The Alienist

The same outer object may suggest either of many realities formerly associated with it—for in the vicissitudes of our outer experience we are constantly liable to meet the same thing in the midst of differing companions.

William James,

The Principles of Psychology

Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others;

whatever seemed wrong to me,

others approved of.

I ran into feuds wherever I found myself,

I met disfavor wherever I went;

if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery;

so I had to be called “Woeful”:

Woe is all I possess.

Wagner,

Die Walkure

CHAPTER 14

By the time Sara reached Washington Square in a hansom, she’d dispatched many of her fears and replaced them with tough determination. Seemingly oblivious of several trivial questions I asked as we charged down the granite slab pavement of Broadway, she sat staring straight ahead, impassively focused on— what? She would not say, and it was impossible to assume with any certainty. My suspicion, however, was that she was preoccupied with that great guiding goal of her life, to prove that a woman could be a capable, effective police officer. Sights such as the one we were moving toward that night would become a regular part of Sara’s professional duties if her career hopes were one day realized—she was quite aware of that. Submission to the sort of faintheartedness that was expected of her sex would therefore have been doubly unbearable and inexcusable, because it would have borne implications far beyond her personal ability to stomach savage bloodshed. And so she gazed at the back of our laboring horse and said barely a word, using every mental power she possessed to ensure that when the time came she would conduct herself as well as any seasoned detective.

All of which stood in some contrast to my own attempts to ease apprehension with idle chatter. By the time we reached Prince Street I’d gotten pretty tired of my own nervous voice; and by Broome I was just about ready to give up all attempts at communication in favor of watching the whores and their marks come out of the concert halls. On one corner a Norwegian sailor, so drunk he was drooling a river of spit down onto the front of his uniform, was being propped up by two dancers while a third slowly and brazenly went through his pockets. It wasn’t an uncommon sort of sight; but on this night it planted a thought in my head.

“Sara,” I said, as we crossed Canal Street and clattered on toward City Hall. “Have you ever been to Shang Draper’s?”

“No,” she answered quickly, her breath condensing in the frigid air. April, as always in New York, had brought precious little respite from the biting cold of March.

It wasn’t much of an opening for conversation, but I took it. “Well, it’s just that the average whore who works a disorderly house knows more ways to shake down a mark than I could probably list—and the children who work in a place like Draper’s, or Paresis Hall, for that matter, are as sharp as any adults. What if our man’s one of those marks? Suppose he was cheated one time too many and now he’s out to settle the score? It was always a theory in the Ripper killings.”

Sara shifted the heavy blanket that covered our laps, still not exactly what I’d call interested. “I suppose it might be possible, John. What makes you think of it now?”

I turned to her. “Those three years, between the Zweigs and our first murder this past January—what if our theory, that there were other bodies and that they’re well hidden, is wrong? What if he didn’t commit any other murders in New York—because he wasn’t here?”

“Wasn’t here?” Sara’s tone became more animated. “You mean, he took a trip? Left town?”

“What if he had to? A sailor, for instance. Half the marks in places like Draper’s or Ellison’s are seamen. It might make sense. If he were a regular customer, he wouldn’t have aroused any suspicion—he might even have known the boys.”

Sara thought it over, then nodded. “It’s not bad, John. It would certainly allow him to come and go without being noticed. Let’s see what the others think when we…” Her speech hitched up a bit, and then she turned back toward the street, anxious again. “When we get there.”

Things grew quiet inside the hansom once more.

Castle Garden sits in the heart of Battery Park, and to get to it we had to travel to the base of Broadway and beyond. That meant a fast trip through the pastiche of architectural styles that made up the publishing and financial districts of Manhattan in those days. On first glance, it was always a bit odd to see structures like the World Building and the dozen-storied National Shoe and Leather Bank looming (or at least, in those days before the Woolworth and Singer towers, they seemed to be looming) over such squat, ornate Victorian monuments as the Old Post Office and the headquarters of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. But the longer one was exposed to the neighborhood, the more one detected a common quality among all these buildings that overrode any stylistic variance: wealth. I had spent much of my childhood in this part of Manhattan (my father ran a moderately sized investment house) and from an early age I’d been struck by the fantastic activity that surrounded the getting and keeping of money. This activity could be alternately seductive and repellant; but by 1896 it was unarguably New York’s strongest reason for being.

I felt this undercurrent of enormous power again that night, even though the district was dark and dormant at two-thirty in the morning; and as we passed the graveyard at Trinity Church—where the father of the American economic system, Alexander Hamilton, lay buried—I found myself smiling bemusedly and thinking: He’s audacious, all right. Whoever our quarry was, and whatever the personal turmoil that was propelling him, he was no longer confining his activities to the less respectable parts of town. He had ventured into this preserve of the wealthy elite and dared to leave a body in Battery Park, within easy sight of the offices of many of the city’s most influential financial elders. Yes, if our man was in fact sane, as Kreizler so passionately believed, then this latest act was not only barbarous but audacious, in that peculiar way that has always produced a mixture of horror and grudging