The Alienist by Caleb Carr Page A

story!”
    Riis huffed again, his big face getting redder. “Steffens, I’ll teach you—”
    “And since we know
your
editors won’t print such seamy stuff, John,” Steffens went on, “I’m afraid that leaves the
Post
—how about it, Dr. Kreizler? Care to give the details to the only paper in town that’ll print them?”
    Kreizler’s mouth curled into a slight smile that was neither gentle nor amused, but somehow deprecating. “The only, Steffens? What about the
World,
or the
Journal
?”
    “Ah, I should have been more precise—the only
respectable
paper in town that will print them.”
    Kreizler only ran his eyes up and down Steffens’s lanky figure. “Respectable,” he echoed with a shake of his head, and then he was going up the stairs.
    “Say what you like, Doctor,” Steffens called after him, still smiling, “but you’ll get a fairer shake from us than from Hearst or Pulitzer!” Kreizler did not acknowledge the comment. “We understand you examined the killer this morning,” Steffens pressed. “Would you at least talk about that?”
    Pausing at the door, Kreizler turned. “The man I examined was indeed a killer. But he has nothing to do with the Santorelli boy.”
    “Really? Well, you might want to let Detective Sergeant Connor know that. He’s been telling us all morning that Wolff got crazed for blood by shooting the little girl and went out looking for another victim.”
    “What?” Genuine alarm was in Kreizler’s face. “No—no, he mustn’t—it is absolutely vital that he not do that!”
    Laszlo bolted inside just as Steffens made a final attempt to get him to talk. With his quarry now gone, my colleague from the
Evening Post
put his free hand to his hip, his smile shrinking just a bit. “You know, John—that man’s attitude doesn’t win him many admirers.”
    “It’s not intended to,” I said, starting up the steps. Steffens grabbed my arm.
    “Can’t you tell us anything, John? It’s not like Roosevelt to keep Jake and me out of police business—hell, we’re more members of the Board of Commissioners than those fools who sit with him.”
    That was true: Roosevelt had often consulted both Riis and Steffens on questions of policy. Nonetheless, I could only shrug. “If I knew anything, I’d tell you, Link. They’ve kept me in the dark, too.”
    “But the body, Moore,” Riis chimed in. “We have heard ungodly rumors—surely they are false!”
    Thinking for just a moment of the corpse on the bridge anchor, I sighed. “However ungodly the rumors, boys, they can’t begin to describe it.” With that I turned and strode up the steps.
    Before I was inside the door Riis and Steffens were at it again, Steffens pelting his friend with sarcastic barbs and Riis angrily trying to shut him up. But Link was right, even if he expressed himself somewhat meanly: Riis’s stubborn insistence that homosexual prostitution did not exist meant that another of the city’s largest papers would never acknowledge the full details of a brutal murder. And how much more the report would have meant coming from Riis than from Steffens; for while most of Link’s important work as an exponent of the Progressive movement lay in the future, Riis was long since an established voice of authority, the man whose angry declamations had caused the razing of Mulberry Bend (the very heart of New York’s most notorious slum, Five Points) along with the destruction of many other pestilential pockets. Yet Jake could not bring himself to fully acknowledge the Santorelli murder; despite all the horrors he had witnessed, he could not accept the circumstances of such a crime; and as I entered the big green doors of headquarters I wondered, just as I had wondered a thousand times during staff meetings at the
Times,
how long many members of the press—not to mention politicians and the public—would be content to equate deliberate ignorance of evil with its nonexistence.
    Inside I found Kreizler standing near