“Yes, yes,” Kreizler answered, holding up the weakened left arm to head me off. “There is no question that yours was the honorable position. The loyal one, too, although your editors seemed to be less enthusiastic in their support.”
“They came ’round in the end,” I said, puffing up the chest a bit. “Not that it saved my job,” I added, slacking again.
“Now, now. No self-recrimination, Moore. But as I was saying, three years ago a water tower above a large tenement on Suffolk Street just north of Delancey was struck by lightning. The tower was the highest structure in the neighborhood, and the event was perfectly explicable, if slightly unusual. When the building’s residents and the fire department reached the roof, however, some were inclined to view it as a providential event—for the tower contained the bodies of a pair of children. A brother and sister. Their throats had been cut. It so happened that I knew the family. They were Jews from Austria. The children were quite beautiful—delicate features, enormous brown eyes—and also quite troublesome. An embarrassment to the family. They stole, lied, attacked other children—uncontrollable. In fact, there was very little remorse in the neighborhood over their deaths. The bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition when they were found. The boy’s had falled off an interior platform on which they were originally placed, and into the water. It was badly bloated. The girl’s was somewhat more intact for having stayed dry, but any clues that might have been gathered from it were destroyed by another incompetent coroner. I never saw anything more than the official reports, but I did note one curious detail from those.” He pointed with his left hand to his face. “The eyes were gone.”
A quiver went through me as I remembered not only the Santorelli boy but the two other murders that Roosevelt had told me of the night before. Glancing at Roosevelt, I saw that he had made the same connection: while his body was quite still, his eyes were wide with apprehension. But we both tried to battle the feeling off, Roosevelt declaring, “That’s not uncommon. Particularly if the bodies were exposed for a long period of time. And if the throats were cut, there would have been plenty of blood to attract scavengers.”
“Perhaps,” Kreizler said with a judicious nod as he continued pacing. “But the water tower was enclosed, with the exact purpose of keeping scavengers and vermin out.”
“I see.” Theodore puzzled with it. “Were those facts reported?”
“They were,” Kreizler answered. “In the World, I believe.”
“But,” I protested, “the water tower or building doesn’t exist that can keep certain animals out. Rats, for instance.”
“True, John,” Kreizler said. “And in the absence of any further details, I was forced to accept that explanation. Why even New York City rats, on discovering a pair of bodies, should so carefully gnaw out only the eyes was a disturbing mystery that I tried to ignore and which remained unaddressed. Until last night.” Kreizler took to pacing the floor again. “As soon as I saw the condition of the Santorelli boy, I made an examination of the ocular orbits of the skull. Working by torchlight was hardly ideal, but I found what I was looking for. On the malar bone as well as the supraorbital ridge were a series of narrow grooves, and on the greater wing of the sphenoid—at the base of the cavities—several small indentations. All consistent with the cutting edge and point of a knife, of the type most frequently used by hunters, I’d say. My guess would be that if we exhumed the bodies of the two 1893 victims—and I intend to request such action—we would find the same thing. In other words, gentlemen, the eyes were removed by the hand of man.”
My dread was increasing, and I fumbled for an argument: “But what about what Sergeant Connor said—”
“Moore.” Kreizler’s voice was definitive. “If we are to continue this discussion we really must dispense with the opinions of men such as Sergeant Connor.”
Roosevelt shifted in his chair apprehensively; I could see in his face that he had run out of ways to avoid bringing Kreizler fully up to date. “I feel I must tell you, Doctor,” he announced, gripping the arms of his chair, “that we have had two more murders in the last three months that might also fit the…pattern you’re describing.”
The statement stopped Laszlo dead in his tracks. “What?” he said, urgently but quietly. “Where—where were the bodies found?”
“I’m not precisely sure,” Theodore answered.
“And were they prostitutes?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“You believe so? Records, Roosevelt, I must have the records! Didn’t anyone in this department ever think to make a connection? Didn’t you?”
The records were sent for. From them we discovered that the bodies of the other two boys, both of whom had indeed been prostitutes, had also been found within what the coroners guessed were hours of their deaths. As Roosevelt had told me the night before, there was somewhat less mutilation involved than in the Santorelli murder; that seemed, however, a difference of quantity rather than quality, for the similarities among the cases far outweighed any slight differences. The first boy, a twelve-year-old African immigrant with no known name other than “Millie,” had been chained to the stern of an Ellis Island ferry; and the second, a ten-year-old named Aaron Morton, had been found suspended by his feet from the Brooklyn Bridge. Both were nearly naked, according to the reports; both had their throats cut, along with various other bodily lacerations; and, again, both were missing their eyes. As Laszlo finished reading the accounts, he mumbled that last fact to himself several times, lost in cogitation.
“I believe I understand what you’re suggesting, Kreizler,” Theodore figured aloud; he never liked to be left behind in any intellectual discussion, even one that took place on what was, for him, very alien territory. “A murderer committed just this kind of an outrage three years ago. It was reported. And now another such man, who at some point read the story, has been inspired to imitation.” He was satisfied with his own extrapolation. “Is that correct, Doctor? It wouldn’t be the first time stories in certain of our newspapers have had that effect.”
Kreizler, however, just sat tapping a forefinger against his pursed lips, with a look that clearly stated that the whole affair was far more complicated than even he had guessed.
I searched for some way to reach a different conclusion. “What about the rest of it?” I asked. “The…the missing organs, and the cut-away flesh of the…well, the rest of it. There was none of that in the earlier cases.”
“No,” Kreizler answered slowly. “But I believe there is an explanation for that difference, not that it need concern us now. The eyes are the link, the key, the way in—I would stake everything on that…” His voice faded again.
“All right,” I said, throwing up my hands. “So someone murdered those two children three years ago, and now we’ve got a mimicking lunatic who also likes to mutilate dead bodies on our hands. What are we supposed to do about it?”
“Almost nothing in what you have just said, John,” Kreizler replied evenly, “is accurate. I am not at all certain he is a lunatic. Nor am I inclined to believe that he likes what he does, in the sense that you understand or intend that statement. But most importantly—and I’m afraid that here I must disappoint you, too, Roosevelt—I am as sure as I can be that this is not an imitator but the same man.”
And there it was—the statement that both Roosevelt and I had been dreading. I’d been a police reporter for quite a while, ever since my unceremonious removal from the Washington beat as a result of my previously mentioned defense of Roosevelt during his battle with the patronage system in the Civil Service. I’d even covered some celebrated murder cases abroad. I therefore knew that murderers like the one Kreizler was describing did exist; but that never made it any easier to hear that one was on the loose. And for Roosevelt—who, though a born fighter, understood few of the intimate details of criminal behavior—it was an even harder notion to swallow.
“But…three years!” Theodore said, aghast. “Surely, Kreizler, if such a man did
exist he could not have eluded the law for so long!”
“It’s no great job to elude that which is not pursuing,” Kreizler answered. “And even if the police had taken an interest, they would have been helpless. Because they could not have begun to understand what motivates the murderer.”
“Do you?” Roosevelt’s words were almost hopeful.
“Not completely. I have the first few pieces—and we must find the rest. For it is only when we truly understand what drives him that we will have even a prayer of solving this case.”
“But what could drive a man to such things?” Roosevelt said in uncomfortable confusion. “After all, the Santorelli boy had no money. We’re investigating the family, but they all appear to have been in their home throughout the night. Unless it was a personal quarrel with someone else, then…”
“I doubt there was any quarrel involved,” Laszlo replied. “In fact, the boy may never have seen his murderer before last night.”
“You’re suggesting that whoever it is kills children he doesn’t even know?”
“Possibly. It is not knowing them that is important to him—it is what they represent.”
“And that is?” I asked.
“That—is what we must determine.”
Roosevelt continued to test carefully: “Do you have any evidence to support such a theory?”
“None, of the kind that you mean. I have only a lifetime of studying similar characters. And the intuition it has given me.”
“But…” As Roosevelt stood to take his turn pacing the floor, Kreizler grew more relaxed, the hard part of his work done. Theodore pounded one fist into an open hand insistently. “Listen, Kreizler, it’s true that I grew up, as we all did, in a privileged household. But I have made it my business since taking this job to acquaint myself with the underworld of this city, and I have seen many things. No one needs to tell me that depravity and inhumanity have taken on dimensions in New York unheard of anywhere in the world. But what unnameable nightmare, even here, could drive a man to this?”
“Do not,” Kreizler answered slowly, trying very hard to be clear, “look for causes in this city. Nor in recent circumstances, nor in recent events. The creature you seek was created long ago. Perhaps in his infancy—certainly in childhood. And not necessarily here.”
Theodore was momentarily unable to answer, his face an open display of conflicting feelings. The conversation disturbed him deeply, in the same way that similar discussions had disturbed him ever since the first time he met Kreizler. Yet he had known the talk would come to this; known it, even counted on it, I began to see, since the moment he asked me to bring Laszlo to his office. For there was satisfaction in his aspect, too, the realization that what seemed a forbidding, unchartable ocean to every detective in his department was, to the experienced Kreizler, full of currents and courses. Laszlo’s theories clearly offered a way of solving what Theodore had been assured was an unsolvable mystery, and thus extending justice to one (or, as it now seemed, more than one) whose death would never have been explored by anyone else in the Police Department. None of which explained why I was there.
“John,” Theodore said abruptly, without looking at me. “Kelly and Ellison have been here.”
“I know. Sara and I ran into them in the staircase.”
“What?” Theodore fixed the pince-nez to his nose. “Was there any trouble? Kelly is a devil, particularly when there’s a woman about.”
“It wasn’t what I’d call pleasant,” I answered. “But Sara stood her ground like a trooper.”
Theodore breathed relief. “Thank God. Though, confidentially, I still sometimes wonder if that was a wise choice.” He was referring to his decision to hire Sara, who, along with another departmental secretary, was one of the first two women ever to work for the New York City police force. Roosevelt had taken a lot of jibes and criticism for those hirings, both in and out of the press; but he had as little patience with the way women were treated in American society as any man I’ve ever known, and he was determined to give the two a chance.
“Kelly,” Theodore went on, “has threatened to create great trouble among the immigrant communities if I try to connect Ellison or him to this case. He says he can whip up all sorts of agitation around the notion that the Police Department allows poor foreign children to be slaughtered with impunity.”
Kreizler nodded. “It wouldn’t be difficult. Since it’s basically true.” Roosevelt looked sharply at Kreizler for a moment, but then softened, knowing he was right. “Tell me, Moore,” Laszlo asked, “what’s your opinion of Ellison? Is there any chance he is involved?”
“Biff?” I sat back, stretched my legs out, and weighed it. “He is, without question, one of the worst men in this city. Most of the gangsters who run things now have some kind of human spark in them somewhere, however hidden. Even Monk Eastman has his cats and birds. But Biff—for all I can tell, nothing touches him. Cruelty is really his only sport, the only thing that seems to give him any pleasure. And if I hadn’t seen that body, if this were just a hypothetical question about a dead boy who worked out of Paresis Hall, I wouldn’t hesitate to say he’s a suspect. Motive? He would have had a few, the most likely being to keep the other boys in line, make sure they pay their full cut to him. But there’s just one problem with it—style. Biff is a stiletto man, if you know what I mean. He kills quietly, neatly, and a lot of the people he’s supposed to have killed have never been found. He’s all flash in his clothes, but not in his work. So, much as I’d like to, I can’t say as I see him involved in this. It’s just not his—style.”
I glanced up to find Laszlo giving me a very puzzled look. “John, that is the most intelligent thing I’ve ever heard you say,” he finally announced. “And to think that you wondered why you’d been brought along.” He turned to Theodore. “Roosevelt, I shall require Moore as my assistant. His knowledge of this city’s criminal activities, and of the locales in which those activities take place, will make him invaluable.”
“Assistant?” I echoed. But they were back to ignoring me. Theodore’s teeth and narrowing eyes showed that he was quite absorbed in, and pleased with, Kreizler’s remark.
“Then you wish to take part in the investigation,” he said. “I sensed you would.”
“Take part in the investigation?” I said, dumbfounded. “Roosevelt, have you lost your Dutch mind? An alienist? A psychologist? You’ve already made an enemy of every senior officer on the force, and half the Board of Commissioners, to boot. They’re taking odds in half the gambling hells in town that you’ll be fired by Independence Day! If word gets out that you’ve brought someone like Kreizler in—why, you’d be better off hiring an African witch doctor!”
Laszlo chuckled. “Which is approximately what most of our respectable citizens consider me. Moore’s right, Roosevelt. The project would have to be undertaken in absolute secrecy.”
Roosevelt nodded. “I’m aware of the realities of the situation, gentlemen, believe me. Secrecy it would be.”
“And there is,” Kreizler continued, making another careful attempt at diplomacy, “the matter of terms…”
“If you mean salary,” Roosevelt said, “since you will be acting in an advisory capacity, naturally—”
“I’m afraid that salary is not what I had in mind. Neither is an advisory capacity. Good lord, Roosevelt, the detectives on your force were not even able to divine the clue regarding the removal of the eyes—three murders in three months and the most vital aspect is attributed to rats! Who can say what other blunders they’ve committed. As for connecting this to the cases of three years ago, assuming such a connection exists, I suspect we’d all die old men in our beds before they’d achieve it, whether they were ‘advised’ or not. No, it won’t do to work with them. What I have in mind is an—auxiliary effort.”
Roosevelt, ever the pragmatist, was willing to listen. “Go on,” he said.
“Give me two or three good young detectives with a sound appreciation of modern metho
ds—men who have no stake in the old order of business in the department, who were never loyal to Byrnes.” (Thomas Byrnes was the much-revered creator and former head of the Division of Detectives, a shadowy man who had amassed a large fortune during his tenure—and who had retired, not coincidentally, when Roosevelt was appointed to the board.) “We will set up an office outside of headquarters, though not too far away. Assign someone you trust as a liaison—again, someone new, someone young. Give us all the intelligence you can without revealing the operation.” Laszlo sat back, aware of the thoroughly unprecedented nature of his proposal. “Give us all of this, and I believe we might even have a chance.”
Roosevelt braced himself against his desk and rocked quietly on his chair, watching Kreizler. “It would mean my job,” he said, without what might have been called appropriate concern, “if it were discovered. I wonder if you truly realize, Doctor, how very much your work frightens and angers the very people who run this city—both its politics and its business. Moore’s comment about the African witch doctor is really no joke.”
“I assure you, I did not take it as one. But if you are sincere in your wish to stop what is happening”—Kreizler’s plea was deeply in earnest—“then you must agree.”
I was still somewhat amazed by what I was hearing and thought that this would certainly be the moment when Roosevelt would stop flirting with the idea and quash it. Instead he slammed another fist into an open hand. “By thunder, Doctor, I know of a pair of detectives that would suit your purpose down to the ground! But tell me—where would you begin?”
“For the answer to that,” Kreizler replied, pointing over to me, “I must thank Moore. It was something he sent me long ago that sparked the idea.”
“Something I sent you?” For a moment egotism made me put aside my trepidation at this dangerous proposal.
Laszlo approached the window and raised the shade altogether so that he could look outside. “You will remember, John, that some years ago you found yourself in London, during the Ripper killings.”