The Alienist - Caleb Carr [249]
“Here,” I said. “Get these on.”
Slowly and absentmindedly, Beecham fit the manacles around his wrists, closing first one and then the other with some difficulty. I searched Connor’s pockets and found the key to the restraints, after which I noticed that there was a small bloodstain on Connor’s shirt. Unbuttoning the dirty garment and then pulling it aside, all the while keeping my gun on Beecham, I saw that Connor had a long, half-healed wound in his side, which had apparently been torn back open by Jack McManus. It was the injury, I realized, that Mary Palmer had inflicted before Connor had flung her down Kreizler’s stairs.
“Good for you, Mary,” I said softly, standing away from Connor.
Kreizler came back out of the control house, running a hand through his hair and surveying the scene before him with evident, if rather amazed, satisfaction. Then he looked my way self-consciously, as if he knew what was coming.
“You,” I said, evenly but very firmly, “are going to tell me what in hell is going on around here!”
CHAPTER 45
* * *
Laszlo had just opened his mouth to reply when the sound of a sharp whistle echoed up from Fortieth Street. Kreizler ran to peer over the street-side fence of the promenade, and I quickly joined him, looking down to see Cyrus and Stevie in the calash.
“I fear that explanations will have to wait, Moore,” Kreizler said, turning toward Beecham again. “Cyrus and Stevie’s arrival means that the opera has been over for at least three quarters of an hour. By now Roosevelt’s suspicions have been thoroughly aroused. He’ll have checked with the others at High Bridge Tower, and when they learn of our disappearance…”
“But what do you plan to do?” I asked.
Kreizler scratched his head and smiled a bit. “I’m not terribly sure. My plans didn’t quite provide for this situation—I wasn’t entirely certain that I’d still be alive, even given our friend McManus.”
That stung me, and I didn’t mind showing it: “Oh,” I huffed, “and I suppose I would have been dead, too!”
“Please, Moore,” Kreizler said, waving his hand impatiently. “There simply isn’t time.”
“But what about Connor?” I demanded, pointing to the former detective’s prostrate form.
“We shall hold Connor for Roosevelt,” Laszlo replied sharply, crossing over to where Beecham sat huddled. “Though he deserves far worse!” Crouching down to stare Beecham in the face, Laszlo drew a deep breath to calm himself, then held a hand in front of our prisoner’s eyes and moved it back and forth. Beecham seemed utterly oblivious.
“The boy has come down from the mountains,” Kreizler mused at length. “Or so it would seem.” I took his point: if the man we’d first encountered on the walls that night had been the evolved version of the cool, sadistic young trapper who’d once roamed the Shawangunks, then the terrified creature now before us was the inheritor of all the terror and self-loathing that Japheth Dury had felt at every other moment of his life. Evidently aware that there was little to fear from the man so long as he was in this mental state, Laszlo took Beecham’s jacket from him and draped it around the man’s huge, bare shoulders. “Listen to me, Japheth Dury,” Kreizler said, in an ominous tone that got Beecham to finally stop swaying and moaning. “You’ve a great deal of blood on your hands. That of your parents, not least of all. Should your crimes become known, your brother, Adam—who is still alive and still attempting to carry on an honest, decent life—will most certainly be privately destroyed and publicly hounded. For that if for no other reason, the part of you that is still human must pay close attention to me.”
Though Beecham’s eyes remained quite glassy, he nodded