The Alienist - Caleb Carr [34]
CHAPTER 7
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We were anxious to begin marshalling our forces for the investigation, and the delays we experienced, though brief, were frustrating. When Theodore got wind of the speculative interest in Kreizler’s visit to headquarters displayed by reporters and police officers, he realized that he’d made a mistake by holding the meeting there, and told us he needed a couple of days to get things calmed down. Kreizler and I used the time to make arrangements regarding our “civilian” occupations. I had to convince my editors to grant me a leave of absence, a goal made somewhat easier by a timely telephone call from Roosevelt, who explained that I was wanted on vital police business. Nonetheless, I was only allowed out of the editorial offices of the Times at Thirty-second and Broadway when I pledged that if the investigation resulted in a story that was fit to print, I would not take it to another paper or magazine, regardless of how much money I was offered. I assured my sour-faced taskmasters that they wouldn’t want the story anyway, and then breezed down Broadway on a typical March morning in New York: twenty-nine degrees at eleven A.M., with winds of fifty miles an hour cutting through the streets. I was scheduled to meet Kreizler at his Institute, and I had thought to walk, so great was my sense of release at not being answerable to my editors for an indefinite period. But real New York cold—the kind that freezes horse urine in little rivulets on the surface of the streets—will conquer the best of spirits eventually. Outside the Fifth Avenue Hotel I decided to get a cab, pausing only to watch Boss Platt emerge from a carriage and vanish inside, his stiff, unnatural movements doing nothing to reassure the onlooker that he was, in fact, alive.
Kreizler’s leave of absence, I speculated inside the cab, would not be so simple a matter as mine. The two dozen or so children at his Institute depended on his presence and his counsel, having come to him from homes (or streets) where they were either habitually ignored, regularly chastised, or actively beaten. Indeed, I had not initially seen how he proposed to take up another vocation, even temporarily, so great was the need for his steadying hand at the Institute; but then he told me that he still planned to spend two mornings and one night per week there, at which times he would leave our investigation in my hands. It was not the kind of responsibility I’d anticipated, and I was surprised when the notion left me feeling eager rather than anxious.
Shortly after my cab passed through Chatham Square and turned onto East Broadway, I disembarked at Numbers 185–187: the Kreizler Institute. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I saw that Laszlo’s calash was also at the curb, and I glanced up at the windows of the Institute, half-expecting to see him looking out for me but finding no face.
Kreizler had bought the Institute’s two four-story, red-brick and black-trim buildings with his own money in 1885, and then had their interiors remodeled so that they became one unit. The subsequent upkeep of the place was covered by the fee he charged his wealthier clients, as well as by the considerable income he took in from his work as an expert legal witness. The children’s rooms were on the top floor of the Institute, and class and recreational halls occupied the third. On the second floor were Kreizler’s consulting and examination rooms, as well as his psychological laboratory, where he performed tests on the children’s powers of perception, reaction, association, memory, and all the other psychic functions that so fascinated the alienist community. The ground floor was reserved for his rather forbidding operational theater, where he performed the occasional brain dissection and post-mortem. My