The Alienist - Caleb Carr [49]
I nodded. “Just don’t cross her,” I murmured back. “Her nerves are strung like piano wire.”
“Yes, that’s apparent,” he said. “The father she speaks of—he’s dead.”
“Hunting accident. Eight years ago. They were very close—in fact, she spent some time in a sanatorium afterwards.” I didn’t know whether I should divulge all, but given our situation it seemed advisable. “Some people said it was suicide, but she denies it. Hotly. So that’s a subject you might want to stay away from.”
Kreizler nodded and pulled on his gloves, watching Sara all the while. “Women of such temperament,” he said as we moved to the carriage, “do not seem fated for happiness in our society. But her capabilities are obvious.”
We got inside the barouche, and Sara began to eagerly relate the details of our interview with Mrs. Santorelli. As we made our way through the snow-quieted streets south of Gramercy Park toward Broadway, Kreizler listened without comment, his fidgeting hands the only evidence of his excitement; but by the time we reached Herald Square, where the sounds of human bustling became much louder around the elevated train station, he was full of detailed questions that tested our memories to the utmost. Laszlo’s curiosity was roused by the strange tale of the two ex-cops and the two priests who had accompanied Roosevelt’s detectives, but he had far more interest (as I had suspected he would) in young Giorgio’s sexual behavior and in the boy’s character more generally. “One of the first ways in which we can know our quarry is to know his victims,” Kreizler said, and as we pulled up under the large electric globes that lit the porte-cochere awning of the Metropolitan Opera House he asked Sara and me what sense of the boy we had formed. Each of us needed to think about that one for a bit, and we grew quiet and pensive as Stevie drove off with the barouche and Cyrus accompanied us through the doors of the porte-cochere entrance.
To the old guard of New York society, the Metropolitan Opera was “that yellow brewery uptown.” This terse dismissal was prompted, on the most obvious level, by the boxiness of the building’s Early Renaissance architecture and the color of the bricks used in its construction; but the attitude behind the comment was sparked by the Metropolitan’s upstart history. Occupying the block bounded by Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and Thirty-ninth and Fortieth streets, the Metropolitan, which opened in 1883, had been paid for by seventy-five of New York’s most famous (and infamous) nouveaux riches: men with names like Morgan, Gould, Whitney, and Vanderbilt, none of whom were deemed by the old Knickerbocker clans to be socially acceptable enough to warrant selling them boxes at the venerable Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. In reply to this unstated yet very apparent assessment of their worth, the founders of the Metropolitan had ordered not one or two tiers of boxes for their new house, but three; and the social wars that were waged in them before, during, and after performances were as vicious as anything that occurred downtown. In spite of all this backbiting, however, the impresarios who managed the Metropolitan, Henry Abbey and Maurice Grau, had brought together some of the best operatic talents in the world; and an evening at the “yellow brewery” was, by 1896, fast becoming a musical experience that no other house or company in the world could surpass.
As we entered the relatively small main vestibule, which had none of the opulence of its various European counterparts, we got the usual stares from several broad-minded souls who were not happy to see Kreizler accompanied by a black man. Most, however, had seen Cyrus before and endured his presence with weary familiarity. We moved up the tight, angular main staircase at a quick pace, and were among the last people to enter the auditorium. Kreizler’s box was on the left-hand side of the second tier of the “Diamond Horseshoe” (as the boxes were known), and we rushed through the red velvet saloon to get to our seats. As we settled in, the houselights began to fade. I pulled