have no family that we could ever locate); the youth was pictured as an abandoned innocent left to the mercy of a police department, a city government, and an upper class that did not care how he lived—or, if he died, who was responsible. This much more systematic, not to mention political, representation of Lohmann’s plight—and that of the immigrant communities generally—may have been due to the fact that there were a good number of Germans in the crowd; but I suspected that it had far more to do with the ongoing influence of Paul Kelly, although I did not see either him or his brougham anywhere near the morgue as we moved through the crowd around it.
We entered the dreary red-brick building through a black iron door in the back, Sara, the Isaacsons, and I crowding around Laszlo so that no one could see his face. Roosevelt met us just inside the doorway and, after brushing off a pair of attendants who wanted to know our business, led us directly to an examination room. The stench of formaldehyde and decay in this sickening chamber was so strong that it seemed to be pulling the yellowing paint off the walls. There were tables bearing draped bodies shoved into each corner, and aging, chipped specimen jars full of various pieces of human bodies sat gruesomely on a series of sagging shelves. A large electrical lamp was suspended from the center of the ceiling, and under it was a dented and rusted operating table, which at some point in the distant past must have looked like those Laszlo kept in the basement theater of his Institute. Atop the table was a body covered by a dirty, wet sheet.
Lucius and Kreizler went immediately to the table, and Lucius tore the sheet away—wanting, it seemed to me, to face as quickly as possible the boy for whose death he felt such heavy responsibility. Marcus followed behind them, but Sara and I remained by the door, not wanting to approach the body if we could avoid it. Kreizler produced his little notebook and then the usual recitation began, Lucius listing the injuries that the boy had suffered in a voice that was monotonous yet, paradoxically, passionate:
“Severing of the complete genitalia at their base…Severing of the right hand just above the wrist joint—both the ulna and radius cleanly cut…Lateral lacerations of the abdominal cavity, with attendant damage to the small intestine…Massive damage to the entire arterial system within the thorax, and apparent removal of the heart… Removal of the left eye, attendant damage to the malar bone and supraorbital ridge on that side…Removal of those sections of the scalp covering the occipital and parietal bones of the skull…”
It was a grim roster, all right, and I tried not to listen; but one of the latter items caught my notice. “Excuse me, Lucius,” I interrupted, “but did you say removal of the left eye?”
“Yes,” came his quick reply.
“The left eye
“Yes,” Kreizler answered. “The right eye is still intact.”
Marcus looked excited. “He must’ve been interrupted.”
“It does seem the most plausible explanation,” Kreizler replied. “Probably he detected the guard’s approach.” Laszlo then pointed at the center of the body. “This business with the heart is new, Detective Sergeant.”
Marcus rushed over to the door. “Commissioner Roosevelt,” he said, “can you give us another forty-five minutes in here?”
Roosevelt checked his watch. “It would be close. The new warden and his staff usually come in at eight. Why, Isaacson?”
“I need some of my equipment—for an experiment.”
“Experiment? Just what sort of an experiment?” For Theodore, distinguished naturalist that he was, the word “experiment” held almost as much power as “action.”
“There are some experts,” Marcus explained, “who think that, at the moment of death, the human eye permanently records the last image it sees. It’s thought that the image can be photographed, using the eye itself as a sort of lens. I’d like to give it a try.”
Theodore considered the proposition for a moment. “You think the boy may have died looking at his murderer?”
“There’s a chance.”
“And will the next examiner be able to tell you’ve made the attempt?”
“No, sir.”
“Mmm. Quite an idea. All right.” Theodore nodded once definitively. “Fetch your equipment. But I warn you, Detective Sergeant—we are going to be out of here by seven forty-five.”
Marcus bolted off toward the rear door of the building. After his exit Lucius and Kreizler continued to prod and pick at the body, and I eventually sank to the floor, exhausted and disheartened past the point where my legs could support me. Looking up at Sara and hoping to find some sympathy in her face, I saw instead that she was staring at the end of the examination table.
“Doctor,” she finally said quietly, “what’s the matter with his foot?”
Laszlo turned, glanced at Sara, and then followed her gaze to the dead boy’s right foot, which was hanging out over the end of the table. It appeared swollen, and was set on the leg at an odd angle; but as this was nothing compared to the rest of the injuries to the body, it seemed scant wonder that Lucius had missed it.
Kreizler took hold of the foot and examined it carefully.
That caught my interest. “Clubfooted?”
“Yes,” Kreizler answered, letting the extremity drop again.
It was a measure, I suppose, of just how rigorously our minds had been trained in recent weeks that, exhausted as we might have been, we were still able to extrapolate an important set of implications from a fairly common physical deformity that had afflicted this latest victim. We began to discuss these implications at some length, continuing to do so as Marcus returned with his photographic equipment and got ready to take his experimental pictures. Subsequent questioning of those who had known the Lohmann boy at the Black and Tan bore our speculations out, and they are therefore worth mentioning.
Sara suggested that the killer might originally have been drawn to Lohmann because of a kind of identification with the boy’s physical plight. But if Lohmann had been resentful of any mention of his deformity—a strong possibility in a boy of his age and occupation—he would have reacted adversely to such charitable expressions. This reaction would, in turn, have sparked the killer’s usual rage with difficult young men. Kreizler agreed with all this and further explained that the betrayal inherent in Lohmann’s refusal of the killer’s empathy would have stirred a new and even deeper anger in our man. This could well account for the fact that the boy’s heart was missing: the killer had apparently meant to take his mutilations to a new extreme but had been interrupted by the guard. We all knew that this spelled trouble—we were not dealing with a man who would react well to having his intimate moments, sickening as they might be, cut short.
At this point in our discussion Marcus announced that he was ready to begin his experiment, at which Kreizler took a few steps back from the operating table to allow the several pieces of equipment Marcus had brought along to be moved next to the body. After requesting that the overhead electrical bulb be switched off, Marcus asked his brother to slowly lift Ernst Lohmann’s remaining eye out of its socket. When Lucius had complied, Marcus took a very small incandescent lamp and placed it behind the eye, onto which he focused his camera. After exposing two plates to this image, he then activated two small wires, whose ends were bared. He ran these wires into the nerves of the eye, activating the latter, and exposed several more plates. As a final step, he shut off the incandescent lamp and took two images of the unlit but still electrically activated eye. The whole thing seemed quite bizarre (indeed, I later learned that the French novelist Jules Verne had written of the procedure in one of his outlandish stories); but Marcus was quite hopeful, and as he turned the overhead lamp back on, he expressed his determination to return to his darkroom immediately.
We had packed all of Marcus’s equipment up and were nearly ready to depart when I caught sight of Kreizler staring at the Lohmann boy’s face, with far less detachment than he’d displayed during his examination of the body. Without myself looking at the mangled corpse, I stood by Laszlo and silently put a hand on his shoulder.
“A mirror image,” Kreizler mumbled. At first I thought he was referring to some part of Marcus’s procedure; but then I remembered the conversation we’d had weeks ago when we’d said that the condition of the victims’ bodies was in a real way a reflection of the psychic devastation that perpetually gnawed at our killer.
Roosevelt moved up beside me, his eyes also fixed on the body. “It’s an even worse sight, in this place,” he said quietly. “Clinical. Utterly dehumanized…”
“But why this?” Kreizler asked, of no one in particular. “Why just exactly
“The devil himself only knows,” Theodore answered. “I’ve never seen anything like it, short of a red
