The Alienist - Caleb Carr [109]
The prerequisite for the killer’s being a sportsman, put simply, was a certain amount of leisure time in his youth, when he could have engaged in hunting not only for survival, but for pleasure, as well. This, in turn, implied either that he had an upper-class urban background (the upper being the only real leisure class in the city in those days before child labor laws, when even middle-class parents tended to work their offspring long hours), or that he had been brought up in a rural area. Each assumption would have narrowed our search significantly, and Laszlo needed to be completely certain of our reasoning before he would accept either of them.
“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.