The Alienist

  It was Parkhurst’s revelations about how very degenerate life in much of New York had become, and how very much many members of the city government profited from that degeneracy, that led to a New York State Senate committee’s investigation of official corruption in the city. Headed by Clarence Lexow, the committee ended up calling for “an indictment against the Police Department of New York City as a whole,” and many members of the old police guard felt the sting of reform. As I’ve said before, however, degeneracy and corruption are not passing aspects but permanent features of life in New York; and while it has always been pleasant to think, when listening to such righteously outraged speakers as Parkhurst, Lexow, Mayor Strong, and even Theodore, that one is hearing the voice of the solid base of the city’s population, walking into a place like the Golden Rule never fails to bring one hard up against the fact that the drives and desires that spawn such joints—drives that would bring ostracism and even prosecution in any other part of the United States—have at least as many disciples and defenders as does “decent society.”

  Of course, the defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people, as became clear to Marcus when we entered the nondescript front door of the Golden Rule on that Saturday evening. Almost immediately, we came face-to-face with a round-bellied, middle-aged man in expensive evening clothes, who shielded his face as he exited the place and then hurried into a very expensive carriage that was waiting for him at the curb. Behind him came a boy of fifteen or sixteen, typically dolled up for a night’s work and counting money with great satisfaction. The boy called something after the man in the usual grating falsetto register that was, for the uninitiated, so strange and disturbing; and then he walked by us very playfully, promising a full evening’s entertainment should we choose him from among his mates. Marcus turned immediately away and stared at the ceiling, but I answered the boy, telling him we were not customers and that we wanted to see Scotch Ann.

  “Oh,” the boy droned languorously in his natural voice. “More cops, I guess. Ann!” He moved toward a large room farther inside the basement, from which emanated raucous laughter. “There’s more gentle-men about the murder!”

  We followed the boy for a few steps, stopping at the entrance to the large room. Inside it were a few pieces of once ostentatious but now-decrepit furniture, and over the cold, moldy floor was thrown a well-worn Persian carpet. On the carpet was a squatting, half-naked man in his thirties, who crawled about and laughed as several even more scantily dressed boys vaulted over him.

  “Leapfrog,” Marcus mumbled, taking it in with a nervous glance. “Didn’t they lure Parkhurst into something like that when he came here?”

  “That was at Hattie Adams’s, up in the Tenderloin,” I answered. “Parkhurst didn’t last long in the Golden Rule—when he found out what actually went on here he bolted.”

  Sauntering out from the area of the back rooms came Scotch Ann, heavily painted, obviously drunk, and well past her prime, if indeed she had ever had one. A flimsy pink dress clung to her powdered body (rising so high on her chest that one could not say if she was, in fact, a woman at all), and her face bore the harassed, weary scowl common to disorderly house owners when presented with an unexpected visit from the law.

  “I don’t know what you want, boys,” she said, in a gruff voice that’d been destroyed by alcohol and smoking, “but I already pay two precinct captains five hundred bucks a month each to let me stay open. Which means there’s nothing left over for fly cops. And everything I know about the murder I already told one detective—”

  “That’s lucky,” Marcus said, showing his badge and taking Ann by the arm toward the front door. “Then it’s all fresh in your mind. But don’t worry, information is all we want.”

  Somewhat relieved that her recitation would cost her nothing, Scotch Ann gave forth with the story of Fatima, originally Ali ibn-Ghazi, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy who had been in America just over a year. Ali’s mother had died within weeks of the family’s arrival in New York, after picking up a lethal disease down in the Syrian ghetto near Washington Market. The boy’s father, an unskilled laborer, had subsequently been unable to find any work at all, and took to begging. He put his children on display in order to spur the generosity of passersby, and it was while Ali was serving in this capacity, on a corner near the Golden Rule, that Scotch Ann first caught sight of him. The boy’s delicate Near Eastern features made him, as Ann put it, “a natural for my place.” She quickly “came to terms” with the father, terms that closely resembled indenture or perhaps even slavery. Thus was born “Fatima,” at the mention of which absurd appellation I discovered that I was rapidly losing patience with the practice of renaming young boys so that they could be proferred to adult men who either had inane scruples about who they molested or were aroused by particularly ridiculous perversions. “She was a real moneymaker,” Scotch Ann told us. I felt like belting the woman, but Marcus pursued the investigation calmly and professionally. Ann could provide us with few other particulars about Ali, and became concerned when we said we wanted to both see the room out of which he’d worked and interview any boys who were particularly friendly with him.

  “I suppose there weren’t many,” Marcus said casually. “He was probably a difficult young man.”

  “Fatima?” Ann said, pulling her head back. “If she was, I never knew about it. Oh, she could play the hellcat with the customers—you’d be surprised how many of them like that kind of thing—but she never complained, and the other girls seemed to dote on her.”

  Marcus and I exchanged a quick, puzzled look. The statement didn’t match the pattern we’d come to expect concerning the victims. As we followed Ann down a dirty little corridor that ran among the partitioned rooms in the back, Marcus puzzled with this apparent inconsistency, then nodded and murmured to me, “Wouldn’t you mind your manners around someone you’d been sold in bondage to? Let’s wait and see what the rest of the girls say. Boys, I mean.” He shook his head. “Damn it, now they’ve got me doing it.”

  The other boys who worked in the Golden Rule, however, provided no information that substantially contradicted their whoremistress. Standing in the narrow corridor and individually interviewing over a dozen painted youths as they exited from their partitioned rooms (forced, all the while, to listen to the obscene grunts, groans, and declarations of lust that emerged from those confines), Marcus and I were consistently presented with a portrait of Ali ibn-Ghazi that lacked any angry or obstreperous details. It was disturbing, but we had no time to dwell on it, for the last rays of daylight were fading and we needed to examine the outside of the building. As soon as the room Ali had regularly used, which faced an alleyway behind the club, had been vacated by a furtive pair of men and an exhausted-looking boy, we entered it, braving the warm, humid atmosphere and the smell of sweat in order to check Marcus’s theory about the killer’s method of movement.

  Here, at least, we found what we were looking for: a filthy window that could be opened, above which were four stories of sheer, unencumbered brick wall leading to the roof of the building. We would need to get a look at that roof before the sun set fully; nevertheless, as we left the little chamber, I paused long enough to ask one momentarily idle boy in a neighboring room what time Ali had left the Golden Rule on the night of his death. The young man frowned and struggled with the question a bit as he stared in a cheap slab of decaying mirror.

  “Damn me—that’s peculiar, ain’t it?” he said, in a tone that seemed too jaded to be coming from so young a mouth. “Now that you mention it, I don’t remember ever seeing him go.” He threw up a hand and went on with his work. “But I was probably engaged. It was the weekend, after all. One of the other girls must’ve seen her leave.”

  But the same question, put a few more times to various painted faces as we walked out of the club, brought similar answers. Ali’s departure, then, had almost certainly been effected through the window in his room, and then up the rear wall o
f the building. Marcus and I ran outside, up to the first-floor entrance and the small vestibule, then into a vermin-infested staircase that wound up to a pitch-black doorway splattered with tar that opened onto the roof. Our quick movements were inspired by more than the dying sunlight: we both knew that we were tracing our killer’s steps more precisely than we’d been able to do before, and the effect was both chilling and exhilarating.

  The roof was like any other in New York, spotted with chimneys, bird droppings, ramshackle utility sheds, and the odd bottle or cigarette end that indicated the occasional presence of people. (Because it was early in the spring and still chilly, there were none of the signs of regular habitation—chairs, tables, hammocks—that would appear during the summer months.) Like a hunting dog, Marcus strode directly to the back of the slightly sloped rooftop and, with no thought to the height, peered over and into the alley. Then he removed his coat, spread it below him, and lay down on his stomach so that his head hung out over the edge of the building. A broad smile came to his face within moments.

  “The same marks,” he said without turning. “All consistent. And here—” His eyes focused on a close spot and he picked something that was invisible to me out of one of the many patches of tar. “Rope fibers,” he said. “He must’ve anchored it to that chimney.” Following Marcus’s pointing finger, I glanced at a squat brick structure toward the front of the roof. “That’s a lot of rope. Plus the other pieces of equipment. He’d need a bag of some kind to carry it all in. We ought to mention that when we’re asking around.”

  Studying the monotonous expanse of the other roofs on the block I said, “He probably wouldn’t have come up through this building’s staircase—he’s smarter than that.”

  “And he’s familiar with getting around on rooftops,” Marcus answered, as he got to his feet, pocketed some of the rope fibers, and picked up his coat. “I think we can be pretty sure, now, that he’s spent a lot of time on them—probably in some kind of professional capacity.”

  I nodded. “So it wouldn’t be tricky for him to size up every building on the block, find the one with the least activity, and use its staircase.”

  “Or ignore the staircases altogether,” Marcus said. “Remember, it’s late at night—he could scale the walls without anybody seeing him.”

  Looking to the west, I saw that the reflective expanse of the Hudson River was quickly turning from bright red to black. I turned fully around twice in the near-darkness, seeing the entire area in a new way.

  “Control,” I mumbled.

  Marcus stayed right with me: “Yes,” he said. “This is his world, up here. Whatever mental turmoil Dr. Kreizler sees in the bodies, this is very different. On these rooftops he’s acting with complete confidence.”

  I sighed and shook as a river breeze hit us. “The confidence of the devil himself,” I mumbled, and was surprised when I got an answer:

  “Not the devil, sir,” said a small, frightened voice from somewhere back by the door to the stairs. “A saint.”

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  Who’s there?” Marcus said sharply, moving toward the voice cautiously. “Come out, or I’ll have you up for interfering with police business!”

  “No, please!” the voice answered, and then one of the painted youths from the Golden Rule, one I didn’t recall having seen downstairs, stepped out from behind the stairway door. The makeup on his face was badly smudged, and he had a blanket pulled around his shoulders. “I only want to help,” he said in a pathetic voice, his brown eyes blinking nervously. With a sinking feeling I realized that he could not have been more than ten years old.

  Taking hold of Marcus’s arm and pulling him back, I urged the boy forward. “That’s all right, we know you do,” I said. “Just come out into the open.” Even in the increasingly dim light of the rooftop I could see that the boy’s face, as well as the blanket he was huddled in, were smudged with soot and tar. “Have you been here all night?” I guessed.

  The boy nodded. “Ever since they told us.” He was starting to weep. “This wasn’t supposed to happen!”

  “What?” I asked urgently. “What wasn’t? The murder?”

  At the mention of the word the boy clamped his small hands over his ears and shook his head insistently. “He was supposed to be good, Fatima said so, everything was supposed to turn out all right!”

  I went over, put an arm around the boy, and guided him to a low wall that separated the roof we were on from that of the building next door. “All right,” I said. “It’s all right, nothing more’s going to happen.”

  “But he could come back!” the boy protested.

  “Who?”

  “Him—Fatima’s saint, the one that was supposed to take him away!”

  Marcus and I glanced at each other quickly: Him. “Look,” I said to the boy quietly, “suppose you start by telling me your name.”

  “Well,” the boy sniffed, “downstairs they—”

  “Just forget what they call you downstairs, for a minute.” I rocked his shoulders a bit with my arm. “You just tell me what name you were born with.”

  The boy paused, his big eyes taking our measure warily. I must admit the situation was quite confusing for me, too; all I could think to do was pull out a handkerchief and begin wiping the paint from the boy’s face.

  It did the trick. “Joseph,” the boy murmured.

  “Well, Joseph,” I said chummily. “My name’s Moore. And this man is Detective Sergeant Isaacson. Now—suppose you come clean about this saint of yours.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t mine,” Joseph answered quickly. “He was Fatima’s.”

  “You mean Ali ibn-Ghazi’s?”

  He nodded rapidly. “She—he—Fatima had been saying for I guess about two weeks that she’d found a saint. Not like a patron saint, in church, not like that—just a person who was kind, and was going to take her away from Scotch Ann to live with him.”

  “I see. I guess you knew Ali pretty well, then?”

  Another nod. “He was my best friend in the club. All the girls liked her, of course, but we were special friends.”

  I had pretty well cleaned up Joseph’s face, and he turned out to be quite a handsome, appealing young man. “It seems Ali got along with everyone,” I remarked. “Customers, too, I guess.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Joseph answered, his words coming faster and faster. “Fatima hated working here. He always made it seem to Scotch Ann like he liked it, because he didn’t want to go back to his father. But he hated it, and when he was alone with a customer, well—he could get pretty angry. But some customers—” The boy turned away, very clearly perplexed.

  “Go on, Joseph,” Marcus said. “It’s all right.”

  “Well…” Joseph turned from one to the other of us. “Some customers, they like it when you don’t like it.” His eyes turned down to gaze at his feet. “Some even pay more for it. Scotch Ann always thought Fatima was pretending, to make more money. But she really did hate it.”

  A sharp jab of both physical revulsion and deep sympathy hit me somewhere in the abdomen, and Marcus’s face betrayed a similar reaction; but we did have an answer to our earlier question.

  “There it is,” Marcus whispered to me. “Hidden, but real—resentment and resistance.” He spoke aloud to Joseph: “Did any of the customers ever get mad at Fatima?”

  “Once or twice,” the boy said. “But mostly, like I say, they liked it.”

  There was a lull in the talk, and then the sound of an elevated train on Third Street jarred me back to business. “And this saint of his,” I said. “This is very important, Joseph—did you ever see him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did Fatima ever meet a man on the roof?” Marcus asked. “Or did you ever notice someone carrying a large bag of some kind?”

  “No, sir,” Joseph said, a bit bewildered. Then he brightened, trying to please us: “The man came in more than once after Fatima met him, though. I do know that. But he told her
never to say who he was.”

  Marcus smiled just a bit. “A customer, then.”

  “And you never guessed which one it was?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” Joseph answered. “Fatima said that if I kept it all secret and was good, then maybe the man would take me away, too, someday.”

  I put my arm back around his shoulders tightly, looking out over the rooftops once more. “You must hope that doesn’t ever happen, Joseph.” I said, and then his brown eyes began to shed tears again.

  The Golden Rule didn’t yield any more significant information that evening, nor did the other residents of the building or the block that we questioned. Before departing the scene, however, I felt I ought to ask the boy Joseph if he wanted to leave Scotch Ann’s employ—he seemed entirely too young for such business, even by disorderly house standards, and I thought there was a good chance that I could get Kreizler to take him on as a charity case at the Institute. But Joseph, orphaned since age three, had already had his fill of institutes, orphanages, and foster homes (not to mention alleyways and empty railroad cars), and nothing I said about Kreizler’s place being “different” had any effect on him. The Golden Rule had been the only home he’d ever known where he hadn’t been ill fed and beaten—repulsive as she might be, Scotch Ann had an interest in keeping her boys relatively healthy and scar-free. That fact counted for more with Joseph than anything I might say about the place’s evils and dangers. In addition, his suspicions about men who promised a better life somewhere else had only been heightened by the saga of Ali ibn-Ghazi and his “saint.”