The Alienist - Caleb Carr [245]
I groaned again and kept trying to lift my head, finally succeeding just enough to be able to turn and catch sight of Kreizler. He was similarly bound, though he seemed quite conscious and unharmed. He gave me a smile.
“Are you back, John?” he said.
“Uhhh,” was all I was able to say in response. “Where’s…”
With effort Kreizler nodded toward the control house.
The bound boy lay where we’d first seen him, though by now his urgent cries had reverted to fearful whimpers. Before him stood an enormous figure clad in unremarkable black clothing, whose back was to Kreizler and me. The man was slowly removing his garments and placing them neatly to one side of the promenade. In a few minutes he was entirely naked, revealing more than six feet of powerful muscles. He stepped forward to the boy—who, judging by the adult lines that were just beginning to show in the face and body, must’ve been about twelve—and picked his painted head up by the hair.
“Crying?” the man said, in a low, emotionless voice. “A boy like you ought to cry…”
The man released the boy’s head and then turned to face Kreizler and me. His anterior musculature was as fully developed as his posterior—from the shoulders down he was a remarkable physical specimen. I strained my neck to look up at his face, furrowing my brow as I did. I don’t know precisely what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the banality of those features. There was something of Adam Dury in the way the skin was pulled tightly over the man’s skull, as well as in the thinness of his hair. The eyes, too, were like his brother’s, too small for the big, bony head in which they sat. The right side of the face drooped a bit, though it wasn’t at that moment spasming, and the big jaw was set firmly; but all in all it was a common sort of face, one that exhibited no hint of the terrible turmoil that boiled without respite deep within the large head. He looked rather as though the construction of this horrendous scene was not altogether different from counting heads for the census.
That fact, I suddenly realized, was the most frightening thing I’d yet learned about John Beecham. In a very businesslike manner he bent down and took his enormous knife from out of his clothes, then walked over to where Kreizler and I were hanging. His chiseled body bore very little hair, allowing it to reflect the light of the moon brightly. He stood in a wide stance and leaned down to look first Kreizler and then me in the face.
“Only two,” he said, shaking his head. “That was stupid—stupid.” He lifted the knife, which closely resembled the one that Lucius had shown us at Delmonico’s, and pressed the flat of its blade against Laszlo’s right cheek, letting it play languorously around the lines of my friend’s face.
Laszlo watched Beecham’s hand move, and then said cautiously, “Japheth—”
Beecham growled viciously and then brought the back of his left hand hard across Laszlo’s head. “Don’t you say that name!” He seethed violently. The knife went back under one of Laszlo’s eyes, and Beecham pressed it firmly enough to bring