The Alienist

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