The Alienist - Caleb Carr [17]
“Ah,” I said, seizing the opportunity, “now, about that—”
“They’ll want him to be mad, of course,” Laszlo mused, not hearing me. “The doctors here, the newspapers, the judges, they’d like to think that only a madman would shoot a five-year-old girl in the head. It creates certain…difficulties, if we are forced to accept that our society can produce sane men who commit such acts.” He sighed once and took an umbrella from Cyrus. “Yes, that will be a long day or two in court, I should think…”
We exited the Pavilion, myself seeking refuge with Kreizler under his umbrella, and then climbed into the now-covered calash. I knew what was coming: a monologue that was a kind of catharsis for Kreizler, a restatement of some of his most basic professional principles, designed to relieve the enormous responsibility of helping send a man to his death. Kreizler was a confirmed opponent of the practice of executing criminals, even vicious murderers such as Wolff; but he did not allow this opposition to affect his judgment or his definition of true insanity, which was, by comparison with that of many of his colleagues, relatively narrow. As Cyrus jumped into the driver’s seat of the calash and the carriage pulled away from Bellevue, Kreizler’s diatribe began to cover subjects I’d heard him discuss many times before: how a broad definition of insanity might make society as a whole feel better but did nothing for mental science, and only lessened the chance that the truly mentally diseased would receive proper care and treatment. It was an insistent sort of speech—Kreizler seemed to be trying to push the image of Wolff in the electrical chair further and further away—and as it wound on, I realized that there was no hope of my gaining any hard information concerning just what in hell was going on and why I’d been called into whatever it was.
Glancing about at the passing buildings in some frustration, I let my eyes come to rest on Cyrus, momentarily thinking that, since he had to listen to this sort of thing more than anyone, I might get some sympathy out of the man. I should have known better. Like Stevie Taggert, Cyrus had had a hard life before coming to work for Laszlo and was now quite devoted to my friend. As a boy in New York Cyrus had seen his parents literally torn to pieces during the draft riots of 1863, when angry hordes of white men and women, many of them recently arrived immigrants, expressed their unwillingness to fight for the causes of the Union and slave emancipation by laying hold of any blacks they could find—including young children—and dismembering them, burning them alive, tarring them, whatever medieval tortures their Old World minds could conceive. A talented musician with a splendid bass-baritone voice, Cyrus had been taken in by a pandering uncle after his parents’ death, and trained to be a “professor,” a piano player in a brothel that proferred young black women to white men of means. But his youthful nightmare had left him rather reluctant to tolerate bigoted abuse from the house’s customers. One night in 1887 he had come upon a drunken policeman taking his graft in trade, which the cop apparently thought included brutal blows from the back of his hand and taunts of “nigger bitch.” Cyrus had calmly gone to the kitchen, fetched a large butcher knife, and dispatched the cop to that special Valhalla reserved for fallen members of the New York City Police Department.
Enter Kreizler once again. Expounding a theory he called “explosive association,” he had revealed the genesis of Cyrus’s actions to the judge in the case: during the few minutes involved in the killing, Laszlo said, Cyrus had returned in his mind to the night of his parents’ death, and the well of anger that had been left untapped since that incident came gushing forth and engulfed the offending policeman. Cyrus was not insane, Kreizler announced; he had responded to the situation in the only way possible for a man with his background. The judge had been impressed