The Alienist

“There is no closing and no signature,” Kreizler finished, in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “Understandably.” He sat back and stared at the note on the table.

“Good Christ,” I breathed, falling a few steps back and then into a chair.

“It’s him, all right,” Lucius said, picking up the note and scanning it. “That business about the—the buttocks, that was never reported in any of the papers.” He put the letter down and returned to Marcus, who was still bellowing the name Alexander Macleod into the telephone.

Staring blankly, Sara began to feel into the air behind her for a chair, at which Laszlo snatched one and slipped it under her. “I couldn’t translate the entire thing for the poor woman,” Sara said, her voice still almost inaudible. “But I did give her the gist of it.”

“You did well, Sara,” Kreizler said reassuringly, crouching by her, and being careful that he wasn’t overheard by anyone else on the terrace. “If the killer is aware of her, it’s best that she be aware of him, and of what he’s thinking. But she hardly needs the details.” Returning to his chair, Laszlo tapped one finger on the note. “Well, it appears that opportunity has placed a treasure trove into our hands. I suggest we make use of it.”

“Make use of it?” I said, still in some shock. “Laszlo, how can you—”

Laszlo ignored me, and turned to Lucius. “Detective Sergeant? May I ask who your brother is attempting to contact?”

“Alexander Macleod,” Lucius answered. “The best handwriting man in North America. Marcus studied with him.”

“Excellent,” Kreizler said. “The ideal place to begin. From such an analysis we can proceed into a more generalized discussion.”

“Wait a minute.” I stood up, trying both to keep my voice down and to prevent all the horror and revulsion I felt at the note from rushing out; nevertheless, I was somewhat astounded by their attitude. “We have just found out that this—this person not only killed that boy but ate him, or at least part of him. Now what exactly do you expect to find out from some goddamned handwriting expert?”

Sara looked up, forcing herself to get a grip on it all. “No. No, they’re right, John. I know it’s horrible, but give yourself a minute to think.”

“Indeed, Moore,” Kreizler added. “The nightmare may have deepened for us, but imagine how much more it has done so for the man we seek. This note shows that his desperation has reached a new height. He may, in fact, be entering a terminal phase of self-destructive emotions—”

“What? Excuse me, Kreizler, but what?” My heart was continuing to beat fast, and my voice trembled as I strained to keep it at a whisper. “You’re still going to insist that he’s sane, that he wants us to catch him? He’s eating his victims, for God’s sake!”

“We don’t know that,” Marcus said, quietly but firmly, as he leaned out the terrace doorway and covered the telephone’s mouthpiece with two fingers.

“Precisely,” Kreizler declared, standing and coming round to me as Marcus began to talk into the ’phone again. “He may or may not be eating parts of his victims, John. What he most certainly is doing is telling us that he is eating them, knowing that such a statement can only shock us and cause us to work all the harder to find him. That is a sane action. Remember all we’ve learned: if he were mad he’d kill, cook the flesh, eat it, and God knows what else, without ever telling anyone—at least, not anyone he knew would go directly to the authorities with the information.” Kreizler gripped my arms hard. “Just think what he’s given us—not only handwriting but information, a vast amount of information to be interpreted!”

Just then Marcus yelled “Alexander!” again, but with more satisfaction this time. He smiled as he went on. “Yes, it’s Marcus Isaacson, in New York. I have a rather urgent matter, and I just need to clear up one or two details…” At that Marcus lowered his voice and leaned into a corner by the doorway, his brother staying with him and straining to listen.

Marcus’s telephone conversation lasted another fifteen minutes. In the meantime the note sat on the table, as gruesome and unapproachable in its own way as had been the dead bodies that the killer had left lying all over Manhattan. Indeed, in one respect it was even more frightening: for the killer, despite the ghoulish reality of his work, had thus far been little more than an imaginary patchwork of traits so far as we were concerned. But to hear his particular and bona fide voice changed everything at a shot. No longer could he be anyone out there—he was him, the only person whose mind could plan these acts, the only person capable of speaking these words. Looking around at the shouting bettors on the terrace and then out at the passersby on the street, I suddenly felt that I’d be much more likely now to know him if I met him. It was a new and haunting sensation, one that I had difficulty absorbing; yet even as I grappled with it, I could already sense that Kreizler was right. Whatever terrible and troubling thoughts dominated the murderer, this note could not be dismissed as a series of mad ravings—it was undeniably coherent, though just how coherent I was only on the verge of learning.

As soon as Marcus returned from the ’phone he picked up the letter, sat at the table, and studied the thing intensely for some five minutes. Then he began to make affirmative little humming noises, at which we all drew around him expectantly. Kreizler produced a notepad and a pen, ready to write down anything of value. The calls of the bettors continued to burst out every few minutes, and I shouted over to ask them to keep it down. It was a request that, ordinarily, would have produced howls of outrage and derision; but my voice must have betrayed some of the urgency of the moment, for my friends did comply. Then, in the dwindling light of that beautifully balmy spring evening, Marcus began to expound, quickly but clearly.

“There are two general areas involved in the study of handwriting,” he said, his voice dry with excitement. “First, there’s document examination, in the traditional legal sense—meaning strictly scientific analysis with a view toward comparison and establishing authorship; and second, a group of techniques that are more—well, speculative. This second group isn’t considered scientific, by most people, and it doesn’t carry much weight in court. But we’ve found it very useful in several investigations.” Marcus glanced at Lucius, who nodded without speaking. “So—let’s start with the basics.”

Marcus paused long enough to order a tall glass of Pilsener to keep his throat from drying up, then continued:

“The man—and the attack of the pen in this case is undoubtedly masculine—who wrote this note had at least several years of schooling that entailed penmanship. This schooling occurred in the United States, no more recently than fifteen years ago.” I could not help a befuddled look, to which Marcus explained, “There are clear signs that he was trained, hard and regularly, in the Palmer system of penmanship. Now, the Palmer system was introduced in 1880, and was quickly taken up by schools all over the country. It remained what you might call dominant until just last year, when it began to be replaced in the East and in some big western cities by the Zaner-Blosser method. Assuming that our killer’s primary education ended at no later than age fifteen, he can’t now be any older than thirty-one.”

It seemed a sound line of reasoning; and with small scratching sounds, Kreizler put these points on his pad, to be transferred later to the big chalkboard at Number 808 Broadway.

“All right, then,” Marcus went on. “If we assume that our man’s about thirty now, and that he finished school at fifteen or younger, then he’s had another fifteen years to evolve both his writing and his personality. It doesn’t look like that’s been a particularly pleasant time. To begin with, and as we’ve already guessed, he’s an inveterate liar and schemer—he actually knows his grammar and his spelling, but he’s gone pretty far out of his way to try to make us think that he doesn’t. See, up here, at the top of the note, he’s written ‘straten,’ along with ‘figger’ and ‘occashun.’ He’s had the idea that maybe he can get us to believe that he’s ignorant, but he’s slipped up—at the bottom, he writes that after he snatched Giorgio he took him ‘straight to the bridge,’ and he has no trouble spelling it.”

“One can only assume,” Kreizler mused, “that by the end of the letter he’s concerned with making his point, rather than with playing games.”

“Exactly, Doctor,” Marcus said. “So his writing is extremely natural. The fact that the misspellings are intentional is also indicated by his script—the false passages are much more hesitating and less certain. The t’s in particular lack the hard, slashing definition that they have in the rest of the writing. His grammar reveals the same point: in some spots he tries to mimic the talk of an uneducated farmhand—‘I seen your boy,’ and whatnot—but then he can let off a sentence like, ‘He died unsoiled by me, and the papers ought to say so.’ It’s completely inconsistent—but, assuming he checked back over the thing