The Alienist - Caleb Carr [234]
There was no doubt about it—he’d just described a truly memorable night of opera, and I was momentarily distracted by the prospect. But then a stabbing sensation hit my gut as a picture of Joseph came into my head, wiping out all fantasies about pleasant evenings. “Kreizler,” I said coldly, “I don’t know what’s happened that lets you sit here and talk so casually about the opera, as if people we both know hadn’t been—”
“There’s nothing casual in what I’m saying, Moore.” The black eyes went dead, and a cool but ferocious sort of determination hardened the voice: “I’ll make a deal with you—come with me to Giovanni, and I’ll rejoin the investigation. And we will end this affair.”
“You’ll rejoin?” I said, surprised. “But when?”
“Not before the opera,” Laszlo answered. I was about to protest, but he held up a firm hand. “I can’t be any more specific than that, John, so don’t ask me to. Just tell me—do you accept?”
Well, of course I did accept—what else was I going to do? Despite everything the Isaacsons, Sara, and I had achieved in recent weeks, Joseph’s murder had left me feeling profoundly doubtful about our ability to see the investigation through. The thought of Kreizler coming back was an enormous incentive to keep going, one that allowed me to get through an entire squab before we finally left Del’s and headed downtown. He was being mysterious, all right—but Laszlo wasn’t capricious about such things, and my money said that he had a good reason for shrouding his intentions. And so I promised to get my opera clothes cleaned, and then shook hands on the deal; though when I said how much I was looking forward to telling the others about the arrangement on my return to Number 808 Broadway, Kreizler requested that I not do so. Above all, I was to say nothing to Roosevelt.
“I don’t ask that out of bitterness,” Laszlo explained, as I got out of the calash at the northern end of Union Square. “Theodore has been decent and kind in recent days, and diligent in his search for Connor.”
“There’s still no sign of the man, however,” I said, having heard as much from Roosevelt.
Laszlo stared off, seeming oddly detached. “He’ll turn up, I suspect. And in the meantime”—he closed the small carriage door—“there are other things to attend to. All right, Cyrus.”
The calash rolled away, and I walked downtown.
When I arrived at our headquarters I found a note from Sara and the Isaacsons on my desk, saying that they’d gone home to get a few hours’ sleep, after which they planned to join the team of detectives that Theodore had assigned to watch Beecham’s building. I took advantage of their absence to stretch out on the divan and try to get some much-needed rest of my own, though the state I subsequently fell into could hardly have been called a sound sleep. Still, by noon I was feeling improved enough to go back to Washington Square, bathe, and change my clothes. Then I telephoned Sara. She informed me that the rendezvous at 155 Baxter Street was set for sundown, and that Roosevelt himself intended to log a few hours on watch. She said she’d pick me up in a cab, and then we both tried to get a little more rest.
As it turned out, Marcus was quite right about Beecham: by three A.M. Saturday morning there’d still been no sign of the man, and we all began to realize that he almost certainly wasn’t going to return to the flat. I told the others about what Kreizler had said concerning Beecham’s “trophies”—that if he’d left them behind it indicated some sort of climax to his murderous career was fast approaching—and this notion underlined for us all the importance of devising an ironclad plan for Sunday night. As per our agreement of several weeks earlier, Roosevelt was included in these deliberations, which we undertook Saturday afternoon at Number 808.
Roosevelt had never actually been to our headquarters before, and watching him take in all its intellectual and decorative oddities reminded me strongly of the morning I’d first woken up in the place after being drugged