The Alienist - Caleb Carr [32]
“I will not, thank you,” I said. My nervousness was only growing. This was precisely the kind of conversation that would fire Roosevelt’s mind, and Kreizler knew it. Action, plans, a campaign—it almost wasn’t fair to ask Theodore to make a sensible decision when faced with that kind of emotional enticement. I stood up and stretched my arms into what I hoped was a preemptive stance. “Listen, you two,” I began, but Laszlo simply touched my arm, gave me one of those looks of his—so authoritative it was downright vexing—and said:
“Do sit down for a moment, Moore.” I could do nothing but follow the instruction, in spite of my discomfort. “There is one more thing you both should know. I have said that under the terms I am outlining we might have a chance of success—we would certainly have nothing more. Our quarry’s years of practice have not been in vain. The bodies of the two children in the water tower were discovered, remember, only by the most fortunate of accidents. We know nothing about him—we do not even know that it is a ‘him.’ Cases of women murdering their own and other children—drastically extreme variants of puerperal mania, or what is now called postpartum psychosis—are not uncommon. We have one central cause for optimism.”
Theodore looked up brightly. “The Santorelli boy?” He was learning fast.
Kreizler nodded. “More precisely, the Santorelli boy’s body. Its location, and those of these other two. The killer could have gone on hiding his victims forever—God only knows how many he’s killed in the last three years. Yet now he’s given us an open statement of his activities—not unlike the letters, Moore, that the Ripper wrote to various London officials during his killings. Some buried, atrophied, but not yet dead part of our murderer is growing weary of the bloodshed. And in these three bodies we may read, as clearly as if it were words, his warped cry that we find him. And find him quickly—for the timetable by which he kills is a strict one, I suspect. That timetable, too, we must learn to decipher.”
“Then you believe you can do it quickly, Doctor?” Theodore asked. “An investigation like the one you’re describing could not be carried on indefinitely, after all. We must have results!”
Kreizler shrugged, seemingly unaffected by Roosevelt’s urgent tone. “I have given you my honest opinion. We would have a fighting chance, nothing more—or less.” Kreizler put a hand on Theodore’s desk. “Well, Roosevelt?”
If it seems odd that I offered no further protest, I can only say this: Kreizler’s explanation that his present course of action had been inspired by a document I had sent him years ago, coming as it did on the heels of our shared reminiscences about Harvard and Theodore’s mounting enthusiasm for this plan, had suddenly made it plain to me that what was happening in that office was only partly a result of Giorgio Santorelli’s death. Its full range of causes seemed to stretch much farther back, to our childhoods and subsequent lives, both individual and shared. Rarely have I felt so strongly the truth of Kreizler’s belief that the answers one gives to life’s crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior. Was Theodore—whose credo of