The Alienist

by Caleb Carr

  Sad as it made me, Joseph’s decision was unappealable: in 1896 there was no way to go over the boy’s head and persuade a government agency (such as those created in recent years) to forcibly remove him from the Golden Rule. American society did not then generally recognize (as much of it still does not) that children might not be fully responsible for their own actions and decisions: childhood has never been viewed by most Americans as a separate and special stage of growth, fundamentally different from adulthood and subject to its own rules and laws. By and large children were and are seen as miniature adults, and according to the laws of 1896 if they wanted to abandon their lives to vice, that was their business—and their lookout. And so there seemed to be nothing for me to do but say goodbye to that frightened little ten-year-old, and wonder if he wouldn’t be the next boy to cross paths with the butcher who was haunting such disreputable houses as the Golden Rule; but then, just as I was leaving the place, an idea occurred to me, one that I thought might both help keep Joseph safe and advance our investigation.

  “Joseph,” I said, kneeling down to speak to him in the entranceway to the club, “do you have many friends who work in other places like this?”

  “Many?” he answered, putting a finger to his mouth pensively. “Let’s see—I guess I do know some. Why?”

  “I want you to tell them what I’m going to tell you. The man who killed Fatima has killed other children who do this kind of work—mostly boys, though maybe not only boys. The main thing to remember is that for some reason that we don’t understand yet they all come from houses like yours. So I want you to tell your friends that from now on they’ve got to be very, very careful about their customers.”

  Joseph reacted to this rather urgent statement by drawing back a bit and looking up and down the street fearfully. But he didn’t run away. “Why only places like this?” he asked.

  “Like I say, we don’t know. But he’ll probably be back, so tell everyone you know to keep their eyes open. Look for someone who gets angry when any of you are”—I strained for a word—“difficult.”

  “You mean uppity?” Joseph asked. “That’s what Scotch Ann calls it—uppity.”

  “Right. He may have picked Fatima because of it. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. But watch for it. And, most important of all—don’t go anywhere with anyone. Never leave the club, no matter how nice the man seems or how much money he offers you. The same goes for your friends. All right?”

  “Well—okay, Mr. Moore,” Joseph answered slowly. “But maybe—maybe you and Detective Sergeant Isaacson can come back and check on us, sometime. Those other cops, the ones that were here this morning, they didn’t seem to care much. They just told everybody to keep quiet about Fatima.”

  “We’ll try to do that,” I answered, taking a pen and a piece of paper from my coat pocket. “And if you ever have anything you want to tell someone, anything at all that you think is important, you come straight to this address during the day, and to this one at night.” I gave him not only our headquarters location but also the number of my grandmother’s house on Washington Square, wondering for an instant what the old girl would make of this boy if he ever did show up. Then I had him write down the telephone number of the Golden Rule. “Don’t go to any other cops—tell us everything first. And don’t tell any other cops that we were here.”

  “Don’t worry,” the boy answered quickly. “You’re the first two cops I ever met that I’d talk to, anyway.”

  “That’s probably because I’m not a cop,” I said with a smile.

  The grin was returned, and with a start I realized that I was seeing someone else’s face echoed in Joseph’s features. “You didn’t seem like one,” the boy said. Then his brows knotted up with another question: “So why are you trying to find out who killed Fatima?”

  I put a hand on the boy’s head. “Because we want to stop him.” Just then the harsh sound of Scotch Ann’s gravelly voice came bursting out of the Golden Rule’s front hall, and I nodded in its direction. “You’d better go. Remember what I said.”

  At a quick, youthful pace Joseph disappeared back into the club, and I stood up to find Marcus smiling at me.

  “You handled that pretty well,” he said. “Spent much time around kids?”

  “Some,” I answered, without elaborating. I had no desire to reveal how much young Joseph’s eyes and smile had reminded me of my own dead brother’s at the same age.

  As we walked back across town, Marcus and I discussed the new lay of things. Sure now that the man we sought was well acquainted with places like the Golden Rule and Paresis Hall, we tried to identify who other than customers would regularly investigate such haunts. The idea of a reporter or social essayist like Jake Riis—a man out to reveal the evils of the city and perhaps driven to mad extremities by overexposure to vice—occurred to us, but just as quickly we realized that no one had yet made much of a print crusade out of child prostitution, and certainly not out of homosexual child prostitution. That left us with missionaries and other church workers, a category that seemed more promising: remembering what Kreizler had said about the connection between religious manias and mass murder, I wondered if indeed we were dealing with someone determined to be the hand of a wrathful god on this earth. Kreizler had said he didn’t consider a religious motivation likely, but Kreizler could be wrong about that—after all, missionaries and church workers were known to travel frequently by rooftops when doing their tenement work. Marcus and I were ultimately led away from such a hypothesis, however, by what Joseph had told us. The man who had killed Ali ibn-Ghazi had come to the Golden Rule regularly, and his visits had gone unnoticed. Any reforming crusader worth his salt would have worked hard to be the center of attention.

  “Whoever or whatever he is,” Marcus announced, as we closed back in on Number 808 Broadway, “we know one thing—that he can come and go unnoticed. He looks completely as if he belongs in those houses.”

  “Right,” I said. “Which brings us back to customers, which means it could be almost anyone.”

  “Your theory about an angry customer might still work. Even if he’s not a transient, he still might’ve been fleeced one too many times.”

  “I’m not so sure. I’ve seen men who’ve been robbed by whores. They might beat the living daylights out of one of them, but the kind of mutilation we’ve seen? He’d have to be mad.”

  “Then maybe we’re back to another one of the Ripper theories,” Marcus said. “Maybe his brain’s deteriorating from disease—a disease he picked up in a place like Ellison’s or the Golden Rule.”

  “No,” I answered, flattening my hands out in front of me and trying to make it all clearer in my mind. “The one constant we’ve been able to hold on to is that he’s not crazy. We can’t question that now.”

  Marcus paused, and then spoke carefully: “John—you’ve asked yourself, I suppose, what’ll happen if some of Kreizler’s basic assumptions are wrong?”

  Taking a deep, weary breath I said, “I’ve asked myself.”

  “And your answer?”

  “If they’re wrong, then we’ll fail.”

  “And you’re satisfied with that?”

  We’d reached the southwest corner of Eleventh Street and Broadway, where trolley cars and carriages were lugging all manner of weekend revelers up- and downtown. Marcus’s question hung in the air over this scene for a moment, causing me to feel very detached from the normal rhythms of city life and very uneasy about the immediate future. What, indeed, would all this terrible learning we were doing amount to if our basic assumptions were wrong?

  “It’s a dark road, Marcus,” I finally said quietly. “But it’s the only road we’ve got.”

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  There were snow flurries that night, and Easter morning saw the city covered by a light white powder. At nine A.M. the thermometer still had not climbed above forty degrees (it would do so later that day, but just barely and only for a few minutes), and I really
was tempted to stay at home and in bed. But Lucius Isaacson had important news for us all, or so he said in a telephone call; and so, with the bells of Grace Church clanging and scores of bonneted worshipers crowding around and through its doors, I trudged back into the headquarters that I’d left only half a dozen hours earlier.

  Lucius had spent the previous evening interviewing Ali ibn-Ghazi’s father, from whom he had learned almost nothing. The elder Ghazi had been determinedly reticent, especially after Lucius had shown him his badge. Initially, Lucius had thought his uncooperative behavior nothing more than the usual slum dweller’s method of dealing with the police; but then Ghazi’s landlord had told Lucius, as the latter left the building, that Ghazi had received a visit that afternoon from a small group of men—including two priests. His general description of them had matched that given by Mrs. Santorelli; but the landlord had further noticed that one of the priests wore the distinctive signet ring of the Episcopal Church. This meant that, however improbable it might have seemed, Catholics and Protestants were working together toward some end. The landlord was of no help in determining that end, for he was unable to say what the two priests had spoken to Ghazi about; but immediately after their departure Ghazi had settled a sizable back rent debt, in full and in large notes. Lucius would have given us this news the night before, but after leaving the Syrian ghetto he had made what he thought would be a brief stop at the morgue. Thinking to find out whether Ali’s body had been inspected by a coroner, and, if it had, what official judgment had been passed on the matter, Lucius had been kept waiting for nearly three hours. He’d finally been informed that Ali’s body had already been removed for burial; and the only copy of the coroner’s report, which the night officer at the morgue assured Lucius had been unusually brief, had been dispatched to Mayor Strong’s office.

  It was impossible to say precisely what the two priests, the coroner, the mayor, or anyone else involved in these activities was up to; but obfuscation and the suppression of facts seemed the very least of it. The feeling that we faced a greater challenge than simply catching our killer—a feeling that had taken seed after Giorgio Santorelli’s murder—now began to grow and chafe at each of us.

  Spurred on by that sinister irritant, our team assumed and maintained a quickened pace over the next week or so. Murder sites and disorderly houses were visited and revisited by the Isaacsons, who spent hours trying to discover new clues and days trying to coax new information out of anyone who might have seen or heard anything of importance. But they generally ran up against the same wall of interference that had silenced Ali ibn-Ghazi’s father. Marcus, for example, was anxious to put the watchman from Castle Garden to a much more severe test than he’d been able to do on the night of Ali’s death—but when he returned to the old fort he was told that the watchman had quit his job and departed from the city, leaving no indication as to his destination. It was safe to assume, we all agreed, that wherever the man had disappeared to, he had taken with him one of the impressive wads of money that the two unidentified priests were dispensing around town.

  Kreizler, Sara, and I, meanwhile, pressed on with the job of fleshing out our imaginary man by using persons apprehended for similar crimes as points of reference. Sadly, there continued to be no shortage of these; if anything, their number only increased as the weather improved. At least one incident, bizarrely enough, was actually inspired by the weather: Kreizler and I investigated the case of one William Scarlet, who was apprehended in his home while attempting to kill his eight-year-old daughter with a hatchet. A police patrolman called to the scene had been Scarlet’s next target, and the entire neighborhood of Thirty-second Street and Madison Avenue had been kept awake for hours by the assailant’s crazed ravings. Both the daughter and the patrolman had escaped without serious injury, and when Scarlet was arrested his only explanation was that he’d been driven mad by a powerful thunderstorm that had swept through the city that night. Surprisingly enough, Kreizler could find very little to dispute this. Scarlet actually loved his daughter dearly, and in the past had always shown the utmost respect for the law. Though Laszlo was inclined to view the proceedings as the result of some deeply buried twist in Scarlet’s mental development, the possibility that the sound of loud thunder had driven him temporarily insane could not be decisively ruled out. Whatever the case, it was without doubt an example of passing violent paroxysm, and thus of little use to us.

  On the very next day, Kreizler took Sara along to investigate the case of Nicolo Garolo, an immigrant living on Park Row, who had severely stabbed his sister-in-law and the woman’s three-year-old daughter after the little girl allegedly claimed that Garolo was trying to “hurt” her. “Hurt” in this case clearly indicated sexual assault, to Laszlo, and the fact that all the participants were immigrants was also intriguing. The familial connection, however, ultimately limited the relevance of the crime to our work, although Garolo’s sister-in-law did provide Sara with some interesting material for the construction of her imaginary women.

  In addition to all this, there were the papers to go through, twice a day, in order to cull bits of useful information. This was a fairly indirect process, however, being as the New York papers had begun one by one to stop covering the boy-whore murders in the days following the Castle Garden affair. In addition, the citizens’ group that was supposed to have been organizing for an information-gathering visit to City Hall never materialized. In short, the brief flicker of interest in the case that had been displayed outside the immigrant ghettos following the ibn-Ghazi murder had been very effectively snuffed out, leaving the daily papers with nothing to offer us but reports of other killings from around the country. These we patiently studied in an effort to gain more elements that could be used in the elaboration of theories.

  It was not uplifting work; for while New York might have been America’s leading center of violent crime, particularly of those varieties directed toward children, the rest of the United States was doing its part to keep national statistics high. There was, for example, the vagabond in Indiana (once interned in an asylum but recently released as sane) who killed the children of a woman who had hired him to do menial work; or the thirteen-year-old girl in Washington whose throat had been cut in Rock Creek Park for absolutely no reason that anyone could divine; and the reverend in Salt Lake City who murdered as many as seven girls and burned their remains in a furnace. We studied all these cases and many more—indeed, every day presented us with at least one incident or criminal to hold up against our developing portrait for comparison. Without doubt, most of these examples involved behavior of a paroxysmal nature: either alcohol- or drug-induced rages, which would pass with the return of sobriety, or temporary brain malfunctions (such as certain rare types of epileptic seizure), which would go into remission on their own. Occasionally, however, there was a case involving careful premeditation, and when the assessments of the mental examiners in such instances were published, or when reports on the trials of the culprits appeared, they sometimes provided small grains of genuine insight.

  Even Kreizler’s servants were contributing to the quest for a solution, either through example or direct participation. I have already described my own speculations concerning Mary Palmer and the possible parallel between her case and ours. Those thoughts were duly weighed and their salient aspects recorded on the big chalkboard, although Mary herself was never consulted about them, as Laszlo continued to insist that she be told as little as possible about the case. Cyrus, on the other hand, had managed to get hold of much of the reading material that Kreizler had assigned to the rest of us, and he devoured it eagerly. He made no comments during meetings save when asked, but at those moments he often proved quite insightful. At one midnight conference, for instance, when we were speculating on the mental and physical condition of our murderer immediately after he’d committed his crimes, we suddenly came hard up against the fact that none of us had ever taken the life of another human being. We all knew, of course, that there was someone
in the room who had, but none of us felt much like asking Cyrus for an experienced opinion—none of us, that is, except Kreizler, who had no trouble posing the question in simple, straightforward language. Cyrus answered in much the same way, confirming that after his act of violence he would have been capable of neither elaborate planning nor extensive physical exertion; but we were all surprised when he punctuated this statement with some interesting thoughts on Cesare Lombroso, the Italian sometimes supposed to be the father of modern criminology.

  Lombroso had postulated the existence of a criminal “type” of human being (in essence a throwback to early, savage man), but Cyrus stated that he found such a theory implausible, given the wide range of motivations and behaviors he’d recently learned could be involved in criminal actions—including his own. Interestingly enough, Dr. H. H. Holmes, the mass murderer who was waiting to be hanged in Philadelphia, had stated during the course of his trial that he believed himself to be representative of Lombroso’s criminal type. Mental, moral, and physical degeneracy had accounted for his actions, Holmes claimed, and so his legal responsibility should of course be considered as diminished. The argument had gotten him nowhere in court; and after discussing his and other cases, we concluded that our killer’s work could no more be ascribed to evolutionary retrogression than could Holmes’s. In both subjects, the intellectual capacity demonstrated was simply too significant.

  And then there was the day that young Stevie Taggert drove me down to meet the Isaacsons under the Brooklyn Bridge. Stevie had been continuing to run “errands” for me on a regular basis, and the process of keeping this activity hidden from Kreizler had forged something of a bond between us, one that permitted straightforward communication. At any rate, we received word one morning that two young girls playing under the Rose Street arch of the Brooklyn Bridge had come upon an abandoned wagon, the freight compartment of which contained a human skull, arm, and hand. Although the crime didn’t resemble our killer’s work in terms of style, the fact that the wagon had been left under a bridge recalled our man’s penchant for water and the structures near it, so we thought it worthwhile to take a look. The body parts, however, proved to be those of an adult, as well as utterly unidentifiable. And, since Marcus found no fingerprints on the wagon that matched those of our murderer, he and Lucius released the gruesome discovery into the care of the city’s chief coroner. In order to avoid questions, I departed in the calash before the men from the morgue arrived; and as we made our way back uptown, Stevie put a question to me: