The Alienist - Caleb Carr [260]
“How long? Well, a good long time, I suppose—hell, he’d been at it for years.”
“Yes,” Kreizler answered, “but how much longer? The crisis was inevitable—he couldn’t go forever without society being aware of him. He wanted that, wanted it desperately. If the average person were to describe John Beecham in light of his murders, he’d say he was a social outcast, but nothing could be more superficial, or more untrue. Beecham could never have turned his back on human society, nor society on him, and why? Because he was—perversely, perhaps, but utterly—tied to that society. He was its offspring, its sick conscience—a living reminder of all the hidden crimes we commit when we close ranks to live among each other. He craved human society, craved the chance to show people what their ‘society’ had done to him. And the odd thing is, society craved him, too.”
“Craved him?” I said, as we passed along the quiet perimeter of Washington Square Park. “How do you mean? They’d have shot him through with electricity if they’d had the chance.”
“Yes, but not before holding him up to the world,” Kreizler answered. “We revel in men like Beecham, Moore—they are the easy repositories of all that is dark in our very social world. But the things that helped make Beecham what he was? Those, we tolerate. Those, we even enjoy…”
As Kreizler’s gaze drifted away again, the calash rolled to a slow stop outside my grandmother’s house. The sky was only beginning to glow in the east, but there was already a light on in the upper floors of Number 19 Washington Square. As Kreizler turned his head to take in the streets around him, he caught sight of that light, and it brought the first small smile of the morning to his face.
“How has your grandmother felt about your involvement in a murder case. Moore?” he asked. “She always took a lively interest in the macabre.”
“I haven’t told her,” I answered. “She simply thinks that my gambling habit has gotten worse. And, all things considered, I’m going to let her keep thinking that.” I got to the sidewalk with a stiff little jump. “So—we’re to be at Del’s tonight, I understand?”
Kreizler nodded once. “It seems appropriate, eh?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’m going to call Charlie—have him tell Ranhofer to lay something really exceptional on. We deserve that much, anyway.”
Kreizler’s smile widened just a bit. “Indeed, Moore,” he said, closing the calash door and offering his hand. I shook it, and then Laszlo faced front with a small groan. “All right, Stevie.”
The boy turned and saluted to me, and then the carriage kept rolling on toward Fifth Avenue.
CHAPTER 47
* * *
Almost twenty-four hours later, as I was stumbling home after a meal at Delmonico’s that would have slowed down a regiment of cavalry and their horses, I stopped at the Fifth Avenue Hotel to buy an early edition of the Tuesday Times. Walking on down the avenue as I scanned the paper, I found myself once more under the watchful eye of Colonel Waring’s helmeted young street cleaners, who were just waiting for me to drop some shred of newsprint. I ignored them, however, and continued my search, finally locating what I was looking for in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page.
That morning the custodian at the Bellevue morgue had made a gruesome discovery. Wrapped in a tarp and deposited near the back door of the building was the body of a muscular adult male who in life had stood over six feet tall. Because the body was not clothed, there were no identifying documents to be found. A single bullet wound to the chest was the apparent cause of death; but the body had sustained further damage, as well. Specifically, the top of the skull had been removed and the brain apparently dissected in a way that, the morgue staff said, indicated an expert hand. A brief note had been found pinned to the tarp, claiming that this was the body of the man responsible for the boy-whore murders—or, as the Times put it, “the deaths of the several forlorn young boys known to have been