The Alienist

by Caleb Carr

  But I never fucked him, though I could have and he would have liked me to. He died unsoiled by me, and the papers ought to say so.

  “There is no closing and no signature,” Kreizler finished, in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “Understandably.” He sat back and stared at the note on the table.

  “Good Christ,” I breathed, falling a few steps back and then into a chair.

  “It’s him, all right,” Lucius said, picking up the note and scanning it. “That business about the—the buttocks, that was never reported in any of the papers.” He put the letter down and returned to Marcus, who was still bellowing the name Alexander Macleod into the telephone.

  Staring blankly, Sara began to feel into the air behind her for a chair, at which Laszlo snatched one and slipped it under her. “I couldn’t translate the entire thing for the poor woman,” Sara said, her voice still almost inaudible. “But I did give her the gist of it.”

  “You did well, Sara,” Kreizler said reassuringly, crouching by her, and being careful that he wasn’t overheard by anyone else on the terrace. “If the killer is aware of her, it’s best that she be aware of him, and of what he’s thinking. But she hardly needs the details.” Returning to his chair, Laszlo tapped one finger on the note. “Well, it appears that opportunity has placed a treasure trove into our hands. I suggest we make use of it.”

  “Make use of it?” I said, still in some shock. “Laszlo, how can you—”

  Laszlo ignored me, and turned to Lucius. “Detective Sergeant? May I ask who your brother is attempting to contact?”

  “Alexander Macleod,” Lucius answered. “The best handwriting man in North America. Marcus studied with him.”

  “Excellent,” Kreizler said. “The ideal place to begin. From such an analysis we can proceed into a more generalized discussion.”

  “Wait a minute.” I stood up, trying both to keep my voice down and to prevent all the horror and revulsion I felt at the note from rushing out; nevertheless, I was somewhat astounded by their attitude. “We have just found out that this—this person not only killed that boy but ate him, or at least part of him. Now what exactly do you expect to find out from some goddamned handwriting expert?”

  Sara looked up, forcing herself to get a grip on it all. “No. No, they’re right, John. I know it’s horrible, but give yourself a minute to think.”

  “Indeed, Moore,” Kreizler added. “The nightmare may have deepened for us, but imagine how much more it has done so for the man we seek. This note shows that his desperation has reached a new height. He may, in fact, be entering a terminal phase of self-destructive emotions—”

  “What? Excuse me, Kreizler, but what?” My heart was continuing to beat fast, and my voice trembled as I strained to keep it at a whisper. “You’re still going to insist that he’s sane, that he wants us to catch him? He’s eating his victims, for God’s sake!”

  “We don’t know that,” Marcus said, quietly but firmly, as he leaned out the terrace doorway and covered the telephone’s mouthpiece with two fingers.

  “Precisely,” Kreizler declared, standing and coming round to me as Marcus began to talk into the ’phone again. “He may or may not be eating parts of his victims, John. What he most certainly is doing is telling us that he is eating them, knowing that such a statement can only shock us and cause us to work all the harder to find him. That is a sane action. Remember all we’ve learned: if he were mad he’d kill, cook the flesh, eat it, and God knows what else, without ever telling anyone—at least, not anyone he knew would go directly to the authorities with the information.” Kreizler gripped my arms hard. “Just think what he’s given us—not only handwriting but information, a vast amount of information to be interpreted!”

  Just then Marcus yelled “Alexander!” again, but with more satisfaction this time. He smiled as he went on. “Yes, it’s Marcus Isaacson, in New York. I have a rather urgent matter, and I just need to clear up one or two details…” At that Marcus lowered his voice and leaned into a corner by the doorway, his brother staying with him and straining to listen.

  Marcus’s telephone conversation lasted another fifteen minutes. In the meantime the note sat on the table, as gruesome and unapproachable in its own way as had been the dead bodies that the killer had left lying all over Manhattan. Indeed, in one respect it was even more frightening: for the killer, despite the ghoulish reality of his work, had thus far been little more than an imaginary patchwork of traits so far as we were concerned. But to hear his particular and bona fide voice changed everything at a shot. No longer could he be anyone out there—he was him, the only person whose mind could plan these acts, the only person capable of speaking these words. Looking around at the shouting bettors on the terrace and then out at the passersby on the street, I suddenly felt that I’d be much more likely now to know him if I met him. It was a new and haunting sensation, one that I had difficulty absorbing; yet even as I grappled with it, I could already sense that Kreizler was right. Whatever terrible and troubling thoughts dominated the murderer, this note could not be dismissed as a series of mad ravings—it was undeniably coherent, though just how coherent I was only on the verge of learning.

  As soon as Marcus returned from the ’phone he picked up the letter, sat at the table, and studied the thing intensely for some five minutes. Then he began to make affirmative little humming noises, at which we all drew around him expectantly. Kreizler produced a notepad and a pen, ready to write down anything of value. The calls of the bettors continued to burst out every few minutes, and I shouted over to ask them to keep it down. It was a request that, ordinarily, would have produced howls of outrage and derision; but my voice must have betrayed some of the urgency of the moment, for my friends did comply. Then, in the dwindling light of that beautifully balmy spring evening, Marcus began to expound, quickly but clearly.

  “There are two general areas involved in the study of handwriting,” he said, his voice dry with excitement. “First, there’s document examination, in the traditional legal sense—meaning strictly scientific analysis with a view toward comparison and establishing authorship; and second, a group of techniques that are more—well, speculative. This second group isn’t considered scientific, by most people, and it doesn’t carry much weight in court. But we’ve found it very useful in several investigations.” Marcus glanced at Lucius, who nodded without speaking. “So—let’s start with the basics.”

  Marcus paused long enough to order a tall glass of Pilsener to keep his throat from drying up, then continued:

  “The man—and the attack of the pen in this case is undoubtedly masculine—who wrote this note had at least several years of schooling that entailed penmanship. This schooling occurred in the United States, no more recently than fifteen years ago.” I could not help a befuddled look, to which Marcus explained, “There are clear signs that he was trained, hard and regularly, in the Palmer system of penmanship. Now, the Palmer system was introduced in 1880, and was quickly taken up by schools all over the country. It remained what you might call dominant until just last year, when it began to be replaced in the East and in some big western cities by the Zaner-Blosser method. Assuming that our killer’s primary education ended at no later than age fifteen, he can’t now be any older than thirty-one.”

  It seemed a sound line of reasoning; and with small scratching sounds, Kreizler put these points on his pad, to be transferred later to the big chalkboard at Number 808 Broadway.

  “All right, then,” Marcus went on. “If we assume that our man’s about thirty now, and that he finished school at fifteen or younger, then he’s had another fifteen years to evolve both his writing and his personality. It doesn’t look like that’s been a particularly pleasant time. To begin with, and as we’ve already guessed, he’s an inveterate liar and schemer—he actually knows his grammar and his spelling, but he’s gone pretty far out of his way to try to make us think that he doesn’t. See, up here, at the top of the note, he’s written ‘straten,’ along wi
th ‘figger’ and ‘occashun.’ He’s had the idea that maybe he can get us to believe that he’s ignorant, but he’s slipped up—at the bottom, he writes that after he snatched Giorgio he took him ‘straight to the bridge,’ and he has no trouble spelling it.”

  “One can only assume,” Kreizler mused, “that by the end of the letter he’s concerned with making his point, rather than with playing games.”

  “Exactly, Doctor,” Marcus said. “So his writing is extremely natural. The fact that the misspellings are intentional is also indicated by his script—the false passages are much more hesitating and less certain. The t’s in particular lack the hard, slashing definition that they have in the rest of the writing. His grammar reveals the same point: in some spots he tries to mimic the talk of an uneducated farmhand—‘I seen your boy,’ and whatnot—but then he can let off a sentence like, ‘He died unsoiled by me, and the papers ought to say so.’ It’s completely inconsistent—but, assuming he checked back over the thing after writing it, he failed to spot the inconsistency. That indicates that, while he’s unquestionably a capable planner, he may have an exaggerated opinion of his own cleverness.”

  After another sip of Pilsener Marcus lit a cigarette and continued, his words finally starting to emerge at a relaxed pace: “Up to this point, we’re on pretty solid ground. All this is good science, and would stand up in a court of law. Age about thirty, several years of decent schooling, a deliberate attempt at deception—no judge would reject it. Now, however, things become less clear-cut. Are any traits of character betrayed by the script itself? A lot of handwriting analysts believe that all people, not just criminals, reveal their basic attitudes during the physical act of writing, regardless of what words are actually written. Macleod’s done a lot of work in this area, and I think it may be useful to apply his principles here.”

  A sudden shout of “Jesus Christ, I never seen a fat man move like that in my life!” came from across the terrace, and I was about to make another request for quiet when I saw my friends already attending to the job. Marcus was then free to proceed:

  “First of all, the slashing downstrokes and the extreme angularity of a lot of the characters suggest a man who’s pretty tormented—he’s under enormous inner tension of some kind, and it can’t find any vent other than anger. In fact, the thrusting, snapping motion of the hand—you see it, here?—is so pronounced that a tendency toward physical violence, and maybe even sadism, is pretty safe to assume. But it gets more complicated than that, because there are other, contrasting elements. In the high register, what’s called the ‘upper zone’ of the writing, you can see these florid little wanderings of the pen. They usually indicate a writer with imagination. In the lower zones, on the other hand, there’s a fair amount of confusion—it’s most apparent in the tendency to place the loops of letters like g and f on the wrong side of the stem. It doesn’t happen every time, but the fact that it keeps happening is important, given that he’s been trained in penmanship and is at all other times very deliberate and very calculating.”

  “Excellent,” Kreizler judged; yet I noticed his pen wasn’t moving. “But I wonder, Detective Sergeant, if these last elements could not have been divined from the contents of the note, as well as from your initial and somewhat more scientific analysis of the handwriting?”

  Marcus smiled and nodded. “Probably. And that shows why the so-called art of reading personality into handwriting hasn’t been accepted as a science yet. But I thought it’d be useful to include the observations, because they at least show no marked inconsistency between the content and the script of the note. If it were a fake, you’d almost certainly find that kind of a gap.” Kreizler accepted the statement with a nod, though he still didn’t write any of it down. “Well, that about does it for the handwriting,” Marcus concluded, as he pulled out his vial of carbon powder. “I’m just going to dust the edges of the paper itself for fingerprints and make sure we get a match.”

  As he did so, Lucius, who’d been scrutinizing the envelope, spoke up: “There’s nothing particularly revealing about the postmark. The thing was sent from the Old Post Office by City Hall, but our man probably traveled to get there. He’s careful enough to expect that the postmark will be examined. But we can’t rule out the possibility that he lives in the City Hall area.”

  Marcus had pulled a set of photographed prints from his pocket, and was holding them against the now smudged letter.

  “Um-hmm,” he noised. “A match.” And as he said it the unrealistic but flickering hope that the note was a forgery was snuffed out.

  “Which leaves us,” Kreizler said, “with the considerable task of interpreting the contents.” He pulled out his watch and checked the time—nearly nine. “It might be better if our minds were fresh, but…”

  “Yes,” Sara said, her balance finally restored, “but.”

  We all knew what the “but” was—our killer wasn’t factoring rest periods for his pursuers into his schedule. With that pressing thought in mind, we got up to depart for Number 808 Broadway, where coffee would be brewed. Whatever engagements any of us had been foolish enough to make for later in the evening were implicitly canceled.

  As we left the terrace, Laszlo touched my arm, indicating that he wanted a private word. “I had hoped that I was wrong, John,” he said, as the others went ahead. “And I still may be, but—I’ve suspected from the beginning that our man has been observing our efforts. If I’m right he probably followed Mrs. Santorelli to Mulberry Street and kept careful track of whom she spoke to. Sara says she translated the note for the unfortunate woman near the front steps of the building—the killer, if he was there, could not have missed their discussion. He may have followed Sara here; he may be watching us right now.” I spun to look at Union Square and the blocks around us, but Kreizler pulled me back in a jerk. “Don’t—he won’t be visible, and I don’t want any of the others to suspect this. Especially Sara. It may affect their work. But you and I should heighten all precautions.”

  “But—watching us? Why?”

  “Vanity, perhaps,” Laszlo answered. “Desperation, as well.”

  I was dumbfounded. “You say you’ve suspected all along?”

  Kreizler nodded as we began to follow the others. “Since we found that bloodstained rag in the calash on the very first day. The torn page that was wrapped up in it was—”

  “Was an article of yours,” I said quickly. “Or so I guessed.”

  “Yes,” Laszlo answered. “The killer must have been observing the bridge anchor at the time I was called to the scene. I suspect that the page was his way of acknowledging me, somehow. And mocking me, too.”

  “But how can you be sure it was definitely the killer who left it?” I asked, looking for a way to avoid the harrowing conclusion that we had been, at least intermittently, under the scrutiny of a murderer.

  “The rag,” Kreizler explained. “Though bloodied and soiled, the material bore a striking resemblance to that of the Santorelli boy’s chemise—which, if you recall, was missing a sleeve.”

  Ahead of us, Sara had begun to look over her shoulder inquisitively, prompting Laszlo to pick up his pace. “Remember, Moore,” he said. “Not a word to the rest of them.”

  Kreizler rushed up to Sara, leaving me to steal one more very nervous glance at the dark expanse of Union Square Park across Fourth Avenue.

  The stakes, as they say, were rising.

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  First of all,” Kreizler announced, as we came into our headquarters that night and began to settle ourselves at our desks, “I think we can finally dispense with one lingering uncertainty.” At the top right-hand corner of the chalkboard, under the ASPECTS OF THE CRIMES heading, sat the word ALONE, with a question mark after it—a question mark that Laszlo now removed. We were already relatively certain that our killer had no accomplices: no pair or team of confederates, we’d reasoned, could have engaged in such behavior for a period of years without some one of them reveal
ing it. During the initial phase of the investigation the only catch to this theory had been the question of how one man on his own could have negotiated the walls and rooftops of the various disorderly houses and murder sites; Marcus, however, had taken care of that problem. Thus, while the use of the pronoun “I” in the letter was not conclusive in and of itself, it seemed, when taken in conjunction with these other facts, definitive evidence that a solitary man was at work.

  We all nodded assent to this reasoning, and Kreizler went on: “Now, then—to the salutation. Why ‘My dear Mrs. Santorelli’?”

  “Could be habit of form,” Marcus answered. “It would be consistent with his schooling.”

  “‘My dear’?” Sara queried. “Wouldn’t schoolchildren learn just ‘dear’?”

  “Sara’s right,” said Lucius. “It’s overly affectionate and informal. He knows his letter is going to devastate the woman, and he’s enjoying it. He’s playing with her, sadistically.”

  “Agreed,” Kreizler said, underlining the word SADISM, which was already written on the right-hand side of the board.

  “And I’d like to point out, Doctor,” Lucius added with conviction, “that this further demonstrates the nature of his hunting.” (Lucius had lately become firmly convinced that our killer’s apparent anatomical knowledge arose from his being an accomplished hunter, because of the stalking nature of many of his activities.) “We’ve already dealt with the blood-lust aspect—but the toying confirms something else, something beyond even blood-crazed hunting. It’s a sporting mentality.”

  Laszlo weighed it. “Your argument is sound, Detective Sergeant,” he said, writing SPORTSMAN so that it bridged the CHILDHOOD and INTERVAL areas. “But I’ll need a bit more convincing”—he chalked on a question mark after the word—“given the prerequisite and its implications.”

  The prerequisite for the killer’s being a sportsman, put simply, was a certain amount of leisure time in his youth, when he could have engaged in hunting not only for survival, but for pleasure, as well. This, in turn, implied either that he had an upper-class urban background (the upper being the only real leisure class in the city in those days before child labor laws, when even middle-class parents tended to work their offspring long hours), or that he had been brought up in a rural area. Each assumption would have narrowed our search significantly, and Laszlo needed to be completely certain of our reasoning before he would accept either of them.