"The closer the church, the closer to God," was how one underworld wit had put his decision to base his illicit operations within a few blocks of Police Headquarters. The statement could have been made by any of dozens of like characters, for the northern terminus of Mulberry Street at Bleeker (headquarters was located at No. 300) marked the heart of a gaggle of tenements, brothels, concert halls, saloons, and gambling dens. One group of girls who staffed a disorderly house directly across Bleeker Street from 300 Mulberry made great sport, during their few idle hours, of sitting in the house's green-shuttered windows and watching the doings at headquarters through opera glasses, then offering commentary to passing police officials. That was the kind of carnival atmosphere that surrounded the place. Or maybe one should rather say that it was a circus of the brutal Roman sort---for several times a day, bleeding victims of crime or wounded perpetrators of such would be dragged into the rather nondescript, hotel-like structure that was the busy heart of New York's law-enforcement arm, leaving a sticky, grim reminder of the deadly nature of the building's business on the pavement outside.
Across Mulberry Street, at No. 303, was the unofficial headquarters of the police reporters: a simple stoop where I and my colleagues spent much of our time, waiting for word of a story. It was therefore not surprising that Peters and Vlodder should have been awaiting my arrival. Vlodder's anxious manner and the gleeful grin that dominated Peters's gaunt, handsome features told me that something particularly spicy was up.
"Well, well," Peters said, raising his umbrella as he jumped onto the running board of Watson's carriage. "The mystery guests arrive together! Good morning, Dr. Watson, a pleasure to see you, dear sir."
"Peters," Watson answered with a nod that was not wholly congenial.
Vlodder came huffing up behind Peters, his hulking Dutch frame not so lithe as the much younger Peters. “Doctor,” he said, to which Watson merely nodded. He had a positive dislike for Vlodder; the Dutchman’s pioneering work in revealing the evils of tenement life---most notably through his collection of essays and pictures called The Life of the Unfortunate Ones---did not change the fact that he was a strident moralist and something of a social bigot, so far as Watson was concerned. And I have to admit, I often saw John’s point. “Randall,” Vlodder went on, “Roosevelt has just thrown us out of his office, saying he is expecting the two of you for an important consultation---some very strange game is being played here, I believe!”
“Pay him no mind,” Peters said with another laugh. “His pride is wounded. It seems that there’s been another murder which, because of our friend Vlodder’s personal beliefs, will never make the pagers of the Evening Sun---we’ve all been riding him rather shamelessly, I fear!”
“Peters, by God, if you keep at me...” Vlodder balled up a healthy Dutch hand and waved the fist in Peters’s direction as he kept breathing hard and jogging along, trying to keep up with the still-rolling carriage. As Herman reigned the gelding to a halt outside headquarters, Peters jumped down.
“Come now, David, no threats!” he said good-naturedly. “This is all in fun!”
“What in hell are you two talking about?” I said, while Watson, trying to ignore the scene, stepped down from the carriage.
“Now, don’t play dumb,” Peters answered. “You’ve seen the body, and so has Dr. Watson---we know that much. But unfortunately, since David chooses to deny the reality of both boy-whores and the houses in which they work, he can’t report the story!”
Vlodder huffed again, his big face getting redder. “Peters, I’ll teach you....”
“And since we know your editors won’t print such seamy stuff, David,” Peters went on, “I’m afraid that leaves the Post---how about it, Dr. Watson? Care to give the details to the only paper in town that’ll print ‘em?”
Watson's mouth curled into a tight smile that was neither gentle nor amused but somehow deprecating. "The only, Peters?" What about the World, or the Journal?"
"Ah, I should have been more precise---the only respectable paper in town that will print them."
Watson simply ran his eyes up and down Peters's lanky figure. "Respectable," he echoed with a shake of his head, and then he was ascending the stairs.
"Say what you will, Doctor," Peters called after him, still smiling, "but you'll get a fairer shake from us than from Hearst or Pulitzer!" Watson did not acknowledge the comment. "We understand you examined the killer this morning," Peters pressed. "Would you at least talk to us about that?"
Pausing at the door, Watson turned. "Yes, the man I examined was indeed a killer. But he has nothing to do with the Fonzerelli boy."
"Really? Well, you might want to let Detective Sergeant McElroy know that. He's been telling us all morning that Beckman got crazed for blood by shooting the little girl and went out looking for another victim."
"What?!" A genuine alarm was now in Watson's face. "No---no, he mustn't---it is absolutely vital that he not do that!"
John bolted inside just as Peters made a last attempt to get him to speak. With his quarry now gone, my colleague from the Evening Post put his free hand to his hip, his smile shrinking just a little bit. "You know, Randall---that man's attitude doesn't win him very many admirers."
"It's not intended to," I said, starting up the steps. Peters grabbed my arm.
"Can't you tell us anything, Randall? It's not like Roosevelt to keep David and me out of police business---hell, we're more members of the Board of Commissioners than those idiots who sit with him.
That was true: Roosevelt had often consulted Peters and Vlodder on questions of policy. Nonetheless, I could only shrug. "If I knew anything, I'd tell you, Will. They've kept me in the dark, too."
"But the body, Waterhouse," Vlodder chimed in. "We have heard ungodly rumors---surely they are falsehoods!"
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 ascended the stairs.
Before I was even inside the door Vlodder and Peters were at it again, Peters pelting his friend with sarcastic barbs and Vlodder angrily trying to shut him up. But Will was right, even if he expressed himself somewhat meanly: Vlodder's stubborn insistence that homosexual prostitution did not exist meant that another of the city's biggest newspapers would never acknowledge the full story of a brutal murder. And how much more the report would have meant coming from Vlodder than from Peters; for while most of Will's important work as an exponent of the Progressive movement lay in the future, Vlodder 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 David could not bring himself to fully acknowledge the Fonzerelli murder; despite all the horrors he had seen, he could not accept the circumstance of that kind of a crime; and as I entered the big green doors of headquarters I wondered, just as I had wondered two thousand times during staff meetings at the Times, how long many members of the press---to say nothing of politicians and the public---would be satisfied to equate deliberate ignorance of evil with its nonexistence.
Within I found Watson standing near the caged elevator, talking heatedly with McElroy, the detective who had been at the crime scene the night before. I was about to join them when my arm was seized and I was guided toward a staircase by one of the more amazing sights available at headquarters: Sherlock Holmes, a man said to be America's greatest detective, if not the world's. He was an old friend of mine.
"Don't get involved in that, William," he said, with that tone of Anglo-Saxon wisdom that often marked her statements. "McElroy is taking a lashing from your friend, and he deserves the full treatment. Besides, the president wants you upstairs---sans Dr. Watson!"
"Holmes!" I said happily. "I am delighted to see you. I've spent a night and a morning with maniacs. I need the sound of a sane voice."
Sherlock's taste in daytime suits ran toward simple designs in shades of green that matched his eyes, and the one he wore that day, with only a minimal waistcoat and high-waisted pants of dark gray, showed off his tall, athletic body to advantage. His face was no less striking but handsomely plain. Yet, even I knew little of his early life and family background, save that his grandmother was the sister of the French artist Vernet. I also knew that in his younger years, Holmes attended at least one of the country's leading universities.....though it cannot be ascertained whether he is an alumnus of Yale, Harvard, or both. Sherlock has an older brother, Mycroft, whom the younger Holmes considered being more intellectually gifted than himself. Sometime earlier, Sherlock referred to Mycroft as being "seven years my senior". If Sherlock's (also unknown) date of birth of 1854 was correct, that would place Mycroft's date of birth as 1847.
"You shan't find many sane voices in this building today," Sherlock said as we climbed the stairs. "Teddy---that is, the president---isn't it bizarre to call him that, Randall?" And indeed it was; but when Roosevelt was at headquarters, which was ruled by a board of 4 commissioners of which he was chief, he was distinguished from the other three by the title "president." Very few of us guessed at the time that he would answer to an identical title in the none-too-distant future. "Well, he's been in one of his whirlwinds over the Fonzerelli case. Every kind of person has been in and out..."
Just then Teddy's voice came booming down from the second-story hallway: "And don't bother bringing your friends at Tammany into this, Coulston! Tammany is a monstrous Democrat creation, and this is a reform Republican administration---you've earned no favors here with your shoulder-hitting! I advise you to cooperate!" Deep chuckles from a pair of voices inside the staircase were the sole reply to this, and the sounds were moving our way. Within seconds Sherlock and I were face-to-face with the foppishly dressed, cologne-drenched, enormous figure of Heber Coulston, as well as his smaller, more tastefully clad, and less aromatic criminal overseer, Iron De Sarro.
The days when Lower Manhattan's underworld affairs were parceled out among dozens of freewheeling street gangs had for the most part come to an end by 1896, and dealings had been taken over and consolidated by bigger groups that were just as deadly but far more businesslike in their approach. The Goliaths, named for their colorful chieftain, Goliath Flore, controlled all territory east of the Bowery between 14th Street and Chatham Square; on the West Side, the Dead Rabbits, darlings of many New York intellectuals and artists (largely because they all shared an seeming unending appetite for cocaine), ran affairs south of 13 Street and west of Broadway; the area above 14th Street on that sound of town belonged to the Dubois Brothers, two cellar-dwelling French creatures whose evolution even Mr. Darwin would have had a hard time explaining; and between these three virtual armies, at the eye of the criminal hurricane and just blocks from Police Headquarters, were Iron De Sarro and La Camorra, who ruled supreme between Broadway and the Bowery from 14th Street to City Hall.
De Sarro's gang had been named after toughest neighborhood in Little Italy in an attempt to inspire fear., though in reality they were far less anarchic in their dealings than the classic Camorra bands of an earlier generation (the Winos, Eastman Gang, South Brooklyn Boys, and the rest), remnants of which still haunted their old neighborhood like violent, disaffected ghosts. De Sarro himself was reflective of this change in style, his sartorial acumen was matched by polished speech and manners. He also had a thorough knowledge of art and politics, his taste in the former running toward modern and in the latter towards socialism. But De Sarro knew his customers, too; and tasteful was not the word to describe the New Brighten Dance Hall, La Camorra's headquarters on Great Jones Street. Overseen by a singular giant known as Saturniano 'One Eye' Benford, the New Brighton was a garish mass of mirrors, crystal chandeliers, brass railings, and scantily clad "dancers," a flash palace with no equal in the Tenderloin, which, before De Sarro's rise, had been the unquestioned hub of outlaw opulence.
Heber U. "Ox" Coulston, in contrast, represented the more traditional kind of New York thug. He had begun his career as a particularly unsavory saloon bouncer, and had first gained notoriety by beating and stomping a policeman to death. Though he aspired to his boss's polish, on Coulston---ignorant, sexually depraved, and drug-ridden as he was----the attempt became grotesquely ostentatious. Coulston had murderous lieutenants whose doings were infamous and even daring, but none save Coulston would have dared to open Parisian Hall, one of the mere three or four saloons in New York that openly---indeed, exuberantly---catered to that segment of society which David Vlodder so assiduously refused to believe existed.
"Well now," Coulston said amiably, the stud in his cravat gleaming as he approached, "it's Mr. Waterhouse of the Times----along with one of the Police Department's pet limey." A scowl crossed his chiseled, Black Irish features. "It certain is no pleasure getting summoned to Police Headquarters." The air in the staircase had suddenly become charged with oppressive threat.
"Mr. Coulston," Sherlock answered with a brave nod, though I could see that he was quite nervous. "I must say that I do not care for you or the company you choose to keep."
Coulston laughed, but De Sarro, who already towered over Sherlock and me, rose up even higher, his fleshy face and ferret's eyes darkening. "It'd be best to watch your mouth, limey---it's a long walk from headquarters to Gramercy Park. A lot of unpleasant things can happen to a gentleman all alone."
"You're a real rabbit, aren't you, De Sarro?" I said, although the man could have broken me in two and think absolutely nothing of it. "What's the matter---run out of little boys to terrorize, you need to start on grown men?"
De Sarro's face went positively red. "Why, you misbegotten piece of scribbling shit---sure, Maria was trouble, a whole bundle of trouble, but I wouldn't have cooked her for it, and I'll kill any man who says I...."
"Now, now, Iron," Coulston's tone was pleasant, but his meaning was unmistakable: Knock it off. "There's no cause for any of that." And then to me: "Iron had nothing to do with that boy's murder, Waterhouse. And I don't want to see my name connected with it, either."
"Hell of a time to think of that, Coulston," I answered. "I saw his body---it was worthy of Iron, all right." In fact, not even De Sarro had done anything so horrendous, but there was no reason to acknowledge that to them. "He was just a boy."
Coulston chuckled as he took a few steps farther down the stairs. "Yes, and a boy playing a dangerous game. Come on, Waterhouse, boys like that die every day in this town---why the interest? Did he have a secret relative somewhere? A bastard kid, maybe?"
"Surely you don't think that is the only reason the case would be investigated?" Sherlock asked, somewhat offended-----he hadn't been working at headquarters very long.
"My dear sir," Coulston answered, "both Mr. Waterhouse and I know that's the only reason. But have it your way----Roosevelt is championing the benighted!" Coulston continued down the stairs, and De Sarro pushed by me to follow. They paused a little farther down and then Coulston turned, his voice for the first time hinting at his occupation. "But I warn you, Waterhouse---if I see my name connected with this, there will be hell to pay!"
"Don't worry, Coulston. My editors would never run the story."
He smiled again. "And a good thing, too. There are momentous things going on in the world, Waterhouse---why waste their energy on a trifle?"
With that they were gone, and Sherlock and I collected ourselves. Coulston may have been a new breed of gangster, but he was a gangster all the same, and our encounter had been absolutely unsettling.
"Do you know," Sherlock said thoughtfully as we started upstairs again, "that my friend Irene Adler went slumming one night just to meet Heber Coulston---and that she found him the most entertaining man? But then, Irene always was an empty-headed little fool." He then put a vice-like grip on my arm. "By the way, Randall, why the deuce did you call Mr. Coulston a rabbit? He's more like an ape to me."
"In the language of his profession, a rabbit is a tough customer."
"Oh By Jove, I must remember to write that down. I want my knowledge of the criminal species to be as thorough as possible."
I could only laugh. "Sherlock---with all the professions open to immigrants these days, why do you insist upon this one? Smart as you are, you could be a scientist, a doctor, or..."
"As could you, Randall," he answered sharply. "Except that you don't happen to have the ambition for it. And, by way of coincidence, neither do I. Honestly, sometimes you can be idiotic. You know perfectly well what I want." And so did every other friend of Sherlock's: to be the world's greatest detective!
"But, Sherlock, are you any closer to your goal? You're only a junior detective, after all."
He smiled wisely, with just a hint of that same tense sharpness behind the smile. "Of course, Randall---but I'm in the building, aren't I?"
I nodded with a shrug, aware that it was useless to argue with him, and then looked around the 2nd-floor hallway in an attempt to locate a familiar face. But the detectives and officers that came from and went to the various rooms were all new to me. "Hell's bells," I said quietly, "I don't recognize anybody up here today."
"It's gotten worse, I fear. We lost twelve last month. They'd all rather resign than face investigation."
"But Teddy can't staff the whole force with googoos." Such being the slang term for new officers.
"So everyone says. But if the choice is between corruption and inexperience, you know which way he'll go." Sherlock let go of me with a slightly unfriendly jerk. "Now, stop dawdling, Randall, he wanted you right away." We wove through uniformed leatherheads and "fly cops" (officers dressed in civilian clothing, just like Sherlock) until we were at the hall's end. "And later," Sherlock added, "you must explain to me just why it is that cases like this one are not usually investigated." Then, in a flurry, he rapped on the door of Teddy's office, opened it, and kept on shoving me until I was through. "Mr. Waterhouse, Commissioner," he announced, closing the door and leaving me inside."
Voluminous reader and writer that he was, Teddy had a penchant for massive desks, and his office at headquarters was 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 little 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 Teddy stood before one of them, wearing a very conservative gray suit for the working day.
"Ah, Randall, excellent," he said, hustling around the desk and then mangling my hand. "Watson's downstairs?"
"Yes. But I understood you wanted to see me alone."
Teddy paced about in a mix of serious yet merry anticipation. "What mood is he in? How do you think he'll respond? He's such a tempestuous fellow---I want to make sure we take the proper tack with him."
I shrugged. "He's all right, I would guess. We were up at Bellevue seeing this Beckman fellow, the one who shot the little girl, and he was in one hell of a mood after that. But he worked it out during the ride down---on my poor ears. But, Roosevelt, I have no idea what it is you want him for..."
Just then there was another fast, lightweight knock on the door, and then Sherlock reappeared. He was followed by Watson; they had evidently been chatting, and as their conversation died down inside the office, I noticed that John was studying him intently. At the time this didn't seem particularly remarkable; it was how most people reacted when encountering a man of Holmes's talents working for a police agency.
Teddy got between them like greased lightning. "Watson!" he clicked loudly. "Delighted, Doctor, delighted to see you!"
"Mr. Roosevelt," Watson answered with a genuinely pleased smile. "It's been a long while, old boy."
It was a reference to their first meeting 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 Teddy 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-mannered youth, 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 so 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 was 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 17th birthday that my application to Harvard was almost rejected, a fate I would have gladly 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 2 of college life did absolutely nothing to make me more inclined to accept a young scholar like Teddy when he arrived.
But in the fall of 1877, during my senior and Teddy's sophomore year, all this started changing. Laboring under the twin burdens of a difficult romance and a seriously ill father, Teddy 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 world, of course; but we nevertheless managed to discover philosophical dimensions in each other that permitted us to pass a good many evenings drinking and talking together. Soon we were conducting expeditions into Boston society, high and low; and on that foundation a solid friendship began to grow.
Meanwhile, another childhood friend of mine, John Watson, having earlier completed an unprecedentedly fast course of study at the Columbia Medical College, had been drawn away from a job as a junior assistant at the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwells Island by a new graduate course in psychology offered at Harvard by Dr. William James. That gregarious, terrier-like professor, who would go on to become a famous philosopher, had recently established America's 1st psychological laboratory in a few small rooms in Lawrence Hall. He also taught comparative anatomy to undergraduates; and in the fall 1877 term, having heard that James was an amusing academician who was sympathetic when it came to grades, I signed up for his course. On the first day I found myself sitting next to Teddy, who was pursuing the interest in all things wild that had consumed him since early youth. Although Roosevelt often got into spirited discussions over some minor point of animal behavior with James, he, like all of us, fast became charmed by the still-young instructor, who had a habit of reclining on the floor when his students' participation was flagging and declaring that teaching was "a mutual process."
Watson's relationship with James was far more complex. Though he greatly respected James's work and grew to have huge affection for the man himself (it really was impossible not to), Watson was nonetheless unable to accept James's famous theories on free will, which were the cornerstone of our instructor's philosophy James had been a maudlin, unhealthy boy, and as a young man had more than once considered suicide; ;but he overcame this tendency as a result of reading the works of the French philosopher Renouvier, who taught that a man could, by sheer force of will, overcome all psychic (and physical) ailments. "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will!" had been James's early battle cry, an attitude that continued to rule his thinking in 1877. Such a philosophy was destined to collide with Watson's developing belief in what he called "context": the theory that every man's actions are to a very decisive extent influenced by his early experiences, and that no man's behavior can be analyzed or affected without knowledge of those experiences. In the laboratory rooms at Lawrence hall, which were chocked full of devices for testing and dissecting animal nervous systems and human reactions. James and Watson fought bitterly over how the patterns of people's lives are formed and whether or not any of us is free to determine what kind of lives we will lead upon adulthood. These encounters became steadily more heated---not to mention a subject of campus gossip---until at last, one night early in the 2nd term, they debated in University Hall the question "Is Free Will a Psychological Phenomenon?"
Most of the student body attended; and though Watson argued will, the crowd was predisposed to dismiss his statements. Additionally, James's sense of humor was far more developed than Watson's at that time, and the boys at Harvard enjoyed their professor's many jokes at Watson's expense. On the other hand, Watson's references to philosophers of gloom, such as the German Schopenhauer, as well as his reliance on Charles Darwin's evolutionist theories and Herbert Spencer in explaining that survival was the goal of man's mental as much as his physical development, provoked many and prolonged groans of undergraduate disapproval. I confess that even I was torn, between loyalty to a friend whose beliefs had always made me nervous and enthusiasm for a man and a philosophy that seemed to offer the promise of limitless possibilities for not just my own but every man's future. Teddy---who did not yet know Watson, and who had, like James, survived many and severe childhood illnesses by dint of what he reasoned to be sheer willpower---was untroubled by any such qualms: he spiritedly cheered James's eventual and inevitable victory.
I dined with Watson after the debate in a tavern across the Charles that was frequented by Harvardians. In the middle of our meal Teddy came in with some friends and, seeing me with Watson, requested an introduction. He made some good-natured but pointed remarks about John's "mystical jumbo jargon regarding the human psyche." and how it was all the result of his European background; but he went to far when he spouted a jibe about "limey blood," for John's mother was English and he took great offense. Watson laid down the challenge for an affair of honor, and Teddy delightedly took him up, suggesting a boxing match. I knew John would have preferred fencing foils---with his bad left arm he stood little chance in a ring, but he agreed, in keeping with the code duello, with gave Teddy, as the challenged party, the choice of weapons.
To Roosevelt's credit, when the two men had stripped to their waists in the Hemenway Gymnasium (entered, at that late hour, by way of a keyring that I had won from a custodian in a poker game earlier this year) and saw Watson's arm, he offered to let him chose some other weapon than fists; but Watson was stubborn and proud, and though he was, for the second time in the same evening, doomed to defeat, he put up a far better fight than anyone had expected. His gameness impressed those present, and, predictably, won him Roosevelt's heartfelt admiration. We all returned to the tavern and drank until the late, late hours; and though Teddy and John never became the best of friends, a very special bond had been formed between them, one that opened Roosevelt's mind---if only a little--to Watsons opinions and theories.
That opening was a good part of the reason we were now collected in Teddy's office; and as we spoke of the old days in Cambridge, our immediate business receded temporarily. The conversation soon spread to the most recent past, Roosevelt asking some genuinely interested questions about Watson's work with both the children at his Institute and the criminally insane, and Watson, saying that he had followed Teddy's career as a lawmaker in Albany and a Civil Service Commissioner in Washington with great interest. It was pleasant talk among old friends who had a great deal of catching up to do, and for much of the time I was satisfied to sit back and listen, enjoying the change of atmosphere from the previous night and morning.
But inevitably, the conversation turned to the Fonzerelli murder; and a sense of foreboding and sadness crept relentlessly into the room, dissipating pleasant memories as cruelly as some unknown savage had dispatched the boy on the bridge tower.
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