The Alienist

you? A little money in the right places doesn’t hurt, either. And I must say, I never expected to run into the eminent Dr. Kreizler in such a situation!” His surprise was transparently false. “Can I drop you gentlemen somewhere?”

I turned to Kreizler. “Saves us the cab fare,” I said, to which Laszlo nodded. Then I spoke to Kelly: “The Museum of Natural History. Seventy-seventh and—”

“I know where it is, Moore.” Kelly slammed his stick on the roof of the brougham and spoke with harsh authority: “Jack! Tell Harry to take us to Seventy-seventh and Central Park West. In a hurry!” The sinister charm then returned: “I’m a little surprised to see you here, too, Moore. I thought that after your run-in with Biff you’d lose interest in these murders.”

“It’ll take more than Ellison to make me lose interest,” I declared, hoping to sound more defiant than I felt.

“Oh, I can give you more,” Kelly volleyed, jerking his head in Jack McManus’s direction. The twinge of apprehension I felt in my gut must have shown in my face, because Kelly laughed out loud. “Relax. I said you wouldn’t get hurt as long as you kept my name out of it, and you’ve played straight. I wish your friend Steffens had your sense. Come to think of it, Moore, you haven’t been writing much of any- thing lately, have you?” Kelly grinned slyly.

“I’m collecting all the facts before I publish,” I said.

“Of course you are. And your friend the doctor’s just out stretching his legs, is that it?”

Laszlo shifted in his seat uneasily, but spoke calmly. “Mr. Kelly, as long as you’ve offered us this remarkably timely ride, I wonder if I might ask you a question.”

“Of course, Doctor. It may be hard for you to believe, but I’ve got a lot of respect for you—why, I even read a monograph you wrote once.” Kelly laughed. “Most of it, at any rate.”

“I’m gratified,” Kreizler answered. “But tell me—knowing as little as I do about the murders you speak of, I am, nevertheless, curious as to what possible reason you can have for inflaming, and perhaps endangering, people who have nothing to do with the matter?”

“Am I endangering them, Doctor?”

“Surely you realize that such behavior as yours can only lead to wider civil unrest and violence. A great many innocent people are likely to be hurt, and still more jailed.”

“That’s right, Kelly,” I added. “In a town like this what you’re starting could get out of hand pretty damned quickly.”

Kelly thought about that for a few moments, without ever losing his smile. “Let me ask you something, Moore—horse races go off every day, but the average guy only takes an interest in the ones he’s betting on. Why’s that?”

“Why?” I said, a bit confused. “Well, because if you’ve got no stake in it…”

“There you are, then,” Kelly interjected, chuckling thoughtfully. “You two gentlemen sit here talking about this city and civil unrest and all of that—but what stake do I have in it? What do I care if New York burns to the ground? Whoever’s still standing when it’s over is going to want a drink and someone to spend a lonely hour with—and I’ll be here to supply those items.”

“In that case,” Kreizler said, “why concern yourself with the matter at all?”

“Because it riles me.” For the first time, Kelly’s face went straight. “That’s right, Doctor—it riles me. Those pigs back there get fed all that slop about society by the boys on Fifth Avenue just as soon as they’re off the boat, and what do they do? They knock themselves out trying to eat every bit of it. It’s a sucker bet, a crooked game, whatever you want to call it, and there’s a part of me that just wouldn’t mind seeing it go the other way for a little while.” His amiable grin suddenly returned. “Or maybe there are deeper reasons for my attitude, Doctor. Maybe you could find something in the—the context of my life that would explain it, if you had access to that kind of information.” The remark surprised me considerably, and I could see that Kreizler, too, hadn’t expected it. There was something very intimidating about Kelly’s rough-hewn intellectual agility: a sense that here was a man who could pose a serious threat on any number of levels. “But whatever the reasons,” our host went on brightly, glancing out of the carriage, “I’m enjoying this entire affair immensely.”

“Enough,” Kreizler pressed, “to complicate a solution?”

“Doctor!” Kelly feigned shock. “I’ve got half a mind to be insulted.” The gangster flipped open a lid on the head of his cane, revealing a small compartment full of a fine crystalline powder. “Gentlemen?” he said, offering it our way. Laszlo and I both declined. “Gets the system moving at this ungodly hour of the day.” Kelly placed some of the cocaine on his wrist and snorted it hard. “I don’t like to give the appearance of some cheap burny blower, but I’m not much for the morning. Anyway, Doctor”—he wiped at his nose with a fine silk handkerchief and closed the lid of the cane—“I wasn’t aware that there’d been any serious attempt to solve this case.” He stared straight at Kreizler. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

Neither Kreizler nor I answered the question, which prompted Kelly to go on, sarcastically but at length, about the appalling lack of any serious official effort to solve the murders. Finally, the brougham lurched to a fortuitous halt on the west side of Central Park. Laszlo and I stepped out onto the intersection of Seventy-seventh Street, hoping that Kelly would now let the matter drop; but as we got to the curb the gangster poked his head out behind us.

“Well, it’s been my honor, Dr. Kreizler,” he called. “You, too, scribbler. One final question, though—you don’t imagine that the big boys are actually going to let you finish this little investigation of yours, do you?”

I was taken too off guard to reply; but Kreizler had evidently adjusted to the situation and replied, “I can only answer that question with another, Kelly—do you intend to let us finish?”

Kelly cocked his head and looked at the morning sky. “To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about that. I didn’t think I’d have to. These murders really have been very useful to me, as I say. If you were actually to jeopardize that usefulness—ah, but what am I saying? With what you’re up against, you’ll be lucky to stay out of jail yourselves.” He held his stick up. “Good morning, gentlemen. Harry! Back to the New Brighton!”

We watched the brougham pull away, Eat-’Em-Up Jack McManus still hanging off of it like some kind of overgrown, malevolent monkey, and then turned to head into the Early Renaissance walls and turrets of the Museum of Natural History.

Though not yet three decades old, the museum already housed a first-rate collection of experts and an enormous, bizarre assortment of bones, rocks, stuffed animals, and pinned insects. But of all the prestigious departments that called the castle-like structure home, none was more renowned, or more iconoclastic, than that of anthropology; and I later learned that the man we were on our way to see that day, Franz Boas, was primarily responsible for this.

He was about Kreizler’s age, and had been born in Germany, where he’d originally been trained as an experimental psychologist before moving on to ethnology. Thus there were obvious circumstantial reasons why Boas and Kreizler should have become acquainted upon the former’s immigration to the United States; but none of these was as important to their friendship as was a pronounced similarity of professional ideas. Kreizler had staked his reputation on his theory of context, the idea that no adult’s personality can be truly understood without first comprehending the facts of his individual experience. Boas’s anthropological work represented, in many ways, the application of this theory on a larger scale: to entire cultures. While doing groundbreaking research with the Indian tribes of the American Northwest, Boas had reached the conclusion that history is the principal force that shapes cultures, rather than race or geographical environment, as had been previously assumed. Different ethnic groups behave as they behave, in other words, not because biology or climate forces them to (there were too many examples of groups that contradicted this theory to allow Boas to accept it) but rather because they’ve been taught to. All cultures are equally valid, when seen in this light; and to his many critics who said that certain cultures had obviously made more progress than others, and could thus be considered superior, Boas replied that “progress” was an entirely relative concept.

Boas had thoroughly energized Natural History’s Department of Anthropology with his new ideas since his appointment in 1895; and when you strolled through the department’s exhibition rooms, as we did that morning, a sense of intellectual vitality and excitement raced through you. Of course, this reaction might have been prompted as much by the sight of the ferocious faces carved into the dozen enormous totem poles that lined the walls; or the large canoe full of plaster Indians—cast from life—who paddled wildly through some imaginary body of water in the center of the main hall; or the case after case of weapons, ritual masks, costumes, and other artifacts that