by Caleb Carr
“Well,” he said, wiping his hands on a bloodstained towel, “that’s that, I suppose.” Collapsing onto the steps beside us, he produced a handkerchief and mopped at his forehead, as Cyrus came down from the front door behind him.
“That’s that?” Marcus asked, a little annoyed. “What do you mean, that’s that? What’s what, what did you find?”
“Nothing,” Lucius said, shaking his head and closing his eyes. “To all appearances, everything was perfectly normal. Dr. Kreizler’s checking a few last details, but…”
I stood up, tossing the stub of my cigarette into the street. “Then he was right,” I said quietly, as a chill ran up my back.
Lucius hunched his shoulders. “He was right so far as medicine can determine that he was right.”
Marcus continued to study his brother. “Are you trying to spoil this?” he said. “If he was right, he was right, don’t bring medicine into it.”
Lucius was about to point out the less than stellar reasoning underlying that statement, but elected instead to sigh and nod. “Yes,” he breathed, “he was right.” Lucius stood up, removed his apron, and handed it to Cyrus. “And I,” he continued, “am going home. He wants us all at Delmonico’s tonight. Eleven-thirty. Maybe by then I’ll be able to eat.” He started to wander off.
“Wait a minute,” Marcus said, as his brother stumbled away. “You’re not leaving me to walk home alone—you’ve got the gun, remember. Goodbye, John. See you tonight.”
“Tonight,” I said with a nod. “Good work, Lucius!”
The shorter Isaacson turned, rolling one hand perfunctorily. “Oh. Yes, thanks, John. You, too. And Sara, and—well, I’ll see you later.”
They strolled away down the street, chattering and arguing until they were out of sight.
The ground-floor door of the Institute opened again and Kreizler emerged, putting on his jacket. He looked even worse than Lucius: his face was pale and there were enormous circles under his eyes. It seemed to take him a moment to identify me.
“Ah, Moore,” he finally said. “I didn’t expect you. Though I am, of course, pleased.” Then, to Cyrus: “We’re finished, Cyrus. You know what to do?”
“Yes, sir. The driver with the van should be here in just a few minutes.”
“He’ll take care not to be seen?” Kreizler asked.
“He’s a very reliable man, Doctor,” Cyrus replied.
“Good. Then you can ride with him as far as Seventeenth Street. I’ll drop Moore off at Washington Square.”
Kreizler and I climbed into his rig and roused the slumbering Stevie, who turned the horse Frederick around and urged him gently forward. I didn’t press Laszlo for information, knowing that he would provide it when he’d had a few minutes to collect himself.
“Lucius told you that we found nothing?” he finally asked as we moved at an easy pace back up Broadway.
“Yes,” I answered.
“No evidence of either congenital abnormality or physical trauma,” Laszlo went on quietly. “Nor of any of the other physical peculiarities that might indicate mental disease or defect. In every way, a perfectly normal, healthy brain.” Kreizler leaned back, letting his head rest against the calash’s folded cover.
“You’re not disappointed, are you?” I asked, a bit confused by his tone. “After all, it proves that you were right—he wasn’t crazy.”
“It indicates that I was right,” Kreizler answered evenly. “We know so little about the brain, Moore…” He sighed, but then tried to rouse himself. “However, yes, to the best of our present psychological and medical knowledge, John Beecham was not insane.”
“Well,” I said, reluctantly recognizing that it was going to be difficult for Kreizler to take any satisfaction from the achievement. “Sane or not, he’s no longer a danger. And that matters more than anything.”
Laszlo turned to me as Stevie took a left turn onto Prince Street in order to avoid the intersection of Houston and Broadway. “You really didn’t feel much pity for him by the end, did you, Moore?” Laszlo asked.
“Ah,” I noised uncomfortably. “To be honest, I felt more than I wanted to. You certainly seemed shaken up by his death.”
“Not so very much by his death,” Kreizler answered, producing his silver cigarette case. “By his life. The evil stupidity that created him. And the fact that he died before we could truly study him. The entire thing seems so wretchedly futile…”
“If you wanted him alive,” I asked, as Laszlo lit a cigarette, “then why did you say that you were hoping Connor would follow us? You must have known he’d try to kill Beecham.”
“Connor,” Laszlo said, coughing a bit. “There, I must confess, is something I don’t regret about this night.”
“Well”—I tried to be judicious—“I mean, he’s dead, after all. And he did save our lives.”
“Nothing of the kind,” Kreizler replied. “McManus would have stepped in before Beecham could have done any real harm—he was watching the entire time.”
“What? Then why did he wait so long? I lost a tooth, for God’s sake!”
“Yes,” Kreizler answered uneasily, touching the small incision on his face, “he did make rather a close thing of it. But I’d told him not to interfere until he was certain the danger was mortal, because I wanted to observe as much of Beecham’s behavior as I could. As for Connor, all I was hoping for from his appearance was that we’d apprehend him. That, or…”
There was a terrible finality and loneliness in Laszlo’s voice as he said this, and I knew that I’d better change the subject if I wanted to keep him talking:
“I saw Kelly tonight. I take it you went to him because you had no other option.” Kreizler nodded, still staring off with bitterness in his black eyes. “He told me why he agreed to help you. Or rather, he hinted at it. He thinks you’re quite a danger to the status quo in this society.”
Laszlo grunted. “Perhaps he and Mr. Comstock should compare notes. Although if I’m a danger to society, such men as they will be the death of it. Particularly Comstock.”
We took a right turn on MacDougal Street, wending our way past small, dark restaurants and Italian cafés toward Washington Square. “Laszlo,” I said, after he’d grown silent again, “what did you mean when you told Beecham that you might be able to arrange a less severe fate for him? You wouldn’t have argued that he was mad, just to keep him alive for study?”
“No,” Kreizler answered. “But I intended to remove him from immediate danger, and then to plead for a life sentence rather than the electrical chair or the gallows. It had occurred to me some time ago that his observation of our efforts, his letter, even his murder of the boy Joseph, all indicated a desire to communicate with us. And when he began to answer my questions tonight, I knew that I’d found something I’d never really come across before—a man who murdered apparent strangers and was willing to talk about his crimes.” Kreizler sighed again and held up his hands weakly. “We’ve lost a tremendous opportunity. Such men will seldom do that, you see—discuss their behavior. They’re reluctant to admit their deeds after capture, and even if they do, they won’t discuss the intimate details. They don’t seem to know how. Look at Beecham’s last words—he’d never been able to say just what it was that made him kill. But I believe I could have helped him find words for it, in time.”
I studied my friend carefully. “You know that they wouldn’t have let you.” Kreizler shrugged obstinately, unwilling to concede the point. “With the political dimension this thing was assuming?” I went on. “He’d have had one of the fastest trials in recent memory, and been strung up in a matter of weeks.”
“Perhaps,” Kreizler said. “We’ll never know, now. Ah, Moore—there are so many things that we’ll never know, now…”
“Will you at least allow yourself credit for finding the man? That’s a fairly amazing feat on its own, damn it all.”
Laszlo shrugged again. “Is it? I wonder. How long would he have stayed hidden from us, John?”
“Yes,” Kreizler answered, “but how much longer? The crisis was inevitable—he couldn’t go forever without society being aware of him. He wanted that, wanted it desperately. If the average person were to describe John Beecham in light of his murders, he’d say he was a social outcast, but nothing could be more superficial, or more untrue. Beecham could never have turned his back on human society, nor society on him, and why? Because he was—perversely, perhaps, but utterly—tied to that society. He was its offspring, its sick conscience—a living reminder of all the hidden crimes we commit when we close ranks to live among each other. He craved human society, craved the chance to show people what their ‘society’ had done to him. And the odd thing is, society craved him, too.”
“Craved him?” I said, as we passed along the quiet perimeter of Washington Square Park. “How do you mean? They’d have shot him through with electricity if they’d had the chance.”
“Yes, but not before holding him up to the world,” Kreizler answered. “We revel in men like Beecham, Moore—they are the easy repositories of all that is dark in our very social world. But the things that helped make Beecham what he was? Those, we tolerate. Those, we even enjoy…”
As Kreizler’s gaze drifted away again, the calash rolled to a slow stop outside my grandmother’s house. The sky was only beginning to glow in the east, but there was already a light on in the upper floors of Number 19 Washington Square. As Kreizler turned his head to take in the streets around him, he caught sight of that light, and it brought the first small smile of the morning to his face.
“How has your grandmother felt about your involvement in a murder case. Moore?” he asked. “She always took a lively interest in the macabre.”
“I haven’t told her,” I answered. “She simply thinks that my gambling habit has gotten worse. And, all things considered, I’m going to let her keep thinking that.” I got to the sidewalk with a stiff little jump. “So—we’re to be at Del’s tonight, I understand?”
Kreizler nodded once. “It seems appropriate, eh?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’m going to call Charlie—have him tell Ranhofer to lay something really exceptional on. We deserve that much, anyway.”
Kreizler’s smile widened just a bit. “Indeed, Moore,” he said, closing the calash door and offering his hand. I shook it, and then Laszlo faced front with a small groan. “All right, Stevie.”
The boy turned and saluted to me, and then the carriage kept rolling on toward Fifth Avenue.
CHAPTER 47
* * *
Almost twenty-four hours later, as I was stumbling home after a meal at Delmonico’s that would have slowed down a regiment of cavalry and their horses, I stopped at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to buy an early edition of the Tuesday Times. Walking on down the avenue as I scanned the paper, I found myself once more under the watchful eye of Colonel Waring’s helmeted young street cleaners, who were just waiting for me to drop some shred of newsprint. I ignored them, however, and continued my search, finally locating what I was looking for in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page.
That morning the custodian at the Bellevue morgue had made a gruesome discovery. Wrapped in a tarp and deposited near the back door of the building was the body of a muscular adult male who in life had stood over six feet tall. Because the body was not clothed, there were no identifying documents to be found. A single bullet wound to the chest was the apparent cause of death; but the body had sustained further damage, as well. Specifically, the top of the skull had been removed and the brain apparently dissected in a way that, the morgue staff said, indicated an expert hand. A brief note had been found pinned to the tarp, claiming that this was the body of the man responsible for the boy-whore murders—or, as the Times put it, “the deaths of the several forlorn young boys known to have been in the employ of houses too sordid to be mentioned in these pages.” Inquiries made of Commissioner Roosevelt (whom I’d spoken to that afternoon by telephone) had confirmed that the murderer had indeed been killed while trying to continue his horrifying work. For various important but unexplained reasons, the commissioner said, he was not at liberty to reveal either the killer’s name or any details of his death; but the public should know that members of the Division of Detectives had been involved, and that the case was most decidedly closed.
On finishing the story I looked around the avenue and gave out with a long, satisfying holler.
I can still feel that sense of relish as I look back across almost twenty-three years. Kreizler and I are old men now, and New York is a very different place—as J. P. Morgan told us the night we visited him in his Black Library, the city, like the country generally, was on the verge of a tumultuous metamorphosis in 1896. Thanks to Theodore and many of his political allies, we have been transformed into a great power, and New York is more than ever the crossroads of the world. The crime and corruption that are still the firm foundations of city life have taken on ever more businesslike trappings—Paul Kelly, for example, has gone on to become an important leader of organized labor. True, children still die at the hands of depraved adults while plying the skin trade, and unidentified bodies are occasionally found in peculiar places; but to the best of my knowledge, a menace of John Beecham’s stripe has not been seen again in this city. It is my abiding hope that such creatures do not appear very often; Kreizler, of course, suspects that such faith is utterly self-deluding.
I’ve seen a great deal of Lucius and Marcus Isaacson during the last twenty-three years, and even more of Sara; all of them have pursued their careers in criminal detection with single-minded devotion and brilliant results. There have even been occasions when we’ve had cause to investigate some little matter together, undertakings that collectively form the chain of my most memorable experiences. But nothing, I suppose, will ever be quite like the hunt for Beecham. Perhaps with Roosevelt’s passing, that achievement will finally gain public appreciation; if nothing else, it serves as a singular reminder that, beneath all his theatrical bluster, Theodore possessed a heart and a mind expansive enough to have made such an unprecedented undertaking possible.
Oh, and a note to those who may be curious about the fates of Cyrus Montrose and Stevie Taggert: Cyrus eventually married, and brought his wife to work for Kreizler. The couple have several children, one of whom is currently enrolled at the Harvard Medical School. As for young Stevie, on attaining adulthood he borrowed some money from Kreizler and opened a tobacconist’s shop across the street from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the new Flatiron Building. He’s done well, and in the past fifteen years I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without a cigarette in his mouth.
Just three years after the Beecham case, the Croton Reservoir—having been outmoded by a new water system constructed after Boss Platt consummated his Greater New York scheme—was demolished to make room for the main headquarters of that most marvelous of all philanthropical endeavors, the New York Public Library. Having seen a notice in the Times announcing the demolition, I went over to take a look at the work during my lunch hour one day. The task of tearing the reservoir down had begun at the southern wall, on top of which we had faced the final challenge of our investigation, and which was now being knocked away to expose an enormous man-made crater one block wide and two blocks long. The structure didn’t look like much, all laid open to view that way; it was hard to believe that it had ever been strong enough to withstand the fantastic pressure exerted by millions of gallons of water.
Afterword to the New Edition
Like most wonderful and terrible things, The Alienist was never supposed to happen.
In the early 1990s, I was a military and diplomatic historian whose ideas on both subjects were too extreme to guarantee regular employment. My last two books—a history of American security policy and a biography of a key but overlooked nineteenth-century American mercenary—had received good reviews, but said reviews had not tran
slated into appreciable sales. Even the articles I wrote for historical journals seemed to inspire controversy, while one piece that I wrote for The New York Times Book Review that dared to question the genius of the generals who ran America’s Civil War inspired more hate mail than any single item in that publication’s long history.
And if what I had to say about the past was objectionable, my feelings about the present, the future, and such things as the possibility of a cataclysmic attack on the United States by obscure people and organizations around the world were worrisome enough that it was often hard to get even close associates to publish them.
Such being the case, I began to think about writing fiction, affecting to tell anyone who was interested that my mind could no longer be constrained by mere facts. I had published a novel (what stunk) right after college, and I knew at least that it’s smart policy, if you’re a writer or would-be writer looking for a subject, to try to imagine a book that you yourself would like to read but can’t find. A lifelong interest in crime and the formation of the mind had led me to decide on a psychological thriller, but my grounding in nonfiction would not allow me to be anything but rigorous in my research and approach. This, I soon realized, could get tricky: How do you devise a story that includes the kind of hard science I’d nosed around in without making readers and audiences want to drive ice picks through their own eyes?
I’m not sure just when the idea of focusing on two men—both from abusive backgrounds, one of whom becomes a murderer, the other a hunter of such murderers—came to me. Perhaps it had always been there; perhaps it had been my original method of reconciling the furiously different sides of what had once been my bright but violently angry young self. Whatever the case, the most pressing need was to know why people of such seemingly similar backgrounds could turn out so differently. This was (and remains) the point at which, for my money, most psychological thrillers went wrong: They’re not really psychological investigations at all, but conventionally crafted whodunits, what I call narrative crossword puzzles.
