The Alienist (25 page)

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 with ‘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

F
irst 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 revealing 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.

“As for his opening statement,” Kreizler went on. “Aside from the pronounced emphasis on ‘lies’—”

“That word has been retraced several times,” Marcus cut in. “There’s a lot of feeling behind it.”

“Then lies are not a new phenomenon for him,” Sara extrapolated. “You get the feeling he’s all too familiar with dishonesty and hypocrisy.”

“And yet is still outraged by them,” Kreizler said. “Any theories?”

“It ties in with the boys,” I offered. “In the first place, they’re dressed up as girls—a kind of deceit. Also, they’re whores, and they’re supposed to be compliant—but we know that the ones he killed could be troublesome.”

“Good,” Kreizler said with a nod. “So he doesn’t like misrepresentation. Yet he’s a liar himself—we need an explanation for that.”

“He’s learned,” Sara said simply. “He’s been exposed to dishonesty, surrounded by it perhaps, and he does hate it—but he’s picked it up as a method of getting by.”

“And you only do that kind of learning once,” I added. “It’s the same thing as the violence: he saw it, he didn’t like it, but he learned it. The law of habit and interest, just like Professor James says—our minds work on the basis of self-interest, the survival of the organism, and our habitual ways of pursuing that interest become defined when we’re children and adolescents.”

Lucius had grabbed volume one of James’s
Principles
and leafed to a page: “‘The character has set like plaster,’” he quoted, holding a finger up, “‘never to soften again.’”

“Even if…?” Kreizler asked, drawing him out.

“Even if,” Lucius answered quickly, flipping a page and scanning it with his finger, “those habits become counterproductive in adulthood. Here: ‘Habit dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.’”

“A spirited reading, Detective Sergeant,” Kreizler observed, “but we need examples. We have postulated an original violent experience or experiences, perhaps sexual in nature”—Laszlo indicated a small blank square in the
CHILDHOOD
section of the board that was boxed off and subheaded
THE MOLDING VIOLENCE AND
/
OR MOLESTATION
—“which we suspect form the basis of his understanding and practice of such behavior. But what of the very strong emotions centered on dishonesty? Can we do the same?”

I shrugged. “Obviously, he might himself have been accused of it. Unjustly, in all likelihood. Perhaps frequently.”

“Sound,” Kreizler answered, chalking the word
DISHONESTY
, and then beneath it,
BRANDED A LIAR
, on the left-hand side of the board.

“And then there’s the family situation,” Sara added. “There’s a lot of lying that goes on in a family. Adultery is probably the first thing we think of, but—”

“But it doesn’t tie in to the violence,” Kreizler finished. “And I suspect that it must. Could the dishonesty apply
to
the violence—to violent incidents that were deliberately concealed and remained unacknowledged both inside and outside the family?”

“Certainly,” Lucius said. “And it would be all the worse if the
image
of the family was something very different.”

Kreizler smiled with real satisfaction. “Precisely. Then if we have an outwardly respectable father who at the very least beats his wife and children…”

Lucius’s face screwed up a bit. “I didn’t necessarily mean a father. It could have been anyone in the family.”

Laszlo waved him off. “The father would be the greatest betrayal.”

“Not the mother?” Sara said carefully. And there was more in the question than just the subject at hand: at that moment it seemed that she was trying to read Laszlo as much as the killer.

“There’s no literature to suggest it,” Kreizler answered. “The recent findings of Breuer and Freud on hysteria point to prepubertal sexual abuse by the
father
in nearly every case.”

“With all due respect, Dr. Kreizler,” Sara protested, “Breuer and Freud seem fairly confused about the meaning of their findings. Freud began by assuming sexual abuse as the basis for all hysteria, but recently he seems to have altered that view, and decided that
fantasies
concerning abuse may be the actual cause.”

“Indeed,” Kreizler acknowledged. “There is much that remains unclear in their work. I myself cannot accept the single-minded emphasis on sex—to the exclusion even of violence. But look at it from an empirical standpoint, Sara—how many households have you known that were ruled by dominating, violent mothers?”

Sara shrugged. “There is more than one kind of violence, Doctor—but I shall have more to say about that when we reach the end of the letter.”

Kreizler had already written
VIOLENT BUT OUTWARDLY RESPECTABLE FATHER
on the left-hand side of the board, and seemed ready, even anxious, to move on. “This entire first paragraph,” he said, slapping at the note. “Despite its deliberate misspellings, it has a consistent tone.”

“You get that immediately,” Marcus answered. “He’s already decided in his mind that there are a lot of people after him.”

“I think I know what you’re driving at, Doctor,” Lucius said, again rifling through the stack of books and papers on his desk. “One of the articles you gave us to read, the one you translated yourself…ah!” He yanked one set of papers free. “Here—Dr. Krafft-Ebing. He discusses ‘intellectual monomania,’ as well as what the Germans call
‘primäre Verrücktheit,’
and argues for replacing both terms with the word ‘paranoia.’”

Kreizler nodded as he wrote the word
PARANOID
on the
INTERVAL
section of the board: “Feelings, perhaps even delusions, of persecution that have taken root after some traumatic emotional experience or set of experiences, but which do not result in dementia—Krafft-Ebing’s admirably succinct definition, and it does seem to fit. I very much doubt that our man is in a deluded state as yet, but his behavior is probably quite antisocial, nevertheless. Which does not mean that we seek a misanthrope—that would be too simple.”

“Couldn’t the murders themselves satisfy the antisocial drive?” Sara asked. “Leaving him, the rest of the time, outwardly normal and—well, participatory, functional?”

“Perhaps even
overly
functional,” Kreizler agreed. “This will not be a man who, in the opinion of his neighbors, could slaughter children and claim to have eaten them.” Kreizler jotted these ideas down and then faced us again. “And so—we arrive at the second and even more extraordinary paragraph.”

“One thing it tells us right away,” Marcus pronounced. “He hasn’t traveled much abroad. I don’t know what he’s been reading, but widespread cannibalism hasn’t been seen in Europe lately. They’ll eat just about anything else, but not each other. Although you can never be quite sure about the Germans…” Marcus caught himself and glanced at Kreizler. “Oh. No offense intended, Doctor,” he said.

Lucius clapped a hand to his forehead, but Kreizler only smiled wryly. The Isaacsons’ idiosyncrasies no longer perplexed him in any way. “No offense taken, Detective Sergeant—you can, indeed, never be certain about the Germans. But if we accept that his travel has been limited to the United States, what are we to make of your theory that his mountaineering skills indicate a European heritage?”

Marcus shrugged. “First-generation American. The parents were immigrants.”

Sara drew a quick breath. “‘Dirty immigrants’!”

Kreizler’s face filled with gratification again. “Indeed,” he said, writing
IMMIGRANT PARENTS
on the left side of the chalkboard. “The phrase resounds with loathing, doesn’t it? It’s the kind of hatred that generally has a specific root, obscure though it may be. In this case, he probably had a troubled relationship with one or both parents early on, and eventually grew to despise everything about them—including their heritage.”

“Yet it’s his own heritage, too,” I said. “That might account for some of the savagery toward the children. It’s self-loathing, as if he’s trying to clean the dirt out of himself.”

“An interesting phrase, John,” Kreizler answered. “And one we shall return to. But there is one more practical question to be answered here. Given the hunting and the mountaineering, and now the supposition that he has not been abroad, can we say anything about the geographical background?”

“Same thing as before,” Lucius replied. “Either a rich city family, or the countryside.”

“Detective Sergeant?” Laszlo said to Marcus. “Would any one region be better than another for this training?”

Marcus shook his head. “You could learn it anywhere that had appreciable rock formations—which means a lot of places in the United States.”

“Hmmm,” Laszlo agreed, with some disappointment. “Not much help there. Let’s let it lie for now and go back to that second paragraph. The language itself would seem to support your theory concerning the ‘upper-zone flourishes’ of the handwriting, Marcus. This is indeed an imaginative tale.”

“That’s a hell of an imagination,” I said.

“True, John,” Kreizler answered. “Without doubt, excessive and morbid.”

Lucius snapped his fingers at that. “Wait,” he said, again going for his books. “I’m remembering something—”

“Sorry, Lucius,” Sara called, with one of her curling little smiles. “I’ve beaten you to it.” She held up an open medical journal. “This fits in with the dishonesty discussion, Doctor,” she went on. “In his article ‘A Schedule for the Study of Mental Abnormalities in Children,’ Dr. Meyer lists some of the warning signs for predicting future dangerous behavior—excessive imagination is one of them.” She read from the article, which had appeared in the
Handbook of the Illinois Society for Child-Study
in February of 1895: “‘Normally children can reproduce voluntarily all sorts of mental pictures in the dark. This becomes abnormal when the mental pictures become an obsession, i.e., cannot be suppressed. Especially pictures that create fear and unpleasant feelings are apt to become excessively strong.’” Sara emphasized the final sentence of the quotation: “‘Excessive imagination may lead to the construction of lies and the irresistible impulse to play them on others.’”

“Thank you, Sara,” Kreizler said.
MORBID IMAGINATION
then went up on both the
CHILDHOOD
and
ASPECTS
sections of the chalkboard, which puzzled me. To my request for an explanation Laszlo replied, “He may be writing this letter in his adulthood, John, but so distinctive an imagination does not spring to life in maturity. It’s been with him always—and Meyer is borne out here, incidentally, for this child did indeed become dangerous.”

Marcus was tapping a pencil into one hand thoughtfully. “Any chance this cannibalism business was a childhood nightmare? He says he’s read it. Any chance he read it
then
? The effect would have been greater.”