butcher who was haunting such disreputable houses as the Golden Rule; but then, just as I was leaving the place, an idea occurred to me, one that I thought might both help keep Joseph safe and advance our investigation.
“Joseph,” I said, kneeling down to speak to him in the entranceway to the club, “do you have many friends who work in other places like this?”
“Many?” he answered, putting a finger to his mouth pensively. “Let’s see—I guess I do know
“I want you to tell them what I’m going to tell you. The man who killed Fatima has killed other children who do this kind of work—mostly boys, though maybe not only boys. The main thing to remember is that for some reason that we don’t understand yet they all come from houses like yours. So I want you to tell your friends that from now on they’ve got to be very, very careful about their customers.”
Joseph reacted to this rather urgent statement by drawing back a bit and looking up and down the street fearfully. But he didn’t run away. “Why only places like this?” he asked.
“Like I say, we don’t know. But he’ll probably be back, so tell everyone you know to keep their eyes open. Look for someone who gets angry when any of you are”—I strained for a word—“difficult.”
“You mean uppity?” Joseph asked. “That’s what Scotch Ann calls it—uppity.”
“Right. He may have picked Fatima because of it. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. But watch for it. And, most important of all—don’t go anywhere with anyone. Never leave the club, no matter how nice the man seems or how much money he offers you. The same goes for your friends. All right?”
“Well—okay, Mr. Moore,” Joseph answered slowly. “But maybe—maybe you and Detective Sergeant Isaacson can come back and check on us, sometime. Those other cops, the ones that were here this morning, they didn’t seem to care much. They just told everybody to keep quiet about Fatima.”
“We’ll try to do that,” I answered, taking a pen and a piece of paper from my coat pocket. “And if you ever have anything you want to tell someone, anything at all that you think is important, you come straight to this address during the day, and to this one at night.” I gave him not only our headquarters location but also the number of my grandmother’s house on Washington Square, wondering for an instant what the old girl would make of this boy if he ever did show up. Then I had him write down the telephone number of the Golden Rule. “Don’t go to any other cops—tell us everything first. And don’t tell any other cops that we were here.”
“Don’t worry,” the boy answered quickly. “You’re the first two cops I ever met that I’d talk to, anyway.”
“That’s probably because I’m not a cop,” I said with a smile.
The grin was returned, and with a start I realized that I was seeing someone else’s face echoed in Joseph’s features. “You didn’t seem like one,” the boy said. Then his brows knotted up with another question: “So why are you trying to find out who killed Fatima?”
I put a hand on the boy’s head. “Because we want to stop him.” Just then the harsh sound of Scotch Ann’s gravelly voice came bursting out of the Golden Rule’s front hall, and I nodded in its direction. “You’d better go. Remember what I said.”
At a quick, youthful pace Joseph disappeared back into the club, and I stood up to find Marcus smiling at me.
“You handled that pretty well,” he said. “Spent much time around kids?”
“Some,” I answered, without elaborating. I had no desire to reveal how much young Joseph’s eyes and smile had reminded me of my own dead brother’s at the same age.
As we walked back across town, Marcus and I discussed the new lay of things. Sure now that the man we sought was well acquainted with places like the Golden Rule and Paresis Hall, we tried to identify who other than customers would regularly investigate such haunts. The idea of a reporter or social essayist like Jake Riis—a man out to reveal the evils of the city and perhaps driven to mad extremities by overexposure to vice—occurred to us, but just as quickly we realized that no one had yet made much of a print crusade out of child prostitution, and certainly not out of homosexual child prostitution. That left us with missionaries and other church workers, a category that seemed more promising: remembering what Kreizler had said about the connection between religious manias and mass murder, I wondered if indeed we were dealing with someone determined to be the hand of a wrathful god on this earth. Kreizler had said he didn’t consider a religious motivation likely, but Kreizler could be wrong about that—after all, missionaries and church workers were known to travel frequently by rooftops when doing their tenement work. Marcus and I were ultimately led away from such a hypothesis, however, by what Joseph had told us. The man who had killed Ali ibn-Ghazi had come to the Golden Rule regularly, and his visits had gone unnoticed. Any reforming crusader worth his salt would have worked hard to be the center of attention.
“Whoever or whatever he is,” Marcus announced, as we closed back in on Number 808 Broadway, “we know one thing—that he
“Right,” I said. “Which brings us back to customers, which means it could be almost anyone.”
“Your theory about an angry customer might still work. Even if he’s not a transient, he still might’ve been fleeced one too many times.”
“I’m not so sure. I’ve seen men who’ve been robbed by whores. They might beat the living daylights out of one of them, but the kind of mutilation we’ve seen? He’d
“Then maybe we’re back to another one of the Ripper theories,” Marcus said. “Maybe his brain’s deteriorating from disease—a disease he picked up in a place like Ellison’s or the Golden Rule.”
“No,” I answered, flattening my hands out in front of me and trying to make it all clearer in my mind. “The one constant we’ve been able to hold on to is that he’s not crazy. We can’t question that now.”
Marcus paused, and then spoke carefully: “John—you’ve asked yourself, I suppose, what’ll happen if some of Kreizler’s basic assumptions are wrong?”
Taking a deep, weary breath I said, “I’ve asked myself.”
“And your answer?”
“If they’re wrong, then we’ll fail.”
“And you’re satisfied with that?”
We’d reached the southwest corner of Eleventh Street and Broadway, where trolley cars and carriages were lugging all manner of weekend revelers up- and downtown. Marcus’s question hung in the air over this scene for a moment, causing me to feel very detached from the normal rhythms of city life and very uneasy about the immediate future. What, indeed, would all this terrible learning we were doing amount to if our basic assumptions were wrong?
“It’s a dark road, Marcus,” I finally said quietly. “But it’s the only road we’ve got.”
CHAPTER 19
There were snow flurries that night, and Easter morning saw the city covered by a light white powder. At nine A.M. the thermometer still had not climbed above forty degrees (it would do so later that day, but just barely and only for a few minutes), and I really was tempted to stay at home and in bed. But Lucius Isaacson had important news for us all, or so he said in a telephone call; and so, with the bells of Grace Church clanging and scores of bonneted worshipers crowding around and through its doors, I trudged back into the headquarters that I’d left only half a dozen hours earlier.
Lucius had spent the previous evening interviewing Ali ibn-Ghazi’s father, from whom he had learned almost nothing. The elder Ghazi had been determinedly reticent, especially after Lucius had shown him his badge. Initially, Lucius had thought his uncooperative behavior nothing more than the usual slum dweller’s method of dealing with the police; but then Ghazi’s landlord had told Lucius, as the latter left the building, that Ghazi had received a visit that afternoon from a small group of men—including two priests. His general description of them had matched that given by Mrs. Santorelli; but the landlord had further noticed that one of the priests wore the distinctive signet ring of the Episcopal Church. This meant that, however improbable it might have seemed, Catholics and Protestants
