The Alienist

  There was no break in the pelting rain as we moved at a trot down the Bowery, the only major street in New York that, to my knowledge, has never known the presence of a church. Saloons, concert halls, and flophouses flashed by, and when we passed Cooper Square I spotted the large electric sign and shaded windows of Biff Ellison’s Paresis Hall, where Giorgio Santorelli had centered his pathetic operations. On we drove, through more tenement wastelands whose sidewalk mayhem was only slightly moderated by the rain. It was not until we had turned onto Bleecker Street and were nearing Police Headquarters that Kreizler said flatly:

  “You saw the body.”

  “Saw it?” I said in some annoyance, though I was relieved to finally discuss the subject. “I still see it if I close my eyes for more than a minute. What the hell was the idea of getting my whole house up and forcing me to go down there, anyway? It’s not as though I can report that kind of thing, you know that—all it did was agitate my grandmother, and that’s not much of an achievement.”

  “I’m sorry, John. But you needed to see just what it is we’ll be dealing with.”

  “I am not dealing with anything!” I protested again. “I’m only a reporter, remember, a reporter with a gruesome story that I can’t tell.”

  “You do yourself no justice, Moore,” Kreizler said. “You are a veritable cyclopedia of privileged information—though you may not realize it.”

  My voice rose: “Laszlo, what in hell—”

  But once again, I could get no further. As we turned onto Mulberry Street I heard calling voices, and looked up to see Link Steffens and Jake Riis running toward the carriage.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  The closer the church, the nearer to God,” was how one gangland wit had put his decision to base his criminal operations within a few blocks of Police Headquarters. The statement could have been made by any one of dozens of like characters, for the northern terminus of Mulberry Street at Bleecker (headquarters was located at Number 300) marked the heart of a jungle of tenements, brothels, concert halls, saloons, and gambling houses. One group of girls who staffed a disorderly house directly across Bleecker Street from 300 Mulberry made great sport, during their few idle hours, of sitting in the house’s green-shuttered windows and watching the doings at headquarters through opera glasses, then offering commentary to passing police officials. That was the sort of carnival atmosphere that surrounded the place. Or perhaps one should rather say that it was a circus, and a brutal Roman one at that—for several times a day, bleeding victims of crime or wounded perpetrators of it would be dragged into the rather nondescript, hotel-like structure that was the busy brain of New York’s law enforcement arm, leaving a sticky, grim reminder of the deadly nature of the building’s business on the pavement outside.

  Across Mulberry Street, at Number 303, was the unofficial headquarters of the police reporters: a simple stoop where I and my colleagues spent much of our time, waiting for word of a story. It was therefore not surprising that Riis and Steffens should have been awaiting my arrival. Riis’s anxious manner and the gleeful grin that dominated Steffens’s gaunt, handsome features indicated that something particularly tasty was up.

  “Well, well!” Steffens said, raising his umbrella as he jumped onto the running board of Kreizler’s carriage. “The mystery guests arrive together! Good morning, Dr. Kreizler, a pleasure to see you, sir.”

  “Steffens,” Kreizler answered with a nod that was not entirely congenial.

  Riis came huffing up behind Steffens, his hulking Danish frame not so lithe as that of the much younger Steffens. “Doctor,” he said, to which Kreizler only nodded. He had a positive dislike for Riis; the Dane’s pioneering work in revealing the evils of tenement life—most notably through his collection of essays and pictures called How the Other Half Lives—did not change the fact that he was a strident moralist and something of a bigot, so far as Kreizler was concerned. And I have to admit, I often saw Laszlo’s point. “Moore,” Riis went on, “Roosevelt has just thrown us out of his office, saying he is expecting the both of you for an important consultation—some very strange game is being played here, I think!”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Steffens said with another laugh. “His pride’s bruised. It seems that there’s been another murder which, because of our friend Riis’s personal beliefs, will never make the pages of the Evening Sun—we’ve all been riding him rather shamelessly, I’m afraid!”

  “Steffens, by God, if you keep at me—” Riis balled up a healthy Scandinavian hand and waved the fist in Steffens’s direction as he kept breathing hard and jogging along, trying to keep up with the still-rolling carriage. As Cyrus reined the gelding to a halt outside headquarters, Steffens jumped down.

  “Come now, Jake, no threats!” he said good-naturedly. “This is all in fun!”

  “What in hell are you two talking about?” I said, as Kreizler, trying to ignore the scene, stepped from the carriage.

  “Now, don’t play stupid,” Steffens answered. “You’ve seen the body, and so has Dr. Kreizler—we know that much. But unfortunately, since Jake chooses to deny the reality of both boy-whores and the houses in which they work, he can’t report the story!”

  Riis huffed again, his big face getting redder. “Steffens, I’ll teach you—”

  “And since we know your editors won’t print such seamy stuff, John,” Steffens went on, “I’m afraid that leaves the Post—how about it, Dr. Kreizler? Care to give the details to the only paper in town that’ll print them?”

  Kreizler’s mouth curled into a slight smile that was neither gentle nor amused, but somehow deprecating. “The only, Steffens? What about the World, or the Journal?”

  “Ah, I should have been more precise—the only respectable paper in town that will print them.”

  Kreizler only ran his eyes up and down Steffens’s lanky figure. “Respectable,” he echoed with a shake of his head, and then he was going up the stairs.

  “Say what you like, Doctor,” Steffens called after him, still smiling, “but you’ll get a fairer shake from us than from Hearst or Pulitzer!” Kreizler did not acknowledge the comment. “We understand you examined the killer this morning,” Steffens pressed. “Would you at least talk about that?”

  Pausing at the door, Kreizler turned. “The man I examined was indeed a killer. But he has nothing to do with the Santorelli boy.”

  “Really? Well, you might want to let Detective Sergeant Connor know that. He’s been telling us all morning that Wolff got crazed for blood by shooting the little girl and went out looking for another victim.”

  “What?” Genuine alarm was in Kreizler’s face. “No—no, he mustn’t—it is absolutely vital that he not do that!”

  Laszlo bolted inside just as Steffens made a final attempt to get him to talk. With his quarry now gone, my colleague from the Evening Post put his free hand to his hip, his smile shrinking just a bit. “You know, John—that man’s attitude doesn’t win him many admirers.”

  “It’s not intended to,” I said, starting up the steps. Steffens grabbed my arm.

  “Can’t you tell us anything, John? It’s not like Roosevelt to keep Jake and me out of police business—hell, we’re more members of the Board of Commissioners than those fools who sit with him.”

  That was true: Roosevelt had often consulted both Riis and Steffens on questions of policy. Nonetheless, I could only shrug. “If I knew anything, I’d tell you, Link. They’ve kept me in the dark, too.”

  “But the body, Moore,” Riis chimed in. “We have heard ungodly rumors—surely they are false!”

  Thinking for just a moment of the corpse on the bridge anchor, I sighed. “However ungodly the rumors, boys, they can’t begin to describe it.” With that I turned and strode up the steps.

  Before I was inside the door Riis and Steffens were at it again, Steffens pelting his friend with sarcastic barbs and Riis angrily trying to shut him up. But Link was right, even if he expressed himself somewhat meanly: Riis’s stubb
orn insistence that homosexual prostitution did not exist meant that another of the city’s largest papers would never acknowledge the full details of a brutal murder. And how much more the report would have meant coming from Riis than from Steffens; for while most of Link’s important work as an exponent of the Progressive movement lay in the future, Riis was long since an established voice of authority, the man whose angry declamations had caused the razing of Mulberry Bend (the very heart of New York’s most notorious slum, Five Points) along with the destruction of many other pestilential pockets. Yet Jake could not bring himself to fully acknowledge the Santorelli murder; despite all the horrors he had witnessed, he could not accept the circumstances of such a crime; and as I entered the big green doors of headquarters I wondered, just as I had wondered a thousand times during staff meetings at the Times, how long many members of the press—not to mention politicians and the public—would be content to equate deliberate ignorance of evil with its nonexistence.

  Inside I found Kreizler standing near the caged elevator, talking heatedly with Connor, the detective who had been at the murder scene the previous night. I was about to join them when my arm was taken and I was guided toward a staircase by one of the more pleasant sights available at headquarters: Sara Howard, an old friend of mine.

  “Don’t get involved in that, John,” she said, with a tone of sage wisdom that often marked her statements. “Connor is taking a lashing from your friend, and he deserves the full treatment. Besides, the president wants you upstairs—sans Dr. Kreizler.”

  “Sara!” I said happily. “I am glad to see you. I’ve spent a night and a morning with maniacs. I need the sound of a sane voice.”

  Sara’s taste in dresses ran toward simple designs in shades of green that matched her eyes, and the one she wore that day, with only a minimal bustle and not much petticoat business, showed off her tall, athletic body to advantage. Her face was by no means striking but handsomely plain; it was the play of eyes and mouth, back and forth between mischievous and sad, that made it such a delight to watch her. Back in the early seventies, when I was in my teens, her family moved into a house near ours on Gramercy Park, and I’d subsequently watched her spend her single-digit years turning that decorous neighborhood into her private rumpus room. Time had not changed her much, except to make her as thoughtful (and occasionally brooding) as she was excitable; and following the demise of my engagement to Julia Pratt I had one night gotten more than a little drunk, decided that all women held by society to be beauties were in fact demons, and asked Sara to marry me. Her answer was to take me in a cab to the Hudson River and throw me in.

  “You won’t find many sane voices in this building today,” Sara said as we climbed the stairs. “Teddy—that is, the president—isn’t it strange to call him that, John?” And indeed it was; but when Roosevelt was at headquarters, which was ruled by a board of four commissioners of which he was chief, he was distinguished from the other three by the title “president.” Very few of us guessed at the time that he would answer to an identical title in the none-too-distant future. “Well, he’s been in one of his whirlwinds over the Santorelli case. Every kind of person has been in and out—”

  Just then Theodore’s voice came booming down from the second-story hallway: “And don’t bother bringing your friends at Tammany into this, Kelly! Tammany is a monstrous Democrat creation, and this is a reform Republican administration—you’ve earned no favors here with your shoulder-hitting! I advise you to cooperate!” Deep chuckles from a pair of voices inside the staircase were the only reply to this, and the sounds were moving our way. Within seconds Sara and I were face-to-face with the foppishly dressed, cologne-drenched, enormous figure of Biff Ellison, as well as his smaller, more tastefully clad, and less aromatic criminal overseer, Paul Kelly.

  The days when Lower Manhattan’s underworld affairs were parceled out among dozens of freewheeling street gangs had for the most part come to an end by 1896, and dealings had been taken over and consolidated by larger groups that were just as deadly but far more businesslike in their approach. The Eastmans, named for their colorful chief, Monk Eastman, controlled all territory east of the Bowery between Fourteenth Street and Chatham Square; on the West Side, the Hudson Dusters, darlings of many New York intellectuals and artists (largely because they all shared a seemingly insatiable appetite for cocaine), ran affairs south of Thirteenth Street and west of Broadway; the area above Fourteenth Street on that side of town belonged to Mallet Murphy’s Gophers, a group of cellar-dwelling Irish creatures whose evolution even Mr. Darwin would have been hard-pressed to explain; and between these three virtual armies, at the eye of the criminal hurricane and just blocks from Police Headquarters, were Paul Kelly and his Five Pointers, who ruled supreme between Broadway and the Bowery and from Fourteenth Street to City Hall.

  Kelly’s gang had been named after the city’s toughest neighborhood in an attempt to inspire fear, though in reality they were far less anarchic in their dealings than the classic Five Points bands of an earlier generation (the Whyos, Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, and the rest), remnants of which still haunted their old neighborhood like violent, disaffected ghosts. Kelly himself was reflective of this change in style: his sartorial acumen was matched by polished speech and manners. He also possessed a thorough knowledge of art and politics, his taste in the former running toward modern and in the latter toward socialism. But Kelly knew his customers, too; and tasteful was not the word to describe the New Brighton Dance Hall, the Five Pointers’ headquarters on Great Jones Street. Overseen by a singular giant known as Eat-’Em-Up Jack McManus, the New Brighton was a garish mass of mirrors, crystal chandeliers, brass railings, and scantily clad “dancers,” a flash palace unequaled even in the Tenderloin, which, before Kelly’s rise, had been the unquestioned center of outlaw opulence.

  James T. “Biff” Ellison, on the other hand, represented the more traditional sort of New York thug. He had begun his career as a particularly unsavory saloon bouncer, and had first gained notoriety by beating and stomping a police officer nearly to death. Though he aspired to his boss’s polish, on Ellison—ignorant, sexually depraved, and drug-ridden as he was—the attempt became grotesquely ostentatious. Kelly had murderous lieutenants whose doings were infamous and even daring, but none save Ellison would have dared to open Paresis Hall, one of the mere three or four saloons in New York that openly—indeed, exuberantly—catered to that segment of society which Jake Riis so assiduously refused to believe existed.

  “Well, now,” Kelly said amiably, the stud in his cravat gleaming as he approached, “it’s Mr. Moore of the Times—along with one of the lovely new ladies of the Police Department.” Taking Sara’s hand, Kelly lowered his chiseled, Black Irish features and kissed it. “It certainly is more enjoyable getting summoned to headquarters these days.” His smile as he stared at Sara was well practiced and confident; none of which changed the fact that the air in the staircase had suddenly become charged with oppressive threat.

  “Mr. Kelly,” Sara answered with a brave nod, though I could see that she was quite nervous. “A pity your charm isn’t matched by the company you choose to keep.”

  Kelly laughed, but Ellison, who already towered over Sara and me, rose up even higher, his fleshy face and ferret’s eyes darkening. “It’d be best to watch your mouth, missy—it’s a long walk from headquarters to Gramercy Park. A lot of unpleasant things could happen to a girl all alone.”

  “You’re a real rabbit, aren’t you, Ellison?” I said, although the man could have broken me in half without much thought. “What’s the matter—run out of little boys to push around, you need to start on women?”

  Ellison’s face went positively red. “Why, you miserable piece of scribbling shit—sure, Gloria was trouble, a whole bundle of trouble, but I wouldn’t a cooked her for it, and I’ll kill any man says I—”

  “Now, now, Biff.” Kelly’s tone was pleasant, but his meaning was unmistakable: Knock it off. “There’s no cause for any of that.
” And then to me: “Biff had nothing to do with the boy’s murder, Moore. And I don’t want to see my name connected with it, either.”

  “Hell of a time to think of that, Kelly,” I answered. “I saw his body—it was worthy of Biff, all right.” In fact, not even Ellison had ever done anything so horrendous, but there was no reason to acknowledge that to them. “He was just a boy.”

  Kelly chuckled as he took a few steps farther down the stairs. “Yes, and a boy playing a dangerous game. Come on, Moore, boys like that die every day in this town—why the interest? Did he have a secret relative somewhere? A bastard kid of Morgan’s or Frick’s?”

  “Do you think that’s the only reason the case would be investigated?” Sara asked, somewhat offended—she hadn’t been working at headquarters very long.

  “My dear girl,” Kelly answered, “both Mr. Moore and I know that’s the only reason. But have it your way—Roosevelt is championing the benighted!” Kelly continued down the stairs, and Ellison pushed by me to follow. They paused a little farther down and then Kelly turned, his voice for the first time hinting at his occupation. “But I warn you, Moore—I do not want to see my name connected with this.”

  “Don’t worry, Kelly. My editors would never run the story.”

  He smiled again. “Very sensible of them, too. There are momentous things going on in the world, Moore—why waste energy on a trifle?”

  With that they were gone, and Sara and I collected ourselves. Kelly may have been a new breed of gangster, but he was a gangster all the same, and our encounter had been genuinely unsettling.

  “Do you know,” Sara said thoughtfully as we started upstairs again, “that my friend Emily Cort went slumming one night specifically to meet Paul Kelly—and that she found him the most entertaining man? But then, Emily always was an empty-headed little fool.” She took hold of my arm. “By the way, John, why in the world did you call Mr. Ellison a rabbit? He’s more like an ape.”