The Alienist - Caleb Carr [4]
“Stevie,” I called out over the din of the carriage wheels hitting the worn edges of the granite Russ slabs, “where is Dr. Kreizler? Is he all right?”
“At the Institute!” Stevie answered, his blue eyes wide. Laszlo’s work was based in the Kreizler Institute for Children, a combination of school and research center that he had founded during the eighties. I was about to ask what he was doing there at such an hour but swallowed the query when we charged headlong through the still-busy intersection of Broadway and Houston Street. Here, it was once sagely remarked, you could fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man; Stevie contented himself with sending drunkards, faro dealers, morphine and cocaine addicts, prostitutes, their sailor marks, and simple vagrants flying for the safety of the sidewalk. From that sanctuary most of them called curses after us.
“Then are we going to the Institute, too?” I shouted. But Stevie only reined the horse sharply left at Spring Street, where we disrupted business outside two or three concert saloons, houses of assignation where prostitutes who passed themselves off as dancers made arrangements for later meetings at cheap hotels with hapless fools who were generally from out of town. From Spring Stevie made his way to Delancey Street—which was in the midst of being widened to accommodate the expected traffic of the new Williamsburg Bridge, whose construction had only recently begun—and then we flew on past several darkened theaters. Echoing down from each passing side street I could hear the desperate, demented sounds of the dives: filthy holes that sold rotgut liquor laced with everything from benzine to camphor for a nickel a glass atop a dirty plank that passed for a bar. Stevie did not slacken the pace—we were headed, it seemed, for the very edge of the island.
I made one last attempt at communication: “Aren’t we going to the Institute?!”
Stevie shook his head in reply, then cracked the long horsewhip again. I shrugged, sitting back to hang on to the sides of the carriage and wonder what could have frightened this boy—who in his short life had seen many of the horrors that New York had to offer—so very badly.
Delancey Street carried us past the shuttered stalls of fruit and clothing merchants and on into one of the worst of the Lower East Side’s tenement- and shanty-strewn ghettos, the neighborhood near the waterfront just above Corlears Hook. A vast, maudlin sea of small shacks and shoddy new tenements stretched away to either side of us. The area was a stewpot of different immigrant cultures and languages, the Irish predominating to the south of Delancey Street and the Hungarians farther north, near Houston. An occasional church of some denomination or other was visible among the rows upon rows of dismal residences, which even on this crisp morning were draped with lines of laundry. Some pieces of clothing and bedding, frozen almost solid, twisted in the wind stiffly at what might have seemed unnatural angles; but in truth, nothing in such a place—where furtive souls scurried from darkened doorways to blackened alleys wrapped in what were often little more than rags, their feet bare to the frozen horse manure, urine, and soot that coated the streets—could truly be called unnatural. We were in a neighborhood that knew little of laws, man-made or otherwise, a neighborhood that gave joy