The Alienist

  “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.”

  “Ask yourself a more basic question,” Laszlo answered. “What is the strongest force behind imagination? Normal imagination, but also and particularly the morbid?”

  Sara had no trouble with that: “Fear.”

  “Fear of what you see,” Laszlo pressed, “or of what you hear?”

  “Both,” Sara answered. “But mostly what you hear—‘nothing is as terrible in reality,’ et cetera.”

  “Isn’t reading a form of hearing?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes, but even well-to-do children don’t learn to read until many years into childhood,” Kreizler answered. “I offer this only as a theory, but suppose the cannibalism story was then what it is now—a tale designed to terrify. Only now, rather than the terrorized party, our man is the terrorizer. As we’ve constructed him thus far, wouldn’t he find that immensely satisfying, even amusing?”

  “But who told it to him?” Lucius asked.

  Kreizler shrugged. “Who generally terrifies children with stories?”

  “Adults who want them to behave,” I answered quickly. “My father had a story about the Japanese emperor’s torture chamber that had me up for nights, picturing every detail—”

  “Excellent, Moore! My very point.”

  “But what about—” Lucius’s words became a bit halting. “What about the—I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I still don’t know how to discuss certain things with a lady present.”

  “Then pretend one isn’t,” Sara said, a bit impatiently.

  “Well,” Lucius went on, no more comfortably, “what about the focus on the—buttocks?”

  “Ah, yes,” Kreizler answered. “Part of the original story, do we think? Or a twist of our man’s invention?”

  “Uhhh—” I droned, having thought of something but, like Lucius, unsure of how to phrase it in front of a woman. “The, uh—the—references, not only to dirt, but to—fecal matter—”

  “The word he uses is ‘shit,’ ” Sara said bluntly, and everyone in the room, including Kreizler, seemed to spring a few inches off the floor for a second or two. “Honestly, gentlemen,” Sara commented with some disdain. “If I’d known you were all so modest I’d have stuck to secretarial work.”

  “Who’s modest?” I demanded—not one of my stronger retorts.

  Sara frowned at me. “You, John Schuyler Moore. I happen to know that you have, on occasion, paid members of the female sex to spend intimate moments with you—I suppose they were strangers to that kind of language?”

  “No,” I protested, aware that my face was a bright red beacon. “But they weren’t—weren’t—”

  “Weren’t?” Sara asked sternly.

  “Weren’t—well, ladies!”

  At that Sara stood up, put one hand to a hip, and with the other produced her derringer from some nether region of her dress. “I would like to warn you all right now,” she said tightly, “that the next man who uses the word ‘lady,’ in that context and in my presence, will be shitting from a new and artificially manufactured hole in his gut.” She put the gun away and sat back down.

  The room was as quiet as the grave for half a minute, and then Kreizler spoke softly: “I believe you were discussing the references to shit, Moore?”

  I gave Sara a rather injured and indignant glance—which she thoroughly ignored, the wretch—and then resumed my thought: “They seem connected—all the scatological references and the preoccupation with that part of the anato—” I could feel Sara’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my head. “And the preoccupation with the ass,” I finished, as defiantly as I could manage.

  “Indeed they do,” Kreizler said. “Connected metaphorically as well as anatomically. It’s puzzling—and there’s not a great deal of literature on such subjects. Meyer has speculated on the possible causes and implications of nocturnal urinary incontinence, and anyone who works with children finds the occasional subject who is abnormally fixated on feces. Most alienists and psychologists, however, consider this a form of mysophobia—the morbid fear of dirt and contamination, which our man certainly seems to have.” Kreizler chalked the word MYSOPHOBIA up in the center of the board, but then stood away from it, looking dissatisfied. “There seems, however, more to it than just that…”

  “Doctor,” Sara said, “I’ve got to urge you again to broaden your concepts of the mother and father in this case. I know your experience with children past a certain age is as extensive as anyone’s, but have you ever been closely involved with the care of an infant?”

  “Only as a physician,” Kreizler answered. “And then rarely. Why, Sara?”

  “It’s not a time of childhood that men figure greatly in, as a rule. Do any of you know men who have played a large part in raising children younger than, say, three or four?” We all shook our heads. I suspect that even if one of us had known such a man he would have denied it, just to keep the derringer out of sight. Sara turned back to Laszlo. “And when you find children with an abnormal fixation on defecation, Doctor, what form does it generally take?”

  “Either an excessive urge or morbid reluctance. Generally.”

  “Urge or reluctance to what?”

 
“To go to the toilet.”

  “And how have they learned to go to the toilet?” Sara asked, keeping right after Kreizler.

  “They’ve been taught.”

  “By men, generally?”

  Kreizler had to pause, at that. The line of questioning had seemed obscure at first, but now we could all see where Sara was going: if our killer’s rather obsessive concern with feces, buttocks, and the more generalized “dirt” (no subjects were, after all, mentioned more in the note) had been implanted in childhood, it was likely that contact with a woman or women—mother, nurse, governess, or what have you—had been involved in the process.

  “I see,” Kreizler finally said. “I take it, then, that you have yourself observed the process, Sara?”

  “Occasionally,” she replied. “And I’ve heard stories. A girl does. It’s always assumed that you’ll need the knowledge. The whole affair can be surprisingly difficult—embarrassing, frustrating, sometimes even violent. I wouldn’t bring it up, except that the references are so insistent. Doesn’t it suggest something out of the ordinary?”

  Laszlo cocked his head. “Perhaps. I’m afraid I can’t consider such observations conclusive, however.”

  “Won’t you at least consider the possibility that a woman—perhaps the mother, though not necessarily—has played a darker role than you’ve yet allowed?”

  “I hope that I am not deaf to any possibilities,” Kreizler said, turning to the board but writing nothing. “However, I fear we have strayed too far into the realm of the barely plausible.”