The Alienist - Caleb Carr [126]
Kreizler’s face lit up a bit at that, but his tone remained cool. “I suppose you’d consider that another demonstration of your insanity?”
Jesse chuckled. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I didn’t twenty years ago,” Kreizler answered with a shrug. “You mutilated the eyes of both the children you killed, as well as those of several you tortured. But I saw no madness in it—it was quite understandable, actually.”
“Oh?” Pomeroy turned playful again. “How’s that?”
Kreizler paused a moment, then leaned forward. “I’ve yet to see a man driven truly insane by simple envy, Jesse.”
Pomeroy’s expression went blank, and he shot a hand toward his face so quickly that it banged against the bars of the collar cap painfully. Tightening both hands into fists he seemed on the verge of springing up, and I got ready for trouble; but then he just laughed it off. “Let me tell you something, Doc—if you paid for that education of yours, you got took. You figger just because I got a bum eye I’d go around fixing people with two good ones? Not likely. Look at me—I’m a catalogue of Mother Nature’s mistakes. How come I never cut anybody’s mouth up, or carved the skin off their faces?” It was Jesse’s turn to lean closer. “And if it’s just envy, Doc, how come you ain’t out chopping off people’s arms?”
I turned quickly to Kreizler, and could see that he hadn’t been ready for such a remark. But he’d long ago learned to control his reactions to anything a subject might say, and he only blinked once or twice without taking his eyes from Pomeroy. Jesse, however, was able to read into those blinks, and he sat back with a satisfied grin.
“Yeah, you’re smart, all right,” he chuckled.
“Then the mutilation of the eyes meant nothing,” Kreizler said; and looking back I can see that he was maneuvering carefully. “Simply random acts of violence.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Doc.” Pomeroy’s voice took on a warning edge again. “We been through that, a long time ago. All I’m saying is I didn’t have a sane reason to do it.”
Kreizler cocked his head judiciously. “Perhaps. But, since you’re unwilling to state what reason you did have, the argument is pointless.” Laszlo got up. “And, as I’ve a train to catch back to New York—”
“Sit down.” The violence embodied in the command was almost palpable; but Kreizler nonetheless made a pointed show of being unimpressed. Pomeroy grew uneasy at that. “I’ll only tell you this once,” Jesse went on urgently. “I was crazy then, but I ain’t crazy anymore—which means that, when I think back to it now, I can see everything pretty clear. There wasn’t any sane reason for me to do what I did to them kids. I just—it was just more than I could stand, that’s all, and I had to stop it.”
Laszlo knew that he was close. As a further inducement he sat back down, and then spoke very softly. “Had to stop what, Jesse?”
Pomeroy looked up at the small chink in the top of the blank stone wall, through which a few stars were now visible. “The staring,” he mumbled, in an altogether new and detached tone of voice. “The watching. All the time, the watching. That had to stop.” He turned our way again, and it seemed to me there were tears in his good eye; his mouth, however, had curled into a smile again. “You know, I used to go to the menagerie—in town? This was when I was real small. And it used to occur to me that everything those animals did, people were watching them. Just staring at them, with those dumb, blank faces, bug-eyed and hang-jawed—especially the kids, because they were too stupid to know any better. And those goddamned animals would look back, and you could see they was mad, God damn me, ferocious was the word, all right. All they wanted was to rip those people apart, just to get them to knock it off. Pacing back and forth, back and forth, thinking that if they could get out for just one minute they’d show ’em what you get when you never leave a thing alone. Well, I might not’ve been in a cage, Doc, but those dumb damned eyes was everywhere around me, all the same, ever since I could remember. Staring, watching, all the time,