The Alienist - Caleb Carr [140]
We found Lucius crouching over Cyrus, who had suffered a nasty blow to the skull. A small pool of blood glittered on the tar beneath Cyrus’s head, while his half-open eyes were rolled frightfully up into their sockets and his mouth was producing strained wheezing sounds. Ever cautious, Lucius had brought some gauze bandages along with him, and was now carefully wrapping them around the top of Cyrus’s head, in an effort to stabilize what was at the very least a bad concussion.
“It’s my fault,” Lucius said, before Stevie and I had even asked any questions. Despite his firm concentration on what he was doing, there was deep remorse in Lucius’s voice. “I was having trouble staying awake, and went for coffee. I forgot that it was Sunday—it took longer to find some than I’d anticipated. I must’ve been gone for more than fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes?” I said, running to the back of the roof. “Could that have been enough time?” Looking down into the rear alleyway, I saw no signs of activity.
“I don’t know,” Lucius answered. “We’ll have to see what Marcus thinks.”
Marcus and Sara arrived a few minutes later, followed soon by Kreizler and Theodore. Pausing just long enough to check on Cyrus’s condition, Marcus produced a magnification lens and a small lantern, then quickly began searching various parts of the rooftop. Explaining that fifteen minutes would indeed have been enough time for a capable climber to get down and up the side of the building, Marcus kept rummaging around until he found some rope fibers that might or might not have been evidence of our killer’s presence. The only way to be sure was to find out from Frank Stephenson if any of his “workers” were missing. Backed up by Theodore, Marcus headed downstairs, while the rest of us stood around Lucius and Kreizler, who were both now at work on Cyrus’s head. Kreizler sent Stevie to tell the street arabs to fetch an ambulance from nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, although there was some question as to whether it was safe to move a man in Cyrus’s condition. After bringing him round with ammonia salts, however, Kreizler was able to learn that Cyrus still had feeling and movement in all his limbs, and Laszlo therefore felt certain that the bumpy ride up Seventh Avenue to the hospital, while uncomfortable, would do no further damage.
Kreizler’s concern for Cyrus’s safety was pronounced; before letting him slip back into semiconsciousness, however, Laszlo wafted more of the ammonia salts under his nose and urgently asked if he’d been able to see who’d struck him. Cyrus only shook his head and moaned pitiably, at which Lucius said that it was useless for Kreizler to press the issue: the wound on Cyrus’s head indicated that he’d been struck from behind, and had therefore probably never realized what was happening.
It took another half an hour for the ambulance from St. Vincent’s to arrive, enough time for us to learn that, in fact, a fourteen-year-old boy from the Black and Tan was not in his assigned room. The details were of a sort that was by now grimly familiar to all of us: the missing youth was a recently arrived German immigrant named Ernst Lohmann, who had not been seen leaving the premises and who had been working out of a chamber that had a window which opened onto the rear alley. According to Stephenson, the boy had requested the room especially that day; so in all likelihood the killer had planned the exodus in advance with his unwitting victim, though how long ago—hours or days—it was impossible to say. I’d told Marcus before he went downstairs that the Black and Tan was not particularly known for offering male whores who dressed up like women, and he’d questioned Stephenson on this point. Sure enough, the one boy in the house who handled such requests was Ernst Lohmann.
Finally, two uniformed ambulance attendants from St. Vincent’s appeared on the roof, carrying a folding stretcher. As they bore Cyrus carefully downstairs and then loaded him into the solemn black ambulance, which was pulled by an equally forbidding