The Alienist

  “I was a fool not to think of it myself,” Laszlo said, as our train clacked along next to the Hudson, giving us a lovely view of sunset beyond the lush, bulging hills to the west. “Of course, it’s been twenty years. But it never seemed likely, at that time, that I’d forget the fellow. I should have made the connection as soon as I saw the bodies.”

  “Laszlo,” I said sternly, though I was pleased that he was finally becoming talkative. “Perhaps, now that you’ve impressed me into this miserable service, you’d care to dispense with all the mystery. Who are we going to see?”

  “And I’m even more surprised that you didn’t think of it, Moore,” he answered, obviously a bit pleased with my discomfort. “After all, he was always one of your favorite characters.”

  “Who was?”

  The black eyes fixed themselves unwaveringly on mine. “Jesse Pomeroy.”

  At the mention of the name we both sat in silent apprehension, as if it alone might bring horror and mayhem into our near-empty train car; and when we spoke again, to review the case, it was in hushed tones. For while there’d been murderers more prolific than Jesse Pomeroy in our lifetimes, none was ever quite so unsettling. In 1872, Pomeroy had enticed a series of small children to remote spots near the small suburban village where he lived, then stripped and bound them and tortured them with knives and whips. He’d eventually been caught and locked up; but his behavior during incarceration was so exemplary that when his mother—long since abandoned by her husband—made an emotional appeal for parole just sixteen months after Jesse’s sentence began, it was granted. Almost immediately after the release a new and even more horrifying crime occurred near the Pomeroy home: a four-year-old boy was found dead on a beach, his throat cut and the rest of his body terribly mutilated. Jesse was suspected, but evidence was lacking; several weeks later, however, the body of a missing ten-year-old girl was discovered in the basement of the Pomeroy house. The girl had also been tortured and mutilated. Jesse was arrested, and in the weeks that followed, every unsolved case in the vicinity that involved a missing child was reopened. None of them was ever tied directly to Pomeroy, but the case against him for the murder of the little girl was solid. Jesse’s lawyers quite understandably decided to plead insanity for their client. The attempt, however, was doomed from the start. Pomeroy was originally condemned to hang, but the sentence was commuted to life in solitary confinement because of the villain’s age:

  Jesse Pomeroy, you see, had been but twelve years old at the start of his terrible career; and when he was shut away forever in a lonely prison cell—one that he still inhabits as I write these words—he was only fourteen.

  Kreizler had crossed paths with what the press took to calling “the boy-fiend” soon after Pomeroy’s lawyers entered the plea of not guilty by reason of insanity in the summer of 1874. At the time, such pleas were judged, as they are today, according to the “M’Naghten Rule,” named after an unfortunate Englishman who, in 1843, fell under the delusion that Prime Minister Robert Peel wanted to kill him. M’Naghten had tried to circumvent this fate by himself killing Peel; and though he failed to achieve that object, he did manage to murder the prime minister’s secretary. He was subsequently acquitted, however, when his lawyers successfully argued that he did not understand the nature or wrongness of his act. In such manner were the floodgates of insanity opened onto the courtrooms of the world; and thirty years later, Jesse Pomeroy’s defenders hired a battery of mental experts to assess their client and, hopefully, pronounce him as mad as M’Naghten. One of these experts was a very young Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, who, along with several other alienists, found Pomeroy quite sane. The judge in the case ultimately agreed with this group, but he took special pains to say that he had found Dr. Kreizler’s particular explanation of the boy-fiend’s behavior arcane and quite possibly obscene.

  Such a statement was not surprising, given Laszlo’s heavy emphasis on Pomeroy’s family life. But it was another part of Kreizler’s twenty-year-old investigation, I suddenly realized as we neared Sing Sing, that was of particular significance with regard to our present purposes: Pomeroy had been born with a harelip, and during infancy had contracted a fever that left his face pockmarked and one of his eyes, even more portentously, ulcerated and lifeless. Even at the time it hadn’t seemed coincidental that Pomeroy had taken special care to mutilate the eyes of his victims during his vicious outings; but at the time of his trial he’d always refused to discuss that aspect of his behavior and thus prevented any solid conclusions from being drawn.

  “I don’t understand, Kreizler,” I said, as our train lurched to a stop at the Sing Sing station. “You say you didn’t make the connection between Pomeroy and our case—so why are we here?”

  “You can thank Adolf Meyer,” Kreizler answered, as we stepped to the station platform and were approached by an old man in a moth-eaten cap who had a rig for hire. “I was on the telephone with him for several hours today.”

  “Dr. Meyer?” I asked. “How much did you tell him?”

  “Everything,” Kreizler answered simply. “My trust in Meyer is absolute. Even though, in certain matters, he believes I’m off course. He quite agrees with Sara, for instance, about the role of a woman in the childhood formation of our killer. In fact, that was what brought Pomeroy to mind, along with the eyes.”

  “The role of a woman?” We had gotten into the old man’s rig and were rolling away from the station toward the prison. “Kreizler, what do you mean?”

  “Never mind, John,” he answered, looking out for the prison walls as the light around us began to diminish rapidly. “You’ll find out soon enough, and there are things you need to know before we go inside. First of all, the warden agreed to this visit only after I offered a fairly sizable bribe, and he will not greet us personally when we arrive. Only one other man, a guard called Lasky, knows who we are and what our purpose is. He will take the money and then guide us in and out, hopefully unnoticed. Say as little as possible, and nothing to Pomeroy.”

  “Why not to Pomeroy? He’s not an official of the prison.”

  “True,” Laszlo answered, as the monotonous edifice of Sing Sing’s thousand-cell main block appeared just ahead of us. “But although I believe Jesse can help us with the question of the mutilations, he’s entirely too perverse to do so if he knows what we’re up to. So, for a variety of reasons, make no mention of your name or our work at any point. I hardly need remind you”—Kreizler lowered his voice as we reached the prison’s front gate—“how very many dangers inhabit this place.”

  CHAPTER 23

  * * *

  Sing Sing’s main block ran parallel to the Hudson, with several out-buildings, shops, and the two-hundred-cell women’s jail running perpendicular to it and toward the riverfront. A series of tall chimneys rose out of various buildings on the grounds and completed the image of a very dreary factory, one whose principal product, by that point in its history, was human misery. Convicts shared cells originally designed for individual prisoners, and the little maintenance work that was done in the place was not enough to counteract the powerful forces of decrepitude: the sights and smells of decay were everywhere. Even before we passed through the main gate, Kreizler and I could hear the monotonous sound of marching feet echoing out of the yard, and while this unhappy tramp was no longer punctuated by the crack of the cat—lashing had been outlawed in 1847—the ominous wooden clubs worn by the guards left no doubt about the primary method of maintaining discipline in the place.

  The guard Lasky, an enormous, ill-shaved man of appropriately black temperament, eventually appeared, and after following him through the stone pathways and patchy grass borders of the yard we entered the main cell block. In one corner near the door several prisoners wearing iron and wood yokes that held their arms up and away from their bodies were being angrily berated by a group of guards, whose dark uniforms were no more tidy than our man Lasky’s and whose dispositions seemed, if anything, worse. As we entered the cell block proper, a sudden sh
out of pain shook Kreizler and me: inside one of the little four-by-eight-foot chambers more guards were going at one prisoner with a “hummingbird,” an electrical device that administered painful shocks. Both Kreizler and I had seen all this before, but familiarity did not breed acceptance. As we kept moving, I glanced at Laszlo once and saw my own reaction reflected in his face: given such a penal system, the high rate of recidivism in our society was really no mystery at all.

  Jesse Pomeroy was being held all the way at the other end of the block, making it necessary for us to walk past dozens more cells full of faces that displayed an enormous range of emotions, from the deepest anguish and sorrow to the most sullen rage. As the rule of silence was enforced at all times we heard no distinct human voices, only an occasional whisper; and the echo of our own steps throughout the cell block, combined with the unceasing scrutiny of the prisoners, soon became almost maddening. When we reached the end of the building we entered a small, dank hallway that led into a tiny room with no real windows, just small chinks in the stone walls near the ceiling. Jesse Pomeroy was sitting in a strange sort of wooden stall inside this room. The stall had water pipes coming out of its top, but its interior was, so far as I could tell, bone dry. After a few seconds of puzzling with it, I realized what the thing was: an infamous “ice water bath,” in which particularly ill-behaved prisoners had formerly been doused with pressurized freezing water. The treatment had resulted in so many deaths from shock that it had been outlawed decades earlier. Apparently, though, no one had ever bothered to dismantle the contraption; no doubt the guards still found even the threat of such torment effective.

  Pomeroy was wearing a heavy set of shackles on his wrists, and an iron “collar cap” rested on his shoulders and surrounded his head. This latter device, a grotesque punishment for particularly unruly prisoners, was a two-foot-high barred cage, and its weight, equal to that of the prisoner’s head, offered unending discomfort that drove many victims to the verge of madness. Despite both the shackles and the collar cap, however, Jesse had a book in his hand and was quietly reading. When he looked up at us I took careful note of the pocked skin of his face, the ugly disfigurement of his upper lip (which was barely covered by a stringy, weak mustache), and finally his milky, repulsive left eye. It was quite apparent why we’d come.

  “Well!” he said quietly, getting to his feet. Even though Jesse was in his thirties and wearing the tall cage around his head, he was short enough to be able to stand inside the old stall. A smile came onto his ugly mouth, one that displayed the peculiar blend of suspicion, surprise, and satisfaction common to convicts who receive unexpected visitors. “Dr. Kreizler, if I’m not very much mistaken.”

  Kreizler managed a smile that seemed quite genuine. “Jesse. It’s been a long time, I’m surprised you remember me.”

  “Oh, I remember you, all right,” Pomeroy answered, in a boyish tone that was nonetheless laced with threat. “I remember all of you.” He studied Laszlo for another second, then turned suddenly to me. “But I’ve never seen you before.”

  “No,” Kreizler said, before I could answer. “You haven’t.” Laszlo turned to our guide, who was looking very put-upon. “All right, Lasky. You can wait outside.” Kreizler handed him a large wad of money.

  Lasky’s face achieved something like a pleased look, though he only said “Yes, sir,” before turning to Pomeroy. “You watch yourself, Jesse. Bad as you’ve had it today, it could still get worse.”

  Pomeroy didn’t acknowledge that statement, but kept on watching Kreizler as Lasky departed. “Pretty hard to get an education in this place,” Jesse said, after the door had closed. “But I’m trying. I figure maybe that’s where I went wrong—no education. I taught myself Spanish, you know.” He continued to sound very much like the young man he’d been twenty years ago.

  Laszlo nodded. “Admirable. I see you’re wearing a collar cap.”

  Jesse laughed. “Ahh—they claim I burned a guy’s face with a cigarette while he was sleeping. They say I stayed up all night, making an arm out of wire just so’s I could reach him with the butt through the bars. But I ask you—” He turned my way, the milky eye floating aimlessly in his head. “Does that sound like me?” A small laugh escaped him, pleased and mischievous—again just like a young boy’s.

  “I gather, then, that you’ve grown tired of skinning rats alive,” Kreizler said. “When I was here several years ago, I heard that you’d been asking other prisoners to catch them for you.”

  Still another chuckle, this one almost embarrassed. “Rats. They do squirm and squeal. Bite you pretty good, too, if you’re not careful.” He displayed several small but nasty scars on his hands.

  Kreizler nodded. “As angry as you were twenty years ago, eh, Jesse?”

  “I wasn’t angry twenty years ago,” Pomeroy answered, without losing his grin. “I was crazy. You people were just too stupid to figure that out, is all. What the hell are you doing here, anyway, Doc?”

  “Call it a reassessment,” Kreizler answered cagily. “I sometimes like to drop in on old cases, to measure their progress. And since I had business in the prison, anyway—”

  For the first time Pomeroy’s voice became deadly serious. “Don’t play games with me, Doc. Even with these cuffs on I could have your eyes out before Lasky gets through that door.”

  Kreizler’s face lit up a bit at that, but his tone remained cool. “I suppose you’d consider that another demonstration of your insanity?”

  Jesse chuckled. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I didn’t twenty years ago,” Kreizler answered with a shrug. “You mutilated the eyes of both the children you killed, as well as those of several you tortured. But I saw no madness in it—it was quite understandable, actually.”

  “Oh?” Pomeroy turned playful again. “How’s that?”

  Kreizler paused a moment, then leaned forward. “I’ve yet to see a man driven truly insane by simple envy, Jesse.”

  Pomeroy’s expression went blank, and he shot a hand toward his face so quickly that it banged against the bars of the collar cap painfully. Tightening both hands into fists he seemed on the verge of springing up, and I got ready for trouble; but then he just laughed it off. “Let me tell you something, Doc—if you paid for that education of yours, you got took. You figger just because I got a bum eye I’d go around fixing people with two good ones? Not likely. Look at me—I’m a catalogue of Mother Nature’s mistakes. How come I never cut anybody’s mouth up, or carved the skin off their faces?” It was Jesse’s turn to lean closer. “And if it’s just envy, Doc, how come you ain’t out chopping off people’s arms?”

  I turned quickly to Kreizler, and could see that he hadn’t been ready for such a remark. But he’d long ago learned to control his reactions to anything a subject might say, and he only blinked once or twice without taking his eyes from Pomeroy. Jesse, however, was able to read into those blinks, and he sat back with a satisfied grin.

  “Yeah, you’re smart, all right,” he chuckled.

  “Then the mutilation of the eyes meant nothing,” Kreizler said; and looking back I can see that he was maneuvering carefully. “Simply random acts of violence.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth, Doc.” Pomeroy’s voice took on a warning edge again. “We been through that, a long time ago. All I’m saying is I didn’t have a sane reason to do it.”

  Kreizler cocked his head judiciously. “Perhaps. But, since you’re unwilling to state what reason you did have, the argument is pointless.” Laszlo got up. “And, as I’ve a train to catch back to New York—”

  “Sit down.” The violence embodied in the command was almost palpable; but Kreizler nonetheless made a pointed show of being unimpressed. Pomeroy grew uneasy at that. “I’ll only tell you this once,” Jesse went on urgently. “I was crazy then, but I ain’t crazy anymore—which means that, when I think back to it now, I can see everything pretty clear. There wasn’t any sane reason for me to do what I did to them kids. I just—it was just more than I
could stand, that’s all, and I had to stop it.”

  Laszlo knew that he was close. As a further inducement he sat back down, and then spoke very softly. “Had to stop what, Jesse?”

  Pomeroy looked up at the small chink in the top of the blank stone wall, through which a few stars were now visible. “The staring,” he mumbled, in an altogether new and detached tone of voice. “The watching. All the time, the watching. That had to stop.” He turned our way again, and it seemed to me there were tears in his good eye; his mouth, however, had curled into a smile again. “You know, I used to go to the menagerie—in town? This was when I was real small. And it used to occur to me that everything those animals did, people were watching them. Just staring at them, with those dumb, blank faces, bug-eyed and hang-jawed—especially the kids, because they were too stupid to know any better. And those goddamned animals would look back, and you could see they was mad, God damn me, ferocious was the word, all right. All they wanted was to rip those people apart, just to get them to knock it off. Pacing back and forth, back and forth, thinking that if they could get out for just one minute they’d show ’em what you get when you never leave a thing alone. Well, I might not’ve been in a cage, Doc, but those dumb damned eyes was everywhere around me, all the same, ever since I could remember. Staring, watching, all the time, everywhere. You tell me, Doc, you tell me if that ain’t enough to drive somebody crazy. And when I got big enough, and I’d see one of those dumb little bastards standing there, licking a piece of candy with his eyes popping out of his head—well, Doc, the fact is, I wasn’t in no cage back then, so there wasn’t nothing to stop me from doing what needed to be done.”

  Pomeroy made no move after he’d stopped talking, but sat stone still and waited for a reaction from Kreizler.

  “You say it was always that way, Jesse,” Laszlo said. “For as long as you can remember? With everyone you knew?”