The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession

by David Grann

  When they arrived, Cerasoli was waiting inside with his wife. A modest man in his fifties with a bald head and a silver mustache, he wore his fireman’s coat. Over eggs and French toast, Cerasoli described how he was struggling with his own memory loss. He had been hit on the head and initially could not recall the location of the firehouse he had worked at for seventeen years. His memories had gradually come back, and he recalled stumbling upon Shea in the middle of the street after the first tower collapsed. “I thought you were dead,” he said. “You weren’t moving at all.”

  Shea’s face whitened, and Cerasoli asked Shea if he was sure that he wanted him to continue. When Shea nodded, Cerasoli explained how he and several others carried Shea on a backboard when they heard the second tower rumble. “We lifted you in the air and ran with you on the board, down an alleyway and into a garage. It suddenly got all black and dark.” Cerasoli drew a map on a napkin, showing where the garage was, on the corner of West Street and Albany Street.

  “Was I conscious?” Shea asked.

  Cerasoli thought for a long moment. “I don’t remember. There are some details I still can’t remember.”

  Shea asked what happened next. Cerasoli said that the Fire Department doctor opened Shea’s shirt and pants. “I was holding your hand. You kept asking me, ‘Where are the others? Are they O.K.?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure, they’re O.K., they’re out there laughing.’ I didn’t really have any idea, but I wanted you to feel O.K.” Cerasoli paused, then asked, “So were they O.K.?”

  Shea shook his head. “No, none of them made it,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Cerasoli said. “I had no idea.”

  After they finished eating, Cerasoli’s wife took a picture of them sitting together. “I know he doesn’t want to forget this,” she said.

  Cerasoli reached over and put his arm around Shea. “God was with you that day,” he said.

  When he wasn’t searching for his past, Shea went from memorial to memorial. One out of every ten people who died that day was a firefighter. Thirty-three died in Shea’s battalion alone, and eleven in his house, including his captain, Frank Callahan, and Bruce Gary, a veteran whom Shea worshipped. “Gary was a senior man with over twenty years,” Shea told me. “He was like Yoda in the house. He was very wise. I wanted to hang out with him all the time. I’m asking, ‘Why you? You would have been a resource for everyone.’ Me? I’m a positive guy, but when people have enough of positive they can’t come to me.”

  Shea attended as many memorials as he could, but there were so many that he had to do what everyone in the department had to: choose between friends. In late October, as another service was taking place in the city, I accompanied Shea to a Mass in upstate New York for his lieutenant, John Ginley. Shea still couldn’t drive, and Steve Kelly picked us up. Kelly and Shea wore their Class A uniforms: navy-blue suits and white gloves.

  As they spoke in the car about the men who had died, Shea seemed detached, as if he were reading from a piece of paper. Several people close to him had noticed that he seemed increasingly numb. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Shea told me at one point. “I’m not sad enough. I should be sadder.”

  While the other men spent more and more time together—searching at Ground Zero, eating their meals at the firehouse, drinking at P. D. O’Hurley’s—Shea spent less and less time with his colleagues.

  He now stared out the window at the changing leaves. “Look at them,” he said. “They’re all orange and purple.”

  “You sure you’re O.K., Kev?” Kelly asked.

  Shea lowered his window and let the wind wash over him. “Ten-four.”

  By the time we arrived at the church, scores of firemen were lined up.

  There was still no body, and in place of a casket a helmet rested at the foot of the altar. “I will never forget those memories,” one of Ginley’s brothers said in his eulogy. “I believe in time this pain will become bearable, because all our memories will be alive in our mind.”

  I glanced at Shea. Unlike the other men, who had begun to weep, he was dry-eyed and his face was utterly blank.

  By the end of October, Shea began losing interest in his search. “What’s the point?” he asked me. “What am I going to figure out? They’re all dead.”

  One day, he found, through the relatives of a deceased firefighter in his house, a news clip from September 11th that showed the men from Engine 40, his truck, going into the towers. At last the quest was over, he thought, as he prepared to watch the clip. On the grainy film he could see each of the men from his company going inside, but he wasn’t there. “I don’t know where the heck I was,” Shea said. “I don’t know what the hell happened to me.”

  Finally, he stopped looking for answers, and devoted himself to helping the families of lost firefighters. He was a featured speaker at fundraisers, though he was suffering from pain in his hand and leg, where the contusions were, and in his groin, where the doctors had surgically removed large amounts of damaged tissue. At a fund-raiser in Buffalo in November, after having appeared only a few days earlier at another in California, he was wan and exhausted. “He’s not letting himself heal,” Stacy told me. “He’s in so much pain, but he won’t say anything.”

  As he stared off into space, a stranger asked for his autograph, and he walked away.

  The next morning, Flight 587 crashed into the Rockaway Peninsula, near Kennedy Airport, and reporters, believing it was another terrorist attack, tried to track Shea down for comment. Rather than speak to them, he went to the hotel gym and got on the StairMaster in his neck brace, climbing to nowhere and watching the fire burn on TV. “How do you feel, Mr. Shea?” he said, parodying their questions. “How do you feel?”

  “He’s starting to have nightmares,” Stacy said. “He’s kicking and thrashing.”

  He told me, “I remember the dreams.”

  Emotions, once suppressed, overwhelmed him, and periodically he began to cry. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said.

  He found an article about post-traumatic stress, and highlighted the words “It is O.K. to be in pain. That is the first principle of recovery.”

  By the beginning of December, many in the firehouse were showing their own symptoms of trauma. “You see signs,” Kelly told me. “Marriages are starting to come under fire more than usual. I don’t know if there is more drinking, but there is plenty of it.”

  While the rest of the men relied on the familial nature of the firehouse as a refuge, Shea, after drifting away, felt cut off. Many of the new recruits who had replaced the missing barely recognized him. In early December, Shea tried for the first time to reintegrate himself into the fabric of the force. “Being with the guys,” he said. “That’s the most important thing to me right now.”

  He went with them to Roosevelt Island for courses on antiterrorism. “He was so excited,” Stacy said. “He got to wear his uniform again.”

  In mid-December, the doctors removed his brace. It was possible that, after the bone fused in a year, he could return to active duty. Yet in the kitchen, where the men gathered to eat and reminisce, he sensed that they were shying away from him. Sometimes when he showed up in the morning they barely acknowledged him, he said, and when he tried to engage them in conversation they seemed uninterested. “A lot of the guys are reluctant to even look at me,” Shea told me one day, sitting in his car. “As odd as it may sound, I think I remind them of the others.”

  That month, at another wake, Shea stood off by himself. “I sometimes think it would’ve been easier if I had died with the rest of the guys,” he said.

  Kelly told me, “It’s hard to watch. Every time I talk to him, he’s not the same guy.” Kelly went on, “First thing he needs to do is simply heal physically. Hopefully, then he can come back and be a full-duty fireman, because he lived for that, and he was going to move up in the department. He was brilliant in the books.”

  Shortly before the three-month anniversary of the attack, Shea showed up early for the C
hristmas party to help with preparation. Many of the relatives of the dead were there, and he served them hot dogs and sauerkraut. He worked alongside the other men, saying, “Yes, sir,” and “Negative K, sir.” “More of the guys are talking to me,” he said. “Maybe in time it will get easier.”

  Hanging on the wall at the firehouse was the riding list from the morning of September 11th, a chalkboard that had the name of each member who had hopped on the rig and died. The men had put a piece of Plexiglas over it to preserve it as a memorial. At the bottom, scribbled almost as an afterthought, were the words “Kevin Shea.”

  “I need to go down,” Shea said.

  He had called me at home one night, his voice agitated, and it took me a moment to realize that he was referring to Ground Zero. He said someone in the Fire Department would pick us up the next afternoon in Chelsea.

  It was a cold day, and Shea wore a sweatshirt and mountain-climbing boots. Stacy stood beside him, holding his hand. He had not returned to the area since that day and had consciously avoided pictures of it in the newspaper and on TV. Liam Flaherty, a member of Rescue 4, showed up in a Fire Department van. He had trained Shea at the academy and had been down at the site, searching for his men’s remains, since September 11th, leaving only long enough to sleep. “I saw guys at their absolute best that day,” he said as he drove. “Guys just kept running in. They went up as it came down.”

  We passed through several checkpoints, trying to follow the route Shea had taken with his own company. Shea pressed his face against the window, wiping away the steam from his breath. We could see the tops of the cranes rising out of the debris and, farther on, two huge metal beams, molded together in the shape of a cross.

  “Look at that,” Shea said, pointing out the opposite window. “That’s Engine 40. That’s the rig we drove in on.” On the side of the road was a huge red truck, the number 40 painted on the side. “It must’ve been moved,” Shea said. “We weren’t parked there.” He looked at me for reassurance. “Right?”

  As we passed through the final checkpoint, Flaherty said, “This is it. You’re in.”

  “There’s the south tower,” Stacy said.

  “Where?”

  “There. By the crane.”

  “Oh, my God,” Shea said.

  All we could see was a giant hole in the skyline. Flaherty parked the van and we climbed out. Flaherty got us hard hats and yelled at us to be careful as we approached the debris.

  “Where’s the lobby command post?” Shea asked.

  “Ten stories underground,” Flaherty said. “It’s still burning.”

  Shea blinked his eyes. He began to recall, in a rush, all the pieces that he had strung together. “I grabbed a Purple K,” he said. “I was going to look for my men in Ladder 35. There were bodies falling. I remember them hitting the ground. I remember the sound. I went to put out car fires. Then I went into the command post. I saw Patriciello.” He closed his eyes. “I hugged him. I told him to be careful.”

  He stopped. How could he have got from the lobby command post to Albany Street? He couldn’t run that fast. “Maybe you were blown out,” Flaherty said. “A lot of guys were picked up and blown out from the concussion.”

  “Where’s Albany?” Shea asked.

  “It’s over here,” Flaherty said. We started to run, mud splattering our shoes. We turned down a small street. There were cars still covered in ash, their windows shattered. Shea recalled that the doctor had told him that he said he had crawled two hundred feet toward light. Shea walked several paces, then stopped and turned around. “This is where they found me,” he said. “Right here.” He looked back at the tower, surveying the distance. “Is there a garage around here?” There was one up the road, Liam said, and we ran again, past a burned-out building and several men in surgical masks. “This must be it,” Shea said.

  The garage was small and dank. We waited a moment, then were rushing out into the street again, down one alley and another, until we arrived at the edge of the Hudson River. “This is where they lowered me down on a stretcher.”

  As he finished his story, drawing new theories from Flaherty about being blown out, estimating the wind speed and the power of the concussion, we were cold and exhausted. By the time we got back to the site, it was dark, and the workers had turned on their spotlights. While the others wandered off, Shea walked toward what was left of the south tower.

  He stood, listening to the cranes. I watched him for several minutes, then asked, “Are you O.K.?”

  “Yeah.”

  He seemed aware that, after months of searching, he might never know everything—that there was no way to piece together a logical story for that day. “I’m so tired,” he said. He wiped his eyes. No matter what happened, I offered, he’d done his job, and at some point he needed to let go of the rest.

  Shea stepped closer to the hole, his feet balancing on the edge, and said, “I just wish I had learned one thing today—anything—that showed I was trying to save someone other than myself.”

  —January, 2002

  Part Two

  “A strange enigma is man!”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, in “The Sign of the Four”

  The Squid Hunter

  CHASING THE SEA’S

  MOST ELUSIVE

  CREATURE

  On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran—a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior—pitched in the waves.

  Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. “It was bigger than a human leg,” Ragot later told me. “It was a tentacle.” He looked again. “It was starting to move,” he recalled.

  He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. “I think it’s some sort of animal,” Ragot said.

  Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. “I had never seen anything like it,” he told me. “There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.”

  The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently. The floorboards creaked, and the rudder started to bend. Then, just as the stern seemed ready to snap, everything went still. “As it unhooked itself from the boat, I could see its tentacles,” Ragot recalled. “The whole animal must have been nearly thirty feet long.”

  The creature had glistening skin and long arms with suckers, which left impressions on the hull. “It was enormous,” Kersauson recalled. “I’ve been sailing for forty years and I’ve always had an answer for everything—for hurricanes and icebergs. But I didn’t have an answer for this. It was terrifying.”

  What they claimed they saw—a claim that many regarded as a tall tale—was a giant squid, an animal that has long occupied a central place in sea lore; it has been said to be larger than a whale and stronger than an elephant, with a beak that can sever steel cables. In a famous scene in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Jules Verne depicts a battle between a submarine and a giant squid that is twenty-five feet long, with eight arms and blue-green eyes—“a terrible monster worthy of all the legends about such creatures.” More recently, Peter Benchley, in his thriller “Beast,” describes a giant squid that “killed without need, as if Nature, in a fit of perverse malevolence, had programmed it to that end.”

 
; Such fictional accounts, coupled with scores of unconfirmed sightings by sailors over the years, have elevated the giant squid into the fabled realm of the fire-breathing dragon and the Loch Ness monster. Though the giant squid is no myth, the species, designated in scientific literature as Architeuthis, is so little understood that it sometimes seems like one. A fully grown giant squid is classified as the largest invertebrate on Earth, with tentacles sometimes as long as a city bus and eyes about the size of human heads. Yet no scientist has ever examined a live specimen—or seen one swimming in the sea. Researchers have studied only carcasses, which have occasionally washed ashore or floated to the surface. (One corpse, found in 1887 in the South Pacific, was said to be nearly sixty feet long.) Other evidence of the giant squid is even more indirect: sucker marks have been spotted on the bodies of sperm whales, as if burned into them; presumably, the two creatures battle each other hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

  The giant squid has consumed the imaginations of many oceanographers. How could something so big and powerful remain unseen for so long—or be less understood than dinosaurs, which died out millions of years ago? The search for a living specimen has inspired a fevered competition. For decades, teams of scientists have prowled the high seas in the hope of glimpsing one. These “squid squads” have in recent years invested millions of dollars and deployed scores of submarines and underwater cameras, in a struggle to be first.

  Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist from New Zealand, is one of the hunters—but his approach is radically different. He is not trying to find a mature giant squid; rather, he is scouring the ocean for a baby, called a paralarva, which he can grow in captivity. A paralarva is often the size of a cricket.