The Alienist (9 page)

So—on that dismal March morning Kreizler and I became detectives, as all three of us knew we must. That certainty was based, as I say, on thorough awareness of each other’s characters and pasts; yet there was one person in New York at that threshold moment who had correctly guessed at our deliberations and their conclusion without ever having been so much as introduced to us. Only in retrospect can I see that that person had taken a careful interest in our activities that morning; and that he chose the moment of Kreizler’s and my departure from Police Headquarters to deliver an ambiguous yet unsettling message.

Hustling through a new onslaught of heavy rain delivered by an increasingly forbidding sky, Laszlo and I got back into his calash, where I became immediately aware of a peculiar stench, one very unlike the usual odors of horse waste and garbage that predominated on the streets of the city.

“Kreizler,” I said, wrinkling my nose as he sat beside me, “has someone been—”

I stopped when I turned to see Laszlo’s black eyes fixed on a remote corner of the carriage floor. Following his gaze I caught sight of a balled-up, heavily stained white rag, which I poked at with my umbrella.

“Quite a distinct blend of aromas,” Kreizler murmured. “Human blood and excrement, unless I’m mistaken.”

I groaned and grabbed my nose with my left hand as I realized he was right. “Some local boy’s idea of funny,” I said, picking up the rag with the point of my umbrella. “Carriages, like top hats, make good targets.” As I flung the rag out the window it disgorged a ball of equally stained printed paper that fell to the carriage floor. I moaned again and tried unsuccessfully to spear the document with my umbrella. As I did the thing began to come unbunched and I was able to make out a bit of the printing on it.

“Well,” I grunted, perplexed. “This sounds like something in
your
department, Kreizler. ‘The Relationship of Hygiene and Diet to the Formation of Infantile Neural—’”

With shocking abruptness Kreizler grabbed my umbrella from my hand, stabbed its tip through the bit of paper, and then flung both items out the window.

“What in—Kreizler!” I jumped out of the carriage, retrieved the umbrella, separated it from the offensive piece of paper, and then got back into the calash. “That umbrella wasn’t cheap, I’ll have you know!”

As I glanced at Kreizler I saw a trace of real apprehension in his features; but then he seemed to force the trace away, and when he spoke it was in a determinedly casual tone. “I am sorry, Moore. But I happen to be familiar with that author. As poor a stylist as he is a thinker. And this is no time to be sidetracked—we’ve much to do.” He leaned forward and called out Cyrus’s name, at which the big man’s head appeared under the canopy of the carriage. “The Institute, and then on to lunch,” Laszlo said. “And pick up some speed, if you can, Cyrus—we could use a bit of fresh air in here.”

It was obvious, at that point, that the person who had left the befouled rag in the calash was not a child: for, based on the brief passage that I’d been able to read as well as on Kreizler’s reaction, the monograph from which the sheet of paper had been torn was almost certainly one of Laszlo’s own works. Thinking that one of Kreizler’s many critics—either in the Police Department or from the public at large—was responsible for the act, I didn’t delve any deeper into it; but in the weeks to come, the full significance of the incident would become harrowingly clear.

CHAPTER 7

W
e were anxious to begin marshalling our forces for the investigation, and the delays we experienced, though brief, were frustrating. When Theodore got wind of the speculative interest in Kreizler’s visit to headquarters displayed by reporters and police officers, he realized that he’d made a mistake by holding the meeting there, and told us he needed a couple of days to get things calmed down. Kreizler and I used the time to make arrangements regarding our “civilian” occupations. I had to convince my editors to grant me a leave of absence, a goal made somewhat easier by a timely telephone call from Roosevelt, who explained that I was wanted on vital police business. Nonetheless, I was only allowed out of the editorial offices of the
Times
at Thirty-second and Broadway when I pledged that if the investigation resulted in a story that was fit to print, I would not take it to another paper or magazine, regardless of how much money I was offered. I assured my sour-faced taskmasters that they wouldn’t want the story anyway, and then breezed down Broadway on a typical March morning in New York: twenty-nine degrees at eleven
A.M
., with winds of fifty miles an hour cutting through the streets. I was scheduled to meet Kreizler at his Institute, and I had thought to walk, so great was my sense of release at not being answerable to my editors for an indefinite period. But real New York cold—the kind that freezes horse urine in little rivulets on the surface of the streets—will conquer the best of spirits eventually. Outside the Fifth Avenue Hotel I decided to get a cab, pausing only to watch Boss Platt emerge from a carriage and vanish inside, his stiff, unnatural movements doing nothing to reassure the onlooker that he was, in fact, alive.

Kreizler’s leave of absence, I speculated inside the cab, would not be so simple a matter as mine. The two dozen or so children at his Institute depended on his presence and his counsel, having come to him from homes (or streets) where they were either habitually ignored, regularly chastised, or actively beaten. Indeed, I had not initially seen how he proposed to take up another vocation, even temporarily, so great was the need for his steadying hand at the Institute; but then he told me that he still planned to spend two mornings and one night per week there, at which times he would leave our investigation in my hands. It was not the kind of responsibility I’d anticipated, and I was surprised when the notion left me feeling eager rather than anxious.

Shortly after my cab passed through Chatham Square and turned onto East Broadway, I disembarked at Numbers 185–187: the Kreizler Institute. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I saw that Laszlo’s calash was also at the curb, and I glanced up at the windows of the Institute, half-expecting to see him looking out for me but finding no face.

Kreizler had bought the Institute’s two four-story, red-brick and black-trim buildings with his own money in 1885, and then had their interiors remodeled so that they became one unit. The subsequent upkeep of the place was covered by the fee he charged his wealthier clients, as well as by the considerable income he took in from his work as an expert legal witness. The children’s rooms were on the top floor of the Institute, and class and recreational halls occupied the third. On the second floor were Kreizler’s consulting and examination rooms, as well as his psychological laboratory, where he performed tests on the children’s powers of perception, reaction, association, memory, and all the other psychic functions that so fascinated the alienist community. The ground floor was reserved for his rather forbidding operational theater, where he performed the occasional brain dissection and post-mortem. My cab had pulled up near the black iron stairs that led to the main entrance, at Number 185, and Cyrus Montrose was at the top of them, his head housed in a bowler, his huge frame enveloped in an even more sizable greatcoat, and his wide nostrils breathing cool fire.

“Afternoon, Cyrus,” I said with a difficult smile as I climbed the stairs, vainly hoping that I didn’t sound as uneasy as I always felt when caught in his shark’s stare. “Is Dr. Kreizler here?”

“That’s his carriage, Mr. Moore,” Cyrus answered, in a pleasant enough voice that still managed to make me sound like one of the bigger idiots in the city. But I just grinned resolutely on.

“I expect you’ve heard that the doctor and I will be working together for a while?”

Cyrus nodded with what, if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn was a wry smile. “I’ve heard, sir.”

“Well!” I brushed my jacket back and slapped at my vest. “I guess I’ll go find him. Afternoon, Cyrus!”

I got no answer from the man as I entered, not that I deserved one; there was no reason for both of us to behave like morons.

The Institute’s small vestibule and front hall—white with dark wood wainscoting—were full of the usual fathers, mothers, and children, all crowded onto two long, low benches and waiting to see Kreizler. Almost every morning in the late winter and early spring, Laszlo personally conducted interviews to determine who would be admitted to the Institute the following fall. The applicants ranged from the wealthiest northeastern families to the poorest of immigrants and rural laborers, but they all had one thing in common: a troubled or troublesome child whose behavior was in some way extreme and inexplicable. This was all very serious, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that the Institute was, on such mornings, a bit of a zoo. As you walked down the hallway you were likely to be tripped, spat at, cursed, and otherwise maltreated, particularly by those children whose only mental deficiency was that they’d been overindulged, and whose parents clearly could and should have saved themselves the trip to Kreizler’s office.

As I moved to the door of Kreizler’s consulting room, I locked gazes with one such prospective troublemaker, a fat little boy with malevolent eyes. A dark, heavily lined woman of about fifty, wrapped in a shawl and mumbling something that I suspected was Hungarian, was pacing back and forth in front of the consulting room door; I had to dodge both her and the fat boy’s kicking legs in order to get close enough to knock. Having done so I heard Kreizler shout “Yes!” and then I entered, the pacing woman watching me with apparent concern.

After the fairly innocuous vestibule, Laszlo’s consulting room was the first place that his prospective patients (whom he always referred to as “students,” insisting that his staff do the same in order to avoid making the children conscious of their situations and conditions) saw on entering the space and experience that were the Kreizler Institute. He had therefore taken care that its furnishings were not intimidating. There were paintings of animals that, while reflecting Laszlo’s good taste, nonetheless amused and reassured the children, as did the presence of toys—ball-and-cup, simple building blocks, dolls, and lead soldiers—which Laszlo actually used in making preliminary tests of agility, reaction time, and emotional disposition. The presence of medical instruments was minimal, most being kept in the examination room beyond. It was there that Kreizler would perform his first series of physical investigations, should a given case interest him. These tests were designed to determine whether the child’s difficulties stemmed from secondary causes (that is, bodily malfunctions that affected mood and behavior) or primary abnormalities, meaning mental or emotional disorders. If a child showed no evidence of secondary distress, and Kreizler thought he could do some good in the case (in other words, if there were no signs of hopeless brain disease or damage), the child would be “enrolled”: he or she would live at the Institute nearly full-time, going home only for holidays, and then only if Kreizler thought such contact safe. Laszlo very much agreed with the theories of his friend and colleague Dr. Adolf Meyer, and often quoted one of Meyer’s dictums: “The degenerative processes in children have their chief encouragement in the equally defective home surroundings.” Allowing troubled children a new environmental context was the most important goal of the Institute; and beyond that, it was the cornerstone of Laszlo’s passionate effort to discover whether or not what he called the “original mold” of the human psyche could be recast and the fate to which the accidents of birth consign each of us thereby redetermined.

Kreizler was sitting at his rather ornate secretary, writing by the light of a small Tiffany desk lamp of muted green and gold glass. Waiting for him to look up, I approached a small bookshelf near the secretary and took down one of my favorite volumes:
The Career and Death of the Mad Thief and Murderer, Samuel Green.
The case, dating from 1822, was one that Laszlo often cited to the parents of his “students,” for the infamous Green had been, in Kreizler’s words, “a product of the whip”—beaten throughout his childhood—and at the time of his capture had openly acknowledged that his crimes against society were a form of revenge. My own attraction to the book was prompted by its frontispiece, which depicted “The Madman Green’s End” on a Boston gallows. I had always enjoyed Green’s crazed stare in the picture, and was amusedly reacquainting myself with it when Kreizler, without turning from his desk, thrust out a few sheets of paper and said:

“Look at these, Moore. Our first success, small though it is.”

Putting the book aside and taking the papers from him, I found that they were a series of forms and releases that seemed to refer to a graveyard, and to two graves in particular; there was a note concerning exhumation of bodies, and a nearly illegible document signed by one Abraham Zweig—

I was distracted by the unmistakable feeling of being watched. Turning, I saw a young girl of about twelve, with a round, pretty face that bore a somewhat frightened and slightly persecuted expression. She had taken up the book I’d laid down, and was glancing from me to the frontispiece as she fixed the top few buttons of a simple but clean dress. She read the small legend that explained the engraving, and apparently leapt to some unpleasant conclusions—her face grew fearful and she looked to Kreizler, while shying away from me.

Laszlo turned to her. “Ah, Berthe. Ready to leave?”

The girl pointed at the book uncertainly, then spoke in a tremor as she turned her finger on me: “Then…am
I
mad, too, Dr. Kreizler? And is this man going to put me in one of those places?”

“What?” Kreizler answered, taking the book away and giving me an admonishing look. “Mad? Ridiculous! We have only good news.” Laszlo spoke to her as to any adult—directly, bluntly—but with a tone that he reserved for children: patient, kind, occasionally indulgent. “Come right over here.” The girl approached him, and Kreizler helped her jump onto his knee. “You are a very healthy, very
intelligent
young lady.” The girl blushed and laughed, quietly and happily. “Your difficulty stems from a series of small growths that are living in your nose and ears. These growths, unlike you, enjoy the fact that your house is
too blasted cold.
” He tapped her head in time with these last words. “You shall have to see a doctor, who is a friend of mine, and have these growths removed. All of which can be done while you’re having a very pleasant sleep. And as for this man”—he put Berthe back on the floor—“he is my friend, Mr. Moore. Say hello.”

The girl curtsied ever so slightly, but did not speak. I bowed back. “Very pleased to meet you, Berthe.”

She only laughed again, at which Laszlo made a ticking noise. “Enough of your giggling. Go and fetch your mother and we’ll arrange everything.”

The girl ran to the door and Kreizler tapped the papers in my hand with some excitement. “Fast work, eh, Moore? They arrived here not an hour ago.”

“Who did?” I asked in bewilderment. “What did?”

“The Zweig children!” he answered quietly. “The ones in the water tower—I have their remains downstairs!”

It was so ghoulish a notion, and one so at odds with the rest of the activity in the Institute that day, that I couldn’t help but shudder. Before I could ask why in the world he should have done such a thing, however, the girl Berthe had brought her mother—the woman with the shawl—into the office. The woman exchanged a few words in Hungarian with Kreizler, but his knowledge of that language was limited (his German father had not wished his children to speak their mother’s tongue) and the conversation soon shifted back to English.

“Mrs. Rajk, you really must listen to me!” Laszlo said, exasperated.

“But, Doctor,” the woman protested, wringing her hands, “sometimes, you see, she understands good, and then I know she is being like a demon, tormenting us—”

“Mrs. Rajk, I’m not certain how many different ways I can explain this to you,” Kreizler said, making one more attempt at evenhandedness as he pulled his silver watch from his vest pocket and quickly looked at it. “Or in how many languages. The swelling is occasionally less marked, you see?” He pointed at his own ear, nose, and throat. “At such times she is in no pain, and can not only hear and speak but breathe easily. So she is alert and attentive. But most of the time the vegetations in the pharynx and the posterior nasal cavity—the throat, the nose—cover the eustachian tubes, connected to her ears, and generally make such an effort difficult, if not impossible. The fact that your flat is full of cold drafts aggravates the condition.” Kreizler put his hands on the young girl’s shoulders, and she smiled happily again. “In short, she is not doing any of this deliberately to torment either you or her instructor. Do you understand?” He leaned down into the mother’s face, giving her a close examination with the hawk’s eyes. “No. Obviously you do not. Well, then, you must simply accept my statement—there is nothing wrong with her mind
or
her soul. Take her to St. Luke’s. Dr. Osborne performs these procedures quite regularly, and I believe I can persuade him to lower his fee. By next fall”—he tousled the girl’s hair, and she looked up at him gratefully—“Berthe will be more than recovered and quite ready to excel at school. Correct, young lady?”

The girl didn’t answer, but let out another little laugh. The mother tried one more “But—” before Kreizler took her by the arm and hustled her out through the vestibule to the front door. “Really, Mrs. Rajk, that is enough. The fact that you cannot understand it does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Take her to Dr. Osborne! I shall consult with him, and if I find you have not obeyed me I shall be extremely angry.” He closed the front door on them, turned back into the vestibule, and was immediately besieged by the remaining families. Shouting an announcement that there would be a short break in the interviewing, Kreizler retreated into the consulting room again and slammed the door.