The Alienist

“And I’d like to point out, Doctor,” Lucius added with conviction, “that this further demonstrates the nature of his hunting.” (Lucius had lately become firmly convinced that our killer’s apparent anatomical knowledge arose from his being an accomplished hunter, because of the stalking nature of many of his activities.) “We’ve already dealt with the blood-lust aspect—but the toying confirms something else, something beyond even blood-crazed hunting. It’s a sporting mentality.”

Laszlo weighed it. “Your argument is sound, Detective Sergeant,” he said, writing SPORTSMAN so that it bridged the CHILDHOOD and INTERVAL areas. “But I’ll need a bit more convincing”—he chalked on a question mark after the word—“given the prerequisite and its implications.”

The prerequisite for the killer’s being a sportsman, put simply, was a certain amount of leisure time in his youth, when he could have engaged in hunting not only for survival, but for pleasure, as well. This, in turn, implied either that he had an upper-class urban background (the upper being the only real leisure class in the city in those days before child labor laws, when even middle-class parents tended to work their offspring long hours), or that he had been brought up in a rural area. Each assumption would have narrowed our search significantly, and Laszlo needed to be completely certain of our reasoning before he would accept either of them.

“As for his opening statement,” Kreizler went on. “Aside from the pronounced emphasis on ‘lies’—”

“That word has been retraced several times,” Marcus cut in. “There’s a lot of feeling behind it.”

“Then lies are not a new phenomenon for him,” Sara extrapolated. “You get the feeling he’s all too familiar with dishonesty and hypocrisy.”

“And yet is still outraged by them,” Kreizler said. “Any theories?”

“It ties in with the boys,” I offered. “In the first place, they’re dressed up as girls—a kind of deceit. Also, they’re whores, and they’re supposed to be compliant—but we know that the ones he killed could be troublesome.”

“Good,” Kreizler said with a nod. “So he doesn’t like misrepresentation. Yet he’s a liar himself—we need an explanation for that.”

“He’s learned,” Sara said simply. “He’s been exposed to dishonesty, surrounded by it perhaps, and he does hate it—but he’s picked it up as a method of getting by.”

“And you only do that kind of learning once,” I added. “It’s the same thing as the violence: he saw it, he didn’t like it, but he learned it. The law of habit and interest, just like Professor James says—our minds work on the basis of self-interest, the survival of the organism, and our habitual ways of pursuing that interest become defined when we’re children and adolescents.”

Lucius had grabbed volume one of James’s Principles and leafed to a page: “‘The character has set like plaster,’” he quoted, holding a finger up, “‘never to soften again.’”

“Even if…?” Kreizler asked, drawing him out.

“Even if,” Lucius answered quickly, flipping a page and scanning it with his finger, “those habits become counterproductive in adulthood. Here: ‘Habit dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.’”

“A spirited reading, Detective Sergeant,” Kreizler observed, “but we need examples. We have postulated an original violent experience or experiences, perhaps sexual in nature”—Laszlo indicated a small blank square in the CHILDHOOD section of the board that was boxed off and subheaded THE MOLDING VIOLENCE AND/OR MOLESTATION—“which we suspect form the basis of his understanding and practice of such behavior. But what of the very strong emotions centered on dishonesty? Can we do the same?”

I shrugged. “Obviously, he might himself have been accused of it. Unjustly, in all likelihood. Perhaps frequently.”

“Sound,” Kreizler answered, chalking the word DISHONESTY, and then beneath it, BRANDED A LIAR, on the left-hand side of the board.

“And then there’s the family situation,” Sara added. “There’s a lot of lying that goes on in a family. Adultery is probably the first thing we think of, but—”

“But it doesn’t tie in to the violence,” Kreizler finished. “And I suspect that it must. Could the dishonesty apply to the violence—to violent incidents that were deliberately concealed and remained unacknowledged both inside and outside the family?”

“Certainly,” Lucius said. “And it would be all the worse if the image of the family was something very different.”

Kreizler smiled with real satisfaction. “Precisely. Then if we have an outwardly respectable father who at the very least beats his wife and children…”

Lucius’s face screwed up a bit. “I didn’t necessarily mean a father. It could have been anyone in the family.”

Laszlo waved him off. “The father would be the greatest betrayal.”

“Not the mother?” Sara said carefully. And there was more in the question than just the subject at hand: at that moment it seemed that she was trying to read Laszlo as much as the killer.

“There’s no literature to suggest it,” Kreizler answered. “The recent findings of Breuer and Freud on hysteria point to prepubertal sexual abuse by the father in nearly every case.”

“With all due respect, Dr. Kreizler,” Sara protested, “Breuer and Freud seem fairly confused about the meaning of their findings. Freud began by assuming sexual abuse as the basis for all hysteria, but recently he seems to have altered that view, and decided that fantasies concerning abuse may be the actual cause.”

“Indeed,” Kreizler acknowledged. “There is much that remains unclear in their work. I myself cannot accept the single-minded emphasis on sex—to the exclusion even of violence. But look at it from an empirical standpoint, Sara—how many households have you known that were ruled by dominating, violent mothers?”

Sara shrugged. “There is more than one kind of violence, Doctor—but I shall have more to say about that when we reach the end of the letter.”

Kreizler had already written VIOLENT BUT OUTWARDLY RESPECTABLE FATHER on the left-hand side of the board, and seemed ready, even anxious, to move on. “This entire first paragraph,” he said, slapping at the note. “Despite its deliberate misspellings, it has a consistent tone.”

“You get that immediately,” Marcus answered. “He’s already decided in his mind that there are a lot of people after him.”

“I think I know what you’re driving at, Doctor,” Lucius said, again rifling through the stack of books and papers on his desk. “One of the articles you gave us to read, the one you translated yourself…ah!” He yanked one set of papers free. “Here—Dr. Krafft-Ebing. He discusses ‘intellectual monomania,’ as well as what the Germans call ‘primare Verrucktheit,’ and argues for replacing both terms with the word ‘paranoia.’”

Kreizler nodded as he wrote the word PARANOID on the INTERVAL section of the board: “Feelings, perhaps even delusions, of persecution that have taken root after some traumatic emotional experience or set of experiences, but which do not result in dementia—Krafft-Ebing’s admirably succinct definition, and it does seem to fit. I very much doubt that our man is in a deluded state as yet, but his behavior is probably quite antisocial, nevertheless. Which does not mean that we seek a misanthrope—that would be too simple.”

“Couldn’t the murders themselves satisfy the antisocial drive?” Sara asked. “Leaving him, the rest of the time, outwardly normal and—well, participatory, functional?”

“Perhaps even overly functional,” Kreizler agreed. “This will not be a man who, in the opinion of his neighbors, could slaughter children and claim to have eaten them.” Kreizler jotted these ideas down and then faced us again. “And so—we arrive at the second and even more extraordinary paragraph.”

“One thing it tells us right away,” Marcus pronounced. “He hasn’t traveled much abroad. I don’t know what he’s been reading, but widespread cannibalism hasn’t been seen in Europe lately. They’ll eat just about anything else, but not each other. Although you can never be quite sure about the Germans…” Marcus caught himself and glanced at Kreizler. “Oh. No offense intended, Doctor,” he said.

Lucius clapped a hand to his forehead, but Kreizler only smiled wryly. The Isaacsons’ idiosyncrasies no longer perplexed him in any way. “No offense taken, Detective Sergeant—you can, indeed, never be certain about the Germans. But if we accept that his travel has been limited to the United States, what are we to make of your theory that his mountaineering skills indicate a European heritage?”