The Alienist

“Yes, that’s been true so far, Stevie. Why?”

“It’s just that it makes me wonder, sir. Does that mean he ain’t a fag?”

I sat up at the frankness of the query—sometimes you had to work very hard to remember that Stevie was only twelve. “No, that doesn’t mean that he’s not a—a fag, Stevie. But the fact that his victims do the work they do doesn’t mean that he is one, either.”

“You figure maybe he just hates fags?”

“That may have something to do with it.”

We fought our way through the traffic on Houston Street, Stevie struggling with his emerging line of reasoning and seemingly oblivious to the whores, drug fiends, peddlers, and beggars that swarmed around us. “What I’m thinking, Mr. Moore, is that maybe he is a fag, and maybe he hates fags, too. Kinda like that guard who gimme such a hard time out on Randalls Island.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get you,” I said.

“Well, you know, in court, when I was up for cracking that guy’s skull, they tried to make me out for crazy, saying the guy had a wife and kids and all, so how could he be a fag? And in the Refuge House, if he caught two boys going at each other like that, brother, would he lay into ’em. But all the same, I wasn’t the first kid he tried it with. No, sir. So I figure maybe that’s why he had such a mean disposition—he never really knew, deep down, just what he was. Know what I mean, Mr. Moore?”

Remarkably enough, I did know what he meant. We’d had many long discussions at our headquarters concerning the sexual proclivities of our killer, and we would have many more before our work was done; yet Stevie had come close to crystallizing all our conclusions in that one statement.

There really wasn’t one of us whose brain wasn’t working overtime to come up with ideas and theories that would propel our investigation forward; but, as might be expected, no one was working harder than Kreizler. In fact, his exertions grew so continuous, and at times so excessive, that I began to worry about his physical and nervous health. After one twenty-four-hour period when he stayed at his desk with a stack of almanacs and a large sheet of paper bearing the four dates of the recent murders (January 1st, February 2nd, March 3rd, and April 3rd), trying to unlock the mystery of when our man chose to kill, Laszlo’s face became so pale and haggard that I ordered Cyrus to remove him to his home for some rest. I remembered Sara’s statement that Kreizler seemed to have some sort of personal stake in the work we were doing; and though I wanted to ask her for elaboration, I feared that such a conversation would only revive my tendency to speculate about their personal relationship, which was neither any of my business nor conducive to productive work on the case.

But a discussion became inevitable one morning, when Kreizler—fresh from a long night at his Institute, where there’d been trouble concerning a new student and her parents—set off without a break to do a mental competency assessment of a man who’d dismembered his wife on a homemade altar. Laszlo had lately been gathering evidence to support the theory that our murders were being conducted as bizarre rituals, during which the killer—much like a Mohammedan whirling dervish—used extreme yet fairly formalized physical action to bring about psychic relief. Kreizler based this idea on several facts: the boys were all strangled before they were mutilated, thus giving the killer complete control over the scene as he played it out; furthermore, the mutilations followed an extremely consistent pattern, centering on the removal of the eyes; and finally, every killing had occurred near water, and on a structure whose function arose from that same water. Other murderers were known to have viewed their grim deeds as personal rites, and Kreizler believed that if he could talk to enough of them he’d begin to understand how to read any messages that might be contained in the mutilations themselves. Such work, however, was especially hard on the nerves, even for an experienced alienist like Kreizler; add to this his general state of overworked exhaustion, and you produced a formula for trouble.

On the morning in question, Sara and I—just coming into Number 808 Broadway as Kreizler went out— happened to be watching as Laszlo tried to enter his calash and very nearly fainted. He shook the spell off with ammonia salts and a laugh, but Cyrus told us that this time it had been two days since he’d had anything like real sleep.

“He’ll kill himself if he doesn’t slow down,” Sara said, as the calash rolled off and we got into the elevator. “He’s trying to make up for the lack of clues and facts with effort. As if he can force an answer to this thing.”

“He’s always been that way,” I replied, shaking my head. “Even when we were boys, he was always at something, and always so deadly serious. It was somewhat amusing, in those days.”

“Well, he’s not a child now, and he ought to learn to take care of himself.” That was Sara’s tough side talking; it was a different tone that came through when she asked, with what seemed affected casualness and without looking at me, “Have there never been any women in his life, John?”

“There was his sister,” I answered, knowing that it wasn’t what she was driving at. “They used to be very close, but she’s married now. To an Englishman, a baronet or some such.”

With what I thought was effort, Sara remained dispassionate. “But no women—romantically, I mean?”

“Oh. Yes, well, there was Frances Blake. He met her at Harvard and for a couple of years it looked as though they might get married. I never saw it, myself—for my money she was something of a shrew. He seemed to find her charming, though.”

Sara’s most mischievous smile, that tiny curl of her upper lip, appeared. “Perhaps she reminded him of someone.”

“She reminded me of a shrew. Look, Sara, what do you mean when you say Kreizler seems as though he’s got some personal stake in this thing? Personal how?”

“I’m not quite sure, John,” she answered, as we walked into our headquarters and found the Isaacsons engaged in a vehement squabble over some evidential details. “But I can say this—” Sara lowered her voice, indicating that she didn’t wish to pursue the conversation in front of any of the others. “It’s more than just his reputation, and more than just scientific curiosity. It’s something old and deep. He’s a very deep man, your friend Dr. Kreizler.”

With that Sara drifted off to the kitchen to make herself some tea, and I was dragged into the Isaacsons’ argument.

Thus did we pass most of April, with the weather warming up, small pieces of information slowly but steadily falling into place, and questions about each other opening wider without being openly addressed. There would be time to explore such matters later, I kept telling myself—for now the work was what mattered, the job at hand, on which depended who knew how many lives. Focus was the key—focus and preparation, readiness to meet whatever could be hatched from the mind of the man we sought. I took this attitude confidently, feeling, after viewing two of his victims, that I’d seen the worst he had to offer.

But an incident that occurred at the end of the month presented my teammates and me with a new kind of horror, one born not of blood but of words—one that, in its own way, was as terrible as anything we’d yet encountered.

CHAPTER 20

On a particularly pleasant Thursday evening, I was sitting at my desk reading a story in the Times about one Henry B. Bastian of Rock Island, Illinois, who several days earlier had killed three boys who worked on his farm, cut up their bodies, and fed the pieces to his hogs. (The citizens of the town had been unable to think of a cause for the dastardly crime; and when local law enforcement officers had closed in to arrest Bastian, he killed himself, thus eliminating any chance that the world would ever discover or study his motives.) Sara was putting in an increasingly rare appearance at Mulberry Street, and Marcus Isaacson was there, too. He frequently visited headquarters at off-hours, in order to rummage undisturbed through the anthropometry files: Marcus still held out hope that our killer might have a prior criminal record. Lucius and Kreizler,