The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [34]
“Dr. Kreizler!” the judge bellowed, slamming a fist down. “This is my courtroom! You have nothing to do with this case, and I demand—”
“No, sir!” the Doctor shot back. “I demand! You have made me a part of this case—myself and any other self-respecting psychologist who is within earshot of your irresponsible declarations! This boy—” At that he pointed in my direction and, for the first time, actually looked at me—and I’m not sure I’m up to describing all that was in the look:
His eyes sparkled with a message of hope, and the smallest, quickest smile told me to have courage. All in a rush and for the first time in my life, I felt like someone over the age of fifteen truly gave a good goddamn about my existence. You don’t really know that you’ve been living without that commodity until someone makes you aware of the possibility of it; and when they do, it’s a very peculiar sensation.
The Doctor’s face went straight and stern again as he snapped back around to the judge: “You have said that this boy is a ‘congenitally destructive menace.’ I demand that you prove that assertion! I demand that he be given a new hearing, conditional upon the findings of at least one qualified alienist or psychologist!”
“You can demand anything you like, sir!” the judge responded. “But this is my court, and my ruling stands! Now kindly await the call of the case for which you have been retained, or I’ll hold you in contempt!”
A bang of the gavel, and I was on my way to Randalls Island. But as I left the courtroom, I looked again to the mysterious man who had appeared—put of thin air, it seemed to me at the time—to take up my cause. He returned the look with an expression what said the matter was far from settled.
And so it was. Three months later, inside my leaky brick cell in the main block of the Boys’ House of Refuge, I had that “encounter” with a guard what I’ve mentioned. Now, the simple truth is that you can find a bit of lead pipe almost anywhere if you look hard enough, and I’d found one pretty quick after my arrival on the Island. I kept it hidden inside my mattress, figuring the day would eventually come when one of either the boys or the guards might force me to use it—and the particular bull that finally did will be forever sorry for it. While he was busy trying to hold me down and undo his pants I laid hold of my pipe, and inside of two minutes he had three fractures in one arm, two in the other, a busted ankle, and a mass of bone chips where his nose used to be. I was still going at him, to the encouraging shrieks of the other boys, when a couple more guards finally pulled me off. The superintendent of the place asked for a hearing to decide whether or not I should be transferred to an insane asylum, and word of the incident got out to the press. Dr. Kreizler caught wind of it and showed up at the hearing, once again demanding that no sentence be pronounced without a proper psychological assessment being done first. The judge this time around was a lot more reasonable, and the Doctor got his way.
For two days, he and I sat in an office on the Island, doing little more than talking—and for most of the first day we didn’t even talk about the specific facts of my case. He asked me questions about my childhood and, even more important, told me a lot about his, which went a long way toward easing my discomfort at being in the presence of a man what I was grateful to but who nonetheless filled me with a kind of nervous awe. During those first hours, in fact, I learned many grim facts about the Doctor’s life that almost nobody knew or knows—and I can see now that he was using his own past as a way to coax mine out of me.
It was peculiar: as we talked, I began to comprehend—to the extent that an uneducated young boy could—that I might not just be doing things at random, that maybe I’d decided on a life of crime and mayhem as much out of anger as out of necessity.