The Alienist

copulate with female spirits in the Sioux vision of the afterlife without the female spirits becoming pregnant. Cutting off the dead man’s genitals, obviously, means he won’t be able to take advantage of that very appealing aspect of the spirit land. There are also games and contests of strength—a nagi without a hand, or without a vital organ, can’t expect to do well in them. We’ve seen many examples of mutilations like that on battlefields.”

“And what about the eyes?” I asked. “The same thinking, in that area?”

“The eyes are somewhat different. You see, the nagi’s journey to the spirit world involves a very perilous test: he must cross a great mythical river on a very narrow log. If the nagi is afraid of this test, or fails it, he must return to our world and wander forever as a lost and forlorn ghost. Of course, a spirit who can’t see stands no chance of making the great trip, and his fate is preordained. The Sioux don’t take this lightly. There are few things they fear more than being lost in this world in the afterlife.”

Kreizler was recording all this in his little notebook, and began to nod as he got this last concept down. “And the differences between the Sioux mutilations and what we’ve described?”

“Well…” Wissler smoked and puzzled. “There are some larger issues, as well as some details, that set the examples you’re giving me apart from Sioux customs. Most importantly, there’s the injury to the buttocks, and the claim to cannibalism. The Sioux, like most Indian tribes, are horrified by cannibalism—it’s one of the things they disdain most about whites.”

“Whites?” I said. “But we’re not—well, let’s be fair, we’re not cannibals.”

“Not usually,” Wissler answered. “But there have been a few notable exceptions that the Indians know about. Remember the Donner party of settlers, in 1847? They got trapped for months without food in a snowbound mountain pass—and some of them ate each other. Made for good stories among the western tribes.”

“But”—I felt the need to protest further—“well, hang it, you can’t base your judgment of an entire culture on what a few people do.”

“Of course you can, Moore,” Kreizler said. “Remember the principle we’ve established for our killer: because of his past experience, his early encounters with a relatively small number of people, he has grown to view the entire world in a distinctive fashion. We may call it a mistaken fashion, but, given his past, he cannot do otherwise. It’s the same principle here.”

“The western tribes haven’t had contact with a very flattering cross section of white society, Mr. Moore,” Wissler agreed. “And then there are miscommunications that back up those original impressions. When the Sioux leader Sitting Bull was dining with some white men several years back, for example, he was served pork—which he, never having seen such meat, but having heard the story of the Donner party, immediately assumed was white human flesh. That’s the unfortunate way in which cultures get to know each other, generally.”

“What of the other differences?” Kreizler asked.

“Well, there’s the stuffing of the genitals into the mouth—that’s gratuitous, in a way that wouldn’t make sense to the Sioux. You’ve emasculated the man’s spirit already. Stuffing the genitals into his mouth isn’t going to serve any practical purpose. But most of all, there’s the fact that these victims are children. Kids.”

“Now, wait a minute,” I said. “Indian tribes have massacred children, we know that.”

“True,” Wissler agreed. “But they wouldn’t commit this kind of ritual mutilation against them. At least, no self-respecting Sioux would. These mutilations are carried out against enemies that they want to make sure never find the spirit land, or can’t enjoy it when they get there. To do this to a child—well, it would be admitting that you considered the child a threat. An equal. It’d be cowardly, and the Sioux are very touchy about cowardice.”

“Let me ask you this, Dr. Wissler,” Kreizler said, having glanced over his notes. “Would the behavior we’ve described to you be consistent with someone who had witnessed Indian mutilations but was too ignorant of their cultural meaning to interpret them as anything more than savagery? And who, in imitating them, might think that more savagery will make his actions look more like an Indian’s?”

Wissler weighed the idea and nodded, knocking burnt tobacco from his pipe. “Yes. Yes, that’d be about how I’d see it, Dr. Kreizler.”

And then Laszlo got that look in his eyes, the one that said we had to get out, get into a cab, and get back to our headquarters. He pled pressing business to Wissler, who very much wanted to talk further, and promised to return for another visit soon. Then he bolted for the door, leaving me to apologize more fully for the abrupt departure—which, not surprisingly, Wissler didn’t seem to mind at all. Scientists’ minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.

By the time I caught up to Kreizler on the street, he’d already flagged down a hansom and gotten into it. Thinking there was a good chance he’d leave me behind if I didn’t hurry, I dashed to the curb and leapt in, closing the doors on our legs.

“Number 808 Broadway, driver!” Laszlo shouted, and then he began to wave his fist. “Do you see, Moore? Do you see? He’s been out there, our man, he’s witnessed it! He defines such behavior as horrible and dirty—‘dirty as a Red Indian’—yet he also considers himself full of filth. He combats those feelings with anger and violence—but when he kills, he only sinks further down, down to a level he despises even more, down to the lowest, most animal behavior he can imagine—modeled on that of Indians, but, in his mind, even more Indian than an Indian.”

“He’s been on the frontier, then,” was what it all meant to me.

“He must have been,” Laszlo answered. “Either as a child or as a soldier—hopefully we can clear that up through our Washington inquiries. I tell you, John, we may have blundered last night, but today we’re closer!”

CHAPTER 29

Closer we may have been, but we were not, sadly, as close as Laszlo hoped. Sara and Lucius, we learned on returning to our headquarters, had been unable to get anywhere with the War Department, despite Theodore’s contacts. All information relating to soldiers hospitalized or dismissed from service for reasons of mental distress was confidential and could not be discussed by telephone. A trip to Washington now loomed as doubly important; indeed, all clues seemed, for the moment, to be leading us away from New York, for if our killer had, in fact, either grown up on the western frontier or served in one of the military units that patrolled that region, then someone would have to head out there to see whether or not an evidential trail of any kind existed.

We spent the remainder of the morning researching possible points, both in time and on the map, at which we might begin to look for such a trail. Eventually we came up with two overall areas: Either the killer had, as a child, witnessed the brutal campaigns against the Sioux that had led up to and followed General Custer’s death at the Little Big Horn in 1876, or he had participated as a soldier in the brutal repression of dissatisfied Sioux tribesmen that had culminated in the battle of Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. Either way, Kreizler was anxious to have someone make the trip out west immediately: for, as he told us, he now suspected that the murder of the Zweig children had not been the killer’s first taste of blood. And if the man had in fact committed murder in the West—either prior to or during his military service—there would have to be some record of the case somewhere. True, such a crime would almost certainly have remained unsolved in the years since its commission; quite probably, it would have been written off as the work of marauding Indians. But there would still be documents relating to it, either in Washington or in some western administrative office. And even if no such killing had taken place, we would nonetheless need to have operatives out there ready to follow whatever leads were uncovered in the capital. Only by visiting the actual localities involved could we discover exactly what had happened to our man, and thus be able to predict his future moves accurately.

Kreizler planned to make the trip to Washington himself; and when I told him that I still knew a good number of journalists and government workers in that city—including one especially good contact at the Department of the