The Alienist

in some brush.

“The Arkansas toothpick,” Marcus said. “It’s unclear whether Jim Bowie or his brother originally designed the thing, back in the early thirties, but we do know that most of them are now manufactured by one of the Sheffield firms, in England, for export to our western states. It can be used for hunting, but it’s basically a fighting knife. For hand-to-hand combat.”

“Could it be used,” I said, again remembering Giorgio Santorelli, “as a—well, as a carving and chopping instrument? I mean, would it be heavy enough, and hold a fine edge?”

“Absolutely,” Marcus answered. “The edge depends on the quality of the steel, and in a knife this size, especially if it’s manufactured in Sheffield, you tend to get high-quality, hard steel.” He caught himself, and looked at me with the same suspicious puzzlement he had shown that afternoon. “Why do you ask?”

“It looks expensive,” Sara said, deliberately changing the subject. “Is it?”

“Sure,” Marcus said. “Durable, though. One of these would last you years.”

Kreizler was staring at the knife: this, his gaze seemed to say, is what he uses.

“The marks on the sphenoid,” Lucius resumed, “were created at the same time that the cutting edge dug into the malar bone and the supraorbital ridge. It’s perfectly natural, since he was working in such a small area—the eye socket of a child’s skull—with such a large instrument. Still, for all that, it was probably a skillful job. The damage could have been much greater. Now…” He took a large sip of wine. “If you want to know what he was doing, or why, there we can only speculate. Possibly he was selling body parts to anatomists and medical colleges. Although he would probably have taken more than just the eyes, in that case. It’s somewhat confusing.”

None of us could say anything to that. We stared at the knife, myself at least afraid to touch it, as the waiters appeared again with plates of saddle of lamb a la Colbert and bottles of Chateau Lagrange.

“Admirable,” Kreizler said. He finally looked up at Lucius, whose fat face was starting to turn red with the wine. “A truly splendid job, Detective Sergeant.”

“Oh, that’s not all of it,” Lucius answered, digging into his lamb.

“Eat slowly,” Marcus whispered. “Remember your stomach.”

Lucius paid no heed. “That’s not all,” he repeated. “There were some very interesting fractures of the frontal and parietal bones, at the top of the skull. But I’ll let my brother—I’ll let Detective Sergeant Isaacson explain those.” Lucius looked up at us with a grin. “I’m enjoying my food too much to talk anymore.”

Marcus watched him, shaking his head. “You’re going to be sick tomorrow,” he mumbled. “And you’re going to blame me—but I warned you.”

“Detective Sergeant?” Kreizler said, leaning back with a glass of Lagrange. “You will have to possess some remarkable information indeed, if you hope to outdo your—colleague, here.”

“Well, it is interesting,” Marcus answered, “and it may well tell us something substantive. The fracture lines that my brother found were inflicted from above—from directly above. Now, in an assault, which this obviously was, you’d expect angles of attack, either from similarity of height or difficulty of approach due to the struggle. The nature of the wounds indicates, however, that not only did the assailant have complete physical control over his victims, but he was also tall enough to strike directly downward very forcefully with a blunt instrument of some kind—possibly even his fists, though we doubt that.”

We allowed Marcus a few moments to eat; but when succulent Maryland terrapin arrived to replace the lamb, from which Lucius had to be almost forcefully separated, we urged him to go on:

“Let me see. I’ll try to make this as accessible as I can—if we take the respective heights of the two children, and then add the aspects of the skull fractures that I’ve just described to the equation, we can start to speculate about the height of the attacker.” He turned to Lucius. “What did we guess, roughly six-foot-two?” Lucius nodded and Marcus continued. “I don’t know how much any of you know about anthropometry—the Bertillon system of identification and classification—”

“Oh, are you trained in it?” Sara said. “I’ve been anxious to meet someone who is.”

Marcus looked surprised. “You know Bertillon’s work, Miss Howard?”

As Sara nodded eagerly, Kreizler cut in: “I must confess ignorance, Detective Sergeant. I’ve heard the name, but little more.”

And so, while disposing of the terrapin we also reviewed the achievements of Alphonse Bertillon, a misanthropic, pedantic Frenchman who had revolutionized the science of criminal identification during the eighties. As a lowly clerk assigned the task of going through the files that the Paris police department kept on known criminals, Bertillon had discovered that if one took fourteen measurements of any human body—not only height, but foot, hand, nose, and ear size, and so on—the odds were over 286 million to one that any two people would share the same results. Despite enormous resistance from his superiors, Bertillon had begun to record the body-part sizes of known criminals and then to categorize his results, training a staff of assistant measurers and photographers in the process; and when he used the information thus collected to solve several infamous cases that had stumped the Paris detectives, he became an international celebrity.

Bertillon’s system had been adopted quickly throughout Europe, later in London, and only recently in New York. Throughout his tenure as head of the Division of Detectives, Thomas Byrnes had rejected anthropometry, with its exact measurements and careful photographs, as too intellectually demanding for most of his men—undoubtedly an accurate assumption. Then, too, Byrnes had created the Rogues’ Gallery, a room full of photographs of most known criminals in the United States: he was jealous of his creation, and considered it sufficient for the purposes of identification. Finally, Byrnes had established his own principles of detection and would not have them overthrown by any Frenchman. But with Byrnes’s departure from the force, anthropometry had picked up more advocates, one of whom was evidently sitting at our table that night.

“The main shortcoming of Bertillon’s system,” Marcus said, “besides the fact that it depends on skilled measurers, is that it can only match a suspected or convicted criminal to his record and aliases.” Having eaten a small bowl of sorbet Elsinore, Marcus started to take a cigarette from his pocket, evidently thinking that the meal was over. He was very pleasantly surprised when a plate of canvasback duck, prepared with hominy and a currant gelee, was placed before him, along with a glass of splendid Chambertin.

“Excuse my asking, Doctor,” Lucius said in continuing confusion, “but…is there actually a conclusion to this meal, or do we just work our way into breakfast?”

“So long as you are full of useful information, Detective Sergeants, the food will continue coming.”

“Well, then…” Marcus took a big bite of duck, closing his eyes in appreciation. “We’d better stay interesting. Now, as I was about to say, the Bertillon system offers no physical evidence of criminal commission. It can’t put a man at the scene of the crime. But it can help us shorten the list of known criminals who may be responsible. We’re betting that the man who killed the Zweig children was somewhere in the neighborhood of six-foot-two. That’ll produce relatively few candidates, even from the files of the New York police. It’s an advantageous starting point. And the better news is that, with so many cities now adopting the system, we can make our check nationwide—even to Europe, if we want to.”

“And if the man has no prior criminal record?” Kreizler asked.

“Then, as I say,” Marcus answered with a shrug, “we’re out of luck.” Kreizler looked disappointed at this, and Marcus—eyeing, it seemed to me, his plate, and wondering if the food would really stop coming when we reached a dead end—cleared his throat. “That is, Doctor, out of luck so far as official departmental methods go. However, I’m a student of some other techniques that might prove useful in that eventuality.”

Lucius looked worried. “Marcus,” he mumbled. “I’m still not sure, it’s not accepted, yet—”

Marcus answered quietly but quickly: “Not in court. But it would still make sense in an investigation. We discussed this.”

“Gentlemen?” Kreizler said. “Will you share your secret?”

Lucius gulped his Chambertin nervously. “It’s still theoretical, Doctor, and is not accepted anywhere in the world as legal evidence, but…” He looked to Marcus, seemingly worried that his brother had cost him dessert. “Oh, all right. Go ahead.”

Marcus spoke confidentially. “It’s called dactyloscopy.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean fingerprinting.”