by Caleb Carr
“I don’t care what Kreizler says, John,” Theodore announced, setting his jaw and balling his fists. “This is a race against time and savagery now, and I’m going to use the force under my command.” I followed him as he rushed to Sixth Avenue to find a hansom. “The Ninth Precinct is closest. I shall make all arrangements from there.” He caught sight of an empty rig, and approached it. “We know the basic pattern—he’ll be making for the waterfront. I’ll have detachments search every foot of—”
“Roosevelt—wait.” I managed to grab his arm and pull him to a halt just as he was getting into the cab. “I understand your feelings. But for heaven’s sake, don’t reveal any details to your men.”
“Not reveal—good God, John!” His teeth started to click louder and his eyes danced with rage behind the spectacles. “Do you understand what’s happening? Why, at this very moment—”
“I know, Roosevelt. But it won’t help things to let the whole force in on it. Just say that there’s been a kidnapping, and that you have reason to suspect the criminals are trying to leave the city by boat or by bridge. It’s the best way to handle it, please believe me.”
Theodore took a big, strong breath into his broad chest, then nodded once. “Perhaps you’re right.” He slammed one fist into the other hand. “Blast all, this damned interference! But I’ll do as you say, John—provided you’ll stand aside and let me get to it!”
With a sharp crack of his horsewhip Roosevelt’s cabbie commenced a fast trip up Sixth Avenue, and I returned to the front of the Black and Tan. There a small and already surly crowd had gathered and was being told the details of the evening’s activities by Frank Stephenson. Technically speaking, the Black and Tan was in the territory of the Hudson Dusters, and Stephenson owed no allegiance to Paul Kelly; but the two men did know each other, and the job Stephenson did exciting that little crowd outside his house that night made me very suspicious that Kelly had foreseen the possibility that one of Stephenson’s boys might be snatched or killed, and had paid him handsomely to make the most of such an event. Stephenson let off a lot of angry statements to the effect that the police had been on the scene and had exercised neither caution nor diligence. The victim was too poor, he said, and entirely too foreign to warrant police interest; if people in such neighborhoods as their own wanted to prevent these kinds of things, they’d have to take matters into their own hands. Marcus, of course, had already identified himself to Stephenson as a police officer; and as the crowd’s mood grew uglier and an increasing number of threatening glances were thrown our way, the Isaacsons, Stevie, and I decided to retreat to our headquarters, where we would try to stay abreast of events through the rest of the night by telephone.
Such proved a lot trickier than it sounded. There was no one for us to ring up—Theodore would never take a call from us while he was in the company of regular police officers—and no one was likely to get in touch with our headquarters. At about four we did have word from Kreizler, who said that he and Sara had gotten Cyrus comfortably settled in a private room at St. Vincent’s and would be returning to our headquarters soon. Other than that, however, there was profound silence. Lucius, though very much relieved by Kreizler’s call, nonetheless felt profoundly guilty about all that had happened, and paced the floor rather frantically. Indeed, had it not been for Marcus I think we might all have slowly gone mad sitting there with nothing to do. But the taller Isaacson decided that if we couldn’t lend our bodies to the search we could at least use our minds, and, pointing to the large map of Manhattan, he suggested that we try to anticipate where the killer would go this time to perform his vicious ritual.
Yet even if we hadn’t been distracted by the thought that events were proceeding without our being able to affect them, I doubt that we would have gotten very far in this endeavor. True, we had a couple of fairly solid starting points: first, the assumption that the killer’s deep hatred of immigrants had resulted in the disposal of bodies at Castle Garden and the Ellis Island ferry; and, second, the belief that his preoccupation with the cleansing power of water had caused him to select two bridges and a water tower as sites for the other murders. But how could we extrapolate from these elements sufficiently to guess what site he would choose next? One suggestion was that he’d return to another bridge; and, if we assumed that he wouldn’t repeat himself in this regard, we were left with either the old High Bridge over the East River at the northern end of Manhattan (an aqueduct that carried Croton Reservoir water into the city) or the nearby Washington Bridge, which had opened a few years earlier. Marcus, however, realized that the killer probably knew that his pursuers were gaining ground on him. Based on the timing of his attack on Cyrus, for example, it seemed certain that it had been he who had put us under surveillance earlier in the evening rather than vice versa. A man who was paying that kind of attention to his antagonists’ activities would likely guess that we were anticipating his return to a favored type of locale and go elsewhere. For Marcus’s money, it was the killer’s hatred of immigrants that offered the best chance of revealing the probable next murder site; and, following this line of reasoning, the detective sergeant argued that the man would head for someplace like the docks belonging to those steamship lines that packed huge numbers of desperate foreigners into the lower decks of their vessels and brought them to America.
When we finally did get an answer to this deadly conundrum, it was so obvious as to make all of us feel quite ashamed. At about four-thirty, just as Kreizler was walking into our headquarters, Sara telephoned from Mulberry Street, where she’d gone to find out what was happening.
“They’ve had a message from Bedloe’s Island,” she said, as soon as I’d picked up the earpiece. “One of the night guards at the Liberty statue—he’s found a body.” My heart sank, and I said nothing. “Hello?” Sara said. “Are you on the line, John?”
“Yes, Sara. I’m here.”
“Then listen carefully, I can’t talk long. There’s already a pack of senior officers getting ready to head out there. The commissioner’s going with them, but he’s told me we mustn’t show ourselves. He says all he can do is try to prevent any coroners from examining the body before it’s sent to the morgue. He’ll try to get us in to see it there.”
“But the crime scene, Sara—”
“John, please don’t be thickheaded. There’s nothing anyone can do. We had our chance tonight and we botched it. Now we’ve got to get what we can, when we can, at the morgue. In the meantime—” Suddenly I heard loud voices in the background on the other end of the line: one of them I recognized as Theodore, another was unquestionably Link Steffens, and then there were several others I couldn’t place. “I’ve got to ring off, John. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve had word from the island.” With a click she was gone.
I gave the others the details, after which it took several minutes for everyone to absorb the fact that despite our weeks of research and days of preparation we’d been unable to prevent another murder. Lucius, of course, took it especially hard, believing himself responsible now not only for a friend’s cracked skull but for a boy’s death. Marcus and I tried to be sympathetic, but nothing we could say would console him. Kreizler, on the other hand, took a very unemotional line, and told Lucius that since the killer had been observing our efforts there was little doubt that he would eventually have found some way to stage a successful attack, if not on that night then on another. We were lucky, Laszlo declared, that Cyrus’s concussion had been the full extent of our casualties—Lucius could also have been laid out on that rooftop, the victim of more than just a nasty knock on the head. There was no time for self-recrimination, Kreizler concluded; Lucius’s keen mind and expertise, undiluted by guilt, were sorely needed. This little speech seemed to mean a great deal to Lucius, as much for its author as for its content, and he was soon composed enough to join our efforts to tabulate what, if anything, we’d learned that night.
Every move the killer had made confirmed our theories concerning his nature and
methods—but the most important aspect of his behavior, so far as Kreizler was concerned, was his attention to our efforts and his attack on Cyrus. Why had he chosen to steal Ernst Lohmann away when he knew that we were watching? And, once committed to such a dangerous course of action, why had he only knocked Cyrus unconscious instead of killing him? The man was, after all, already certain to go to the gallows, if caught, and he could only hang once. Why take the chance that Cyrus might put up a fight, get a glimpse of his attacker during it, and then live to tell us about it? Kreizler wasn’t at all sure that we could answer these questions definitely; but it was at least clear that the man had enjoyed the evening’s sense of heightened risk. And since he knew that we were getting closer to him, perhaps letting Cyrus live was his way of urging us on: a defiant challenge, as well as a desperate plea.
Important as all this no doubt was, I could not keep my mind from wandering, as Kreizler spoke, to thoughts of what had occurred on Bedloe’s Island that night. Beneath Bartholdi’s great statue—which symbolized freedom to so many but was now, in my mind, an ironic emblem of our killer’s slavery to a murderous obsession—another boy had met a terrible and undeserved end. I tried to stifle the vague but powerful image of a youth I’d never seen, bound and on his knees beneath Lady Liberty, trusting fully in the man who was about to wring his neck, and then feeling sudden, brief, all-consuming horror at the realization that he had given his trust unwisely and was going to pay the fullest possible price for his mistake. Then, in rapid succession, other pictures flashed across my mind: first the knife, that fearsome instrument created to meet the dangers of a world very unlike New York; then the long, slow, careful movements of that blade through flesh, and the sharp, mean chops at the limbs; the blood, no longer propelled by the heart, flowing out onto the grass and rocks in leisurely, thick streams; and the sickening grind and squeak of sharp steel against the ocular orbits of the skull…There was nothing that resembled justice or humanity in it. Whatever Ernst Lohmann’s way of making a living, whatever his error in trusting a stranger, the penalty was too severe, the price too abominably high.
When my attention returned to the ongoing conversation, I heard Kreizler hissing in frustrated urgency:
“Something—there’s got to be something new that we’ve learned tonight.”
Neither Marcus, Lucius, nor I spoke; but Stevie, who was glancing at each of us uncertainly, seemed to have something to say, and finally piped up with: “Well, there is one thing, Doctor.” Kreizler turned to him expectantly. “He’s losing his hair.”
And then I remembered the head that we’d thought belonged to Lucius but which had sat atop a body far too tall to be the detective sergeant’s. “That’s right,” I said. “We saw him—good Christ, Stevie, for that one moment we were looking at him!”
“Well? Well?” Kreizler demanded. “Surely you noticed something else.”
I looked to Stevie, who only shrugged. Tearing my own memory of that one instant apart like a demon, I sought a forgotten detail, one overlooked moment when I’d clearly seen…nothing. The back of a balding head. That was all that had been visible.
Kreizler sighed in great disappointment. “Balding, eh?” he said, as he scratched the word on the chalkboard. “Well, I suppose it’s more than we knew yesterday.”
“It doesn’t seem much,” Lucius said. “Measured against a boy’s life.”
A few minutes later Sara finally telephoned again. The body of Ernst Lohmann was on its way to the morgue at Bellevue. The guard who’d found it, naturally, had witnessed no part of the killing, but had heard a sound just before he spotted the dead boy that could have been a steam launch drawing away from the island. Roosevelt had told Sara that he needed some time to get rid of the police officers that were with him; he thought that if we were to meet him at Bellevue at six-thirty he could make sure that we would be allowed to examine the body without interference. That left just over an hour; I decided to go home, bathe, and change my clothes before joining the others at the morgue.
I arrived at Washington Square to find my grandmother, thankfully and remarkably, still asleep. Harriet was up and about, though, and she offered to draw my bath. As she scurried up the stairs, I remarked on my grandmother’s sound slumber.
“Yes, sir,” Harriet said. “Ever since the news came she’s been much easier in her mind.”
“The news?” I said, in tired confusion.
“Sure you’ve heard, sir? About that horrible Dr. Holmes—it was in all the papers yesterday. I believe we still have the Times in the nook, if you’d like me to—”
“No, no,” I said, stopping her as she came back down the stairs. “I’ll get it. If you’ll just draw the bath, Harriet, I’ll be your servant for a lifetime.”
“Hardly necessary, Mr. John,” she answered, going up again.
I found the previous day’s Times in the copper and glass nook next to my grandmother’s favorite chair. The story was blazoned across the front page: HOLMES COOL TO THE END. The infamous “torture doctor” had been dispatched on a Philadelphia gallows, after confessing without remorse to the murder of twenty-seven additional people, mostly women he’d romanced and robbed. The drop had fallen at 10:12 A.M., and twenty minutes later he’d been pronounced dead. As added precautions—against what, the paper did not say—Holmes’s coffin had been filled with cement after he’d been laid in it, and then, when the box had been deposited in a ten-foot hole in an unnamed cemetery, another ton of cement had been poured in over it.
My grandmother still had not stirred when I left the house again for Bellevue; in fact, I later learned from Harriet that she slept until well past ten.
CHAPTER 27
* * *
As it turned out, the greatest difficulty with our trip to the morgue early Monday morning did not result from a confrontation with any member of that institution’s staff. They were all quite new on the job (having recently replaced a group who’d been fired for selling bodies to anatomists at $150 a head) and too unsure of their authority to go up against Roosevelt. No, our problem was simply getting into the building, for by the time we arrived, another angry mob of Lower East Side residents had formed to demand an explanation as to why their children were still being slaughtered without so much as one suspect being taken into custody. The general air among this crowd was not only angrier than that of the group that’d assembled at Castle Garden, it was also far more indignant. Absent was any mention of Ernst Lohmann’s profession or living arrangements (he turned out to have no family that we could ever locate); the youth was pictured as an abandoned innocent left to the mercy of a police department, a city government, and an upper class that did not care how he lived—or, if he died, who was responsible. This much more systematic, not to mention political, representation of Lohmann’s plight—and that of the immigrant communities generally—may have been due to the fact that there were a good number of Germans in the crowd; but I suspected that it had far more to do with the ongoing influence of Paul Kelly, although I did not see either him or his brougham anywhere near the morgue as we moved through the crowd around it.
We entered the dreary red-brick building through a black iron door in the back, Sara, the Isaacsons, and I crowding around Laszlo so that no one could see his face. Roosevelt met us just inside the doorway and, after brushing off a pair of attendants who wanted to know our business, led us directly to an examination room. The stench of formaldehyde and decay in this sickening chamber was so strong that it seemed to be pulling the yellowing paint off the walls. There were tables bearing draped bodies shoved into each corner, and aging, chipped specimen jars full of various pieces of human bodies sat gruesomely on a series of sagging shelves. A large electrical lamp was suspended from the center of the ceiling, and under it was a dented and rusted operating table, which at some point in the distant past must have looked like those Laszlo kept in the basement theater of his Institute. Atop the table was a body covered by a dirty, wet sheet.
Lucius and Kreizle
r went immediately to the table, and Lucius tore the sheet away—wanting, it seemed to me, to face as quickly as possible the boy for whose death he felt such heavy responsibility. Marcus followed behind them, but Sara and I remained by the door, not wanting to approach the body if we could avoid it. Kreizler produced his little notebook and then the usual recitation began, Lucius listing the injuries that the boy had suffered in a voice that was monotonous yet, paradoxically, passionate:
“Severing of the complete genitalia at their base…Severing of the right hand just above the wrist joint—both the ulna and radius cleanly cut…Lateral lacerations of the abdominal cavity, with attendant damage to the small intestine…Massive damage to the entire arterial system within the thorax, and apparent removal of the heart…Removal of the left eye, attendant damage to the malar bone and supraorbital ridge on that side…Removal of those sections of the scalp covering the occipital and parietal bones of the skull…”
It was a grim roster, all right, and I tried not to listen; but one of the latter items caught my notice. “Excuse me, Lucius,” I interrupted, “but did you say removal of the left eye?”
“Yes,” came his quick reply.
“The left eye only?”
“Yes,” Kreizler answered. “The right eye is still intact.”
Marcus looked excited. “He must’ve been interrupted.”
“It does seem the most plausible explanation,” Kreizler replied. “Probably he detected the guard’s approach.” Laszlo then pointed at the center of the body. “This business with the heart is new, Detective Sergeant.”
