The Alienist

“Don’t listen to him,” Steffens said with another laugh. “His pride’s bruised. It seems that there’s been another murder which, because of our friend Riis’s personal beliefs, will never make the pages of the Evening Sun—we’ve all been riding him rather shamelessly, I’m afraid!”

“Steffens, by God, if you keep at me—” Riis balled up a healthy Scandinavian hand and waved the fist in Steffens’s direction as he kept breathing hard and jogging along, trying to keep up with the still-rolling carriage. As Cyrus reined the gelding to a halt outside headquarters, Steffens jumped down.

“Come now, Jake, no threats!” he said good-naturedly. “This is all in fun!”

“What in hell are you two talking about?” I said, as Kreizler, trying to ignore the scene, stepped from the carriage.

“Now, don’t play stupid,” Steffens answered. “You’ve seen the body, and so has Dr. Kreizler—we know that much. But unfortunately, since Jake chooses to deny the reality of both boy-whores and the houses in which they work, he can’t report the story!”

Riis huffed again, his big face getting redder. “Steffens, I’ll teach you—”

“And since we know your editors won’t print such seamy stuff, John,” Steffens went on, “I’m afraid that leaves the Post—how about it, Dr. Kreizler? Care to give the details to the only paper in town that’ll print them?”

Kreizler’s mouth curled into a slight smile that was neither gentle nor amused, but somehow deprecating. “The only, Steffens? What about the World, or the Journal?”

“Ah, I should have been more precise—the only respectable paper in town that will print them.”

Kreizler only ran his eyes up and down Steffens’s lanky figure. “Respectable,” he echoed with a shake of his head, and then he was going up the stairs.

“Say what you like, Doctor,” Steffens called after him, still smiling, “but you’ll get a fairer shake from us than from Hearst or Pulitzer!” Kreizler did not acknowledge the comment. “We understand you examined the killer this morning,” Steffens pressed. “Would you at least talk about that?”

Pausing at the door, Kreizler turned. “The man I examined was indeed a killer. But he has nothing to do with the Santorelli boy.”

“Really? Well, you might want to let Detective Sergeant Connor know that. He’s been telling us all morning that Wolff got crazed for blood by shooting the little girl and went out looking for another victim.”

“What?” Genuine alarm was in Kreizler’s face. “No—no, he mustn’t—it is absolutely vital that he not do that!”

Laszlo bolted inside just as Steffens made a final attempt to get him to talk. With his quarry now gone, my colleague from the Evening Post put his free hand to his hip, his smile shrinking just a bit. “You know, John—that man’s attitude doesn’t win him many admirers.”

“It’s not intended to,” I said, starting up the steps. Steffens grabbed my arm.

“Can’t you tell us anything, John? It’s not like Roosevelt to keep Jake and me out of police business—hell, we’re more members of the Board of Commissioners than those fools who sit with him.”

That was true: Roosevelt had often consulted both Riis and Steffens on questions of policy. Nonetheless, I could only shrug. “If I knew anything, I’d tell you, Link. They’ve kept me in the dark, too.”

“But the body, Moore,” Riis chimed in. “We have heard ungodly rumors—surely they are false!”

Thinking for just a moment of the corpse on the bridge anchor, I sighed. “However ungodly the rumors, boys, they can’t begin to describe it.” With that I turned and strode up the steps.

Before I was inside the door Riis and Steffens were at it again, Steffens pelting his friend with sarcastic barbs and Riis angrily trying to shut him up. But Link was right, even if he expressed himself somewhat meanly: Riis’s stubborn insistence that homosexual prostitution did not exist meant that another of the city’s largest papers would never acknowledge the full details of a brutal murder. And how much more the report would have meant coming from Riis than from Steffens; for while most of Link’s important work as an exponent of the Progressive movement lay in the future, Riis was long since an established voice of authority, the man whose angry declamations had caused the razing of Mulberry Bend (the very heart of New York’s most notorious slum, Five Points) along with the destruction of many other pestilential pockets. Yet Jake could not bring himself to fully acknowledge the Santorelli murder; despite all the horrors he had witnessed, he could not accept the circumstances of such a crime; and as I entered the big green doors of headquarters I wondered, just as I had wondered a thousand times during staff meetings at the Times, how long many members of the press—not to mention politicians and the public—would be content to equate deliberate ignorance of evil with its nonexistence.

Inside I found Kreizler standing near the caged elevator, talking heatedly with Connor, the detective who had been at the murder scene the previous night. I was about to join them when my arm was taken and I was guided toward a staircase by one of the more pleasant sights available at headquarters: Sara Howard, an old friend of mine.

“Don’t get involved in that, John,” she said, with a tone of sage wisdom that often marked her statements. “Connor is taking a lashing from your friend, and he deserves the full treatment. Besides, the president wants you upstairs—sans Dr. Kreizler.”

“Sara!” I said happily. “I am glad to see you. I’ve spent a night and a morning with maniacs. I need the sound of a sane voice.”

Sara’s taste in dresses ran toward simple designs in shades of green that matched her eyes, and the one she wore that day, with only a minimal bustle and not much petticoat business, showed off her tall, athletic body to advantage. Her face was by no means striking but handsomely plain; it was the play of eyes and mouth, back and forth between mischievous and sad, that made it such a delight to watch her. Back in the early seventies, when I was in my teens, her family moved into a house near ours on Gramercy Park, and I’d subsequently watched her spend her single-digit years turning that decorous neighborhood into her private rumpus room. Time had not changed her much, except to make her as thoughtful (and occasionally brooding) as she was excitable; and following the demise of my engagement to Julia Pratt I had one night gotten more than a little drunk, decided that all women held by society to be beauties were in fact demons, and asked Sara to marry me. Her answer was to take me in a cab to the Hudson River and throw me in.

“You won’t find many sane voices in this building today,” Sara said as we climbed the stairs. “Teddy—that is, the president—isn’t it strange to call him that, John?” And indeed it was; but when Roosevelt was at headquarters, which was ruled by a board of four commissioners of which he was chief, he was distinguished from the other three by the title “president.” Very few of us guessed at the time that he would answer to an identical title in the none- too-distant future. “Well, he’s been in one of his whirlwinds over the Santorelli case. Every kind of person has been in and out—”

Just then Theodore’s voice came booming down from the second-story hallway: “And don’t bother bringing your friends at Tammany into this, Kelly! Tammany is a monstrous Democrat creation, and this is a reform Republican administration—you’ve earned no favors here with your shoulder-hitting! I advise you to cooperate!” Deep chuckles from a pair of voices inside the staircase were the only reply to this, and the sounds were moving our way. Within seconds Sara and I were face-to-face with the foppishly dressed, cologne-drenched, enormous figure of Biff Ellison, as well as his smaller, more tastefully clad, and less aromatic criminal overseer, Paul Kelly.

The days when Lower Manhattan’s underworld affairs were parceled out among dozens of freewheeling street gangs had for the most part come to an end by 1896, and dealings had been taken over and consolidated by larger groups that were just as deadly but far more businesslike in their approach. The Eastmans, named for their colorful chief, Monk Eastman, controlled all territory east of the Bowery between Fourteenth Street and Chatham Square; on the West Side, the Hudson Dusters, darlings of many New York intellectuals and artists (largely because they all shared a seemingly insatiable appetite for cocaine), ran affairs south of Thirteenth Street and west of Broadway; the area above Fourteenth Street on that side of town belonged to Mallet Murphy’s Gophers, a group of cellar-dwelling Irish creatures whose evolution even Mr. Darwin would have been hard-pressed to explain; and between these three virtual armies, at the eye of the criminal hurricane and just blocks from Police Headquarters, were Paul Kelly and his Five Pointers, who ruled supreme between Broadway and the Bowery and from Fourteenth Street to City Hall.

Kelly’s gang had been named after the city’s toughest neighborhood in an attempt to inspire fear, though in