The Alienist - Caleb Carr [26]
“Eh?” Theodore looked up in surprise, the pince-nez that he wore in the office falling from his nose. “I beg your pardon?”
“Many eyes see reports at headquarters, Commissioner.” Kreizler was doing his best to be diplomatic, which in his case was a genuine effort. “I did not wish to take the chance of certain details becoming…public. Not yet.”
Theodore paused, his eyes narrowing pensively. “You write,” he eventually said quietly, “of terrible errors.”
Kreizler stood and walked to the window, pulling the shade aside just a crack. “First of all, Roosevelt, you must promise me that persons such as”—he said the rank with true disgust—“Detective Sergeant Connor will not be told any of this. The man has spent this morning propagating false information to the press—information that may well end up costing more lives.”
Theodore’s ordinarily furrowed brow became positively creased. “By thunder! If that’s true, Doctor, I’ll have the man’s—”
Kreizler held up a hand. “Just promise me that, Roosevelt.”
“You have my word. But at least tell me what Connor said.”
“He has given several reporters the impression,” Kreizler answered, beginning to walk the floor of the office, “that this man Wolff was responsible for the Santorelli killing.”
“Then you think otherwise?”
“Unquestionably. Wolff’s thoughts and actions are entirely too unpremeditated and unsystematic for this. Though he is utterly devoid of emotional restraint, and has no aversion to violence.”
“Would you consider him a…” For Roosevelt the language was somewhat unfamiliar. “A psychopath?” Kreizler cocked an eyebrow. “I have seen some of your recent writings,” Theodore went on, looking a bit self-conscious. “Though I can’t say how much I’ve truly understood.”
Kreizler nodded with a small, enigmatic smile. “Is Wolff a psychopath, you ask. There is constitutional psychopathic inferiority, without question. But as to the implications of labeling him a psychopath—if you’ve read even some of the literature, Roosevelt, you know that that depends on whose opinions we accept.”
Roosevelt nodded in return and rubbed his chin with one of his tough hands. I did not then know, but would learn in the weeks to come, that one of the greatest single points of contention between Kreizler and many of his colleagues—a battle that had been fought primarily in the pages of the American Journal of Insanity, a quarterly published by the national organization of asylum superintendents—was the issue of what constituted a true homicidal lunatic. Men and women whose savagely violent acts betrayed peculiar patterns of moral thought, but whose intellectual capacities were acknowledged to be healthy, had recently been included within the broad classification of “psychopathic personalities” by the German psychologist Emil Kraepelin. The classification had been generally accepted throughout the profession; the contested question was, were such psychopaths genuinely mentally diseased? Most doctors answered in the affirmative, and although they couldn’t yet precisely identify the full nature and causes of the disease, they thought such discoveries only a matter of time. Kreizler, on the other hand, believed that psychopaths were produced by extreme childhood environments and experiences and were unafflicted by any true pathology. Judged in context, the actions of such patients could be understood and even predicted (unlike those of the truly mad). This was clearly the diagnosis he had reached with regard to Henry Wolff.
“Then you’ll declare him competent to stand trial?” Roosevelt asked.
“I will.” Kreizler’s face darkened perceptibly, and he stared at his hands as he folded them together. “And, more importantly, I’ll wager that long before that trial begins we will have proof that he is not connected to the Santorelli case. Grim proof.”
I was finding it hard to remain silent. “That proof being…?” I asked.
Kreizler’s hands fell to his sides as he returned to the window. “More bodies, I fear. Especially if an attempt is made to tie Wolff to Santorelli.