The Alienist - Caleb Carr [136]
“Yes. I’ve heard. But you’ll be doing yourself a favor if you ignore that kind of talk. There’s a man behind it, all right. I can guarantee that, Joseph.” I rubbed my hands together. “Now, then—how about a game?”
Over the years I’ve heard people say that the game of billiards (three-cushion, pocket, or what have you) is nothing more or less than a fast way for a young man to go to the devil. But the way I saw it, a career as a professional gambler—that nightmare of so many mothers and fathers in this city—would’ve been nothing but a step up for this boy; and so for the next hour or so I taught him most of the tricks of the table that I knew: it was a pleasant time, jarred only by the occasional recollection of where Joseph would be heading when we parted company. There was nothing, however, for me to do about that: such boys were their own men.
It was nearly dark by the time I got back to our headquarters, which was still alive with activity. Sara was on the telephone with Roosevelt, attempting to explain that there was no one else we could trust to fill the eighth surveillance spot on Thursday night and that he would therefore have to come along. Normally, Theodore would have required no urging; but recently his troubles at Mulberry Street had multiplied. Two of the men who sat on the Board of Commissioners with him, along with the chief of police, had decided to side with Boss Platt and the antireform forces. Roosevelt was being scrutinized more closely than ever by his enemies, in the hope that he would commit some indiscretion that would justify his dismissal. He did agree to be part of the surveillance effort, ultimately; but he had real misgivings.
Kreizler and the Isaacsons, meanwhile, were engaged in another spirited discussion of our killer’s timing. Lucius had postulated that the one inconsistency in the man’s schedule—the killing of Giorgio Santorelli on March 3rd—could be accounted for by the deceptively mundane phrase “I decided to wait” in the note to Mrs. Santorelli. It was distinctly possible, the younger Isaacson elaborated, that the sighting and selection of a victim were as crucial in their own way to the murderer’s psychic satisfaction as the act of killing itself. Kreizler quite approved of this theory, and added that so long as the man experienced no interference with his intended goal—to murder the boy—he might even derive sadistic pleasure from the delay. This meant that the Santorelli killing could be made to fit the overall timing pattern, because the critical mental event had occurred on Ash Wednesday.
Laszlo and the Isaacsons parted company, however, over the question of whether the man struck on some holidays but not others because he was only angered by certain religious stories and events. Kreizler didn’t like this idea, because it got back to the notion of a religious maniac, a man obsessively, dementedly absorbed in the arcana of the Christian faith. Laszlo was still willing to consider the possibility that the man was (or at some point in his life had been) a priest; but he could not see any reason why, say, the tale of the Three Wise Men should not offer sufficient cause to kill, whereas the purification of the Virgin Mary apparently did. Marcus and Lucius protested that there had to be some reason why only certain holidays were selected, and Kreizler did agree; but he said that we simply hadn’t found the contextual key to that particular part of the puzzle yet.
There being no guarantee that our Ascension Day surveillance plan would produce any results, we all pursued alternate lines of inquiry during the days leading up to it. Marcus and I kept diligently after our priest theory, while Kreizler, Lucius, and Sara engaged in a new and promising activity: canvassing asylums throughout our own and various other parts of the country, by cable and in person, to see if any of them had treated a patient who matched our