The Alienist - Caleb Carr [135]
“A reasonable arrangement,” Kreizler decided, with a wave toward Lucius. Then, as I entered the elevator, Laszlo lowered his voice: “And remember, John, there’s a very good chance that, while you may be helping the boy by warning him, you may also put him at great risk if you’re seen in his company. Avoid it if you can.”
After walking to the Golden Rule I arranged to meet Joseph in a small billiard parlor around the corner. When he arrived I noticed that his face was quite rosy after being scrubbed free of the usual paint, a fact that touched me. I remembered that our first interaction had involved a similar cleaning of Joseph’s face; and I was struck by the thought that he hadn’t wanted me to see him all made up this time, either. Indeed, his entire manner did not seem that of a boy-whore, when he was dealing with me, but rather that of a young man who desperately needed an older male friend; or was I now suffering from Professor James’s famous fallacy, and allowing the way in which Joseph reminded me of my brother to influence my reading of the boy’s behavior?
Joseph ordered himself a short beer in a manner that suggested he’d done so many times before (and which ruled out my presuming to lecture him about the perils of alcohol). As we started to knock some ivory balls around a table casually, I told Joseph I had some new information about the man who’d killed Ali ibn-Ghazi, and I asked him to pay very close attention, so that he’d be able to pass the news on to his friends. Then I launched into a physical description:
The man was tall, I said, about six-foot-two, and very strong. He was capable of lifting a boy like Joseph, or someone even larger, without difficulty. Yet despite his size and strength, there was something wrong with him, something that he was very sensitive about. It was probably some part of his face; maybe his eyes. They might be injured, scarred, deformed in some way. Whatever the problem, he didn’t like it when people mentioned it or looked at it. Joseph said that he’d never noticed such a man, but that a lot of the Golden Rule’s customers hid their faces when they came in. I told him to watch for it in future, and went on to the subject of what the man might wear. Nothing fancy, I said, because he didn’t want to attract attention to himself. Also, he probably didn’t have much money, which meant that he couldn’t afford expensive clothes. It was likely, as Marcus had told Joseph during our last visit, that he would be carrying a large bag; inside that bag were tools he used to climb up and down walls, in order to reach the rooms of the boys he was after without being detected.
Then came the hard part: I told Joseph that the man was especially careful about not being seen because he’d been in all the houses like the Golden Rule before and might be very easy for some (maybe most) of the boys to identify. He might even be someone they knew and trusted, someone who’d helped them out, who’d tried to show them how to make new lives for themselves. A settlement or charity worker, perhaps—maybe even a priest. The main thing was that he didn’t look or sound like someone who could do the things he’d been doing.
Joseph kept track of all these details by ticking them off on his fingers, and when I’d finished he nodded and said, “Okay, okay, I’ve got it. But do you mind if I ask you something, Mr. Moore?”
“Fire away,” I answered.
“Well, then—how is it you know all these things about the guy, anyway?”
“Sometimes,” I said with a small laugh, “I’m a little confused about that, myself. Why?”
Joseph smiled, but also began to kick his legs nervously. “It’s only because—well, a lot of my friends, they didn’t believe me when I told them what you said last time. They didn’t see how anybody could know. Thought maybe