The Alienist

  “Taking—?” Kreizler asked leadingly.

  “Taking an indirect route, in case we’re followed.”

  Laszlo nodded. “Good. All right, Moore.”

  As Kreizler slipped into the saloon, I looked back into the house and realized that no other members of the audience would have been able to see this exchange taking place—such was obviously why Laszlo had asked that we sit in the back of the box. Then, glancing at Stevie as he continued to suffer under the yoke of evening clothes, I had another realization: these two were supposed, by supplying vaguely similar silhouettes, to give the impression that Kreizler and I were still in the theater. But for what purpose? Where was Kreizler rushing off to? Questions continued to proliferate in my head, but the man with the answers was already on his way out of the building; and so, with Don Giovanni bellowing in horror as he descended into the inferno, I followed Kreizler to the Broadway doors of the Metropolitan.

  His mood, when I caught up to him, was one of exhilarated determination. “We’ll walk,” he said to the doorman outside, who then waved off a group of anxious cab drivers.

  “Kreizler, damn it,” I said in exasperation, as I followed him to the corner of Broadway. “You might at least tell me where we’re going!”

  “I should’ve thought you would have determined that by now,” he answered, waving me on. “We’re going to find Beecham.”

  The words hit me rather hard, making it necessary for Laszlo to grab me by my lapel and pull me along. As I stumbled with him to the curb and then waited for the traffic to let us cross, Laszlo chuckled once. “Don’t worry, John,” he said, “it’s only a few blocks, but that should give us enough time to attend to all your questions.”

  “A few blocks?” I said, trying to shake off my daze as we wound through horse manure and rolling carriages and finally got across Broadway. “To High Bridge Tower? It’s miles away!”

  “I’m afraid Beecham won’t be at High Bridge Tower tonight, Moore,” Kreizler answered. “Our friends are destined for a rather frustrating vigil.”

  As we proceeded down Thirty-ninth Street, the noise of Broadway faded behind us and our voices began to echo off the darkened row houses that stretched on toward Sixth Avenue. “And where the hell is he going to be, then?”

  “You can determine that for yourself,” Kreizler answered, his stride picking up ever more speed. “Remember what he left behind in his flat!”

  “Laszlo,” I said angrily, grabbing his arm. “I’m not out here to play games! You’ve got me abandoning people I’ve been working with for months, not to mention leaving Roosevelt fairly well in the lurch—so just stand still and tell me what the hell is going on!”

  For a moment he managed to trade his enthusiasm for compassion. “I’m sorry about the others, John—truly I am. If I could have thought of another way…But there isn’t one. Please understand, if the police are at all involved in this it will result in Beecham’s death—I’m as certain of that as I am of anything. Oh, I don’t mean that Roosevelt himself would play a part, but during the trip to the Tombs, or while he’s in his cell, there will be an incident of some kind. A detective, or a guard, or some other prisoner, perhaps—probably claiming self-defense—will most assuredly put an end to the rather large set of problems that you and I have come to know as John Beecham.”

  “But Sara,” I protested. “And the Isaacsons. Surely they deserve—”

  “I couldn’t take that chance!” Kreizler declared, continuing east with insistent steps. “They work for Roosevelt, they all owe their positions to him. I couldn’t take the chance that they wouldn’t tell him what I was planning. I couldn’t even tell you all of it, because I knew you’d pledged to share everything you knew with Theodore—and you’re not a man to break your word.”

  That mollified me a bit, I must admit; but as I hustled to keep up with him, I continued to press hard for details. “But what are you planning? And how the hell long have you been planning it?”

  “Since the morning after Mary was killed,” he answered, with just a trace of bitterness. We came to another halt at the corner of Sixth Avenue, and Kreizler turned to me, the black eyes still gleaming. “My initial withdrawal from the investigation was a purely emotional reaction, one that I probably would have reconsidered, in time. But on that morning I realized something—since I had become the main focus of our antagonists’ attention, my withdrawal was likely to give the rest of you a free hand.”

  I paused to consider that. “And it did,” I judged after a few seconds. “We never saw any of Byrnes’s men again.”

  “I did, however,” Kreizler answered. “And still do. I’ve had quite a time, leading them around the city. It was absurd, really, but I stayed with it, trusting that the rest of you—combining your own abilities with what you’d learned during our time together—would be able to find a set of clues that would make a definite prediction of Beecham’s next move possible.” As we started through the Sixth Avenue traffic, Laszlo held up his right hand, counting off considerations: “I’d already made the same assumptions you had about the twenty-first of June—Saint John the Baptist’s Day. That left the determination of victim and location in your hands. I had great hopes that your young friend Joseph would give us help with the first of those questions—”

  “He very nearly did,” I said, a now familiar pang of guilt and pain tugging at me. “As it was, he gave us an idea of who the victim wouldn’t be—we knew he didn’t come from one of the disorderly houses, that he was a street cruiser.”

  “Yes,” Laszlo said, as we got to the east side of the avenue. “The boy did great service, and his death was a tragedy.” He hissed once, in deep remorse. “There are moments when this entire case, when everything and everyone that comes into any kind of contact with the life of John Beecham, seem destined for a tragic end…” His determination came suddenly bounding back: “At any rate, what Joseph said about a ‘castle,’ from which the intended victim would be able to view the entire city, was an unqualified help—that is, when considered in conjunction with what you found at Beecham’s flat. That really was a superb piece of work, by the way—your finding the place, I mean.”

  I only nodded and smiled in appreciation, having by now abandoned any further attempt to question the course of action that Kreizler had evidently settled on for the evening. If such comparatively speedy aquiescence seems surprising, it must be remembered that for weeks I had worked without the benefit of Laszlo’s friendship and guidance, and had often felt their absence keenly. To be once again walking purposefully by his side, to hear him dissecting the case in such a deliberate and confident manner, and, above all, to know that Sara, the Isaacsons, and I, along with the investigation itself, had been in his thoughts throughout the time we’d spent apart, all gave me a great deal of joy and relief. I knew that he was now working somewhat at cross-purposes with the rest of our team; and it was easy to see that his wild-eyed enthusiasm contained an unpredictable and perhaps uncontrollable element; but such considerations seemed to count for little as we made our way down Thirty-ninth Street. We were on the correct trail, I was certain of that much, and my own excitement soon made short work of the small, prudent voice in the back of my mind that said that we were only two, rushing in to perform a task that had originally been planned for scores.

  I gave Kreizler a conspiratorial glance. “When Roosevelt finds that we’ve left the opera,” I said, “he’ll tear the city apart looking for us.”

  Laszlo shrugged. “He’d be better off using his head. He has the clues he needs to determine our whereabouts.”

  “The clues? You mean the things in Beecham’s flat?” I grew puzzled yet again. “But it was what we found there that led us to decide on High Bridge Tower—that and the business about a castle.”

  “No, John,” Kreizler answered, his hands moving again as he spoke. “It was part of what you found at Beecham’s flat that led you to such a conclusion. Think again. What did he leave behind?”

  I went
over it in my mind. “The collection of eyes…the map…and the box with the daguerreotype on it.”

  “Correct. Now think what conscious or unconscious considerations caused him to leave only those things. The eyes tell you unmistakably that you have the right man. The map gives you a general idea of where he’ll strike next. And the box—”

  “The box tells us the same thing,” I interjected quickly. “The daguerreotype lets us know that we’ve found Japheth Dury.”

  “True,” Kreizler said emphatically, “but what about the thing that’s in the box?”

  I wasn’t following him. “The heart?” I mumbled in confusion. “It was an old, dried-up heart—you think it was his mother’s.”

  “Yes. Now, put the map and the contents of the box together.”

  “The city water system…and the heart…”

  “Now add what Joseph said.”

  “A castle or a fort,” I answered, still not getting it. “A place from which you can see the whole city.”

  “And…?” Kreizler urged.

  As we turned and began to walk up Fifth Avenue, the answer hit me like a cartload of bricks. Stretching away for two blocks to the north and one block to the west, its walls as high as the buildings around them and as prodigious as those of the fabled city of Troy, was the Croton Reservoir. Built in the Egyptian mausoleum style, it was indeed a castlelike fortress, on whose ramparts New Yorkers often strolled, enjoying the splendid, panoramic views of the city (as well as of the man-made lake within) that the structure afforded. In addition, the Croton was the main distributing reservoir for all of New York; it was, quite simply, the heart of the city’s water system, the center to which all aqueducts fed and from which all mains and arteries drew their supply. Astounded, I turned to Kreizler.

  “Yes, John,” he said, smiling as we approached the thing. “Here.” Then he pulled me in close under the walls of the reservoir, which were deserted at that late hour, and lowered his voice. “The rest of you no doubt discussed the possibility that Beecham knows our first move would be to watch the waterfronts—but in the absence of a suitable alternative, you remained focused on those areas.” Laszlo looked up and, for the first time that night, displayed some little bit of apprehension. “If my guess is correct, he’s up there now.”

  “This early?” I asked. “I thought you said—”

  “Tonight is very different,” Kreizler answered quickly. “Tonight he has set his table early, the better to be ready for his guests.” Reaching inside his cloak, Kreizler produced a Colt revolver. “Take this, will you, Moore? But do not use it, unless you must. There is much I want to ask this man.”

  Kreizler started to move toward the massive main gate and staircase of the reservoir, which strongly resembled the entranceway to an Egyptian temple of the dead. Given our purpose that night, the similarity caused a strong shiver to rattle my bones. I stopped Laszlo as we neared the portal.

  “One thing,” I whispered to him. “You say Byrnes’s men have been following you—how do you know they’re not watching us now?”

  There was something about the blank way in which he looked back at me that was deeply unsettling: like a man who has divined his fate and has no intention of trying to avoid it.

  “Oh, I don’t know that they’re not,” he answered, quietly and simply. “In fact, I’m counting on the fact that they are.”

  With that, Laszlo entered the gate and took to the broad, dark stairs that wound up through the massive wall to the promenade. I shrugged helplessly at his cryptic words and was about to follow him, when a faint glimmer of brass somewhere on the other side of Fifth Avenue suddenly caught my eye. I stopped short and tried to locate the source.

  On Forty-first Street, beneath one broad-boughed tree whose leaves provided an effective refuge from the glow of the arc streetlamps on the avenue, was an elegant black brougham, whose lanterns were glittering ever so slightly. Both horse and driver appeared to be asleep. For a moment the sense of dread that I felt about climbing the reservoir walls heightened dramatically; but then I shook it off and moved to catch up to Kreizler, telling myself that there had to be a great many people in New York besides Paul Kelly who owned elegant black broughams.

  CHAPTER 44

  * * *

  As soon as we reached the top of the reservoir’s walls I realized the potentially disastrous error I’d made in allowing Kreizler to talk me into coming to this place alone with him. The eight-foot-wide promenade atop the walls, ringed on either side by four-foot iron fences, was some six stories from the ground, and when I looked down I saw the streets from an angle that instantly recalled all the rooftop work we’d done in recent months. That reminder was forbidding enough on its own. But when I looked straight out and around me I saw the tar surfaces and multitudinous chimneys of the buildings that surrounded the reservoir, all of which made it even more plain that while we might not be standing on a rooftop per se, we had nonetheless reentered the lofty realm over which John Beecham was acknowledged master. We were in his world once again, only this time we’d arrived by way of a perverse invitation; and as we strode silently down toward the Fortieth Street side of the walls, the waters of the reservoir stretching out to our right and reflecting a bright moon that had suddenly appeared and was still ascendant in the clear night sky, it became apparent that our status as hunters was in very serious jeopardy: we were on the verge of becoming prey.

  Familiar yet still troubling images began to flicker in my head like the projected films I’d seen at Koster and Bial’s theater with Mary Palmer: each of the dead boys, trussed and cut to pieces; the long, terrible knife that had done that cutting; the remains of the butchered cat at Mrs. Piedmont’s; Beecham’s bleak flat in Five Points, and the oven in which he claimed to have cooked the “tender ass” of Giorgio Santorelli; Joseph’s lifeless body; and finally a picture of the killer himself, formed out of all the clues and theories we’d collected during our investigation, yet still, for all our work, no more than a vague silhouette. The infinite black sky and innumerable stars above the reservoir offered no comfort or refuge from these horrific visions, and civilization, as I once again glanced down toward the streets of the city, seemed terribly far away. Each of our careful footsteps tapped home the message that we had come to a lawless place of death, a place where the hopeful invention of fearful man that I clutched in my hand would likely prove a feeble defense, and where the answers to greater mysteries than those we’d spent the last dozen weeks trying to unravel would be made plain with brutal finality. Despite all these anxious thoughts, however, I never once considered turning back. Perhaps Laszlo’s conviction that we were going to end this business on those walls that night was infectious; whatever the reason, I didn’t leave his side, even though I knew, as certainly as I’ve ever known anything, that we stood an excellent chance of never returning to the streets below.

  We heard the sobbing before we saw the boy. There were no lights on the promenade, only the moon to guide us, and as we turned onto the Fortieth Street side of the pathway a one-story stone structure that had been built atop the walls to house the reservoir’s control mechanisms loomed up spectrally in the distance. The sobs—high-pitched, desperate, and yet somehow muffled—seemed to be coming from somewhere near it. When we’d gotten to a point some forty-five feet from the structure, I caught a vague glimpse of human flesh glowing in the moonlight. We took a few steps closer, and then I made out plainly the figure of a naked young boy on his knees. His hands had been bound behind his back, causing his head to rest on the stone surface of the promenade, and his feet were similarly tied. A gag had been wrapped around his head, holding his painted mouth open at a painful angle. His face was glistening with tears; but he was alive, and, just as surprisingly, he was alone.

  Reflexively, I took a quick step forward, intending to help the unfortunate youth. Kreizler grabbed my arm and held me back, whispering urgently, “No, John! That is exactly what he intends for you to do.”

  “What?” I
whispered back. “But how do you know he’s—”

  Kreizler nodded, his eyes directing me toward the top of the control house.

  Rising just above the roof of the thing and reflecting the soft light of the moon was the same balding head that I’d seen above Stephenson’s Black and Tan the night that Cyrus was attacked. I felt my heart jump, but quickly sucked in air and tried to stay calm.

  “Does he see us?” I whispered to Kreizler.

  Laszlo’s eyes had gone thin, but he betrayed no other reaction to the scene. “Undoubtedly. The question is, does he know we’ve seen him?”

  An answer came immediately: the head disappeared, the way an animal in the wild will do—completely and with astonishing speed. By now the bound boy had caught sight of us, and his stifled sobbing had changed to more emphatic sounds that, though incomprehensible as words, were plainly appeals for help. Another picture of Joseph appeared in my head, doubling my already driving desire to go and help this next intended victim. But Kreizler kept his grip on my arm.

  “Wait, John,” he whispered. “Wait.” There was a small doorway leading from the promenade into the control house, and Kreizler pointed at it. “I was here this morning. There are only two ways out of that structure—back onto the promenade or down a flight of stairs to the street. If he doesn’t appear…”

  Another full minute went by with no sign of life either in the doorway or on the roof of the control house. Kreizler looked very puzzled. “Is it possible he’s run?”

  “Maybe the risk of actually getting caught was too much for him,” I answered.

  Kreizler weighed that, then studied the still-pleading boy. “All right,” he finally decided. “We’ll approach, but very slowly. And keep that revolver handy.”

  The first few steps we took down that stretch of the promenade were stiff and difficult, as if our bodies knew and were rejecting the danger that our minds had decided to accept. But after we’d covered ten feet or so without catching a glimpse of our antagonist we began to move more freely, and I became more convinced that Beecham had, in fact, been more intimidated by the prospect of capture than he had expected to be and fled to the street. I felt a sudden, powerful feeling of joy at the thought that we were actually going to prevent a killing, and allowed myself a small smile—