The Alienist - Caleb Carr [69]
Articles by Laszlo’s friend Adolf Meyer and other alienists; the works of philosophers and evolutionists from Hume and Locke to Spencer and Schopenhauer; monographs by the elder Forbes Winslow, whose theories had originally inspired Kreizler’s theory of context; and finally, in all its weighty, two-volume splendor, our old professor William James’s Principles of Psychology—these and more were dropped on our desks, producing loud, ponderous booms. The Isaacsons, Sara, and I all exchanged worried glances, looking and feeling like beleaguered students on the first day of class—which, obviously, is just what we were. Kreizler spelled out the purpose of our going through such an ordeal:
From that moment on, he said, we must make every possible effort to rid ourselves of preconceptions about human behavior. We must try not to see the world through our own eyes, nor to judge it by our own values, but through and by those of our killer. His experience, the context of his life, was all that mattered. Any aspect of his behavior that puzzled us, from the most trivial to the most horrendous, we must try to explain by postulating childhood events that could lead to such eventualities. This process of cause and effect—what we would soon learn was called “psychological determinism”—might not always seem entirely logical to us, but it would be consistent.
Kreizler emphasized that no good would come of conceiving of this person as a monster, because he was most assuredly a man (or a woman); and that man or woman had once been a child. First and foremost, we must get to know that child, and to know his parents, his siblings, his complete world. It was pointless to talk about evil and barbarity and madness; none of these concepts would lead us any closer to him. But if we could capture the human child in our imaginations—then we could capture the man in fact.
“And if that is not reward enough,” Kreizler concluded, glancing from one of our gaping faces to another, “there is always food.”
Food, we learned during the next few days, was quite a major reason why Laszlo had selected Number 808 Broadway: we were within easy walking distance of some of Manhattan’s best restaurants. Ninth Street and University Place offered exceptional French dining at traditional Parisian banquettes in both the Café Lafayette and the small dining room of the proportionally small hotel run by Louis Martin. Should the mood run to German fare, we could trot up Broadway to Union Square and turn into that huge, darkly paneled Mecca of gourmands, Lüchow’s. Tenth Street and Second Avenue offered hearty Hungarian meals at the Café Boulevard, while there was no better Italian cooking to be had than that served in the dining room of the Hotel Gonfarone, on Eighth and MacDougal streets. And, of course, there was always Del’s, a bit further away but assuredly worth the trip. All these centers of culinary brilliance would become our informal conference rooms during legions of lunches and dinners, although there would be many occasions on which the grim work with which we were preoccupied made it difficult indeed to concentrate on gustatory satisfaction.
That was especially true during those first days, when it became increasingly hard to escape the knowledge that, although we were cutting a new path on this job and needed to take the time to study and understand all the psychological as well as criminological elements that would necessarily form the basis of a successful conclusion, we were also working against a clock. Out in the streets below our arched windows were dozens of children like Giorgio Santorelli, plying the ever-dangerous flesh trade without knowing that a new and especially violent danger was loose among them. It was an odd feeling, to go to an assessment with Kreizler or to study notes at Number 808 Broadway or to stay up until the small hours reading at my grandmother’s, trying to force my mind to absorb information at a speed it was (to say the least) unaccustomed to, all the while a voice whispering