The Alienist - Caleb Carr [122]
It’s less than an hour by train from the middle of Manhattan to the small town on the Hudson River named by an early Dutch trader for the Chinese city of Tsing-sing; but for visitors and prisoners alike, the trip to Sing Sing is usually divorced from real time, seeming at once the shortest and longest journey imaginable. Situated hard by the water and offering a commanding view of the Tappan Zee bluffs opposite, Sing Sing Prison (originally known as “Mount Pleasant”) was opened in 1827 amid claims that it embodied the most advanced ideas in penology. And indeed, in those days when prisons were, in effect, small factories where inmates manufactured everything from combs to furniture to cut stone, prisoners did seem in many ways better-off (or at least better occupied) than they were seventy years later. True, they were beaten and tormented mercilessly in those early decades of the century, but so had they always been, and so are they still; and work, most will tell you, was preferable to “penitence,” a largely idle state in which there is little to do save brood over the acts that have brought one to such a terrible place—that and plan schemes of revenge against those responsible. But prison manufacture died with the advent of organized labor, which would not tolerate wages being driven down by cheap convict workers; and for this reason more than any other, Sing Sing had degenerated, by 1896, into a horribly pointless place, where prisoners still wore their striped costumes, still obeyed the rule of silence, and still marched in lockstep, even though the jobs they’d once marched to had all but vanished.
Forbidding as the prospect of a visit to such a brutal, hopeless place was, it was overshadowed by the real apprehension I experienced when Kreizler finally told me whom we were going to see.
“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