The Alienist - Caleb Carr [129]
“You’ve got one hell of a lot of explaining to do,” I said to Laszlo, as we stood in the warm rush of air that blew back from the engine of the train. My feeling of relief was so pronounced that I could not suppress a smile, though I was quite serious about wanting answers. “You can start with why we came here.”
Kreizler took another pull from my flask, then studied it. “This is a particularly barbaric blend, Moore,” he said, avoiding my demand for information. “I’m a bit shocked.”
I drew myself up. “Kreizler…”
“Yes, yes, I know, John,” he replied, waving me to silence. “You’re entitled to some answers. But just where to begin?” Sighing once, Laszlo took another drink. “As I told you before, I spoke to Meyer earlier today. I gave him a complete outline of our work to date. I then told him about my—my exchange of words with Sara.” Grunting once shamefacedly, Laszlo kicked at the railing of the deck. “I really must apologize to her for that.”
“Yes,” I replied, “you must. What did Meyer say?”
“That he found Sara’s points concerning the role of a woman in the formation quite sound,” Kreizler answered, still a bit contrite. “I suddenly found myself arguing with him as I’d argued with Sara.” Taking another pull from the flask, Kreizler grunted again and murmured, “The fallacy, damn it all…”
“The what?” I asked, bewildered.
“Nothing,” Kreizler answered, with a shake of his head. “An aberration in my own thinking that has caused me to waste precious days. But it’s of no importance now. What is important is that as I thought the whole issue over this afternoon I found that both Meyer and Sara were right—there was powerful evidence that a woman had played an ominous role in the formation of our killer. His obsessive furtiveness, the particular breed of sadism, all such factors pointed toward the sort of conclusions that Sara had outlined. As I say, I tried to argue with Meyer, just as I’d argued with Sara, but then he brought up Jesse Pomeroy, and used my own twenty-year-old words to contradict what I was now saying. Pomeroy, after all, never even knew his own father, nor did he ever, so far as I have been able to tell, suffer excessive physical punishment as a child. Yet his was—and is—a personality in many ways similar to that of the man we seek. As you know, Pomeroy was steadfast in his unwillingness to discuss his mutilative activities at the time of his capture. I could only hope that time and solitary confinement had loosened his resolve. We were lucky there.”
I nodded, thinking back to Pomeroy’s statement. “What he said about his mother, and other children, and the scrutiny he was always under—do you think that’s really crucial?”
“I do, indeed,” Laszlo answered, his words starting to move at a characteristically quicker clip. “And so is his pronounced emphasis on the unwillingness of the people who inhabited his world to touch him. You remember what he said, about his own mother being unwilling to kiss his face? Quite probably the only physical contact with others that he ever knew as a boy was taunting or tormenting in nature. And from there we can draw a direct line to his violence.”
“How so?”
“Well, Moore, I’ll offer you yet another statement from Professor James. It’s a concept that he often brought up in class in the old days, and one which struck me like a thunderbolt the first time I read it in the Principles.” Laszlo turned to the sky and tried hard to remember the exact wording. “‘If all cold things were wet and all wet things cold,