The Alienist - Caleb Carr [20]
Thinking for just a moment of the corpse on the bridge anchor, I sighed. “However ungodly the rumors, boys, they can’t begin to describe it.” With that I turned and strode up the steps.
Before I was inside the door Riis and Steffens were at it again, Steffens pelting his friend with sarcastic barbs and Riis angrily trying to shut him up. But Link was right, even if he expressed himself somewhat meanly: Riis’s stubborn insistence that homosexual prostitution did not exist meant that another of the city’s largest papers would never acknowledge the full details of a brutal murder. And how much more the report would have meant coming from Riis than from Steffens; for while most of Link’s important work as an exponent of the Progressive movement lay in the future, Riis was long since an established voice of authority, the man whose angry declamations had caused the razing of Mulberry Bend (the very heart of New York’s most notorious slum, Five Points) along with the destruction of many other pestilential pockets. Yet Jake could not bring himself to fully acknowledge the Santorelli murder; despite all the horrors he had witnessed, he could not accept the circumstances of such a crime; and as I entered the big green doors of headquarters I wondered, just as I had wondered a thousand times during staff meetings at the Times, how long many members of the press—not to mention politicians and the public—would be content to equate deliberate ignorance of evil with its nonexistence.
Inside I found Kreizler standing near the caged elevator, talking heatedly with Connor, the detective who had been at the murder scene the previous night. I was about to join them when my arm was taken and I was guided toward a staircase by one of the more pleasant sights available at headquarters: Sara Howard, an old friend of mine.
“Don’t get involved in that, John,” she said, with a tone of sage wisdom that often marked her statements. “Connor is taking a lashing from your friend, and he deserves the full treatment. Besides, the president wants you upstairs—sans Dr. Kreizler.”
“Sara!” I said happily. “I am glad to see you. I’ve spent a night and a morning with maniacs. I need the sound of a sane voice.”
Sara’s taste in dresses ran toward simple designs in shades of green that matched her eyes, and the one she wore that day, with only a minimal bustle and not much petticoat business, showed off her tall, athletic body to advantage. Her face was by no means striking but handsomely plain; it was the play of eyes and mouth, back and forth between mischievous and sad, that made it such a delight to watch her. Back in the early seventies, when I was in my teens, her family moved into a house near ours on Gramercy Park, and I’d subsequently watched her spend her single-digit years turning that decorous neighborhood into her private rumpus room. Time had not changed her much, except to make her as thoughtful (and occasionally brooding) as she was excitable; and following the demise of my engagement to Julia Pratt I had one night gotten more than a little drunk, decided that all women held by society to be beauties were in fact demons, and asked Sara to marry me. Her answer was to take me in a cab to the Hudson River and throw me in.
“You won’t find many sane voices in this building today,” Sara said as we climbed the stairs. “Teddy—that is, the president—isn’t it strange to call him that, John?” And indeed it was; but when Roosevelt was at headquarters, which was ruled by a board of four commissioners of which he was chief, he was distinguished from the other three by the title “president.” Very few of us guessed at the time that he would answer to an identical title in the none-too-distant future. “Well, he’s been in one of his whirlwinds over the Santorelli case. Every kind of person has been in and out—”
Just then Theodore’s voice came booming down from the second-story hallway: “And don’t bother bringing your friends at Tammany into this, Kelly! Tammany is a monstrous Democrat creation, and this is a reform Republican administration—you’ve