The Alienist - Caleb Carr [55]
Marcus watched him, shaking his head. “You’re going to be sick tomorrow,” he mumbled. “And you’re going to blame me—but I warned you.”
“Detective Sergeant?” Kreizler said, leaning back with a glass of Lagrange. “You will have to possess some remarkable information indeed, if you hope to outdo your—colleague, here.”
“Well, it is interesting,” Marcus answered, “and it may well tell us something substantive. The fracture lines that my brother found were inflicted from above—from directly above. Now, in an assault, which this obviously was, you’d expect angles of attack, either from similarity of height or difficulty of approach due to the struggle. The nature of the wounds indicates, however, that not only did the assailant have complete physical control over his victims, but he was also tall enough to strike directly downward very forcefully with a blunt instrument of some kind—possibly even his fists, though we doubt that.”
We allowed Marcus a few moments to eat; but when succulent Maryland terrapin arrived to replace the lamb, from which Lucius had to be almost forcefully separated, we urged him to go on:
“Let me see. I’ll try to make this as accessible as I can—if we take the respective heights of the two children, and then add the aspects of the skull fractures that I’ve just described to the equation, we can start to speculate about the height of the attacker.” He turned to Lucius. “What did we guess, roughly six-foot-two?” Lucius nodded and Marcus continued. “I don’t know how much any of you know about anthropometry—the Bertillon system of identification and classification—”
“Oh, are you trained in it?” Sara said. “I’ve been anxious to meet someone who is.”
Marcus looked surprised. “You know Bertillon’s work, Miss Howard?”
As Sara nodded eagerly, Kreizler cut in: “I must confess ignorance, Detective Sergeant. I’ve heard the name, but little more.”
And so, while disposing of the terrapin we also reviewed the achievements of Alphonse Bertillon, a misanthropic, pedantic Frenchman who had revolutionized the science of criminal identification during the eighties. As a lowly clerk assigned the task of going through the files that the Paris police department kept on known criminals, Bertillon had discovered that if one took fourteen measurements of any human body—not only height, but foot, hand, nose, and ear size, and so on—the odds were over 286 million to one that any two people would share the same results. Despite enormous resistance from his superiors, Bertillon had begun to record the body-part sizes of known criminals and then to categorize his results, training a staff of assistant measurers and photographers in the process; and when he used the information thus collected to solve several infamous cases that had stumped the Paris detectives, he became an international celebrity.
Bertillon’s system had been adopted quickly throughout Europe, later in London, and only recently in New York. Throughout his tenure as head of the Division of Detectives, Thomas Byrnes had rejected anthropometry, with its exact measurements and careful photographs, as too intellectually demanding for most of his men—undoubtedly an accurate assumption. Then, too, Byrnes had created the Rogues’ Gallery, a room full of photographs of most known criminals in the United States: he was jealous of his creation, and considered it sufficient for the purposes of identification. Finally, Byrnes had established his own principles of detection and would not have them overthrown by any Frenchman. But with Byrnes’s departure from the force, anthropometry had picked up more advocates, one of whom was evidently sitting at our table that night.
“The main shortcoming of Bertillon’s system,” Marcus said, “besides the fact that it depends on skilled measurers, is that it can only match a suspected or convicted criminal to his record and aliases.” Having eaten