Read Online The Alienist by Caleb Carr - Free Book Online Page B

dominated by one. A few armchairs were crowded around it uncomfortably. A tall clock sat atop the white mantel of the fireplace, and there was a shiny brass telephone on a small side table; otherwise the only items in the room were stacks of books and papers, some resting on the floor and going halfway up to the ceiling. The shades on the windows, which faced out onto Mulberry Street, were drawn halfway down and Theodore stood before one of them, wearing a very conservative gray suit for the business day.
    “Ah, John, excellent,” he said, hustling around the desk and then mangling my hand. “Kreizler’s downstairs?”
    “Yes. You wanted to see me alone?”
    Theodore paced about in a mix of serious yet merry anticipation. “What’s his mood? How will he respond, do you think? He’s such a tempestuous fellow—I want to make sure I take the right tack with him.”
    I shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose. We were up at Bellevue seeing this Wolff character, the one who shot the little girl, and he was in a hell of a mood after that. But he worked it out during the ride down—on my ears. However, Roosevelt, since I have no idea what it is you want him for—”
    Just then there was another quick, light knock on the door, and then Sara reappeared. She was followed by Kreizler: they had evidently been chatting, and as their conversation faded away inside the office I noticed that Laszlo was studying her intently. At the time this didn’t seem particularly remarkable; it was how most people reacted to finding a woman employed at headquarters.
    Theodore got between them in a flash. “Kreizler!” he clicked loudly. “Delighted, Doctor, delighted to see you!”
    “Roosevelt,” Kreizler answered with a genuinely pleased smile. “It’s been a long while.”
    “Too long, too long! Shall we sit and talk, or shall I have the office cleared so that we can enjoy a rematch?”
    It was a reference to their first encounter at Harvard, which had involved a boxing match; and as we laughed and sat, the ice very nicely broken, my thoughts drifted back to those days.
    Though I’d known Theodore for many years before his arrival at Harvard as a freshman in 1876, I’d never been very close to him. In addition to being sickly, he’d been a studious and generally well-behaved boy, whereas both I and my younger brother had spent our youths ensuring that anarchy reigned as much as possible on the streets of our Gramercy Park neighborhood. “Ringleaders” was a label my brother and I were usually given by our parents’ friends, and there was much talk about the remarkable misfortune of one family being afflicted with two black sheep. In reality there was nothing very evil or malicious in what we did; it was more that we chose to do it in the company of a small band of boys whose homes were the back alleys and doorways of the Gas House district to the east of us. Such were not considered acceptable playmates in our staid little corner of Knickerbocker society, where class counted for much and no adult was prepared to tolerate children with minds of their own. A few years away at preparatory school did nothing to discourage my tendencies; indeed, so great had the general alarm over my behavior grown by my seventeenth birthday that my application for admission to Harvard was almost rejected, a fate I would gladly have accepted. But my father’s deep pockets swung the balance back in my supposed favor and off I went to the stultifying little village of Cambridge, where a year or two of college life did absolutely nothing to make me more inclined to accept a young scholar like Theodore when he arrived.
    But in the fall of 1877, during my senior and Theodore’s sophomore year, all this began to change. Laboring under the twin burdens of a difficult romance and a gravely ill father, Theodore began to develop from a rather narrow youth into a much more broad-minded and accessible young man. He never became anything like a man of the