The Alienist

Important as it was that we all be well rested for Sunday’s undertakings, I felt it even more imperative that we return to the streets one more time Saturday night, in order to make at least a minimal effort to locate the young street cruiser that Joseph had mentioned to me. The odds of finding such a boy without either a name or a description were, admittedly, fairly long; and they only got longer as the night wore on. In addition to combing those Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, and Tenderloin blocks that were known to harbor such characters, we revisited all of the disorderly houses that proferred boy-whores. But in every one, we met with the same dumbfounded and usually dismissive response. We were looking for a boy, we’d say; a boy who worked the streets; a boy who might be planning to quit the game soon (even though we knew that if Beecham was following his pattern he would’ve told the boy to keep his departure quiet); and a boy who’d been a friend of Joseph, from the Golden Rule—yes, the same boy who’d been murdered. Whatever small chance we might’ve had of finding any leads was generally destroyed by this last statement: Everyone we interviewed figured that we were looking for Joseph’s killer, and no one wanted to be implicated or involved in any way. By midnight we had to accept it—if we were going to find the boy, we were going to find him with Beecham, hopefully before he’d been killed.

That thought was sobering enough to send us all on our respective ways home. It was now quite apparent that there was something very different about this latest prospect of facing Beecham, and it wasn’t simply the fact that we knew his name and a great deal about his history: it was the inescapable feeling that the confrontation that was almost upon us—and which had largely been arranged, even if unconsciously, by Beecham himself—might be far more dangerous for us than we’d ever suspected. True, we’d assumed since the beginning that a strong desire to be stopped was evident in Beecham’s behavior; but we now understood that that desire had a cataclysmic, even apocalyptic, side to it, and that his being “stopped” could very well entail great violence to those who performed the service. Yes, we would be armed, and together with our official auxiliaries we would outnumber him by tens and perhaps hundreds to one; yet in many ways this man had faced greater odds throughout his nightmarish life, and— simply by surviving—had beaten them. Then, too, the line on any race is not determined by the statistical record alone; it takes into account the intangibles of breeding and training as well. If one entered such factors into our current undertaking, the outlook changed dramatically, even given our side’s superior numbers and armaments—in fact, I was not at all sure that, thus calculated, the odds were not decidedly in Beecham’s favor.

CHAPTER 43

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and the temerity to style themselves “New York Society.” Suited, gowned, bejeweled, and perfumed, the fabled Four Hundred top families in the city, along with their various relations and hangers-on, can shove, snipe, gossip, and gorge with an abandon that the amused onlooker might find fascinating but the unfortunate interloper will deem nothing short of deplorable. I was one such interloper on Sunday evening, the twenty-first of June. Kreizler had asked me (strangely, it seemed even then) to meet him not at Seventeenth Street but in his box at the Metropolitan before the benefit performance, making it necessary for me to take a cab to the “yellow brewery” and then fight my way up the house’s narrow staircases alone. Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function; and as I squeezed and pushed through the vestibule, trying to coax movement out of grandes dames whose clothing and physical proportions were suited only to stationary pursuits, I occasionally ran into people I’d known during my childhood, friends of my parents who now turned away quickly when they caught my eye, or simply bowed in a minimal way that declared unmistakably, “Please, spare me the embarrassment of actually having to speak with you.” All of which was fine as far as I was concerned, except that they generally wouldn’t then step aside and allow me to get by. By the time I reached the building’s second tier my nerves, along with my clothes, had been thrown into disarray, while my ears were ringing with the din of several thousand perfectly idiotic conversations. Remedy was at hand, however: I sliced my way through to one of the pocket bars under a staircase, downed a quick glass of champagne, grabbed hold of two more, and then made directly and determinedly for Kreizler’s box.

I found Laszlo already in it, studying the evening’s program as he sat in one of the rear seats. “My God!” I said, falling into a chair next to him without spilling a drop of my champagne. “I haven’t seen anything like this since Ward McAllister died! You don’t suppose he’s risen from the grave, do you?” (For the benefit of my younger readers, Ward McAllister had been Mrs. Astor’s social eminence grise, the man who actually devised the Four Hundred system, basing it on the number of people who could fit comfortably into that great lady’s ballroom.)

“Let’s hope not,” Laszlo answered, turning to me with a welcoming—and welcome—smile. “Though one can never be truly certain about such creatures as McAllister. Well, Moore!” He put his program aside and rubbed his hands together, continuing to look much happier and healthier than he had during our last several encounters. He eyed my champagne. “You appear to be well prepared for an evening among the wolves.”

“Yes, they’re all out tonight, aren’t they?” I said, scanning the Diamond Horseshoe. I started to move to a forward seat, but Kreizler held me back.

“If you wouldn’t mind, Moore, I’d prefer that we sat in the back, tonight.” To my questioning look he answered, “I’m in no mood to be scrutinized this evening.”

I shrugged and resettled myself next to him, then continued to investigate the audience, turning soon to box 35. “Ah, I see Morgan’s brought his wife. Some poor actress will be out a diamond bracelet or two tonight, I suspect.” I looked down at the sea of bobbing heads below us. “Where in hell are they going to put all the people who are still outside—the orchestra seats are already full.”

“It’ll be a miracle if we can even hear the performance,” Kreizler said, with a laugh that puzzled me—it wasn’t the sort of thing he would usually have found amusing. “The Astor box is so overloaded it looks as though it’ll collapse, and the Rutherford boys were already too drunk to stand at seven-thirty!”

I’d taken out my folding glasses and was scrutinizing the other side of the horseshoe. “Quite a gaggle of girls in the Clews’ box,” I said. “They don’t look precisely like they came to hear Maurel. High- stakes husband-hunting, would be my guess.”

“The guardians of the social order,” Kreizler said, holding his right hand out toward the house with a sigh. “On parade, and don’t they make a sight!”

After giving Kreizler a baffled glance I said, “You’re in a rather bizarre mood—not drunk yourself, are you?”

“As sober as a judge,” Laszlo answered. “Not that any of the judges here are sober. And let me hasten to add, Moore, in reply to that very concerned look on your face, that I have not taken leave of my senses, either. Ah, there’s Roosevelt.” Kreizler held up his arm to wave, then winced a bit.

“Still giving you trouble?” I asked.

“Only occasionally,” he answered. “It really wasn’t much of a shot. I shall have to take that up with the man—” Kreizler seemed to catch himself as he glanced at me, and then he brightened deliberately. “Someday. Now, tell me, John—where are the other members of the team at this moment?”

I could feel that the “very concerned” look was still on my face, but at this last question I finally shrugged and let it go. “They’ve gone up to High Bridge with the detectives,” I said. “To get in position early.”

“High Bridge?” Kreizler repeated eagerly. “Then they’re expecting it to be High Bridge Tower?”

I nodded. “That was our interpretation.”

Kreizler’s eyes, quick and electric to that point, became positively brilliant with excitement. “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes, of course. It was the only other intelligent choice.”

“Other?” I said.

Shaking his head quickly he replied, “Nothing of importance. You didn’t tell them about our arrangement?”

“I told them where I was going,” I answered, a bit defensively. “But I didn’t tell them exactly why.”