The Alienist (44 page)

“Kreizler,” I said, ever more worried, for there was no question now that he meant what he was saying. “Listen to yourself, you’re going against everything—”

“No!” he answered. “I’m going
along
! I’ll go back to my Institute and my dead, empty house, and
forget
this case. I’ll see to it that Stevie and Cyrus heal and never again face unknown attackers because of my vain schemes. And this bloody society that they’ve built for themselves can go down the path they have planned for it, and
rot
!”

I stood back a couple of steps, knowing in some part of myself that it was useless to argue with him, but stung by his attitude nonetheless. “All right, then. If self-pity’s going to be your solution—”

He swung at me hard with his left arm, but missed badly. “Damn you, Moore!” he seethed, breathing in short, quick contractions. “Damn you and damn them!” He grabbed the iron door and drew it open, then paused to get his breathing under control. Eyes again wide with horror, he stared into the dark, miserable hallway before him. “And damn me, too,” he added quietly. The heaving in his chest finally began to subside. “I’m going to wait inside. I would appreciate it if you’d go. I’ll arrange to have my things removed from Number 808. I—I’m sorry, John.” He entered the morgue, the iron door swinging shut with a crash as he went.

I stood there for a moment, my sodden clothes now starting to cling to my body and limbs. I looked up at the square, feelingless brick buildings around me, and then at the sky. More clouds were being blown in by the westerly wind, which was only picking up pace. In a sudden movement I reached down, tore a bit of grass and earth from the ground beneath me, and then threw it at the black door.

“Damn you
all,
then!” I shouted, holding up my muddy fist; but there was no relief in the exclamation. I let the hand fall slowly, then wiped rainwater from my face and stumbled back to my cab.

CHAPTER 37

N
ot wanting to see or talk to anyone after I left the morgue, I ordered my cabbie to take me to Number 808 Broadway. The building was fairly deserted, and when I stumbled into our headquarters the only sound I could hear was the blast of rain against the ring of Gothic windows around me. I collapsed onto the Marchese Carcano’s divan and stared at the large, note-covered chalkboard, my spirits sinking ever lower. Grief and hopelessness were finally and mercifully overwhelmed by exhaustion, and I fell asleep for most of the dark, gloomy day. But at about five o’clock I shot up to the sound of loud knocking at the front door. Staggering over and opening the thing, I found myself facing a dripping Western Union boy who had a sodden envelope in his hand. I took the message from him and peeled it apart, my lips moving rather idiotically as I read it:

CAPTAIN MILLER, FORT YATES, CONFIRMS CPL JOHN BEECHAM HAD FACIAL SPASM. CARRIED SIMILAR KNIFE. KNOWN TO CLIMB MOUNTAINS WHEN OFF DUTY. ADVISE
.

As I finished reading the wire for a third time, I became aware that the delivery boy was saying something, and I looked up blankly. “What’s that?”

“Reply, sir,” the boy said impatiently. “Do you want to send a reply?”

“Oh.” I thought about it for a moment, trying to decide what the best course would be in light of the morning’s developments. “Oh…yes.”

“You’ll have to write it down on something dry,” the boy said. “My forms are soaked.”

I walked over to my desk, pulled out a slip of paper, and scribbled a short note:
RETURN BY FASTEST TRAIN. EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY
. The delivery boy read the thing and gave me a price for its transmission, to which I pulled some money out of my pocket and handed it to him uncounted. The boy’s attitude immediately improved, from which I divined that I’d given him a sizable tip, and then he was back in the elevator and on his way.

There seemed little point in the Isaacsons staying in North Dakota if our investigation was about to come to an abrupt conclusion. Indeed, if Kreizler was serious about dealing himself out of the game there seemed little point in any of us doing anything except cashing in our chips and heading back to our ordinary walks of life. Whatever understanding Sara, the Isaacsons, and I had of our killer was due to Laszlo’s tutelage, and as I looked out over rainswept Broadway, where furtive shoppers were doing their best to avoid rushing carriages and delivery wagons as they tried to get in out of the downpour, I could imagine no way in which we could succeed without his continued leadership.

I’d just reconciled myself to this conclusion when I heard a key turning in the front door. Sara came bustling in, umbrella and grocery parcels in hand, her movements and air nothing like they’d been that morning. She was stepping and talking quickly, even lightly, as if nothing at all had happened.

“It’s a flood, John!” she announced, shaking her umbrella and depositing it in the ceramic stand. She took off her wrap, then lugged her parcels back toward the little kitchen. “You can barely get across Fourteenth Street on foot, and it’s worth your life to try to find a cab.”

I looked back out the window. “Cleans the streets, though,” I said.

“Do you want something to eat?” Sara called. “I’ll get some coffee going, and I brought food—sandwiches will have to do, I’m afraid.”

“Sandwiches?” I answered, not very enthusiastically. “Couldn’t we just go out somewhere?”

“Out?” Sara said, reemerging from the kitchen and coming over to me. “We can’t go out, we’ve got—” She stopped as she caught sight of the Isaacsons’ telegram, then picked it up carefully. “What’s this?”

“Marcus and Lucius,” I answered. “They got confirmation on John Beecham.”

“But that’s wonderful, John!” Sara said in a rush. “Then we—”

“I’ve already sent a reply,” I interrupted, disturbed by her manner. “Told them to get back as soon as they can.”

“Even better,” Sara said. “I doubt if there’s much more for them to discover out there, and we’ll need them here.”

“Need them?”

“We’ve got work to do,” Sara answered simply.

My shoulders drooped with the realization that my worries about her attitude had been well founded. “Sara, Kreizler told me this morning that—”

“I know,” she answered. “He told me, as well. What of it?”

“What of it? It’s over, that’s what of it. How are we supposed to go on without him?”

She shrugged. “As we went on with him. Listen to me, John.” Grabbing hold of my shoulders, Sara led me over to my desk and sat me on it. “I know what you’re thinking—but you’re wrong. We’re good enough now without him. We can finish this.”

My head had started shaking even before she finished this statement. “Sara, be serious—we don’t have the training, we don’t have the background—”

“We don’t need any more than we have, John,” she answered firmly. “Remember what Kreizler himself taught us—context. We don’t need to know everything about psychology, or alienism, or the history of all similar cases to finish this job. All we need to know is
this
man, his
particular
case—and we do, now. In fact, when we put together what we’ve gathered during the last week, I’ll bet that we know him as well as he knows himself—perhaps even better. Dr. Kreizler was important, but he’s gone now, and we don’t need him. You can’t quit. You mustn’t.”

There were undeniable bits of truth in what she was saying, and I took a minute to digest them; but then my head began to shake again. “Look, I know how much this opportunity means to you. I know how much it could have helped you convince the department—”

I shut up instantly as she took a good cut at my shoulder with her right fist. “Damn it, John, don’t insult me! Do you honestly think I’m doing this just for the opportunity? I’m doing it because I want to sleep soundly again someday—or have your little trips up and down the eastern seaboard made you forget?” She dashed over and grabbed some photographs off of Marcus’s desk. “Remember these, John?” I glanced down only briefly, knowing what she held: pictures of the various crime scenes. “Do you really think
you’re
going to spend many easy hours if you stop now? And what happens when the next boy is killed? How will you feel then?”

“Sara,” I protested, my voice rising to match hers, “I’m not talking about what I’d
prefer
here! I’m talking about what’s
practical.
”

“How practical is it to walk away?” she shouted back. “Kreizler’s only doing it because he
has
to—he’s been hurt, hurt as badly as anyone can be, and this is the only way he can find to respond. But that’s
him,
John.
We
can go on! We’ve
got
to go on!”

Letting her arms fall to her sides, Sara took several deep breaths, then smoothed her dress, walked across the room, and pointed to the right side of the chalkboard. “The way I see it,” she said evenly, “we’ve got three weeks to get ready. We can’t waste a minute.”

“Three weeks?” I said. “Why?”

She went over to Kreizler’s desk and picked up the thin volume with the cross on its cover. “The Christian calendar,” she said, holding it up. “I assume you found out why he’s following it?”

I shrugged. “Well, we may have. Victor Dury was a reverend. So the—the—” I tried to find an expression, and finally latched onto one that sounded like something Kreizler would have said: “The rhythms of the Dury house, the cycle of the family’s life, would naturally have coincided with it.”

Sara’s mouth curled up. “You see, John? You weren’t entirely wrong about a priest being involved.”

“And there was something else,” I said, thinking back to the questions that Kreizler had put to Adam Dury just as we were leaving the latter’s farm. “The reverend was fond of holidays—gave some rattling good sermons, apparently. But his wife…” I tapped a finger slowly on my desk, considering the idea; then, realizing its importance, I looked up. “It was his wife who was Japheth’s chief tormentor, according to his brother—and she gave the boys hellfire and brimstone over holidays.”

Sara looked very gratified. “Remember what we said about the killer hating dishonesty and hypocrisy? Well, if his father’s preaching one thing in his sermons, while at the same time, at home…”

“Yes,” I mumbled, “I do see it.”

Sara returned to the chalkboard slowly, and then did something that rather struck me: She picked up a piece of chalk and, without hesitation, jotted down the information I’d given her on the left-hand side of the board. Her handwriting, at that angle, was not quite as neat and practiced as Kreizler’s, but it looked like it belonged there, just the same. “He’s reacting to a cycle of emotional crisis that’s existed all his life,” Sara said confidently, setting the chalk back down. “Sometimes the crises are so severe that he kills—and the one he’ll reach in three weeks may be the worst of all.”

“So you’ve said,” I answered. “But I don’t remember there being any significant holy days in late June.”

“Not significant for everyone,” Sara said, opening the calendar. “But for him…”

She held the book out to me, pointing to one page in particular. I looked down to see the notation for Sunday, June 21st: The Feast of Saint John the Baptist. My eyes jumped open.

“Most churches don’t make much of a to-do about it anymore,” Sara said quietly. “But—”

“Saint John the Baptist,” I said quietly. “Water!”

Sara nodded. “Water.”

“Beecham,” I whispered, making a connection that, though perhaps a long shot, was nonetheless apparent:
“John Beecham…”

“What do you mean?” Sara asked. “The only Beecham I found any mention of in New Paltz was a George.”

It was my turn to go to the board and pick up the chalk. Tapping it on the boxed-off area marked
THE MOLDING VIOLENCE AND/OR MOLESTATION
, I explained at high speed: “When Japheth Dury was eleven, he was attacked—raped—by a man his brother worked with. A man who’d befriended him, a man he trusted. That man’s name was
George
Beecham.” A small, urgent sound came out of Sara, and one of her hands went to her mouth. “Now,
if
Japheth Dury, in fact, took the name Beecham after the killings, in order to begin a new life—”

“Of course,” Sara said. “He
became
the tormentor!”

I nodded eagerly. “And why the name John?”

“The Baptist,” Sara answered. “The purifier!”

I laughed once and wrote these thoughts down in the appropriate segments of the board. “It’s just speculation, but—”

“John,” Sara said, admonishing me good-humoredly. “That entire
board
is just speculation. But it
works.
” I set the chalk down and turned back around to find Sara absolutely beaming. “You see now, don’t you?” she said. “We’ve got to do it, John—we’ve
got
to keep going!”

And of course we did.

So began twenty of the most extraordinary and difficult days of my life. Knowing that the Isaacsons would not get back to New York any earlier than Wednesday night, Sara and I set ourselves the task of sharing, interpreting, and recording all the information we’d gathered during the previous week, in order to have it ready for the detective sergeants to quickly assimilate on their return. We spent most of the next few days together at Number 808, going over facts and—on a less obvious, unacknowledged level—reshaping the atmosphere and spirit of our headquarters so as to ensure that Kreizler’s would not become a crippling absence. All obvious signs and reminders of Laszlo’s presence were quietly put aside or removed, and we pushed his desk into a corner, so that the other four could be re-formed into a smaller (or rather, as I chose to view it, tighter) ring. Neither Sara nor I were particularly happy about doing any of this, but we tried not to be sad or maudlin, either. As always, focus was the key: so long as we kept our vision steadily fixed on the twin goals of preventing another murder and capturing our killer, we found we could get through even the most painful and disorienting moments of transition.

Not that we simply wiped Kreizler out of our minds; on the contrary, Sara and I spoke of him several times, in an effort to fully comprehend just what twists and turns his mind had taken after Mary’s death. Naturally, these conversations involved some discussion of Laszlo’s past; and thinking about the unfortunate reality of Kreizler’s upbringing as I talked with Sara dispelled the last of the anger I felt over Laszlo’s abandonment of the investigation, to the extent that on Tuesday morning I actually went, without telling Sara, back to Kreizler’s house.

I made the trip in part to see how Stevie and Cyrus were doing, but primarily to smooth over the bumps and cracks that had been left by Laszlo’s and my parting at Bellevue. Thankfully, I found that my old friend was also anxious to put things right in this regard, though he was still quite determined not to return to our investigation. He spoke of Mary’s death quietly, making it easy for me to appreciate how thoroughly his spirit had been savaged by the incident. But more than that, I think it was the shattering of his confidence that prevented him from coming back to the hunt. For only the second time in his life that I could recall (the first having occurred during the week before we visited Jesse Pomeroy), Laszlo seemed to truly doubt his own judgment. And while I didn’t agree with his self-indictment, I certainly couldn’t blame him. Every human being must find his own way to cope with such severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses. And so I finally shook Laszlo’s hand and accepted his determination to bow out of our work, even though it pained me deeply. We said goodbye, and I wondered again how we would ever get along without him; yet before I’d even gotten clear of his front yard, my thoughts had turned back to the case.

Sara’s trip to New Paltz, I learned during those three days before the Isaacsons returned, had confirmed many of our hypotheses concerning our killer’s childhood years. She’d been able to locate several of Japheth Dury’s contemporaries, and they acknowledged—rather ruefully, to give them their due—that the boy had suffered much mockery because of his violent facial spasms. Throughout his years at school (and as Marcus had speculated, the New Paltz school had taught the Palmer system of handwriting at that time), as well as on those special occasions when he accompanied his parents into town, Japheth would often be set on by gangs of children who made a great game out of competing to see who could most accurately imitate the boy’s tic. This last was no ordinary twitch, the now-grown citizens of New Paltz had assured Sara: it was a contraction so severe that Japheth’s eyes and mouth would be pulled around almost to the side of his head, as if he were in terrible pain and were about to break into violent tears. Apparently—and strangely—he never struck back when attacked by the children of New Paltz, and never turned a spiteful tongue on anyone who teased him; rather, he always went silently about his business, so that after a few years the children in town grew bored of tormenting him. Those few years, however, had apparently been enough to poison Japheth’s spirit, coming as they did on top of a lifetime’s coexistence with someone who never tired of hounding him: his own mother.