The Alienist - Caleb Carr [31]
Roosevelt, ever the pragmatist, was willing to listen. “Go on,” he said.
“Give me two or three good young detectives with a sound appreciation of modern methods—men who have no stake in the old order of business in the department, who were never loyal to Byrnes.” (Thomas Byrnes was the much-revered creator and former head of the Division of Detectives, a shadowy man who had amassed a large fortune during his tenure—and who had retired, not coincidentally, when Roosevelt was appointed to the board.) “We will set up an office outside of headquarters, though not too far away. Assign someone you trust as a liaison—again, someone new, someone young. Give us all the intelligence you can without revealing the operation.” Laszlo sat back, aware of the thoroughly unprecedented nature of his proposal. “Give us all of this, and I believe we might even have a chance.”
Roosevelt braced himself against his desk and rocked quietly on his chair, watching Kreizler. “It would mean my job,” he said, without what might have been called appropriate concern, “if it were discovered. I wonder if you truly realize, Doctor, how very much your work frightens and angers the very people who run this city—both its politics and its business. Moore’s comment about the African witch doctor is really no joke.”
“I assure you, I did not take it as one. But if you are sincere in your wish to stop what is happening”—Kreizler’s plea was deeply in earnest—“then you must agree.”
I was still somewhat amazed by what I was hearing and thought that this would certainly be the moment when Roosevelt would stop flirting with the idea and quash it. Instead he slammed another fist into an open hand. “By thunder, Doctor, I know of a pair of detectives that would suit your purpose down to the ground! But tell me—where would you begin?”
“For the answer to that,” Kreizler replied, pointing over to me, “I must thank Moore. It was something he sent me long ago that sparked the idea.”
“Something I sent you?” For a moment egotism made me put aside my trepidation at this dangerous proposal.
Laszlo approached the window and raised the shade altogether so that he could look outside. “You will remember, John, that some years ago you found yourself in London, during the Ripper killings.”
“Certainly I remember,” I answered with a grunt. It had not been one of my more successful holidays: three months in London in 1888, when a bloodthirsty ghoul had taken to accosting random prostitutes in the East End and disemboweling them.
“I asked you for information, and for local press reports. You very decently obliged and included in one pouch statements made by the younger Forbes Winslow.”
I raked my memory of the time. Forbes Winslow, whose similarly named father had been an eminent British alienist and an early influence on Kreizler, had set himself up as an asylum superintendent during the 1880s by trading on his father’s achievements. The younger Winslow was a conceited fool, for my money, but when the Jack the Ripper killings began he was sufficiently well known to be able to inject himself into the investigation; indeed, he’d claimed that his participation had caused the murders (still unsolved at the time of this writing) to come to an end.
“Don’t tell me Winslow’s pointed the way for you,” I said in astonishment.
“Only inadvertently. In one of his absurd treatises on the Ripper he discussed a particular suspect in the case, saying that if he had created an ‘imaginary man’—that was his phrase, ‘imaginary man’—to fit the known traits of the murderer, he could not have devised a better one. Well,