The Alienist Read online

  “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?”

  But I’d lost him to the rapture of a plan. He ignored my plaintive question, took a deep breath, barreled his chest, and appeared far more comfortable than he had to that point. “Action, Moore—we shall respond with action!”

  And then he grabbed me around the shoulders in a tight hug, his enthusiasm and moral certainty all back in full force. As for my own sense of certainty, any kind of certainty, I waited in vain for its arrival. All I knew was that I was being drawn into something that involved the two most passionately determined men I’d ever known—and that thought offered me no comfort as we went back downstairs to Kreizler�
�s carriage, leaving the body of the pitiable Santorelli boy alone on that tower, high in the freezing sky that was still untouched by any trace of dawn.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  Cold, cutting March rain came with the morning. I rose early to find that Harriet had, mercifully, prepared me a breakfast of strong coffee, toast, and fruit (which she, drawing on the experience of a family full of inebriates, believed essential for anyone who imbibed often). I settled into my grandmother’s glass-enclosed nook, overlooking her still-dormant rose garden in the rear yard, and decided to digest the morning edition of the Times before trying to telephone the Kreizler Institute. With the rain pattering on the copper roof and glass walls around me, I inhaled the fragrance of the few plants and flowers that my grandmother kept alive year-round and took in the paper, trying to reestablish contact with a world that, in light of the previous evening’s events, seemed suddenly and disturbingly removed.

  SPAIN IS FULL OF WRATH, I learned; the question of American support for the nationalist rebels in Cuba (the U.S. Congress was considering granting them full belligerent status, and thus effectively recognizing their cause) was continuing to cause the vicious, crumbling regime in Madrid much worry. Boss Tom Platt, the town’s cadaverous old Republican mastermind, was assailed by the editors of the Times for trying to prostitute the imminent reorganization of the city into a Greater New York—one that would include Brooklyn and Staten Island, as well as Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan—to his own nefarious purposes. The approaching Democratic and Republican conventions both promised to center around the question of bimetallism, or whether or not America’s solid old gold standard should be sullied by the introduction of silver-based currency. Three hundred and eleven black Americans had taken ship for Liberia; and the Italians were rioting because their troops had been badly defeated by Abyssinian tribesmen on the other side of that dark continent.

  Momentous as all this no doubt was, it held little interest for a man in my mood. I turned to lighter matters. There were bicycling elephants at Proctor’s Theatre; a troop of Hindu fakirs at Hubert’s Fourteenth Street Museum; Max Alvary was a brilliant Tristan at the Academy of Music; and Lillian Russell was The Goddess of Truth at Abbey’s. Eleanora Duse was “no Bernhardt” in Camille, and Otis Skinner in Hamlet shared her penchant for weeping too easily and too often. The Prisoner of Zenda was in its fourth week at the Lyceum—I had seen it twice and thought for a moment about going again that night. It was a grand escape from the worries of the usual day (not to mention the grim sights of an extraordinary night): castles with watery moats, sword battles, a diverting mystery, and stunning, swooning women…

  Yet even as I thought of the play, my eyes wandered to other items. A man on Ninth Street who had once cut his brother’s throat while drunk, drank again and shot his mother; there were still no clues in the particularly vicious murder of artist Max Eglau at the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf Mutes; a man named John Mackin, who had killed his wife and mother-in-law and then tried to end his own life by cutting his throat, had recovered from the wound but was now trying to starve himself. The authorities had convinced Mackin to eat by showing him the frightful force-feeding apparatus that would otherwise be used to keep him alive for the executioner…

  I threw the paper aside. Taking in a last heavy gulp of sweet black coffee, and then a section of a peach shipped from Georgia, I redoubled my resolve to get to the Lyceum box office. I had just started back for my room to dress when the telephone let out with a loud clang, and I heard my grandmother in her morning room exclaim “Oh, God!” in alarm and anger. The telephone bell did that to her, yet she never entertained any suggestion that it be removed, or at least muffled.

  Harriet appeared from the kitchen, her soft, middle-aged features specked with soap bubbles. “It’s the telephone, sir,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Dr. Kreizler calling.”

  Pulling my Chinese robe tighter, I headed for the little wooden box near the kitchen and took up the heavy black receiver, putting it to my ear as I placed my other hand on the anchored mouthpiece. “Yes?” I said. “Is that you, Laszlo?”

  “Ah, so you’re awake, Moore,” I heard him say. “Good.” The sound was faint, but the manner was, as always, energetic. The words bore the lilt of a European accent: Kreizler had immigrated to the United States as a child, when his German father, a wealthy publisher and 1848 republican, and Hungarian mother had fled monarchist persecution to begin a somewhat celebrated life in New York as fashionable political exiles. “What time does Roosevelt want us?” he asked, without any thought that Theodore might have refused his suggestion.

  “Before lunch!” I said, raising my volume as if to overcome the faintness of his voice.

  “Why the devil are you shouting?” Kreizler said. “Before lunch, eh? Excellent. Then we’ve time. You’ve seen the paper? The bit on this man Wolff?”

  “No.”

  “Read it while you’re dressing, then.”

  I glanced at my robe. “How did you know that I—”

  “They have him at Bellevue. I’m supposed to assess him, anyway, and we can ask a few additional questions, to determine if he’s connected to our business. Then on to Mulberry Street, a brief stop at the Institute, and lunch at Del’s—squab, I should think, or the pigeon crepinettes. Ranhofer’s poivrade sauce with truffles is superb.”

  “But—”

  “Cyrus and I will go directly from my house. You’ll have to take a hansom. The appointment’s for nine-thirty—try not to be late, will you, Moore? We mustn’t waste a minute in this affair.”

  And then he was gone. I walked back to the nook, picked up the Times again, and leafed through it. The article was on page eight:

  Henry Wolff had been drinking in the tenement apartment of his neighbor, Conrad Rudesheimer, the night before. The latter’s five-year-old daughter had entered the room, and Wolff proceeded to make some comments that Rudesheimer found unsuitable for the ears of a young girl. The father objected; Wolff pulled a gun and shot the girl in the head, killing her, then fled. He had been captured, several hours later, wandering aimlessly—near the East River. I dropped the paper again, momentarily struck by a premonitory feeling that the events of the previous night atop the bridge tower had been only an overture.

  Back in the hallway I ran headlong into my grandmother, her silver hair perfectly coiffed, her gray and black dress unimpeachably neat, and her gray eyes, which I had inherited, glaring. “John!” she said in surprise, as if ten other men were staying in her house. “Who in the world was on the telephone?”

  “Dr. Kreizler, Grandmother,” I said, bounding up the stairs.

  “Dr. Kreizler!” she called after me. “Well, dear! I’ve had about enough of that Dr. Kreizler for one day!” As I closed the door of my bedroom and began to dress, I could still hear her: “If you ask me, he’s awfully peculiar! And I don’t put much stock in his being a doctor, either. That Holmes man was a doctor, too!” She stayed in that vein while I washed, shaved, and scrubbed my teeth with Sozodont. It was her way; and for all that it was annoying, to a man who, without recent memory, had lost what he was sure was his only chance at domestic happiness, it was still better than a lonely apartment in a building full of other men who had resigned themselves to solitary lives.

  Snatching a gray cap and a black umbrella as I dashed out the front door, I made for Sixth Avenue at a brisk pace. The rain was coming down much harder now, and a particularly stiff wind had begun to blow. When I reached the avenue the force of air suddenly changed directions as it swept under the tracks of the New York Elevated Railroad line, which ran above either side of the street just inside the sidewalks. The shift blasted my umbrella inside out, along with those of several other members of the throng that was hustling under the tracks; and the combined effect of the heightening wind, the rain, and the cold was to make the usually bustling rush hour seem absolute pandemonium. Making for a cab as I struggled with my cumbersome, useless um
brella, I was cut off by a merry young couple who maneuvered me out of their way with no great finesse and clambered quickly into my hansom. I swore loudly against their progeny and shook the dead umbrella at them, prompting the woman to scream in fright and the man to fix an anxious eye on me and tell me I was mad—all of which, considering my destination, gave me a good chuckle and made the wet wait for another hansom much easier. When one came around the corner of Washington Place I did not wait for it to stop, but leapt in, shut the doors around my legs, and hollered to the driver to get me to the Insane Pavilion at Bellevue: not the kind of order any cabbie wants to hear. The look of dismay on his face as we drove off gave me another little laugh, so that by the time we hit Fourteenth Street I didn’t even mind the feel of wet tweed against my legs.

  With the perversity of the typical New York City cabman, my driver—the collar of his raincoat turned up and his top hat encased in a thin rubber sheath—decided to battle his way through the shopping district along Sixth Avenue above Fourteenth Street before turning east. We had slowly passed most of the big department stores—O’Neill’s, Adams & Company, Simpson-Crawford—before I rapped on the roof of the cab with my first and assured my man that I did need to get to Bellevue this morning. With a rude jerk we spun right at Twenty-third, and then plowed through the thoroughly unregulated intersection of that street with Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Passing the squat bulk of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where Boss Platt made his headquarters and was probably putting the finishing touches to the Greater New York scheme at that very moment, we turned up along the eastern edge of Madison Square Park to Twenty-sixth, then changed directions in front of the Italianate arcades and towers of Madison Square Garden to head east once more. The square, solemn, red-brick buildings of Bellevue appeared on the horizon, and in just a few more minutes we crossed First Avenue and pulled up behind a large black ambulance on the Twenty-sixth Street side of the hospital grounds, near the entrance to the Insane Pavilion. I paid my cabbie off and headed in.