The Alienist

“Do sit down for a moment, Moore.” I could do nothing but follow the instruction, in spite of my discomfort. “There is one more thing you both should know. I have said that under the terms I am outlining we might have a chance of success—we would certainly have nothing more. Our quarry’s years of practice have not been in vain. The bodies of the two children in the water tower were discovered, remember, only by the most fortunate of accidents. We know nothing about him—we do not even know that it is a ‘him.’ Cases of women murdering their own and other children—drastically extreme variants of puerperal mania, or what is now called postpartum psychosis—are not uncommon. We have one central cause for optimism.”

Theodore looked up brightly. “The Santorelli boy?” He was learning fast.

Kreizler nodded. “More precisely, the Santorelli boy’s body. Its location, and those of these other two. The killer could have gone on hiding his victims forever—God only knows how many he’s killed in the last three years. Yet now he’s given us an open statement of his activities—not unlike the letters, Moore, that the Ripper wrote to various London officials during his killings. Some buried, atrophied, but not yet dead part of our murderer is growing weary of the bloodshed. And in these three bodies we may read, as clearly as if it were words, his warped cry that we find him. And find him quickly—for the timetable by which he kills is a strict one, I suspect. That timetable, too, we must learn to decipher.”

“Then you believe you can do it quickly, Doctor?” Theodore asked. “An investigation like the one you’re describing could not be carried on indefinitely, after all. We must have results!”

Kreizler shrugged, seemingly unaffected by Roosevelt’s urgent tone. “I have given you my honest opinion. We would have a fighting chance, nothing more—or less.” Kreizler put a hand on Theodore’s desk. “Well, Roosevelt?”

If it seems odd that I offered no further protest, I can only say this: Kreizler’s explanation that his present course of action had been inspired by a document I had sent him years ago, coming as it did on the heels of our shared reminiscences about Harvard and Theodore’s mounting enthusiasm for this plan, had suddenly made it plain to me that what was happening in that office was only partly a result of Giorgio Santorelli’s death. Its full range of causes seemed to stretch much farther back, to our childhoods and subsequent lives, both individual and shared. Rarely have I felt so strongly the truth of Kreizler’s belief that the answers one gives to life’s crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior. Was Theodore—whose credo of active response to all challenges had guided him through physical sickness in youth and political and personal trials in adulthood—truly free to refuse Kreizler’s offer? And if he accepted it, was I then free to say no to these two friends, with whom I had lived through many escapades and who were now telling me that my extracurricular activities and knowledge —so often dismissed as useless by almost everyone I knew—would prove vital in catching a brutal killer? Professor James would have said that, yes, any human being is free, at any time, to pursue or decline anything; and perhaps, objectively, that is true. But as Kreizler loved to say (and Professor James ultimately had a hard time refuting), you cannot objectify the subjective, you cannot generalize the specific. What man, or a man, might have chosen was arguable; Theodore and I were the men who were there.

So—on that dismal March morning Kreizler and I became detectives, as all three of us knew we must. That certainty was based, as I say, on thorough awareness of each other’s characters and pasts; yet there was one person in New York at that threshold moment who had correctly guessed at our deliberations and their conclusion without ever having been so much as introduced to us. Only in retrospect can I see that that person had taken a careful interest in our activities that morning; and that he chose the moment of Kreizler’s and my departure from Police Headquarters to deliver an ambiguous yet unsettling message.

Hustling through a new onslaught of heavy rain delivered by an increasingly forbidding sky, Laszlo and I got back into his calash, where I became immediately aware of a peculiar stench, one very unlike the usual odors of horse waste and garbage that predominated on the streets of the city.

“Kreizler,” I said, wrinkling my nose as he sat beside me, “has someone been—”

I stopped when I turned to see Laszlo’s black eyes fixed on a remote corner of the carriage floor. Following his gaze I caught sight of a balled-up, heavily stained white rag, which I poked at with my umbrella.

“Quite a distinct blend of aromas,” Kreizler murmured. “Human blood and excrement, unless I’m mistaken.”

I groaned and grabbed my nose with my left hand as I realized he was right. “Some local boy’s idea of funny,” I said, picking up the rag with the point of my umbrella. “Carriages, like top hats, make good targets.” As I flung the rag out the window it disgorged a ball of equally stained printed paper that fell to the carriage floor. I moaned again and tried unsuccessfully to spear the document with my umbrella. As I did the thing began to come unbunched and I was able to make out a bit of the printing on it.

“Well,” I grunted, perplexed. “This sounds like something in your department, Kreizler. ‘The Relationship of Hygiene and Diet to the Formation of Infantile Neural—’”

With shocking abruptness Kreizler grabbed my umbrella from my hand, stabbed its tip through the bit of paper, and then flung both items out the window.

“What in—Kreizler!” I jumped out of the carriage, retrieved the umbrella, separated it from the offensive piece of paper, and then got back into the calash. “That umbrella wasn’t cheap, I’ll have you know!”

As I glanced at Kreizler I saw a trace of real apprehension in his features; but then he seemed to force the trace away, and when he spoke it was in a determinedly casual tone. “I am sorry, Moore. But I happen to be familiar with that author. As poor a stylist as he is a thinker. And this is no time to be sidetracked—we’ve much to do.” He leaned forward and called out Cyrus’s name, at which the big man’s head appeared under the canopy of the carriage. “The Institute, and then on to lunch,” Laszlo said. “And pick up some speed, if you can, Cyrus—we could use a bit of fresh air in here.”

It was obvious, at that point, that the person who had left the befouled rag in the calash was not a child: for, based on the brief passage that I’d been able to read as well as on Kreizler’s reaction, the monograph from which the sheet of paper had been torn was almost certainly one of Laszlo’s own works. Thinking that one of Kreizler’s many critics—either in the Police Department or from the public at large—was responsible for the act, I didn’t delve any deeper into it; but in the weeks to come, the full significance of the incident would become harrowingly clear.

CHAPTER 7

We were anxious to begin marshalling our forces for the investigation, and the delays we experienced, though brief, were frustrating. When Theodore got wind of the speculative interest in Kreizler’s visit to headquarters displayed by reporters and police officers, he realized that he’d made a mistake by holding the meeting there, and told us he needed a couple of days to get things calmed down. Kreizler and I used the time to make arrangements regarding our “civilian” occupations. I had to convince my editors to grant me a leave of absence, a goal made somewhat easier by a timely telephone call from Roosevelt, who explained that I was wanted on vital police business. Nonetheless, I was only allowed out of the editorial offices of the Times at Thirty-second and Broadway when I pledged that if the investigation resulted in a story that was fit to print, I would not take it to another paper or magazine, regardless of how much money I was offered. I assured my sour-faced taskmasters that they wouldn’t want the story anyway, and then breezed down Broadway on a typical March morning in New York: twenty-nine degrees at eleven A.M., with winds of fifty miles an hour cutting through the streets. I was scheduled to meet Kreizler at his Institute, and I had thought to walk, so great was my sense of release at not being answerable to my editors for an indefinite period. But real New York cold—the kind that freezes horse urine in little rivulets on the surface of the streets—will conquer the best of spirits eventually. Outside the Fifth Avenue Hotel I decided to get a cab, pausing only to watch Boss Platt emerge from a