The Alienist

Potter came first. Although New York’s Episcopals only numbered in the tens of thousands in those days, some of those tens of thousands were among the wealthiest of the city’s families; and the parish reflected that fact in its luxuriously appointed churches and chapels, its extensive real estate holdings, and its heavy involvement in city affairs. Bishop Potter—often referred to as New York’s “first citizen”—personally preferred the quaint villages and churches of his upstate parishes to the bustle, noise, and dirt of New York; but he knew where the Church made its money, and he did his part to expand the flock in the city. All of which is to say that Potter was a man with big things on his mind; and although I waited in his very luxurious sitting room for longer than it would’ve taken him to say mass, when he finally did appear he found that he could spare me only some ten minutes of his time.

I asked if he was aware that a man dressed as a priest and wearing a signet ring that bore the large red and smaller white crosses of the Episcopal Church had been going around to people who had information concerning the recent child murders and paying them large sums of money to keep quiet. If the question shocked Potter, he didn’t show it: cool as a cucumber he told me that the man was undoubtedly an impostor or a lunatic or both—the Episcopal Church had no interest in interfering with any police business, certainly not a murder case. Then I inquired as to whether a signet ring like the one that had been spotted would be a particularly easy item to get hold of. He shrugged and sat back comfortably, the flesh of his neck falling down over his stiff white and black collar, and said that he had no idea how easy it would be to lay hands on such a thing. He supposed any capable jeweler could manufacture one. Obviously, I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the man; but just for the hell of it I decided to ask if he was aware of Paul Kelly’s partially realized threat to stir up trouble among the immigrant communities over the issue of the murders. Potter said he was barely aware of Mr. Kelly at all, much less of any threats he might have made; being as the Episcopal Church had very few members among what Potter called the “recently arrived citizens of the city,” little attention would have been paid to such matters by either himself or his subordinates. Potter concluded by suggesting that I visit Archbishop Corrigan, who had much more contact with such groups and neighborhoods. I told him that Corrigan’s residence was my next stop, and was on my way.

I’ll admit that I’d been in a suspicious mood even before I encountered Potter; but his very un-churchmanlike lack of interest only made me more so. Where was any sense of concern for the victims of the crimes? Where was the pledge that if there was anything he could do, I had only to ask? Where was the head-shaking wish that the fiendish murderer be captured, and the fervent pressing of the flesh on that wish?

All these, I soon learned, were at Archbishop Corrigan’s residence, behind the almost-completed magnificence of the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets. The new St. Pat’s was unarguable evidence that the architect James Renwick had only been warming up when he’d designed our downtown neighbor, Grace Church. The enormous spires, archways, stained glass windows, and brass doors of St. Patrick’s were on a scale, and had been executed with a speed, unheard-of even in New York. And, in good Catholic tradition, all the considerable work had been paid for not by the kind of crass business ventures that lined the coffers of the Episcopal Church, but by subscriptions from the faithful—including wave after wave of Irish, Italian, and other Catholic immigrants, whose numbers were rapidly swelling the power of a religion which, in the first days of the republic, had been frowned on by nearly all the populace.

Archbishop Corrigan was far more animated and engaging than Potter had been; a man who lives by subscriptions, I reasoned as I met him, has little choice but to be. He took me on a short tour of the cathedral, and outlined all the work that was still to be done: the Stations of the Cross needed to be installed, the Ladies’ Chapel was as yet unbuilt, the chimes had to be paid for, and the spires required crowning. I began to think that he was going to ask me for a contribution; but I soon discovered that all this was just a buildup to a visit to the Catholic Orphan Society, where I was to be shown that the Church had another side. The Society was located across Fifty- first Street, in a four-story building with a pleasant front yard and plenty of well-behaved children wandering about. Corrigan took me there, he said, because he wanted me to understand the depth of the Church’s commitment to lost and abandoned children in New York; they were avowedly just as important to him as the great cathedral in whose shadow the Orphan Society stood.

All of which was fine—except that I suddenly realized I hadn’t asked him anything yet. This very pleasant, welcoming, deep-feeling fellow knew why I was there, a fact that became especially apparent after I started putting the same questions I’d asked Potter to him. Corrigan answered as if he’d been carefully rehearsed: Oh, yes, it was a terrible shame about those murdered boys; horrible; he couldn’t imagine why anyone purporting to be a Catholic priest would be interfering (though he didn’t seem very shocked by the suggestion); certainly, he would make inquiries, but he could assure me…On and on. I finally spared him any further effort by pleading a pressing engagement downtown, then caught a hansom on Fifth Avenue and headed in that direction.

I was now sure that in recent days I hadn’t developed what Dr. Krafft-Ebing called “paranoia”: we were faced with some sort of a conspiracy, a deliberate effort to conceal the facts of these murders. And what reason could these distinguished gentlemen have for such an effort, I thought with mounting excitement, other than to protect themselves from scandal—the kind of scandal that would have arisen if the murderer were revealed to be one of their own?

Marcus agreed with my reasoning; and over the next couple of days we began playing devil’s advocate in an effort to find flaws in the theory of a renegade priest. Nothing we could come up with, however, ruled out the core hypothesis. Perhaps it was unlikely, for example, that a priest would be an accomplished mountaineer, but it was not impossible; and as for his remark about a “Red Injun,” that could have grown out of missionary experience in the West. The hunting skills might have presented a problem, insofar as Lucius had already postulated that the man had spent a lifetime hunting—but our imagined priest could easily have developed the expertise in childhood. Priests, after all, are not born such. They have parents, families, and pasts like everyone else. And that, finally, meant that all of Kreizler’s psychological speculations could be made to fit Marcus’s and my picture as well as any other.

During the rest of the week Marcus and I looked for more details to support our work. A priest who possessed the kind of intimate knowledge of rooftops that our killer displayed would almost certainly be associated with mission work, we reasoned, and we therefore investigated those Catholic and Episcopal agencies that dealt with the poor. Much resistance was encountered, during this pursuit, and little hard information was gleaned. But our enthusiasm was not dampened; in fact, by Friday we were feeling so confident about our theory that we decided to explain it to Sara and Lucius. They expressed some appreciation for our efforts, but also insisted on highlighting little inconsistencies that Marcus and I had played down. What about the theory of a military background, Lucius asked, which accounted for our man’s ability to plot violence carefully and execute it coolly when danger was all around? Where would a priest have developed such a capacity? Perhaps, we answered, he had served as a chaplain in some part of the Army of the West. That would give us not only the military experience, but the Indian and frontier connections, as well. Lucius replied that he was not aware that chaplains were trained for combat; and anyway, Sara added, if our man had served many years on the frontier, and we already knew he was no older than thirty-one, then when had he found the time to become so intimately familiar with New York City? In childhood, we answered. If that were true, Sara continued, then we would have to accept that he did indeed come from a wealthy family, in order to explain his mountaineering and sporting expertise. All right, we said—so he was wealthy. Then there was the fact that Catholics and Protestants were working together: Wouldn’t either group, Sara asked, be just as happy if the other had a murderous priest on its hands? We couldn’t answer that one with anything more effective than a claim that Sara and Lucius were merely jealous of our work. They got a bit incensed at that, declaring that they were only following procedure by peppering us with objections and inconsistencies, and just to make sure we got the point, they went right on doing so.

Kreizler appeared at about five o’clock, but did not participate in the debate; instead, he pulled me rather urgently aside and told me that I was to accompany him immediately to the Grand Central Depot. The fact that I hadn’t had much contact with Laszlo for a number of days hadn’t kept me from worrying about him, and this sudden, secretive announcement that we were going to board a train didn’t ease my mind. I asked him if I needed to pack a bag, but he said no, that we were only taking a brief ride on the Hudson River Line for the purpose of conducting an interview at an institution that was not far upstate. He’d decided to schedule the meeting for the evening, he said, because most of the institution’s senior staff would be gone, and we could come and go fairly unnoticed. That was all the detail he was prepared to provide, a fact that struck me at the time as very mysterious; knowing what I do now, however, it makes perfect sense, for had he told me exactly where we were bound and who we were scheduled to meet, I almost certainly would have refused to go.