The Alienist

purpose of our going through such an ordeal:

From that moment on, he said, we must make every possible effort to rid ourselves of preconceptions about human behavior. We must try not to see the world through our own eyes, nor to judge it by our own values, but through and by those of our killer. His experience, the context of his life, was all that mattered. Any aspect of his behavior that puzzled us, from the most trivial to the most horrendous, we must try to explain by postulating childhood events that could lead to such eventualities. This process of cause and effect—what we would soon learn was called “psychological determinism”—might not always seem entirely logical to us, but it would be consistent.

Kreizler emphasized that no good would come of conceiving of this person as a monster, because he was most assuredly a man (or a woman); and that man or woman had once been a child. First and foremost, we must get to know that child, and to know his parents, his siblings, his complete world. It was pointless to talk about evil and barbarity and madness; none of these concepts would lead us any closer to him. But if we could capture the human child in our imaginations—then we could capture the man in fact.

“And if that is not reward enough,” Kreizler concluded, glancing from one of our gaping faces to another, “there is always food.”

Food, we learned during the next few days, was quite a major reason why Laszlo had selected Number 808 Broadway: we were within easy walking distance of some of Manhattan’s best restaurants. Ninth Street and University Place offered exceptional French dining at traditional Parisian banquettes in both the Cafe Lafayette and the small dining room of the proportionally small hotel run by Louis Martin. Should the mood run to German fare, we could trot up Broadway to Union Square and turn into that huge, darkly paneled Mecca of gourmands, Luchow’s. Tenth Street and Second Avenue offered hearty Hungarian meals at the Cafe Boulevard, while there was no better Italian cooking to be had than that served in the dining room of the Hotel Gonfarone, on Eighth and MacDougal streets. And, of course, there was always Del’s, a bit further away but assuredly worth the trip. All these centers of culinary brilliance would become our informal conference rooms during legions of lunches and dinners, although there would be many occasions on which the grim work with which we were preoccupied made it difficult indeed to concentrate on gustatory satisfaction.

That was especially true during those first days, when it became increasingly hard to escape the knowledge that, although we were cutting a new path on this job and needed to take the time to study and understand all the psychological as well as criminological elements that would necessarily form the basis of a successful conclusion, we were also working against a clock. Out in the streets below our arched windows were dozens of children like Giorgio Santorelli, plying the ever-dangerous flesh trade without knowing that a new and especially violent danger was loose among them. It was an odd feeling, to go to an assessment with Kreizler or to study notes at Number 808 Broadway or to stay up until the small hours reading at my grandmother’s, trying to force my mind to absorb information at a speed it was (to say the least) unaccustomed to, all the while a voice whispering in the back of my head: “Hurry up or a child will die!” The first few days of it almost drove me mad—studying and restudying the condition of the various bodies, as well as the sites at which they were discovered, trying to find patterns in both groups while simultaneously wrestling with passages like this one from Herbert Spencer:

“Can the oscillation of a molecule be represented in consciousness side by side with a nervous shock, and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion, becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposition.”

“Give me your derringer, Sara,” I remember calling out when I first ran across that statement. “I’m going to shoot myself.” Why in the world should I have to understand such things, I wondered during that first week or so, when what I wanted to know was where, where was our murderer? Yet in time I came to see the point of such efforts. Take that particular Spencer quote, for example—I eventually grasped that the attempts of people like Spencer to interpret the activities of the mind as the complex effects of material motion within the human organism had failed. This failure had reinforced the inclination of younger alienists and psychologists like Kreizler and Adolf Meyer to view the origins of consciousness primarily in terms of formative childhood experience, and only secondarily in terms of pure physical function. That had real relevance, in terms of understanding that our killer’s path from birth to savagery had not been the random result of physical processes that we would have been powerless to chart but rather the product of conceivable events.

Nor were our studies designed to debunk or defame: While Spencer’s attempt to explain the origins and evolution of mental activity might have been wide of the mark, there was no arguing his belief that what most men consider their rationally selected actions are in fact idiosyncratic responses (again, established during the decisive experiences of childhood) that have grown strong enough, through repeated use, to overpower other urges and reactions—that have won, in other words, the mental battle for survival. Obviously, the person we sought had developed a profoundly violent set of such instincts; it was up to us to theorize what terrible series of experiences had confirmed such methods, in his mind, as the most reliable reaction to the challenges of life.

Yes, it soon became clear that we needed to know all this and more, much more, if we were going to have any hope of fully fleshing out our imaginary man. And as that truth sank in, we all began to study and read with greater determination and speed, trading thoughts and ideas at all hours of the day and night. Sara and I would often shout heady philosophy over crackling telephone lines at two in the morning, much to my grandmother’s despair, as we first groped and then more competently reached for greater knowledge. The rather remarkable fact that we were getting an extremely rapid education (the bulk of it was chewed and swallowed, if not completely digested, in the first ten days) was obscured by the practical task at hand, and by the attention we had to pay to whatever physical clues and methodical theories Marcus and Lucius Isaacson detected and devised. Not that there were many of these, in the beginning; we hadn’t had enough access to any of the crime scenes for that. (Take the Williamsburg Bridge tower, for example: by the time Marcus examined it, there was no hope of gaining any relevant fingerprints—the place was an outdoor construction site, tampered with every day by weather and workmen.) The knowledge that we needed more than what we had to build a detailed picture of the killer’s method only increased the morbidly expectant air in our headquarters. Though buried in our work, we were all aware that we were waiting for something to happen.

As March turned to April, it did. At 1:45 A.M. on a Saturday, I was dozing in my room at my grandmother’s house with my copy of the second volume of Professor James’s Principles resting rather uncomfortably across my face. That afternoon I’d begun a noble effort to tackle James’s thoughts on “Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience” at Number 808 Broadway but had been distracted by the entrance of Stevie Taggert, who’d torn a list of the following day’s entries at the new Aqueduct racing park on Long Island from a late city edition of the Herald and wanted some advice on handicapping from me. I’d lately been employing Stevie as a runner to my betting agent (unbeknownst to Kreizler, of course) and the boy had quite taken to the sport of kings. I’d encouraged him not to bet his own money unless and until he really knew what he was doing; but with his background that hadn’t taken long. At any rate, when the telephone rang that night, I was in the midst of a deep sleep brought on by hours of thick reading. I bolted directly upright at the sound of the bell and sent the volume of James slamming against the opposite wall. The telephone clanged again as I got into my robe, and once more before I dashed through the hallway clumsily and picked the receiver up.

“Blank slate,” I mumbled in a sleepy rush, assuming that the caller was Sara.

It was. “Excuse me?” she answered.

“What we were talking about this afternoon,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Is the mind a blank slate at birth, or do we have innate knowledge of certain things? My money’s on the blank slate.”

“John, be quiet for a moment.” Her voice was tinged with anxiety. “It’s happened.”

That roused me. “Where?”

“Castle Garden. The Battery. The Isaacsons are getting their camera and other equipment ready. They have to arrive before the rest of us, so that the officer who was first on the scene can be dismissed. Theodore’s there now, making sure it goes smoothly. I’ve already called Dr. Kreizler.”

“Right.”

“John—”

“Yes?”

“I’ve never—I’m the only one who’s never—how bad will it be?”

What could I say? There were only practicalities to consider. “You’ll want ammonia salts. But try not to worry too much. We’ll all be there. Pick me up in a cab, we’ll go together.”

I heard her breathe deeply once. “All right, John.”