White Fire (2 page)
“I would be much obliged if you’d explain,” Doyle said.
Wilde took a sip of wine. “If he’s to be a truly great detective, a great
persona
, he should be more eccentric. The world doesn’t need another Sergeant Cuff or Inspector Dupin. No—make his humanity aspire to the greatness of his art.” He paused a moment, thinking, idly stroking the orchid that drooped from his buttonhole. “In
Scarlet
, you call Watson ‘extremely lazy.’ In my opinion, you should allow the virtues of dissipation and idleness to be bestowed on your hero, not his errand boy. And make Holmes more reserved. Don’t have
delight shining on his features
, or have him
barking with laughter
.”
Doyle colored, recognizing the infelicitous phraseology.
“You must confer on him a vice,” Wilde went on. “Virtuous people are so banal; I simply cannot bear them.” He paused again. “Not just a vice, Doyle—give him a
weakness
. Let me think—ah, yes! I recall.” He opened his copy of
A Study in Scarlet
, leafed quickly through the pages, found a passage, and began to quote Dr. Watson: “‘I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.’” He returned the book to his vest pocket. “There—you had the perfect weakness in your hands, but you let it go. Pluck it up again! Deliver Holmes into the clutches of some addiction. Opium, say. But no: opium is so dreadfully common these days, it’s become quite overrun by the lower classes.” Suddenly Wilde snapped his fingers. “I have it! Cocaine hydrochloride. There’s a novel and elegant vice for you.”
“Cocaine,” Doyle repeated a little uncertainly. As a doctor, he had sometimes prescribed a seven percent solution to patients suffering from exhaustion or depression, but the idea of making Holmes an addict was, on the face of it, quite absurd. Although Doyle had asked for Wilde’s opinion, he found himself slightly put out at actually receiving criticism from the man. Across the table, the good-humored argument between Stoddart and Gill continued.
The aesthete took another sip of wine and tossed his hair back.
“And what about you?” Doyle asked. “Will you do a book for Stoddart?”
“I shall. And it shall be under your influence—or rather, Holmes’s influence—that I will proceed. Do you know, I’ve always believed there’s no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written—that’s all. But I find myself taken with the idea of writing a book about both art
and
morals. I’m planning to call it
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. And do you know, I believe it will be rather a ghastly story. Not a ghost story, exactly, but one in which the protagonist comes to a beastly end. The kind of story one wishes to read by daylight—not lamplight.”
“Such a story doesn’t seem to be exactly in your line.”
Wilde looked at Doyle with something like amusement. “Indeed? Did you think that—as one who would happily sacrifice himself on the pyre of aestheticism—I do not recognize the face of horror when I stare into it? Let me tell you: the shudder of fear is as sensual as the shudder of pleasure, if not more so.” He underscored this with another wave of his hand. “Besides, I was once told a story so dreadful, so distressing in its particulars and in the extent of its evil, that now I truly believe nothing I hear could ever frighten me again.”
“How interesting,” Doyle replied a little absently, still mulling over the criticism of Holmes.
Wilde regarded him, a small smile forming on his large, pale features. “Would you care to hear it? It is not for the faint of heart.”
The way Wilde phrased this, it sounded like a challenge. “By all means.”
“It was told to me during my lecture tour of America a few years back. On my way to San Francisco, I stopped at a rather squalid yet picturesque mining camp known as Roaring Fork. I gave my lecture at the bottom of their mine, and it was frightfully well received by the good gentlemen of the camp. After my lecture, one of the miners approached me, an elderly chap somewhat the worse—or, perhaps, the better—for drink. He took me aside, said he’d enjoyed my story so much that he had one of his own to share with me.”
Wilde paused, wetting his thick, red lips with a delicate sip of wine. “Here, lean in a little closer, that’s a good fellow, and I’ll tell it you exactly as it was told to me…”
Ten minutes later, a diner at the restaurant in the Langham Hotel would have been surprised to note—amid the susurrus of genteel conversation and the tinkle of cutlery—a young man in the dress of a country doctor abruptly rise from his table, very pale. Knocking over his chair in his agitation, one hand to his forehead, the man staggered from the room, nearly upsetting a waiter’s tray of delicacies. And as he vanished in the direction of the gentlemen’s toilet area, his face displayed a perfect expression of revulsion and horror.
Present Day
C
orrie Swanson stepped into the ladies’ room for the third time to check how she looked. A lot had changed with her since she’d transferred to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the beginning of her sophomore year. John Jay was a buttoned-down place. She had resisted it for a while, but finally realized she needed to grow up and play the game of life instead of acting the rebel forever. Gone were the purple hair, the piercings, the black leather jacket, the dark eye shadow and other Goth accoutrements. There was nothing she could do about the Möbius strip tattoo on the nape of her neck, beyond combing her hair back and wearing high collars. But someday, she realized, that would have to go as well.
If she was going to play the game, she was going to play it well.
Unfortunately, her personal transformation had taken place too late for her advisor, a former NYPD cop who had gone back to school and turned professor. She got the feeling his first impression of her had been that of a perp, and nothing she’d done in the year since she’d first met him had erased that. Clearly, he had it in for her. He had already rejected her first proposal for the Rosewell thesis, which involved a trip to Chile to do a perimortem analysis on skeletal remains discovered in a mass grave of Communist peasants murdered by the Pinochet regime back in the 1970s. Too far away, he said, too expensive for a research project, and besides it was old history. When Corrie replied that this was the point—these were old graves, requiring specialized forensic techniques—he said something about not involving herself in foreign political controversies, especially Communist ones.
Now she had another idea for her thesis, an even better one, and she was willing to do almost anything to see it happen.
Examining herself in the mirror, she rearranged a few strands of hair, touched up her conservative lipstick, adjusted her gray worsted suit jacket, and gave her nose a quick powdering. She hardly recognized herself; God, she might even be mistaken for a Young Republican. So much the better.
She exited the ladies’ room and walked briskly down the hall, her conservative pumps clicking professionally against the hard linoleum. Her advisor’s door was shut, as usual, and she gave it a brisk, self-confident rap. A voice inside said, “Come in.”
She entered. The office was, as always, neat as a pin, the books and journals all lined up flush with the edges of the bookshelves, the comfortable, masculine leather furniture providing a cozy air. Professor Greg Carbone sat behind his large desk, its acreage of burnished mahogany unbroken by books, papers, family photographs, or knickknacks.
“Good morning, Corrie,” Carbone said, rising and buttoning his blue serge suit. “Please sit down.”
“Thank you, Professor.” She knew he liked to be called that. Woe to the student who called him Mister or, worse, Greg.
He settled back down as she did. Carbone was a strikingly handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair, wonderful teeth, trim and fit, a good dresser, articulate, soft-spoken, intelligent, and successful. Everything he did, he did well, and as a result he was an accomplished asshole indeed.
“Well, Corrie,” Carbone began, “you are looking well today.”
“Thank you, Dr. Carbone.”
“I’m excited to hear about your new idea.”
“Thanks.” Corrie opened her briefcase (no backpacks at John Jay) and took out a manila file folder, placing it on her knee. “I’m sure you’ve been reading about the archaeological investigation going on down in City Hall Park. Next to the location of the old prison known as the Tombs.”
“Tell me about it.”
“The parks department has been excavating a small cemetery of executed criminals to make way for a new subway entrance.”
“Ah yes, I did read about that,” said Carbone.
“The cemetery was operational from 1858 to 1865. After 1865, all execution burials were moved to Hart Island and remain unavailable.”
A slow nod from Carbone. He looked interested; she felt encouraged.
“I think this would make for a great opportunity to do an osteological study of those skeletons—to see if severe childhood malnourishment, which as you know leaves osteological markers, might correlate with later criminal behavior.”
Another nod from Carbone.
“I’ve got it all outlined here.” She laid a proposal on the table. “Hypotheses, methodology, control group, observations, and analysis.”
Carbone laid a hand on the document, drew it toward himself, opened it, and began perusing.
“There are a number of reasons why this is a great opportunity,” she went on. “First, the city has good records on most of these executed criminals—names, rap sheets, and trial records. Those who were orphans raised in the Five Points House of Industry—about half a dozen—also have some childhood records. They were all executed in the same way—hanging—so the cause of death is identical. And the cemetery was used for only seven years, so all the remains come from roughly the same time period.”
She paused. Carbone was slowly turning over the pages, one after another, apparently reading. There was no way to tell what he was thinking; his face was a blank.
“I made a few inquiries, and it seems the parks department would be open to having a John Jay student examine the remains.”
The slow turning of the pages paused. “You already contacted them?”
“Yes. Just a feeler—”
“A feeler…You contacted another city agency without seeking prior permission?”
Uh-oh.
“Obviously I didn’t want to bring you a project that might get shot down later by outside authorities. Um, was that wrong?”
A long silence, and then: “Did you not read your undergraduate handbook?”
Corrie was seized with apprehension. She had in fact read it—when she’d been admitted. But that was over a year ago. “Not recently.”
“The handbook is quite clear. Undergraduate students are not to engage other city departments except through official channels. This is because we’re a city institution, as you know, a senior college of the City University of New York.” He said this mildly, almost kindly.
“I…Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t recall that from the handbook.” She swallowed, feeling a rising panic—and anger. This was such unbelievable bullshit. But she forced herself to keep her cool. “It was just a couple of phone calls, nothing official.”
A nod. “I’m sure you didn’t
deliberately
violate university regulations.” He began turning the pages again, slowly, one after the other, not looking up at her. “But in any case I find other problems with this thesis proposal of yours.”
“Yes?” Corrie felt sick.
“This idea that malnourishment leads to a life of crime…It’s an old idea—and an unconvincing one.”
“Well, it seems to me worth testing.”
“Back then, almost everyone was malnourished. But not everyone became a criminal. And the idea is redolent of…how shall I put it?…of a certain philosophy that crime in general can be traced to unfortunate experiences in a person’s childhood.”
“But malnourishment—severe malnourishment—might cause neurological changes, actual damage. That isn’t philosophy; that’s science.”
Carbone held up her proposal. “I can already predict the outcome: you’ll discover that these executed criminals
were
malnourished as children. The
real
question is why, of all those hungry children, only a small percentage went on to commit capital crimes. And your research plan does not address that. I’m sorry, this won’t fly. Not at all.”
And, opening his fingers, he let her document drop gently to his desk.
T
he famous—some might say infamous—“Red Museum” at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice had started as a simple collection of old investigative files, physical evidence, prisoners’ property, and memorabilia that, almost a hundred years ago, had been put into a display case in a hall at the old police academy. Since then, it had grown into one of the country’s largest and best collections of criminal memorabilia. The crème de la crème of the collection was on display in a sleek new exhibition hall in the college’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill building on Tenth Avenue. The rest of the collection—vast rotting archives and moldering evidence from long-ago crimes—remained squirreled away in the hideous basement of the old police academy building on East Twentieth Street.
Early on at John Jay, Corrie had discovered this archive. It was pure gold—once she’d made friends with the archivist and figured out her way around the disorganized drawers and heaping shelves of stuff. She had been to the Red Museum archives many times in search of topics for papers and projects, most recently in her hunt for a topic for her Rosewell thesis. She had spent a great deal of time in the old unsolved-case files—those cold cases so ancient that all involved (including the possible perps) had definitely and positively died.
Corrie Swanson found herself in a creaking elevator, descending into the basement, one day after the meeting with her advisor. She was on a desperate mission to find a new thesis topic before it became too late to complete the approval process. It was mid-November already, and she was hoping to spend the winter break researching and writing up the thesis. She was on a partial scholarship, but Agent Pendergast had been making up the difference in tuition, and she was absolutely determined not to take one penny more from him than necessary. If her thesis won the Rosewell Prize, with its twenty-thousand-dollar grant, she wouldn’t have to.