The Alienist - Caleb Carr [246]
“You’ve been looking for me,” he said—and then, for the first time, he smiled, showing huge, yellowing teeth. “You’ve been trying to watch me, but I’ve been watching you.” The smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “You want to watch?” He indicated the boy with his knife. “Then watch. He dies first. Cleanly. Not you, though. You’re stupid and worthless—you couldn’t even stop me. Stupid, worthless animals—you I’ll dress alive.”
As he strode back to the boy I whispered to Kreizler, “What’s he going to do?”
Laszlo was still shaking off the effects of the blow he’d taken. “I believe,” he answered, “that he intends to kill that boy. And I believe he intends for us to observe it. After which…”
I saw that a small stream of blood was running down Kreizler’s cheek and jaw. “You all right?” I asked.
“Ah,” Laszlo noised in reply, showing remarkably little concern over our prospective fates, “it’s the stupidity that hurts the most. We chase a man who’s an expert mountaineer, and then we’re surprised when he negotiates a simple masonry wall to get behind us…”
Beecham was by now crouching over the bound boy. “Why did he take off his clothes?” I asked.
Laszlo studied our attacker for a moment. “The blood,” he said at length. “He wants to keep it off his clothes.”
Having put his knife aside for a moment, Beecham began to run his hands over the young, writhing body before him.
“But is that, in fact, the only reason?” Laszlo went on, some surprise showing in his voice.
Beecham’s face continued to betray no sign of anger or lust or any other feeling. He probed the boy’s torso and limbs as an anatomy instructor might have done, pausing only when he laid hands on the young genitals. After fondling them for a few minutes he stood and stepped behind the boy, stroking the upturned buttocks with one hand and his own member with the other.
I grew sickened at the thought of what I believed must come next, and turned away. “But I thought—” My quiet mumble was almost a protest. “I thought he didn’t rape them.”
Laszlo continued to observe. “That may not mean that he hasn’t tried to,” he judged. “This is a complex moment, John. He claimed in his note that he didn’t ‘soil’ the boys. But did he try?”
I picked my head back up to see Beecham still stroking the boy and himself, failing to produce an erection in his own organ. “Well,” I said in disgust, “if he wants to do it why—”
“Because he doesn’t, in fact, want to,” Kreizler replied, his already strained neck straining further to nod his head as he began to fully comprehend what was happening. “He feels an obsessive force pushing him toward it, as toward the killing—but it isn’t desire. And while he can force himself to kill, he can’t force himself to rape.”
As if in response to Laszlo’s analysis of the scene, Beecham suddenly howled in deep-seated frustration, raising his thick arms to the heavens and shaking throughout his body. Then he looked down again, stepped quickly around to the boy’s front end once more, and slipped his long-fingered hands around the young throat.
“No!” Kreizler suddenly called. “No, Japheth, for God’s sake, it isn’t what you want to—”
“Don’t say that name!” Beecham shouted again, as the boy squealed and twisted madly in his grip. “I’ll kill you, you filthy—”
Suddenly, from my left, a somehow familiar voice came out of the darkness:
“You ain’t killing anybody, you miserable bastard.”
Sore as my neck was, it turned quickly to catch sight of Connor, walking down the promenade and holding an impressive Webley .445 revolver. Behind him came two figures who had by now taken on the status of old acquaintances: the same thugs who’d come after Sara and me in the Santorellis’ tenement, who’d dogged Laszlo’s and my steps during our trip to visit Adam Dury, and whom I’d unceremoniously ejected from the Boston–New York train.
Connor’s shifty eyes went thin as he stepped toward Beecham. “You hear