The Alienist (7 page)

That opening was a good part of the reason we were now collected in Theodore’s office; and as we talked of the old days in Cambridge, our immediate business receded for a time. The conversation soon spread to the more recent past, Roosevelt asking some genuinely interested questions about Kreizler’s work with both the children at his Institute and the criminally insane, and Laszlo saying that he had followed Theodore’s career as an assemblyman in Albany and a civil service commissioner in Washington with great interest. It was pleasant talk among old friends who had a great deal of catching up to do, and for much of the time I was content to sit back and listen, enjoying the change of atmosphere from the previous night and morning.

But inevitably, the conversation turned to the Santorelli murder; and a sense of foreboding and sadness crept relentlessly into the room, dissipating pleasant memories as cruelly as some unknown savage had dispatched the boy on the bridge tower.

CHAPTER 6

I
have your report, Kreizler,” Roosevelt said, picking up the document from his desk. “Along with the coroner’s. It won’t surprise you to learn that he gave us no additional insights.”

Kreizler nodded in distasteful familiarity. “Any butcher or patent-medicine salesman can be appointed a coroner, Roosevelt. It’s almost as easy as becoming an asylum superintendent.”

“Indeed. At any rate, your report seems to indicate—”

“It does not indicate
everything
I discovered,” Kreizler interrupted carefully. “Indeed, it does not cover some of the most important points.”

“Eh?” Theodore looked up in surprise, the pince-nez that he wore in the office falling from his nose. “I beg your pardon?”

“Many eyes see reports at headquarters, Commissioner.” Kreizler was doing his best to be diplomatic, which in his case was a genuine effort. “I did not wish to take the chance of certain details becoming…public. Not yet.”

Theodore paused, his eyes narrowing pensively. “You write,” he eventually said quietly, “of terrible errors.”

Kreizler stood and walked to the window, pulling the shade aside just a crack. “First of all, Roosevelt, you must promise me that persons such as”—he said the rank with true disgust—“Detective Sergeant Connor will not be told any of this. The man has spent this morning propagating false information to the press—information that may well end up costing more lives.”

Theodore’s ordinarily furrowed brow became positively creased. “By thunder! If that’s true, Doctor, I’ll have the man’s—”

Kreizler held up a hand. “Just promise me that, Roosevelt.”

“You have my word. But at least tell me what Connor said.”

“He has given several reporters the impression,” Kreizler answered, beginning to walk the floor of the office, “that this man Wolff was responsible for the Santorelli killing.”

“Then you think otherwise?”

“Unquestionably. Wolff’s thoughts and actions are entirely too unpremeditated and unsystematic for this. Though he
is
utterly devoid of emotional restraint, and has no aversion to violence.”

“Would you consider him a…” For Roosevelt the language was somewhat unfamiliar. “A psychopath?” Kreizler cocked an eyebrow. “I have seen some of your recent writings,” Theodore went on, looking a bit self-conscious. “Though I can’t say how much I’ve truly understood.”

Kreizler nodded with a small, enigmatic smile. “Is Wolff a psychopath, you ask. There is constitutional psychopathic inferiority, without question. But as to the
implications
of labeling him a psychopath—if you’ve read even some of the literature, Roosevelt, you know that that depends on whose opinions we accept.”

Roosevelt nodded in return and rubbed his chin with one of his tough hands. I did not then know, but would learn in the weeks to come, that one of the greatest single points of contention between Kreizler and many of his colleagues—a battle that had been fought primarily in the pages of the
American Journal of Insanity,
a quarterly published by the national organization of asylum superintendents—was the issue of what constituted a true homicidal lunatic. Men and women whose savagely violent acts betrayed peculiar patterns of moral thought, but whose intellectual capacities were acknowledged to be healthy, had recently been included within the broad classification of “psychopathic personalities” by the German psychologist Emil Kraepelin. The classification had been generally accepted throughout the profession; the contested question was, were such psychopaths genuinely mentally diseased? Most doctors answered in the affirmative, and although they couldn’t yet precisely identify the full nature and causes of the disease, they thought such discoveries only a matter of time. Kreizler, on the other hand, believed that psychopaths were produced by extreme childhood environments and experiences and were unafflicted by any true pathology. Judged in context, the actions of such patients could be understood and even predicted (unlike those of the truly mad). This was clearly the diagnosis he had reached with regard to Henry Wolff.

“Then you’ll declare him competent to stand trial?” Roosevelt asked.

“I will.” Kreizler’s face darkened perceptibly, and he stared at his hands as he folded them together. “And, more importantly, I’ll wager that long before that trial begins we will have proof that he is not connected to the Santorelli case. Grim proof.”

I was finding it hard to remain silent. “That proof being…?” I asked.

Kreizler’s hands fell to his sides as he returned to the window. “More bodies, I fear. Especially if an attempt is made to tie Wolff to Santorelli. Yes.” Kreizler’s voice became distracted. “He’d be angered by having his thunder stolen that way…”

“
Who
would?”

But Laszlo didn’t seem to hear me. “Do either of you remember,” he continued, in the same distant tone, “an interesting case of some three years ago, also involving murdered children? Roosevelt, I’m afraid it was at the height of your struggles in Washington, so you may not have heard. And Moore, I believe you were at the time involved in a rather heated battle with
The Washington Post,
which wanted Roosevelt’s head on a platter.”

“The
Post,
” I sighed in disgust. “The
Post
was in the muck up to its eyes with every illegal government appointee—”

“Yes, yes,” Kreizler answered, holding up the weakened left arm to head me off. “There is no question that yours was the honorable position. The loyal one, too, although your editors seemed to be less enthusiastic in their support.”

“They came ’round in the end,” I said, puffing up the chest a bit. “Not that it saved my job,” I added, slacking again.

“Now, now. No self-recrimination, Moore. But as I was saying, three years ago a water tower above a large tenement on Suffolk Street just north of Delancey was struck by lightning. The tower was the highest structure in the neighborhood, and the event was perfectly explicable, if slightly unusual. When the building’s residents and the fire department reached the roof, however, some were inclined to view it as a providential event—for the tower contained the bodies of a pair of children. A brother and sister. Their throats had been cut. It so happened that I knew the family. They were Jews from Austria. The children were quite beautiful—delicate features, enormous brown eyes—and also quite troublesome. An embarrassment to the family. They stole, lied, attacked other children—uncontrollable. In fact, there was very little remorse in the neighborhood over their deaths. The bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition when they were found. The boy’s had falled off an interior platform on which they were originally placed, and into the water. It was badly bloated. The girl’s was somewhat more intact for having stayed dry, but any clues that might have been gathered from it were destroyed by another incompetent coroner. I never saw anything more than the official reports, but I did note one curious detail from those.” He pointed with his left hand to his face. “The eyes were gone.”

A quiver went through me as I remembered not only the Santorelli boy but the two other murders that Roosevelt had told me of the night before. Glancing at Roosevelt, I saw that he had made the same connection: while his body was quite still, his eyes were wide with apprehension. But we both tried to battle the feeling off, Roosevelt declaring, “That’s not uncommon. Particularly if the bodies were exposed for a long period of time. And if the throats were cut, there would have been plenty of blood to attract scavengers.”

“Perhaps,” Kreizler said with a judicious nod as he continued pacing. “But the water tower was enclosed, with the exact purpose of keeping scavengers and vermin out.”

“I see.” Theodore puzzled with it. “Were those facts reported?”

“They were,” Kreizler answered. “In the
World,
I believe.”

“But,” I protested, “the water tower or building doesn’t exist that can keep certain animals out. Rats, for instance.”

“True, John,” Kreizler said. “And in the absence of any further details, I was forced to accept that explanation. Why even New York City rats, on discovering a pair of bodies, should so carefully gnaw out only the eyes was a disturbing mystery that I tried to ignore and which remained unaddressed. Until last night.” Kreizler took to pacing the floor again. “As soon as I saw the condition of the Santorelli boy, I made an examination of the ocular orbits of the skull. Working by torchlight was hardly ideal, but I found what I was looking for. On the malar bone as well as the supraorbital ridge were a series of narrow grooves, and on the greater wing of the sphenoid—at the base of the cavities—several small indentations. All consistent with the cutting edge and point of a knife, of the type most frequently used by hunters, I’d say. My guess would be that if we exhumed the bodies of the two 1893 victims—and I intend to request such action—we would find the same thing. In other words, gentlemen, the eyes were removed by the hand of man.”

My dread was increasing, and I fumbled for an argument: “But what about what Sergeant Connor said—”

“Moore.” Kreizler’s voice was definitive. “If we are to continue this discussion we really must dispense with the opinions of men such as Sergeant Connor.”

Roosevelt shifted in his chair apprehensively; I could see in his face that he had run out of ways to avoid bringing Kreizler fully up to date. “I feel I must tell you, Doctor,” he announced, gripping the arms of his chair, “that we have had two more murders in the last three months that might also fit the…
pattern
you’re describing.”

The statement stopped Laszlo dead in his tracks. “What?” he said, urgently but quietly. “Where—where were the bodies found?”

“I’m not precisely sure,” Theodore answered.

“And were they prostitutes?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“You
believe
so? Records, Roosevelt, I must have the records! Didn’t anyone in this department ever think to make a connection? Didn’t
you
?”

The records were sent for. From them we discovered that the bodies of the other two boys, both of whom had indeed been prostitutes, had also been found within what the coroners guessed were hours of their deaths. As Roosevelt had told me the night before, there was somewhat less mutilation involved than in the Santorelli murder; that seemed, however, a difference of quantity rather than quality, for the similarities among the cases far outweighed any slight differences. The first boy, a twelve-year-old African immigrant with no known name other than “Millie,” had been chained to the stern of an Ellis Island ferry; and the second, a ten-year-old named Aaron Morton, had been found suspended by his feet from the Brooklyn Bridge. Both were nearly naked, according to the reports; both had their throats cut, along with various other bodily lacerations; and, again, both were missing their eyes. As Laszlo finished reading the accounts, he mumbled that last fact to himself several times, lost in cogitation.

“I believe I understand what you’re suggesting, Kreizler,” Theodore figured aloud; he never liked to be left behind in any intellectual discussion, even one that took place on what was, for him, very alien territory. “A murderer committed just this kind of an outrage three years ago. It was reported. And now another such man, who at some point read the story, has been inspired to imitation.” He was satisfied with his own extrapolation. “Is that correct, Doctor? It wouldn’t be the first time stories in certain of our newspapers have had that effect.”

Kreizler, however, just sat tapping a forefinger against his pursed lips, with a look that clearly stated that the whole affair was far more complicated than even he had guessed.

I searched for some way to reach a different conclusion. “What about the rest of it?” I asked. “The…the missing organs, and the cut-away flesh of the…well, the rest of it. There was none of that in the earlier cases.”

“No,” Kreizler answered slowly. “But I believe there is an explanation for that difference, not that it need concern us now. The eyes are the link, the key, the way in—I would stake everything on that…” His voice faded again.

“All right,” I said, throwing up my hands. “So someone murdered those two children three years ago, and now we’ve got a mimicking lunatic who also likes to mutilate dead bodies on our hands. What are we supposed to do about it?”

“Almost nothing in what you have just said, John,” Kreizler replied evenly, “is accurate. I am not at all certain he is a lunatic. Nor am I inclined to believe that he likes what he does, in the sense that you understand or intend that statement. But most importantly—and I’m afraid that here I must disappoint you, too, Roosevelt—I am as sure as I can be that this is not an imitator but the
same man.
”

And there it was—the statement that both Roosevelt and I had been dreading. I’d been a police reporter for quite a while, ever since my unceremonious removal from the Washington beat as a result of my previously mentioned defense of Roosevelt during his battle with the patronage system in the Civil Service. I’d even covered some celebrated murder cases abroad. I therefore knew that murderers like the one Kreizler was describing did exist; but that never made it any easier to hear that one was on the loose. And for Roosevelt—who, though a born fighter, understood few of the intimate details of criminal behavior—it was an even harder notion to swallow.

“But…three years!” Theodore said, aghast. “Surely, Kreizler, if such a man did exist he could not have eluded the law for so long!”

“It’s no great job to elude that which is not pursuing,” Kreizler answered. “And even if the police had taken an interest, they would have been helpless. Because they could not have begun to understand what motivates the murderer.”

“Do you?” Roosevelt’s words were almost hopeful.

“Not completely. I have the first few pieces—and we must find the rest. For it is only when we truly understand what drives him that we will have even a prayer of solving this case.”

“But what
could
drive a man to such things?” Roosevelt said in uncomfortable confusion. “After all, the Santorelli boy had no money. We’re investigating the family, but they all appear to have been in their home throughout the night. Unless it was a personal quarrel with someone else, then…”