by Caleb Carr
Kreizler and the Isaacsons, meanwhile, were engaged in another spirited discussion of our killer’s timing. Lucius had postulated that the one inconsistency in the man’s schedule—the killing of Giorgio Santorelli on March 3rd—could be accounted for by the deceptively mundane phrase “I decided to wait” in the note to Mrs. Santorelli. It was distinctly possible, the younger Isaacson elaborated, that the sighting and selection of a victim were as crucial in their own way to the murderer’s psychic satisfaction as the act of killing itself. Kreizler quite approved of this theory, and added that so long as the man experienced no interference with his intended goal—to murder the boy—he might even derive sadistic pleasure from the delay. This meant that the Santorelli killing could be made to fit the overall timing pattern, because the critical mental event had occurred on Ash Wednesday.
Laszlo and the Isaacsons parted company, however, over the question of whether the man struck on some holidays but not others because he was only angered by certain religious stories and events. Kreizler didn’t like this idea, because it got back to the notion of a religious maniac, a man obsessively, dementedly absorbed in the arcana of the Christian faith. Laszlo was still willing to consider the possibility that the man was (or at some point in his life had been) a priest; but he could not see any reason why, say, the tale of the Three Wise Men should not offer sufficient cause to kill, whereas the purification of the Virgin Mary apparently did. Marcus and Lucius protested that there had to be some reason why only certain holidays were selected, and Kreizler did agree; but he said that we simply hadn’t found the contextual key to that particular part of the puzzle yet.
There being no guarantee that our Ascension Day surveillance plan would produce any results, we all pursued alternate lines of inquiry during the days leading up to it. Marcus and I kept diligently after our priest theory, while Kreizler, Lucius, and Sara engaged in a new and promising activity: canvassing asylums throughout our own and various other parts of the country, by cable and in person, to see if any of them had treated a patient who matched our emerging portrait within the last fifteen years. Despite his firm conviction that our killer was sane, Kreizler hoped that the man’s idiosyncrasies had caused his commitment at some earlier point in his life. Perhaps when his secret taste for blood had first emerged he had committed some indiscretion that the average person (not to mention the average asylum superintendent) would have assumed was a symptom of some form of insanity. Whatever the exact circumstances, asylums kept fairly extensive records as a rule, and checking them seemed a prudent investment of time and energy.
On Ascension Eve we apportioned our responsibilities for the next night: Marcus and Sara, the latter carrying both her firearms, would take up watch on the roof of the Golden Rule; Kreizler and Roosevelt would man Paresis Hall, where Theodore’s authority would be sufficient to keep Biff Ellison in line if there was trouble; Lucius and Cyrus would cover the Black and Tan, Cyrus’s color offering a convenient explanation for their presence should such prove necessary; and Stevie and I would be just down Bleecker Street, atop the Slide. Positioned outside each of these houses would be several street arabs of Stevie’s acquaintance, who, without being told any details of the operation, could be dispatched to bring assistance from the other locations in the event something did happen at any one of them. Roosevelt thought that this task might be better served by policemen, but Kreizler vehemently opposed such an idea. Privately, Laszlo told me he suspected that any contact between officers of the law and the killer would result in the latter’s quick death, Theodore’s prohibitive orders notwithstanding. We had now experienced enough mysterious interference to know that there were forces far more powerful than Roosevelt at work, and those forces unquestionably had as their goal the complete suppression of the case. It was obvious that such a result could best be achieved through a quick dispatch of the apprehended suspect, which would circumvent the need for a trial with all its attendant publicity. Kreizler was determined to prevent this outcome, not only because it would be grievously criminal, but because it would eliminate any possibility of the killer’s being examined to learn his motives as well.
As it turned out, all our anxious anticipation of what might happen on Ascension Day was in vain, for the night passed without incident. We took up our various surveillance positions and spent the long, slow hours until six A.M. battling no greater enemy than boredom. As a result, the days that followed were full of more useless arguments over why the killer should have elected to strike on Good Friday but not on Ascension Day. There was a growing feeling, voiced first by Sara, that the coincidence of the holidays and the murders might be nothing more than that; but Marcus and I remained firmly committed to the idea that our killer’s calendar and that of the Christian faith were somehow connected, since this theory only helped our hypothesis about a rogue or defrocked priest being the killer. We urged that our interceptive sights be set on the next significant holiday—Pentecost, just eleven days after the Feast of the Ascension—and that we try to use the intervening time as productively as possible. Sad to say, though, Marcus and I ran into a brick wall with our priest research; and it began to seem that our entire theory might not be very much more than a well-reasoned waste of time.
Our teammates, on the other hand, did achieve some progress during the week before Pentecost: answers to the cables and letters that Sara, Lucius, and Kreizler had sent out to almost every reputable asylum in the country began to trickle in. Most of them were firmly negative, but a few offered hope, reporting that a man or men of the general physical stature that Kreizler had described, and characterized by at least some of the mental symptoms he’d noted, had been committed within their walls at some point during the past fifteen years. A few institutions even sent copies of case files along; and while none of these ultimately proved of any value, a brief note postmarked Washington, D.C., did create quite a stir one afternoon.
On that day I happened to be watching as Lucius strolled through the room, carrying a batch of the asylum letters and case files. He caught sight of something, then suddenly spun on his heels, dropped the pile of papers, and stared at Kreizler’s desk. His eyes went quite wide for a moment, and his forehead almost instantly began to perspire; but as he took out a handkerchief and began to mop the sweat away, his voice remained steady.
“Doctor—” he said to Laszlo, who was standing by the door talking with Sara. “This note from the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s—have you looked at it?”
“Only once,” Kreizler answered, crossing over to where Lucius stood. “It didn’t seem to offer very much.”
“Yes, that was what I thought.” Lucius picked up the letter. “The description’s awfully vague—the reference to ‘some sort of facial tic,’ for instance, might cover a lot of ground.”
Kreizler studied Lucius. “But, Detective Sergeant…?”
“But—” Lucius grappled with his thought. “Well, it’s the postmark, Doctor: Washington. St. Elizabeth’s is the federal government’s principal asylum for the insane, isn’t it?”
Kreizler paused for a moment; and then his black eyes jumped in their quick, electric way. “That’s right,” he said, quietly yet urgently. “But since they never mentioned the man’s background, I didn’t—” He knocked a fist against his forehead. “Fool!”
Laszlo made a dash for the telephone, and Lucius followed. “Given the legal situation in the capital,” Lucius said, “it would hardly represent an unusual case.”
“You’ve a mastery of understatement, Detective Sergeant,” Kreizler said. “There are several such cases every year, in the capital!”
Sara was walking toward them, drawn by the excitement. “Lucius? What is it, what’s struck you?”
“The postmark,” Lucius said again, slapping at the letter. “There’s a very troublesome little codicil to the Washington laws that deal with insanity and the involuntary commitment of patients to asylums. If the patient hasn’t actually been adjudicated insane in the District of C
olumbia but is confined to a Washington institution, he can apply for a writ of habeas corpus—and he stands an almost one hundred percent chance of being released.”
“Why’s that so troublesome?” I asked.
“Because,” Lucius said, as Kreizler attempted to get a telephone line through to Washington, “so many mental patients in that city, especially at St. Elizabeth’s, have been sent there from other parts of the country.”
“Oh?” Now it was Marcus’s turn to draw near. “Why’s that?”
Lucius took a deep breath, his own excitement mounting. “Because St. Elizabeth’s is the receiving hospital for soldiers and sailors who’ve been judged unfit for military duty. Unfit—because of mental illness.”
The slow, drifting way in which Sara, Marcus, and I had been approaching Lucius and Kreizler now became something of a stampede. “It didn’t occur to us at first,” Lucius explained, shying away from our advance, “because there’s no mention of the man’s background in the letter. Only descriptions of his appearance and his symptoms—delusions of persecution and persistent cruelty. But if he did, in fact, see military service and was sent to St. Elizabeth’s—well, there’s a chance, a slim but real chance that it’s—” Lucius paused, seemingly afraid to say the word: “him.”
The idea seemed a sound one; but our mood of hopefulness was fairly well dashed by Kreizler’s ’phone call. After being kept waiting for quite a while, he did finally manage to get the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s on the line, but the man treated Laszlo’s request for further information with the utmost contempt. Apparently, he knew all about the notorious Dr. Kreizler and felt the way many asylum superintendents did about my friend. Kreizler asked if there wasn’t some other member of the hospital staff who could look into the matter, to which the superintendent replied that his staff was severely overworked and had already lent “extraordinary” assistance in this matter. If Kreizler wanted to rummage through the hospital’s records, he could damned well come down to Washington and do so himself.
The difficulty was that Kreizler couldn’t just drop everything and shoot off to the capital—none of us could, for we were just a couple of days away from Pentecost. There was nothing to do but put the trip to Washington at the top of the list of things to be attended to after our next all-night vigil, then swallow our excitement and patiently focus on the immediate job to be done. Given the poor results that had attended our Ascension Day efforts, however, I couldn’t help feeling that such focus was going to prove somewhat difficult to achieve.
Nonetheless, when Pentecost Sunday (the feast celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles) arrived we all returned to our various nocturnal aeries and waited again for the appearance of our killer. I cannot say what the mood on the other three rooftops was; but for Stevie and myself, up above the Slide, boredom struck early. It being Sunday night fairly little noise echoed up from Bleecker Street, while the occasional grunt and hiss of the Sixth Avenue Elevated nearby evolved in quality from monotonous to somewhat lulling. Before long it was all I could do to stay awake.
At about twelve-thirty I glanced over to see Stevie quietly laying out a deck of cards in thirteen piles on the tar in front of him. “Solitaire?” I whispered.
“Jewish faro,” he answered, giving the criminal class’s name for the game of stuss, a particularly shady and complicated method of bilking suckers that I’d never been able to comprehend. Seeing a chance to fill this void in my gambling education, I crept over to sit by Stevie, and he quietly tried for the better part of an hour to explain the game to me. I absorbed none of it; and finally, frustrated as well as bored, I stood up and looked out at the city around us.
“This is useless,” I decided quietly. “He’s never going to show up.” I turned to look across Cornelia Street. “I wonder how the others are doing.”
The building that housed the Black and Tan—where Cyrus and Lucius had been posted—was just across the way, and looking beyond its cornice I could see the back of Lucius’s balding pate reflected in the moonlight. I laughed quietly and called it to Stevie’s attention.
“He oughta wear a hat,” Stevie laughed. “If we can see it, so can other people.”
“True,” I answered; and then, as the balding head moved to another spot on the roof and finally disappeared, my face screwed up in puzzlement. “Has Lucius grown since we started this investigation?”
“Must’ve been standing on the dividing wall,” Stevie answered, going back to his cards.
In such innocuous ways are disasters presaged. It was another fifteen minutes before a series of urgent shouts that I recognized to be Lucius’s started to blare across Cornelia Street; and when I looked over, the urgency and fear in the detective sergeant’s face were enough to make me immediately grab Stevie by the collar and head for the staircase. It was apparent even to my tired, bored brain that we’d had our first contact with the killer.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
Once on the sidewalk, Stevie and I dispatched our waiting contingent of street arabs to fetch Kreizler, Roosevelt, Sara, and Marcus, then sped across Cornelia Street to the Black and Tan. Making straight for the structure’s front door, we ran headlong into Frank Stephenson, who had been drawn out of his infamous brothel by Lucius’s shouts for assistance. Like most men of his profession, Stephenson employed plenty of muscle, and several of these thugs were standing on the stoop with him, blocking our entrance. I was in no mood, however, to go through the usual game of threat and counterthreat with them: I simply said that we were on police business, that there was a police officer on the roof, and that the president of the Board of Police Commissioners would be arriving soon. That litany was enough to get Stephenson and his boys out of the way, and in seconds Stevie and I were on the roof of the building.
We found Lucius crouching over Cyrus, who had suffered a nasty blow to the skull. A small pool of blood glittered on the tar beneath Cyrus’s head, while his half-open eyes were rolled frightfully up into their sockets and his mouth was producing strained wheezing sounds. Ever cautious, Lucius had brought some gauze bandages along with him, and was now carefully wrapping them around the top of Cyrus’s head, in an effort to stabilize what was at the very least a bad concussion.
“It’s my fault,” Lucius said, before Stevie and I had even asked any questions. Despite his firm concentration on what he was doing, there was deep remorse in Lucius’s voice. “I was having trouble staying awake, and went for coffee. I forgot that it was Sunday—it took longer to find some than I’d anticipated. I must’ve been gone for more than fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes?” I said, running to the back of the roof. “Could that have been enough time?” Looking down into the rear alleyway, I saw no signs of activity.
“I don’t know,” Lucius answered. “We’ll have to see what Marcus thinks.”
Marcus and Sara arrived a few minutes later, followed soon by Kreizler and Theodore. Pausing just long enough to check on Cyrus’s condition, Marcus produced a magnification lens and a small lantern, then quickly began searching various parts of the rooftop. Explaining that fifteen minutes would indeed have been enough time for a capable climber to get down and up the side of the building, Marcus kept rummaging around until he found some rope fibers that might or might not have been evidence of our killer’s presence. The only way to be sure was to find out from Frank Stephenson if any of his “workers” were missing. Backed up by Theodore, Marcus headed downstairs, while the rest of us stood around Lucius and Kreizler, who were both now at work on Cyrus’s head. Kreizler sent Stevie to tell the street arabs to fetch an ambulance from nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, although there was some question as to whether it was safe to move a man in Cyrus’s condition. After bringing him round with ammonia salts, however, Kreizler was able to learn that Cyrus still had feeling and movement in all his limbs, and Laszlo therefore felt certain that the bumpy ride up Seventh Avenue to the hospital, while uncomfortable, would do no further da
mage.
Kreizler’s concern for Cyrus’s safety was pronounced; before letting him slip back into semiconsciousness, however, Laszlo wafted more of the ammonia salts under his nose and urgently asked if he’d been able to see who’d struck him. Cyrus only shook his head and moaned pitiably, at which Lucius said that it was useless for Kreizler to press the issue: the wound on Cyrus’s head indicated that he’d been struck from behind, and had therefore probably never realized what was happening.
It took another half an hour for the ambulance from St. Vincent’s to arrive, enough time for us to learn that, in fact, a fourteen-year-old boy from the Black and Tan was not in his assigned room. The details were of a sort that was by now grimly familiar to all of us: the missing youth was a recently arrived German immigrant named Ernst Lohmann, who had not been seen leaving the premises and who had been working out of a chamber that had a window which opened onto the rear alley. According to Stephenson, the boy had requested the room especially that day; so in all likelihood the killer had planned the exodus in advance with his unwitting victim, though how long ago—hours or days—it was impossible to say. I’d told Marcus before he went downstairs that the Black and Tan was not particularly known for offering male whores who dressed up like women, and he’d questioned Stephenson on this point. Sure enough, the one boy in the house who handled such requests was Ernst Lohmann.
Finally, two uniformed ambulance attendants from St. Vincent’s appeared on the roof, carrying a folding stretcher. As they bore Cyrus carefully downstairs and then loaded him into the solemn black ambulance, which was pulled by an equally forbidding horse with blood-red eyes, I realized that a terrible death watch was now beginning: not for Cyrus, who though badly hurt would almost certainly recover fully, but for young Ernst Lohmann. After the ambulance had driven off, with Kreizler and Sara accompanying Cyrus to the hospital, Roosevelt turned to me, and I could see he’d reached the same conclusion.
