The Alienist - Caleb Carr [44]
Sara shook her head. “It’s all so strange,” she sighed, starting to apply gauze to some of the worst cuts and bruises. “Santorelli nearly got himself killed—yet he hasn’t seen Giorgio for four years. The boy’s been living on the streets.”
Mrs. Santorelli’s trust had been inspired by Sara’s care for her husband, and once she began to tell us the story of her son Giorgio, it would have been difficult to stop her. Sara and I kept laboring over Santorelli’s wounds as though they were the primary center of our attention, but our thoughts were very much fixed on the peculiar story we heard.
Giorgio was a shy boy in his early years, but smart and determined enough to attend the public school on Hester Street and get good marks. Starting at about age seven, however, there was a problem with some other boys at school. The older ones were apparently able to persuade Giorgio to perform sexual acts, ones that Mrs. Santorelli didn’t much want to define. Sara pressed her on the issue, however, sensing that such information would be important, and we found that it involved sodomy of both the anal and oral varieties. The behavior was discovered and reported to the parents by a teacher. The Latin concept of masculinity being as broad and forgiving as it is, Giorgio’s father nearly lost his mind, and took to beating the boy at regular intervals. Mrs. Santorelli demonstrated for us how her husband would bind Giorgio by his wrists to the front door, then whip him across the backside with a wide belt, which she also showed us. It was a cruel implement, and in Santorelli’s hands it apparently inflicted such damage that Giorgio sometimes avoided school altogether, simply because he couldn’t sit down.
The odd thing, however, was that instead of becoming more compliant, Giorgio only grew more willful every time he got a whipping. After months of such punishment, his behavior progressed to an extreme: he began to stay away from the family’s flat for nights at a time, and gave up school altogether. Then one day the parents spotted him on a street west of Washington Square, wearing ladies’ cosmetics and hawking himself like any street cruiser. Santorelli confronted the boy, and said that if he ever returned home he’d kill him. Giorgio screamed angry insults in return, and the father was getting ready to attack him right then and there when another man—probably Giorgio’s panderer—stepped in and advised the Santorellis to disappear. That was the last they ever saw of their son, until they viewed his mangled body at the morgue.
The tale roused many questions in my mind, and I could see that Sara felt the same. We would never get to ask them. Just as we were wrapping Santorelli back up in the worn, dirty blankets in which we’d found him, a booming came at the door; and I, thinking it was the men from the stoop, opened it. In an instant, two large, mustachioed thugs in suits and bowlers had forced their way into the flat. The mere sight of them sent Mrs. Santorelli into hysterics.
“Who the hell’re you people?” one of the thugs demanded.
Sara made a brave show of saying that she was a nurse; but the explanation that I was her assistant, which had worked so admirably on a desperate woman who didn’t speak English, went nowhere with these two.
“Assistant, eh?” the thug said, as they both moved on me. Sara and I carefully edged our way to the door of the flat. “That’s a hell of a rig out there, for an assistant!”
“Well, I do value your opinion,” I said with a smile; then I grabbed Sara and we flew down the stairs. Never have I been so grateful that the girl was of an athletic disposition, for even in her skirt she was faster than our pursuers. Such did not help, however, when we reached the hall of the front building and saw the men on the stoop blocking our exit. They began moving our way, slapping their sticks in the palms of their hands ominously.
“John,” Sara said, “are they really trying to trap us?” Her voice was, I remember thinking, damned steady—which, given the circumstances,