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By Root 1779 0

and revisited by the Isaacsons, who spent hours trying to discover new clues and days trying to coax new information out of anyone who might have seen or heard anything of importance. But they generally ran up against the same wall of interference that had silenced Ali ibn-Ghazi’s father. Marcus, for example, was anxious to put the watchman from Castle Garden to a much more severe test than he’d been able to do on the night of Ali’s death—but when he returned to the old fort he was told that the watchman had quit his job and departed from the city, leaving no indication as to his destination. It was safe to assume, we all agreed, that wherever the man had disappeared to, he had taken with him one of the impressive wads of money that the two unidentified priests were dispensing around town.

Kreizler, Sara, and I, meanwhile, pressed on with the job of fleshing out our imaginary man by using persons apprehended for similar crimes as points of reference. Sadly, there continued to be no shortage of these; if anything, their number only increased as the weather improved. At least one incident, bizarrely enough, was actually inspired by the weather: Kreizler and I investigated the case of one William Scarlet, who was apprehended in his home while attempting to kill his eight-year-old daughter with a hatchet. A police patrolman called to the scene had been Scarlet’s next target, and the entire neighborhood of Thirty-second Street and Madison Avenue had been kept awake for hours by the assailant’s crazed ravings. Both the daughter and the patrolman had escaped without serious injury, and when Scarlet was arrested his only explanation was that he’d been driven mad by a powerful thunderstorm that had swept through the city that night. Surprisingly enough, Kreizler could find very little to dispute this. Scarlet actually loved his daughter dearly, and in the past had always shown the utmost respect for the law. Though Laszlo was inclined to view the proceedings as the result of some deeply buried twist in Scarlet’s mental development, the possibility that the sound of loud thunder had driven him temporarily insane could not be decisively ruled out. Whatever the case, it was without doubt an example of passing violent paroxysm, and thus of little use to us.

On the very next day, Kreizler took Sara along to investigate the case of Nicolo Garolo, an immigrant living on Park Row, who had severely stabbed his sister-in-law and the woman’s three-year-old daughter after the little girl allegedly claimed that Garolo was trying to “hurt” her. “Hurt” in this case clearly indicated sexual assault, to Laszlo, and the fact that all the participants were immigrants was also intriguing. The familial connection, however, ultimately limited the relevance of the crime to our work, although Garolo’s sister-in-law did provide Sara with some interesting material for the construction of her imaginary women.

In addition to all this, there were the papers to go through, twice a day, in order to cull bits of useful information. This was a fairly indirect process, however, being as the New York papers had begun one by one to stop covering the boy-whore murders in the days following the Castle Garden affair. In addition, the citizens’ group that was supposed to have been organizing for an information-gathering visit to City Hall never materialized. In short, the brief flicker of interest in the case that had been displayed outside the immigrant ghettos following the ibn-Ghazi murder had been very effectively snuffed out, leaving the daily papers with nothing to offer us but reports of other killings from around the country. These we patiently studied in an effort to gain more elements that could be used in the elaboration of theories.

It was not uplifting work; for while New York might have been America’s leading center of violent crime, particularly of those varieties directed toward children, the rest of the United States was doing its part to keep national statistics high. There was, for example, the vagabond in Indiana (once interned in an asylum but