The Alienist - Caleb Carr [90]
At this point in his tale, my companion reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a rather innocuous steel spike that he’d discovered lying in some grass. The thing had an eye at one end: for securing ropes, Marcus told me. He’d dusted the piton for prints once he’d gotten it home, and found a set that exactly matched those we’d taken from the ceramic chimney the night before. I had to give the man a firm, admiring slap on the back, at that: Marcus was as dogged as any detective I’d met during the years I’d been covering the police beat, and considerably more intelligent. It was small wonder he hadn’t gotten along with the old guard at the Division of Detectives.
For the remainder of our walk Marcus went on to explain the larger implications of his discovery. Though mountaineering hadn’t really caught on as a form of recreation in North America as of 1896, in Europe the sport was well established. Throughout the last century, expert teams on that continent had knocked off peaks in the Alps and the Caucasus, and one intrepid German had even ventured to East Africa and conquered Mount Kilimanjaro. Nearly all these groups, Marcus told me, had been either English, Swiss, or German; and in those countries mountain and rock climbing of a less ambitious nature had become a very popular form of recreation. Given that our killer displayed what could only be called expertise, it was likely that he’d been exposed to the sport quite a long time ago, perhaps even in his youth; and it was therefore very possible that his family had immigrated to America from one of those three European nations in the not-too-distant past. That might not mean much just at the moment; but it was easy to see that, when added to other crucial factors further down the road, it could become highly illuminating. In such knowledge there was real cause for hope.
We would need an abundant reservoir of that particular emotion during our visit to the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, a pestilential little hole that could not have had a more sadly ironic name. Paresis Hall at least had the advantages of being aboveground and fairly roomy; the Golden Rule was housed in a dank, cramped basement that had been divided into small “rooms” by shoddy partitions, where any one client’s activities were made known to everyone in the place by sound if not by sight. Run by a large, repulsive woman called Scotch Ann, the Golden Rule offered only effeminate young boys who painted themselves, spoke in falsetto voices, and called each other by women’s names, leaving the other variations on male homosexual behavior to joints like Ellison’s. In 1892 the Golden Rule had gained notoriety when the Reverend Charles Parkhurst, a Presbyterian pastor and head of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, had visited the place during his campaign to bare the links between New York’s criminal underworld and various agencies of the city government, particularly the Police Department. Parkhurst, a strong, noble-looking fellow who was far more tolerable than most antivice crusaders, had enlisted a private detective, Charlie Gardner, as a guide for the odyssey. Charlie was an old friend of mine, and he’d immediately invited me to come along on what promised to be a thoroughly entertaining spree.
By 1892, however, the fires of my youth had begun to cool, and I’d started to make a strong run at mending my reprobate ways. Wondering if perhaps there wasn’t something to the idea of a stable, peaceful existence, both professional and domestic, I’d fixed my eyes on Washington politics and Julia Pratt, and was not prepared to jeopardize either my journalistic or my romantic standing by throwing in with Charlie Gardner for even one night. Thus my only contribution to Reverend Parkhurst’s soon-to-be-famous adventure was a short list of dives and hells that I thought the group should visit. Visit them they did, along with many other centers of infamy; and subsequent written accounts of Parkhurst’s exposure to the