The Alienist

for my questions. “I—that is, it’s his brother. He may be involved in a—a—land speculation scandal. I thought Mr. Beecham might be able to help us find him, or would at least care to make a statement.”

“Brother?” Murray queried. “He never mentioned a brother.” I was about to reply to this remark with another fabrication, when Murray went on: “Not that that’s any indication. Not a talkative man, John Beecham. I never knew much about him—certainly nothing about his private affairs. Always a very proper, respectable person. Which was why I found it remarkable…” Murray’s voice trailed off and he tapped a long, bony finger on his chair for a few seconds as he examined first me and then Sara again. Finally he stood up, went to one of the rolling ladders, and sent it down its track to the far end of the room with a sudden, hard shove. “He was hired in the spring of 1890,” Murray called, as he followed and then mounted the ladder. Pulling out one wooden drawer near the ceiling, he ran through it for a file. “Beecham applied for a job as an enumerator.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“An enumerator,” Murray answered, coming back down the ladder with a large envelope in one hand. “The men who do the actual counting and interviewing for the census. I hired nine hundred such men in June and July of 1890. Two weeks’ work, twenty-five dollars a week. Each man was required to fill out an application.” Opening the envelope, Murray pulled out a folded paper and handed it to me. “Beecham’s,” he said.

Trying to disguise my eagerness, I scanned the document as Murray summarized it: “He was quite qualified —just the sort of man we look for, actually. University education, unmarried, good references—all powerful recommendations.”

And so they would have been, I thought as I studied the document, had they been even remotely legitimate. The information before my eyes represented a litany of lies and an impressive set of forgeries; provided, of course, that there weren’t two John Beechams with chronic facial spasms roaming around the United States. (I wondered for a moment how high Alphonse Bertillon’s system of anthropometry would have put those odds.) Sara was looking over my shoulder at the application, and when I turned to her she nodded as if to acknowledge that she, too, had drawn the obvious conclusion from it: that in 1890, as before and after that year, Beecham was sharpening his talent for elaborate deception.

“You’ll see his address at the head of the form,” Murray continued. “At the time I dismissed him, he was still living in the same rooms.”

At the top of the sheet was written, in a hand that I recognized from the note we’d studied weeks earlier, “23 Bank Street”—near the center of Greenwich Village. “Yes,” I said slowly. “Yes, I see. Thank you.”

Looking somewhat perturbed by Sara’s and my continued interest in the application, Murray plucked the thing out of my hands and slipped it back into the large envelope. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Else?” I answered. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Murray.”

“Good evening, then,” he said, sitting back down and pulling on his cuff protectors.

Sara and I moved to the door. “Oh,” I said, doing my best to feign an afterthought. “You say you dismissed Beecham, Mr. Murray. Might I inquire why, if he was so well qualified?”

“I don’t trade in gossip, Mr. Moore,” Murray answered coldly. “Besides, your business is with his brother, is it not?”

I tried another tack: “I trust he didn’t do anything untoward while he was working in the Thirteenth Ward?”

Murray grunted once. “If he had, I hardly would have promoted him from enumerator to office clerk and kept him on for another five years—” Murray caught himself and jerked his head up. “Just a minute. How did you know he was assigned to the Thirteenth Ward?”

I smiled. “It’s of no consequence. Thank you, Mr. Murray, and good evening.”

Grabbing Sara by the wrist, I started back down the stairs quickly. I could hear Murray’s chair backing up, and then he appeared at the stairway door.

“Mr. Moore!” he called angrily. “Stop, sir! I demand to know how you knew that information! Mr. Moore, do you hear—”

But we were already out the door. I kept a firm grip on Sara’s wrist as we headed west, though it wasn’t necessary for me to pull her along—she was moving at a quick, exuberant pace, and by the time we reached Fifth Avenue she had started to laugh out loud. As we came to a halt and waited for a gap in the evening traffic on the avenue to appear, Sara suddenly threw her arms around my neck.

“John!” she said breathlessly. “He’s real, he’s here—my God, we know where he lives!”

I returned her embrace, though there was caution in my voice: “We know where he lived. It’s June now—he was dismissed in December. Six months without a job may have changed a lot of things—his ability to pay rent in a decent neighborhood, for one.”

“But he could’ve gotten another job,” Sara said, her jubilation fading a bit.

“Let’s hope so,” I answered, as the traffic in front of us thinned. “Come on.”

“But how?” Sara called as we stepped into the avenue. “How did you think of it? And what was all that about the Thirteenth Ward?”

As we kept marching farther west toward Bank Street, I explained my line of reasoning to Sara. The 1890 census, I’d remembered hearing from friends of mine who’d reported on it, had indeed been the cause of a great scandal in New York (and the nation generally) when it was conducted during the summer and fall of that year. The chief causes of said scandal had been, not surprisingly, the city’s political bosses, whose power stood to be affected by the results of the count and who had tried to influence every stage of the proceedings. Many of the nine hundred men who’d shown up at Charles Murray’s Eighth Street offices to apply for positions as enumerators in July of 1890 had been agents of either Tammany Hall or Boss Platt, and they had been instructed by their superiors to tailor their returns so as to ensure that congressional districts loyal to their respective political parties weren’t redrawn in a way that would cause them to lose power in state and national affairs. Sometimes this had meant inflating the count of a given district, a job that entailed manufacturing the vital statistics and backgrounds of nonexistent citizens. For enumerators, apparently, were far more than simple numbers men: their work entailed careful interviews with a cross section of their subjects, the purpose being to determine not only how many citizens the nation had but also what sorts of lives they led. These interviews included personal questions that might, as one of my colleagues at the Times had put it in an article, “under other circumstances have seemed quite impertinent.” The flood of false information that had come into Superintendent Murray’s office from Democratic and Republican agents had been perforce imaginative and often impossible to distinguish from real returns. Such behavior hadn’t been confined to New York, as I say, though as usual New York had taken the trend to almost absurd extremes. As a result, the work of assembling the final report in Washington had been greatly delayed. The original overall head of the project (the Superintendent Porter whom Murray had mentioned) had resigned in 1893, and the census was completed by his successor, C. D. Wright—but there was really no way to tell, even then, how reliable the final product was.

Enumerators had received their assignments according to congressional districts, which in New York had been subdivided according to wards. My question to Murray about Beecham and the Thirteenth Ward had, I told Sara, been a guess: I knew that Benjamin and Sofia Zweig had lived in that ward, and I was going on the theory that Beecham had met them while working in the area, perhaps even while interviewing their family for the census. Fortunately, my guess had paid off, though we were still in the dark as to exactly why Murray had dismissed our man.

“It doesn’t seem likely that Beecham was involved in falsifying returns,” Sara said, as we hustled up Greenwich Avenue toward Bank Street. “He’s not the type to get involved in politics—and besides, the census was already completed. But if not that, then what?”

“We can send the Isaacsons back to find out tomorrow,” I answered. “Murray seems like the kind of man who’ll respond to a badge. Though if you asked me to post odds right now I’d give you twelve to one that it’s got something to do with children. Maybe someone finally came forward with a complaint—not necessarily anything violent, but something seamy, all the same.”

“It does seem likely,” Sara said. “You remember the remark Murray made when he was discussing how respectable Beecham seemed? And how that made him find whatever it was so ‘remarkable’?”

“Exactly,” I answered. “There’s an unpleasant little tale in there somewhere.”

We’d reached Bank Street and turned left. A typical series of Greenwich Village blocks opened up before us, tree- and townhouse-lined until they closed in on the Hudson River, where trucking stations and warehouses took