The Alienist - Caleb Carr [243]
There was something about the blank way in which he looked back at me that was deeply unsettling: like a man who has divined his fate and has no intention of trying to avoid it.
“Oh, I don’t know that they’re not,” he answered, quietly and simply. “In fact, I’m counting on the fact that they are.”
With that, Laszlo entered the gate and took to the broad, dark stairs that wound up through the massive wall to the promenade. I shrugged helplessly at his cryptic words and was about to follow him, when a faint glimmer of brass somewhere on the other side of Fifth Avenue suddenly caught my eye. I stopped short and tried to locate the source.
On Forty-first Street, beneath one broad-boughed tree whose leaves provided an effective refuge from the glow of the arc streetlamps on the avenue, was an elegant black brougham, whose lanterns were glittering ever so slightly. Both horse and driver appeared to be asleep. For a moment the sense of dread that I felt about climbing the reservoir walls heightened dramatically; but then I shook it off and moved to catch up to Kreizler, telling myself that there had to be a great many people in New York besides Paul Kelly who owned elegant black broughams.
CHAPTER 44
* * *
As soon as we reached the top of the reservoir’s walls I realized the potentially disastrous error I’d made in allowing Kreizler to talk me into coming to this place alone with him. The eight-foot-wide promenade atop the walls, ringed on either side by four-foot iron fences, was some six stories from the ground, and when I looked down I saw the streets from an angle that instantly recalled all the rooftop work we’d done in recent months. That reminder was forbidding enough on its own. But when I looked straight out and around me I saw the tar surfaces and multitudinous chimneys of the buildings that surrounded the reservoir, all of which made it even more plain that while we might not be standing on a rooftop per se, we had nonetheless reentered the lofty realm over which John Beecham was acknowledged master. We were in his world once again, only this time we’d arrived by way of a perverse invitation; and as we strode silently down toward the Fortieth Street side of the walls, the waters of the reservoir stretching out to our right and reflecting a bright moon that had suddenly appeared and was still ascendant in the clear night sky, it became apparent that our status as hunters was in very serious jeopardy: we were on the verge of becoming prey.
Familiar yet still troubling images began to flicker in my head like the projected films I’d seen at Koster and Bial’s theater with Mary Palmer: each of the dead boys, trussed and cut to pieces; the long, terrible knife that had done that cutting; the remains of the butchered cat at Mrs. Piedmont’s; Beecham’s bleak flat in Five Points, and the oven in which he claimed to have cooked the “tender ass” of Giorgio Santorelli; Joseph’s lifeless body; and finally a picture of the killer himself, formed out of all the clues and theories we’d collected during our investigation, yet still, for all our work, no more than a vague silhouette. The infinite black sky and innumerable stars above the reservoir offered no comfort or refuge from these horrific visions, and civilization, as I once again glanced down toward the streets of the city, seemed terribly far away. Each of our careful footsteps tapped home the message that we had come to a lawless place of death, a place where the hopeful invention of fearful man that I clutched in my hand would likely prove a feeble defense, and where the answers to greater mysteries than those we’d spent the last dozen weeks trying to unravel would be made plain with brutal finality. Despite all these anxious thoughts, however, I never once considered turning back. Perhaps Laszlo’s conviction that we were going to end this business on those walls that night was infectious; whatever the reason, I didn’t leave his side, even though I knew, as certainly as I’ve ever known anything, that we stood