The Alienist - Caleb Carr [229]
“Here. John.”
Looking down I saw her remove a small wooden box from the bottom drawer. She placed it on the grooved desktop rather fearfully, then stood away.
Affixed to the lid of the box was an old daguerreotype, very similar in style and composition to the Civil War work of the eminent photographer Mathew Brady. Based on the picture’s aged and battered condition I judged it to be of about the same vintage as Brady’s work. The image displayed was that of a dead white man: scalped, eviscerated, and emasculated, with arrows protruding from his arms and legs. His eyes were missing. There were no identifying marks on the picture, but it was obviously one of the Reverend Victor Dury’s creations.
The box on which the daguerreotype was mounted was closed tightly, but there seemed to be an aroma emanating from it—the same sort of aroma that’d been present in Beecham’s room at Mrs. Piedmont’s: rotting animal flesh. My heart sank as I laid hold of the thing, although before I could open it I heard Marcus’s voice:
“Oh, no. God, how…”
Then there were bustling sounds, and Marcus stumbled out to where Sara and I were standing. Even in the lamplight I could see that he was pale—a surprising condition, given that I’d watched the man calmly photograph scenes that would’ve turned most people’s stomachs. In a few seconds Lucius followed him in, bearing something in his arms.
“John!” Lucius called in quiet urgency. “John, it—it’s evidence! Good lord, I think we’ve got a straight murder investigation now!”
“Aw, shit,” said our man at the door. “Then youse is cops?”
Without answering I struck a match and held it high as I approached Lucius. Just as I focused in on the object in his arms, Sara let out a short cry and then clamped a hand over her mouth, spinning away.
Lucius was holding an enormous glass jar. Inside it, preserved in a substance that I could only suppose to be formaldehyde, were human eyes. Some still trailed their ganglia of optic nerves, and some were smoothly round; some were fresh, others milky and obviously aged; some were blue in color, some were brown, and others were hazel, gray, and green. But it was not the discovery or condition of the eyes, I now understood, that had stunned Marcus—it was their number. For these were not the ten eyes of our five murdered boys, nor even the fourteen eyes of the boys plus the Zweig children; these were the dozens—the dozens—of eyes of more than a score of victims. And all of them were gaping through the curved glass in what seemed silent accusation, pathetically begging to know what had taken us so very long…
In a moment my own eyes wandered back to the small box that Sara had found, which I now opened slowly. The stench of decay that wafted up was not so strong as I expected, allowing me to study the receptacle’s strange contents without difficulty. But I could make no sense of what I saw: A small, red-black piece of what looked like desiccated rubber.
“Lucius?” I said softly, holding it out toward him.
Setting the large jar down on the desk, Lucius took the box over by the front door and held it under the kerosene lamp. Our guide looked over his shoulder as the detective sergeant studied the contents.
“Shit?” the man with the nightstick said. “Sure enough smells like shit.”
“No,” Lucius answered evenly, eyes ever on the box. “It is, I believe, the preserved remnants of a human heart.”
That was enough to give even a Five Points thug pause, and our guide turned away and into the hall with a look of utter consternation on his face. “Who da hell are you people?” he breathed.
I kept my eyes on Lucius. “A heart? Is it the Lohmann boy’s?”
He shook his head. “Too old. This has been in here for a very long time. It looks as though it may even