The Alienist - Caleb Carr [123]
Jesse Pomeroy, you see, had been but twelve years old at the start of his terrible career; and when he was shut away forever in a lonely prison cell—one that he still inhabits as I write these words—he was only fourteen.
Kreizler had crossed paths with what the press took to calling “the boy-fiend” soon after Pomeroy’s lawyers entered the plea of not guilty by reason of insanity in the summer of 1874. At the time, such pleas were judged, as they are today, according to the “M’Naghten Rule,” named after an unfortunate Englishman who, in 1843, fell under the delusion that Prime Minister Robert Peel wanted to kill him. M’Naghten had tried to circumvent this fate by himself killing Peel; and though he failed to achieve that object, he did manage to murder the prime minister’s secretary. He was subsequently acquitted, however, when his lawyers successfully argued that he did not understand the nature or wrongness of his act. In such manner were the floodgates of insanity opened onto the courtrooms of the world; and thirty years later, Jesse Pomeroy’s defenders hired a battery of mental experts to assess their client and, hopefully, pronounce him as mad as M’Naghten. One of these experts was a very young Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, who, along with several other alienists, found Pomeroy quite sane. The judge in the case ultimately agreed with this group, but he took special pains to say that he had found Dr. Kreizler’s particular explanation of the boy-fiend’s behavior arcane and quite possibly obscene.
Such a statement was not surprising, given Laszlo’s heavy emphasis on Pomeroy’s family life. But it was another part of Kreizler’s twenty-year-old investigation, I suddenly realized as we neared Sing Sing, that was of particular significance with regard to our present purposes: Pomeroy had been born with a harelip, and during infancy had contracted a fever that left his face pockmarked and one of his eyes, even more portentously, ulcerated and lifeless. Even at the time it hadn’t seemed coincidental that Pomeroy had taken special care to mutilate the eyes of his victims during his vicious outings; but at the time of his trial he’d always refused to discuss that aspect of his behavior and thus prevented any solid conclusions from being drawn.
“I don’t understand, Kreizler,” I said, as our train lurched to a stop at the Sing Sing station. “You say you didn’t make the connection between Pomeroy and our case—so why are we here?”
“You can thank Adolf Meyer,” Kreizler answered, as we stepped to the station platform and were approached by an old man in a moth-eaten cap who had a rig for hire. “I was on the telephone with him for several hours today.”
“Dr. Meyer?” I asked. “How much did you tell him?”
“Everything,” Kreizler answered simply. “My trust in Meyer is absolute. Even though, in certain matters, he believes I’m off course. He quite agrees with Sara, for instance, about the role of a woman in the childhood formation of our killer. In fact, that was what brought Pomeroy to mind, along with the eyes.”
“The role of a woman?” We had gotten into the old man’s rig and were rolling away from the station toward the prison. “Kreizler,