The Alienist

“Cyrus and I will go directly from my house. You’ll have to take a hansom. The appointment’s for nine-thirty —try not to be late, will you, Moore? We mustn’t waste a minute in this affair.”

And then he was gone. I walked back to the nook, picked up the Times again, and leafed through it. The article was on page eight:

Henry Wolff had been drinking in the tenement apartment of his neighbor, Conrad Rudesheimer, the night before. The latter’s five-year-old daughter had entered the room, and Wolff proceeded to make some comments that Rudesheimer found unsuitable for the ears of a young girl. The father objected; Wolff pulled a gun and shot the girl in the head, killing her, then fled. He had been captured, several hours later, wandering aimlessly—near the East River. I dropped the paper again, momentarily struck by a premonitory feeling that the events of the previous night atop the bridge tower had been only an overture.

Back in the hallway I ran headlong into my grandmother, her silver hair perfectly coiffed, her gray and black dress unimpeachably neat, and her gray eyes, which I had inherited, glaring. “John!” she said in surprise, as if ten other men were staying in her house. “Who in the world was on the telephone?”

“Dr. Kreizler, Grandmother,” I said, bounding up the stairs.

“Dr. Kreizler!” she called after me. “Well, dear! I’ve had about enough of that Dr. Kreizler for one day!” As I closed the door of my bedroom and began to dress, I could still hear her: “If you ask me, he’s awfully peculiar! And I don’t put much stock in his being a doctor, either. That Holmes man was a doctor, too!” She stayed in that vein while I washed, shaved, and scrubbed my teeth with Sozodont. It was her way; and for all that it was annoying, to a man who, without recent memory, had lost what he was sure was his only chance at domestic happiness, it was still better than a lonely apartment in a building full of other men who had resigned themselves to solitary lives.

Snatching a gray cap and a black umbrella as I dashed out the front door, I made for Sixth Avenue at a brisk pace. The rain was coming down much harder now, and a particularly stiff wind had begun to blow. When I reached the avenue the force of air suddenly changed directions as it swept under the tracks of the New York Elevated Railroad line, which ran above either side of the street just inside the sidewalks. The shift blasted my umbrella inside out, along with those of several other members of the throng that was hustling under the tracks; and the combined effect of the heightening wind, the rain, and the cold was to make the usually bustling rush hour seem absolute pandemonium. Making for a cab as I struggled with my cumbersome, useless umbrella, I was cut off by a merry young couple who maneuvered me out of their way with no great finesse and clambered quickly into my hansom. I swore loudly against their progeny and shook the dead umbrella at them, prompting the woman to scream in fright and the man to fix an anxious eye on me and tell me I was mad—all of which, considering my destination, gave me a good chuckle and made the wet wait for another hansom much easier. When one came around the corner of Washington Place I did not wait for it to stop, but leapt in, shut the doors around my legs, and hollered to the driver to get me to the Insane Pavilion at Bellevue: not the kind of order any cabbie wants to hear. The look of dismay on his face as we drove off gave me another little laugh, so that by the time we hit Fourteenth Street I didn’t even mind the feel of wet tweed against my legs.

With the perversity of the typical New York City cabman, my driver—the collar of his raincoat turned up and his top hat encased in a thin rubber sheath—decided to battle his way through the shopping district along Sixth Avenue above Fourteenth Street before turning east. We had slowly passed most of the big department stores— O’Neill’s, Adams & Company, Simpson-Crawford—before I rapped on the roof of the cab with my first and assured my man that I did need to get to Bellevue this morning. With a rude jerk we spun right at Twenty-third, and then plowed through the thoroughly unregulated intersection of that street with Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Passing the squat bulk of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where Boss Platt made his headquarters and was probably putting the finishing touches to the Greater New York scheme at that very moment, we turned up along the eastern edge of Madison Square Park to Twenty-sixth, then changed directions in front of the Italianate arcades and towers of Madison Square Garden to head east once more. The square, solemn, red-brick buildings of Bellevue appeared on the horizon, and in just a few more minutes we crossed First Avenue and pulled up behind a large black ambulance on the Twenty-sixth Street side of the hospital grounds, near the entrance to the Insane Pavilion. I paid my cabbie off and headed in.

The Pavilion was a simple building, long and rectangular. A small, uninviting vestibule greeted visitors and internees, and beyond this, through the first of many iron doors, was a wide corridor running down the center of the building. Twenty-four “rooms”—really cells—opened off of the corridor, and separating these cells into two wards, female and male, were two more sliding, studded iron doors at the corridor’s midway point. The Pavilion was used for observation and evaluation, primarily of persons who had committed violent acts. Once their sanity (or lack of it) had been determined and official reports were received, the internees were shipped out to other, even less inviting institutions.

As soon as I was inside the vestibule I heard the usual shouts and howls—some coherent protests, some simply wails of madness and despair—coming from the cells beyond. At the same instant I spotted Kreizler; odd, how strongly the sight of him has always been associated, in my mind, with such sounds. As usual, his suit and coat were black, and as often he was reading the music notices in the Times. His black eyes, so much like a large bird’s, flitted about the paper as he shifted from one foot to the other in sudden, quick movements. He held the Times in his right hand, and his left arm, underdeveloped as the result of a childhood injury, was pulled in close to his body. The left hand occasionally rose to swipe at his neatly trimmed mustache and the small patch of beard under his lower lip. His dark hair, cut far too long to meet the fashion of the day, and swept back on his head, was moist, for he always went hatless; and this, along with the bobbing of his face at the pages before him, only increased the impression of some hungry, restless hawk determined to wring satisfaction from the worrisome world around him.

Standing next to Kreizler was the enormous Cyrus Montrose, Laszlo’s valet, occasional driver, effective bodyguard, and alter ego. Like most of Kreizler’s employees, Cyrus was a former patient, one who made me more than a little nervous, despite his apparently controlled manner and appearance. That morning he was dressed in gray pants and a tightly buttoned brown jacket, and his broad, black features did not seem even to register my approach. But as I came closer he tapped Kreizler on the arm and pointed my way.

“Ah, Moore,” Kreizler said, taking a chained watch from his vest with his left hand and extending his right with a smile. “Splendid.”

“Laszlo,” I answered, shaking his hand. “Cyrus,” I added, with a nod that was barely returned.

Kreizler indicated his newspaper as he checked the time. “I’m somewhat irritated with your employers. Yesterday evening I saw a brilliant Pagliacci at the Metropolitan, with Melba and Ancona—and all the Times can talk about is Alvary’s Tristan.” He paused to study my face. “You look tired, John.”

“I can’t imagine why. Tearing around in an uncovered carriage in the middle of the night is usually so restful. Would you mind telling me what I’m doing here?”

“A moment.” Kreizler turned to an attendant in a dark blue uniform and box cap who lounged in a straight- backed wooden chair nearby. “Fuller? We’re ready.”

“Yes sir, Doctor,” the man answered, taking an enormous ring of large keys from his belt and starting for the doorway to the central corridor. Kreizler and I fell in to follow, Cyrus remaining behind like a waxwork.

“You did read the article, didn’t you, Moore?” Kreizler asked, as the attendant unlocked and opened the doorway to the first ward. With the opening the howls and shouts from the cells became almost deafening and quite unnerving. There was little light in the windowless corridor, only that which a few overworked electric bulbs could offer. Some of the small observation windows in the imposing iron doors of the cells were open.

“Yes,” I answered at length, very uneasily. “I read it. And I understand the possible connection—but why do you need me?”

Before Kreizler could answer, a woman’s face suddenly appeared in the first door to our right. Her hair, though pinned up, was unkempt, and the expression on her worn, broad features was one of violent outrage. That expression changed in an instant, however, when she saw who the visitor was. “Dr. Kreizler!” she said in a hoarse but passionate gasp.

At that the train of reaction was propelled into high speed: Kreizler’s name spread down the corridor from cell to cell, inmate to inmate, through the walls and iron doors of the women’s ward and on into the men’s. I’d seen this happen several times before, in different institutions, but it was no less remarkable on each occasion: the