The Alienist

sees in the bodies, this is very different. On these rooftops he’s acting with complete confidence.”

I sighed and shook as a river breeze hit us. “The confidence of the devil himself,” I mumbled, and was surprised when I got an answer:

“Not the devil, sir,” said a small, frightened voice from somewhere back by the door to the stairs. “A saint.”

CHAPTER 18

Who’s there?” Marcus said sharply, moving toward the voice cautiously. “Come out, or I’ll have you up for interfering with police business!”

“No, please!” the voice answered, and then one of the painted youths from the Golden Rule, one I didn’t recall having seen downstairs, stepped out from behind the stairway door. The makeup on his face was badly smudged, and he had a blanket pulled around his shoulders. “I only want to help,” he said in a pathetic voice, his brown eyes blinking nervously. With a sinking feeling I realized that he could not have been more than ten years old.

Taking hold of Marcus’s arm and pulling him back, I urged the boy forward. “That’s all right, we know you do,” I said. “Just come out into the open.” Even in the increasingly dim light of the rooftop I could see that the boy’s face, as well as the blanket he was huddled in, were smudged with soot and tar. “Have you been here all night?” I guessed.

The boy nodded. “Ever since they told us.” He was starting to weep. “This wasn’t supposed to happen!”

“What?” I asked urgently. “What wasn’t? The murder?”

At the mention of the word the boy clamped his small hands over his ears and shook his head insistently. “He was supposed to be good, Fatima said so, everything was supposed to turn out all right!”

I went over, put an arm around the boy, and guided him to a low wall that separated the roof we were on from that of the building next door. “All right,” I said. “It’s all right, nothing more’s going to happen.”

“But he could come back!” the boy protested.

“Who?”

“Him—Fatima’s saint, the one that was supposed to take him away!”

Marcus and I glanced at each other quickly: Him. “Look,” I said to the boy quietly, “suppose you start by telling me your name.”

“Well,” the boy sniffed, “downstairs they—”

“Just forget what they call you downstairs, for a minute.” I rocked his shoulders a bit with my arm. “You just tell me what name you were born with.”

The boy paused, his big eyes taking our measure warily. I must admit the situation was quite confusing for me, too; all I could think to do was pull out a handkerchief and begin wiping the paint from the boy’s face.

It did the trick. “Joseph,” the boy murmured.

“Well, Joseph,” I said chummily. “My name’s Moore. And this man is Detective Sergeant Isaacson. Now— suppose you come clean about this saint of yours.”

“Oh, he wasn’t mine,” Joseph answered quickly. “He was Fatima’s.”

“You mean Ali ibn-Ghazi’s?”

He nodded rapidly. “She—he—Fatima had been saying for I guess about two weeks that she’d found a saint. Not like a patron saint, in church, not like that—just a person who was kind, and was going to take her away from Scotch Ann to live with him.”

“I see. I guess you knew Ali pretty well, then?”

Another nod. “He was my best friend in the club. All the girls liked her, of course, but we were special friends.”

I had pretty well cleaned up Joseph’s face, and he turned out to be quite a handsome, appealing young man. “It seems Ali got along with everyone,” I remarked. “Customers, too, I guess.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Joseph answered, his words coming faster and faster. “Fatima hated working here. He always made it seem to Scotch Ann like he liked it, because he didn’t want to go back to his father. But he hated it, and when he was alone with a customer, well—he could get pretty angry. But some customers—” The boy turned away, very clearly perplexed.

“Go on, Joseph,” Marcus said. “It’s all right.”

“Well…” Joseph turned from one to the other of us. “Some customers, they like it when you don’t like it.” His eyes turned down to gaze at his feet. “Some even pay more for it. Scotch Ann always thought Fatima was pretending, to make more money. But she really did hate it.”

A sharp jab of both physical revulsion and deep sympathy hit me somewhere in the abdomen, and Marcus’s face betrayed a similar reaction; but we did have an answer to our earlier question.

“There it is,” Marcus whispered to me. “Hidden, but real—resentment and resistance.” He spoke aloud to Joseph: “Did any of the customers ever get mad at Fatima?”

“Once or twice,” the boy said. “But mostly, like I say, they liked it.”

There was a lull in the talk, and then the sound of an elevated train on Third Street jarred me back to business. “And this saint of his,” I said. “This is very important, Joseph—did you ever see him?”

“No, sir.”

“Did Fatima ever meet a man on the roof?” Marcus asked. “Or did you ever notice someone carrying a large bag of some kind?”

“No, sir,” Joseph said, a bit bewildered. Then he brightened, trying to please us: “The man came in more than once after Fatima met him, though. I do know that. But he told her never to say who he was.”

Marcus smiled just a bit. “A customer, then.”

“And you never guessed which one it was?” I asked.

“No, sir,” Joseph answered. “Fatima said that if I kept it all secret and was good, then maybe the man would take me away, too, someday.”

I put my arm back around his shoulders tightly, looking out over the rooftops once more. “You must hope that doesn’t ever happen, Joseph.” I said, and then his brown eyes began to shed tears again.

The Golden Rule didn’t yield any more significant information that evening, nor did the other residents of the building or the block that we questioned. Before departing the scene, however, I felt I ought to ask the boy Joseph if he wanted to leave Scotch Ann’s employ—he seemed entirely too young for such business, even by disorderly house standards, and I thought there was a good chance that I could get Kreizler to take him on as a charity case at the Institute. But Joseph, orphaned since age three, had already had his fill of institutes, orphanages, and foster homes (not to mention alleyways and empty railroad cars), and nothing I said about Kreizler’s place being “different” had any effect on him. The Golden Rule had been the only home he’d ever known where he hadn’t been ill fed and beaten—repulsive as she might be, Scotch Ann had an interest in keeping her boys relatively healthy and scar-free. That fact counted for more with Joseph than anything I might say about the place’s evils and dangers. In addition, his suspicions about men who promised a better life somewhere else had only been heightened by the saga of Ali ibn-Ghazi and his “saint.”

Sad as it made me, Joseph’s decision was unappealable: in 1896 there was no way to go over the boy’s head and persuade a government agency (such as those created in recent years) to forcibly remove him from the Golden Rule. American society did not then generally recognize (as much of it still does not) that children might not be fully responsible for their own actions and decisions: childhood has never been viewed by most Americans as a separate and special stage of growth, fundamentally different from adulthood and subject to its own rules and laws. By and large children were and are seen as miniature adults, and according to the laws of 1896 if they wanted to abandon their lives to vice, that was their business—and their lookout. And so there seemed to be nothing for me to do but say goodbye to that frightened little ten-year-old, and wonder if he wouldn’t be the next boy to cross paths with the