The Alienist

Sara.”

“Sara?” he repeated in bewilderment—and by the way he said the name I realized just exactly how wrong I’d been since the very beginning.

“Oh, no,” I sighed. “It’s not Sara…”

Kreizler stared at me for a few more seconds, then leaned back, opened his mouth, and let out a deeper laugh than any I’d ever heard from him; deep, and irritatingly long.

“Kreizler,” I said contritely, after a full minute of this treatment. “Please, I hope you’ll—” He didn’t stop, however, at which annoyance began to come through in my voice. “Kreizler. Kreizler! All right, I’ve made a jackass out of myself. Now will you have the decency to shut up?”

But he didn’t. After another half-minute the laugh finally did begin to calm, but only because it was now causing some pain in his right arm. Holding that wounded limb, Laszlo continued to chuckle, tears appearing in his eyes. “I am sorry, Moore,” he finally said. “But what you must have been thinking—” And then another round of painful laughter.

“Well, what in hell was I supposed to think?” I demanded. “You’ve had enough time alone with her. And you said yourself—”

“But Sara has no interest in marriage,” Kreizler answered, finally getting himself under control. “She’s little enough interest in men at all—she’s constructed her entire life around the idea that a woman can live an independent, fulfilling existence. You ought to know that.”

“Well, it did cross my mind,” I lied, trying to salvage some vestige of dignity. “But the way that you were acting, it seemed as though—well, I don’t know how it seemed!”

“That was one of the first conversations I had with her,” Kreizler explained further. “There were to be no complications, she said—everything would be strictly professional.” Laszlo studied me as I pouted. “It must have been very trying for you,” he said, with another chuckle.

“It was,” I answered petulantly.

“You might’ve simply asked.”

“Well, Sara wasn’t the only one trying to be professional!” I protested, stamping a foot. “Though I can see now that I shouldn’t have bothered with any—” I suddenly stopped, my volume falling again. “Wait a minute. Just one minute. If it’s not Sara, then who in hell—” I turned slowly to Laszlo, and then he turned equally slowly to the ground: the explanation was all over his face. “Oh, my God,” I breathed. “It’s Mary, isn’t it?”

Kreizler looked toward the station, and then into the distance in the direction from which the train would approach us, as if searching for salvation from this inquisition. None came. “It’s a complicated situation, John,” he finally said. “I must ask you to understand and respect that.”

Too shocked to offer any commentary, I proceeded to sit mutely through Laszlo’s subsequent explanation of this “complicated situation.” Clearly there were aspects of the thing that disturbed him deeply: Mary had originally been a patient of his, after all, and there was always the danger that what she believed was affection for him was in reality a kind of gratitude and, worse still, respect. For this reason, Laszlo explained to me carefully, he’d tried very hard not to encourage her or to permit himself any reciprocal emotions when it had first become clear to him, almost a year earlier, how she felt. At the same time, he was anxious that I should understand how very much his and Mary’s mutual attraction had grown from beginnings that in many ways were perfectly natural.

When Kreizler first started to work with the illiterate and supposedly uncomprehending Mary, he quickly realized that he would not be able to communicate with her until he could establish a bond of trust. And he forged that bond by revealing to her what he now referred to ambiguously as his own “personal history.” Unaware that I currently knew more about his personal history than he’d ever told me, Kreizler didn’t realize how fully I understood his words. Mary had probably been, I speculated, the first person who ever heard the tale of Laszlo’s apparently violent relationship with his own father, and such a difficult disclosure would indeed have bred trust, and more: while Laszlo had only intended to encourage Mary to tell her own tale by telling his, he had, in fact, planted the seeds of an unusual sort of intimacy. That intimacy had survived into the period when Mary came to work for him, making life on Seventeenth Street far more interesting, not to mention perplexing, than it had ever been before. When it eventually became impossible for Kreizler to deny first that Mary’s feelings for him went beyond mere gratitude, and, second, that he was experiencing a similar attraction to her, he entered on a long period of self- examination, trying to determine if what he felt was not at heart a kind of pity for the unfortunate, lonely creature whom he’d taken under his roof. He only fully satisfied himself that it was not several days before our investigation burst in on his life. The case forced him to put off a resolution of his personal predicament; yet it also helped him clarify what form that resolution might take. For when it became clear that not only were the members of our team in physical danger, but his servants, as well, Kreizler experienced a desire to protect Mary that went far beyond the usual duties of a benefactor. At that point he decided that she should be told as little as possible about the case, and play no part in its prosecution: knowing that his enemies might come at him through the people he cared about, Laszlo hoped to safeguard Mary by making sure that, on the off chance some outsider found a way to communicate with her, she had no useful information to divulge. It hadn’t been until the morning of our departure for Washington that Kreizler had decided it might be time for his and Mary’s relationship to, as he rather awkwardly put it, “evolve.” He informed her immediately of this decision; and she watched him depart with tears in her eyes, fearful that something would happen to him while he was away and thus prevent their ever becoming more than master and servant.

As Kreizler finished his story, I heard the first whistle of the New York train in the eastern distance. Still stunned, I nonetheless began going over the events of recent weeks in my mind, trying to determine where it was that I had gone so wrong in my interpretation.

“It was Sara,” I finally said. “Since the beginning she’s been behaving like—well, I don’t know just what she’s been behaving like, but it’s been damned peculiar. Does she know?”

“I’m sure of it,” Kreizler answered, “though I’ve never told her. Sara seems to view everything around her as a test case on which to sharpen her detecting skills. I believe this little puzzle has been most entertaining for her.”

“Entertaining,” I said with a grunt. “And I thought it was love. I’ll bet she knew I was off on the wrong track. It’s just the kind of thing she’d do, let me go around thinking—well, you wait till we get back. I’ll show her what happens when you play that kind of game with John Schuyler—”

I stopped as the New York train appeared a mile or so down the tracks to our left, still moving at high speed toward the station.

“We can continue this on board,” I said, helping Kreizler up. “And rest assured we will continue it!”

After waiting for the train to come to a full, grunting halt outside the station, Kreizler and I began a quick trot across another rock- and ditch-riddled field toward the vehicle’s last car. We climbed onto the observation deck and then moved stealthily on inside, where I got Laszlo comfortably positioned in a rear seat. There was as yet no sign of the conductor, and we used the few minutes before our departure to neaten Kreizler’s bandage, and our general appearances, as well. I glanced out at the station platform every few seconds, trying to spot anyone whose demeanor might betray him for an assassin, but the only other people entraining were an elderly, well-to-do woman with a walking stick and her large, rather harried nurse.

“Looks as though we may have gotten a break,” I said, standing in the aisle. “I’ll just have a quick look up ahead and—”

My voice froze as my eyes turned to the rear door of the car. Two large forms had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on the observation deck; and although their attention was directed away from the train—they were arguing with a station official—I could see enough of them to recognize the two thugs who had chased Sara and me from the Santorellis’ flat.

“What is it, Moore?” Kreizler asked, eyeing me. “What’s happened?”

Knowing that in his current condition Laszlo wasn’t going to be much good in a confrontation of any kind, I tried to smile, and then shook my head. “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing at all. Don’t be so jumpy, Kreizler.”

We both turned at the sound of the elderly woman and her nurse entering the front door of our car. Though my stomach was alive with sudden dread, my mind was working reliably: “I’ll be right back,” I told Laszlo, and then I approached the newcomers.

“Excuse me,” I said, smiling and doing my best to be engaging. “May I be of some assistance in getting you settled, madam?”