The Alienist - Caleb Carr [217]
“But he could’ve gotten another job,” Sara said, her jubilation fading a bit.
“Let’s hope so,” I answered, as the traffic in front of us thinned. “Come on.”
“But how?” Sara called as we stepped into the avenue. “How did you think of it? And what was all that about the Thirteenth Ward?”
As we kept marching farther west toward Bank Street, I explained my line of reasoning to Sara. The 1890 census, I’d remembered hearing from friends of mine who’d reported on it, had indeed been the cause of a great scandal in New York (and the nation generally) when it was conducted during the summer and fall of that year. The chief causes of said scandal had been, not surprisingly, the city’s political bosses, whose power stood to be affected by the results of the count and who had tried to influence every stage of the proceedings. Many of the nine hundred men who’d shown up at Charles Murray’s Eighth Street offices to apply for positions as enumerators in July of 1890 had been agents of either Tammany Hall or Boss Platt, and they had been instructed by their superiors to tailor their returns so as to ensure that congressional districts loyal to their respective political parties weren’t redrawn in a way that would cause them to lose power in state and national affairs. Sometimes this had meant inflating the count of a given district, a job that entailed manufacturing the vital statistics and backgrounds of nonexistent citizens. For enumerators, apparently, were far more than simple numbers men: their work entailed careful interviews with a cross section of their subjects, the purpose being to determine not only how many citizens the nation had but also what sorts of lives they led. These interviews included personal questions that might, as one of my colleagues at the Times had put it in an article, “under other circumstances have seemed quite impertinent.” The flood of false information that had come into Superintendent Murray’s office from Democratic and Republican agents had been perforce imaginative and often impossible to distinguish from real returns. Such behavior hadn’t been confined to New York, as I say, though as usual New York had taken the trend to almost absurd extremes. As a result, the work of assembling the final report in Washington had been greatly delayed. The original overall head of the project (the Superintendent Porter whom Murray had mentioned) had resigned in 1893, and the census was completed by his successor, C. D. Wright—but there was really no way to tell, even then, how reliable the final product was.
Enumerators had received their assignments according to congressional districts, which in New York had been subdivided according to wards. My question to Murray about Beecham and the Thirteenth Ward had, I told Sara, been a guess: I knew that Benjamin and Sofia Zweig had lived in that ward, and I was going on the theory that Beecham had met them while working in the area, perhaps even while interviewing their family for the census. Fortunately, my guess had paid off, though we were still in the dark as to exactly why Murray had dismissed our man.
“It doesn’t seem likely that Beecham was involved in falsifying returns,” Sara said, as we hustled up Greenwich Avenue toward Bank Street. “He’s not the type to get involved in politics—and besides, the census was already completed. But if not that, then what?”
“We can send the Isaacsons back to find out tomorrow,” I answered. “Murray seems like the kind of man who’ll respond to a badge. Though if you asked me to post odds right now I’d give you twelve to one that it’s got something to do with children. Maybe someone finally came forward with a complaint—not necessarily anything violent, but something seamy, all the same.”
“It does seem likely,” Sara said. “You remember the remark Murray made when he was discussing how respectable Beecham seemed? And how that made him find whatever it was so ‘remarkable’?”
“Exactly,” I answered. “There’s an unpleasant little tale in there somewhere.”
We’d reached Bank Street and turned