The Alienist - Caleb Carr [137]
On Ascension Eve we apportioned our responsibilities for the next night: Marcus and Sara, the latter carrying both her firearms, would take up watch on the roof of the Golden Rule; Kreizler and Roosevelt would man Paresis Hall, where Theodore’s authority would be sufficient to keep Biff Ellison in line if there was trouble; Lucius and Cyrus would cover the Black and Tan, Cyrus’s color offering a convenient explanation for their presence should such prove necessary; and Stevie and I would be just down Bleecker Street, atop the Slide. Positioned outside each of these houses would be several street arabs of Stevie’s acquaintance, who, without being told any details of the operation, could be dispatched to bring assistance from the other locations in the event something did happen at any one of them. Roosevelt thought that this task might be better served by policemen, but Kreizler vehemently opposed such an idea. Privately, Laszlo told me he suspected that any contact between officers of the law and the killer would result in the latter’s quick death, Theodore’s prohibitive orders notwithstanding. We had now experienced enough mysterious interference to know that there were forces far more powerful than Roosevelt at work, and those forces unquestionably had as their goal the complete suppression of the case. It was obvious that such a result could best be achieved through a quick dispatch of the apprehended suspect, which would circumvent the need for a trial with all its attendant publicity. Kreizler was determined to prevent this outcome, not only because it would be grievously criminal, but because it would eliminate any possibility of the killer’s being examined to learn his motives as well.
As it turned out, all our anxious anticipation of what might happen on Ascension Day was in vain, for the night passed without incident. We took up our various surveillance positions and spent the long, slow hours until six A.M. battling no greater enemy than boredom. As a result, the days that followed were full of more useless arguments over why the killer should have elected to strike on Good Friday but not on Ascension Day. There was a growing feeling, voiced first by Sara, that the coincidence of the holidays and the murders might be nothing more than that; but Marcus and I remained firmly committed to the idea that our killer’s calendar and that of the Christian faith were somehow connected, since this theory only helped our hypothesis about a rogue or defrocked priest being the killer. We urged that our interceptive sights be set on the next significant holiday—Pentecost, just eleven days after the Feast of the Ascension—and that we try to use the intervening time as productively as possible. Sad to say, though, Marcus and I ran into a brick wall with our priest research; and it began to seem that our entire theory might not be very much more than a well-reasoned waste of time.
Our teammates, on the other hand, did achieve some progress during the week before Pentecost: answers to the cables and letters that Sara, Lucius, and Kreizler had sent out to almost every reputable asylum in the country began to trickle in. Most of them were firmly negative, but a few offered hope, reporting that a man or men of the general physical stature that Kreizler had described, and characterized by at least some of the mental symptoms he’d noted, had been committed within their walls at some point during the past fifteen years. A few institutions even sent copies of