moving so fast that I failed to notice, and nearly tripped over, a rather large gunnysack that someone had left in the vestibule. Crouching down I saw a tag attached to the closed top of the bag:
NR
. 808
B’WAY—6TH FLOOR
. I glanced up at Sara and saw that she, too, was examining the sack and the tag.

“You haven’t been ordering produce, have you, John?” she asked, a bit wryly.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I answered. “Must be something for Marcus and Lucius.”

I studied the sack for a few more seconds, then shrugged and reached down to undo the twine that bound its mouth. The cord was twisted into a complex knot, however, so I pulled out a penknife and slit the thick fabric of the bag from top to bottom.

Out onto the floor, like so much meat, fell Joseph. There were no obvious marks on his body, but the pallor of his skin made it instantly clear that he was dead.

CHAPTER 42

I
t 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.