The Alienist - Caleb Carr [150]
“Enough,” Kreizler pressed, “to complicate a solution?”
“Doctor!” Kelly feigned shock. “I’ve got half a mind to be insulted.” The gangster flipped open a lid on the head of his cane, revealing a small compartment full of a fine crystalline powder. “Gentlemen?” he said, offering it our way. Laszlo and I both declined. “Gets the system moving at this ungodly hour of the day.” Kelly placed some of the cocaine on his wrist and snorted it hard. “I don’t like to give the appearance of some cheap burny blower, but I’m not much for the morning. Anyway, Doctor”—he wiped at his nose with a fine silk handkerchief and closed the lid of the cane—“I wasn’t aware that there’d been any serious attempt to solve this case.” He stared straight at Kreizler. “Do you know something I don’t know?”
Neither Kreizler nor I answered the question, which prompted Kelly to go on, sarcastically but at length, about the appalling lack of any serious official effort to solve the murders. Finally, the brougham lurched to a fortuitous halt on the west side of Central Park. Laszlo and I stepped out onto the intersection of Seventy-seventh Street, hoping that Kelly would now let the matter drop; but as we got to the curb the gangster poked his head out behind us.
“Well, it’s been my honor, Dr. Kreizler,” he called. “You, too, scribbler. One final question, though—you don’t imagine that the big boys are actually going to let you finish this little investigation of yours, do you?”
I was taken too off guard to reply; but Kreizler had evidently adjusted to the situation and replied, “I can only answer that question with another, Kelly—do you intend to let us finish?”
Kelly cocked his head and looked at the morning sky. “To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about that. I didn’t think I’d have to. These murders really have been very useful to me, as I say. If you were actually to jeopardize that usefulness—ah, but what am I saying? With what you’re up against, you’ll be lucky to stay out of jail yourselves.” He held his stick up. “Good morning, gentlemen. Harry! Back to the New Brighton!”
We watched the brougham pull away, Eat-’Em-Up Jack McManus still hanging off of it like some kind of overgrown, malevolent monkey, and then turned to head into the Early Renaissance walls and turrets of the Museum of Natural History.
Though not yet three decades old, the museum already housed a first-rate collection of experts and an enormous, bizarre assortment of bones, rocks, stuffed animals, and pinned insects. But of all the prestigious departments that called the castle-like structure home, none was more renowned, or more iconoclastic, than that of anthropology; and I later learned that the man we were on our way to see that day, Franz Boas, was primarily responsible for this.
He was about Kreizler’s age, and had been born in Germany, where he’d originally been trained as an experimental psychologist before moving on to ethnology. Thus there were obvious circumstantial reasons why Boas and Kreizler should have become acquainted upon the former’s immigration to the United States; but none of these was as important to their friendship as was a pronounced similarity of professional ideas. Kreizler had staked his reputation on his theory of context, the idea that no adult’s personality can be truly understood without first comprehending the facts of his individual experience. Boas’s anthropological work represented, in many ways, the application of this theory on a larger scale: to entire cultures. While doing groundbreaking research with the Indian tribes of the American Northwest, Boas had reached the conclusion that history is the principal force that shapes cultures, rather than race or geographical environment, as had been previously assumed. Different ethnic groups behave as they behave, in other words, not because biology or climate forces them to (there were too many examples of groups that contradicted this theory to allow Boas to accept it) but rather because