City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (46 page)

Gyp couldn’t believe his luck as he closed in on the long, stoop-shouldered back before him. He made himself go slowly, his eyes darting back and forth through the crowd in case it was somehow a trap—but he didn’t believe that Spanish Louie could dissemble this well. More likely he was just being stupid, as usual.

Gyp homed in, sidling inconspicuously through the sidewalk crowd, letting himself be jostled along until he was right behind him.

Steady, steady—

He searched the street ahead for a likely alley, a handy basement doorway. Reminding himself he didn’t want to finish the man off—not just yet, not here. Not until he had scared Louie into telling where Kid and that damned dwarf were—

There was a small gap in the walls of tenements just ahead, a little thieves’ den the I-ties called Bandits’ Roost. It might be trouble if some of them were home, but it was a risk Gyp was willing to take. He couldn’t be sure that he’d ever have a setup this plum again.

“There you are, boy-o!”

He felt the wooden stick like a knife under his shoulder blade and whirled around, furiously.

“Big Tim himself’ll be needin’ a word wit’ you, son.”

It was Buckley, the squat little cop. Gyp nearly spat with anger—
to be interrupted so close to the mark!

“Not now,
tsitser
!” he hissed. “Lose yourself, I got business.”

“Oh, you do, you do at that, my boy,” Buckley smirked, one hand already reaching for his belt.

Gyp pushed him away, started back through the crowd after Spanish Louie. Too late, from the corner of his eye, he saw the club coming up, felt it crack down on his skull before he could turn around. He felt his knees buckle, and as he fell to the sidewalk he could see Louie strolling on ahead, out of reach—oblivious to what was going on less than half a block behind him.

The last thing Gyp saw, before he blacked out, was Buckley standing over him, grinning smugly.

“How the mighty are fallen,” he said, and gave him a vicious kick in the side.

Freud had gone uptown in the morning looking for his old friend Siggy Lustgarten from medical school, but the man had left town on vacation. Afterwards he decided he might as well get it over with and look up his sister’s family, but the directions were vague, and he had a hard time finding the address.

It was better here, uptown. The farther he went the wider the streets seemed, the cleaner the air. The apartment houses were immense, gracious structures of granite and brick and marble, instead of the awful, dull brown stone that even the best homes in New York seemed to be made of. Spires of vast new cathedrals going up beside them, at least as big as anything in Europe.

America, carrying the faith forward—

He had almost been forced to bring his own family to this place—and he wondered how different all their lives would have been, if that had come to pass.

Well, it would not have been so bad, really. A few comforts sacrificed, here and there, but one could get along. One could always get along—

It had been right after he married, the same year of his last military reserve duty, up in Olmutz. There had been an incident—one that made him wonder seriously if he could ever make a decent living in Vienna as a Jewish doctor, much less one with his ideas—

“Reservists! If we had been using live ammunition you all would be dead now!”

The voice made him freeze, huddled in the ditch where he was. The huge, braided general had ridden up behind them, just as the officer was handing Freud his list of ghastly wounds. He was an enormous man, in another, spectacular red and yellow uniform, bellowing merrily at his cowed troops: a certain General E. M., master of ordnance on the general staff—one of the bellicose anti-Semitic clique at the imperial court.

Freud knew him. He had recognized him right away. He was fatter now, great gut spilling over his saddle pommel, but the voice, the swagger were still unmistakably the same—

He had run into the General six years before, during his first call-up, at a Vienna military hospital. Freud had been a young officer-cadet then, just starting his medical training, bored and contemptuous of the endless military maneuvering. On his birthday he had slipped away to town, as he so often did, to read the newspapers in the Ringstrasse cafes, and silently toast himself with an
einen kleinen Braunen.

While he was gone, the General had come into the company clinic—a thinner man then, sleek as a whip, with a wolfish grin. Bellowing just as he was now, demanding a cure for a dose he had picked up in an officers’ brothel, complaining that he had urgent business with the emperor. Freud had been caught out, absent without leave, and when he got back that night the general had personally arrested him. He had clapped him into barracks for a week, his big teeth grinning maniacally at him through the barracks window.

“That will teach you to run away, my fine Jew doctor!”

He had never been so humiliated in his life. That week, lying in his barracks bunk day and night, enduring the taunts of the other young reservists, he had felt close to a nervous breakdown. His whole record, his whole career teetered on the edge of ruin. In his despair he had remembered again that time, when he was seven or eight, that he had peed on his parents’ bedroom floor. His father railing at him:

The boy will come to nothing!

And now here was his General—back like a bad dream, more inflated than ever. Freud tried not to look at him, keeping his eyes fixed on the list of hideous wounds, and the great man did not seem to notice him. After a few more harangues he had kicked his long-suffering steed into motion, gone on to rebuke another section of the line.

But that night, back in the one decent cafe in Olmutz, the General had appeared again, dominating a boisterous table full of general officers, all in their medals and parakeet uniforms. The waiters had all hovered about them, attending to their every need, and Freud and the other junior reserve officers had not been able to get the slightest attention.

As he watched them Freud grew more and more resentful—not wanting to do anything that might draw the man’s attention but seething at the humiliation, the unfairness of it all. Until finally he had reached out and pulled at the apron strings of a waiter as he scurried past with more brandy for the generals.

“Hey! Over here, you! Who knows? Maybe someday
I
will be a general, too!”

The other officers at his table had erupted in laughter, a waiter even reluctantly coming over to serve them at last. Freud had sat grinning sheepishly, basking in the audacity of his act—until he noticed that the men around his table were no longer laughing, but discreetly lowering their faces into their hands and beer glasses.

“You? A general?”

The great, fat General was standing there, smirking just behind him, a cigar in one hand and his brandy snifter in the other. He had opened his tunic, and undone the top button of his pants to let his immense stomach breathe, and it occurred to Freud despite himself that he looked like nothing so much as an angry father, preparing to undo his belt for a whipping.

“A man who leaves his post could
never
be a general,” he said as Freud scrambled to his feet, nearly knocking his chair over in his haste. Behind them, it was the turn of the canary generals to laugh and grin now. Freud stood dumbly at attention, waiting for whatever more might be coming.

When he was a child, he remembered, his father had told him a story about how a gentile had once confronted him on the sidewalk, tossed his new hat in the gutter, and told him to get out of the way.

“What did you do?” Freud asked him.

“Well, I picked up my hat,” he said, and Sigmund had burned with shame for his father’s cowardice.

Yet now all he could do was stand at attention, waiting for the General’s pleasure. To his infinite relief, the man merely flashed his great, toothy grin at him, and began to turn away—making a curt, dismissive gesture with his hand as he did so.

“A deserter could
never
be a general,” he repeated—then flung back over his shoulder:

“Besides, you’re a Jew!”

The generals at their table roared with laughter. So did the waiters and the civilians at the other tables, and even the other junior officers at his own table were smiling behind their hands. And all Freud could do was bow stiffly, put down a few coins for his drink, and make his way out of the restaurant.

He tried scrupulously to avoid the general throughout the rest of the maneuvers, but as luck would have it he had run into him again in the regiment’s indoor pool. It was a cool afternoon, and the general was the only other officer present, wading hippopotamuslike into the water, the ripples spreading out across the entire pool from his immense, hairy white stomach.

Freud had almost decided to leave once he saw that they were alone, but instead he forced himself to stay.

What did you do?

Well, I picked up my hat—

The General looked less intimidating, even ludicrous now, stripped down to his swimming costume, and Freud wondered to himself that he didn’t have epaulets sewn on his trunks as well, or something to show at all times that he was a general. The idea almost made him laugh out loud—

Just then the General spotted him; the huge, awful grin spread slowly across his face.

“So there you are, my good Jew!”

Freud said nothing, peeling off his shirt and wooden sandals, placing his towel carefully along a chair. He walked over to the edge of the pool and stood there, peering down into water murky with the steam seeping out from the sauna room.

“What a fine physique you have!” the general called out, grinning wider. “How about pulling them down for a moment and giving us a peek, eh?”

Freud stood frozen where he was.

“Come on—just a peek. I’ve always been curious to see what a circumcised Jew cock looks like. How about it?”

He looked out at the General, treading water across the pool like some great, white manatee, fat little hands and legs churning away under the surface.

“Huh? Just one peek. Or maybe I’ll confine you to barracks again. How would you like that, hmm? Then I can come and take a look whenever I want—”

Still Freud had controlled himself, saying nothing, letting no hint of expression cross his face. Instead, he straightened up and made a low, perfect dive into the pool, the General’s meaty laughter still ringing in his ears as he slowly, deliberately swam his laps.

He would not permanently give up the civilized comforts of his native city for some American wilderness. He would make his home in Vienna, and fight for his new science, his Cause, painstakingly building up his practice, winning respect for his theories.

And so he had arrived on the shores of the New World as the conquering hero, to be lauded and honored by the greatest minds of science.

It will be like an incredible, omnipotent daydream—

He had thought about it for months: taking the stage at Clark, up in Worcester, the audience applauding fervently, leaning forward to catch his every word—

Yet somehow he still could not fully picture it. It remained murky, like the pool room water—as if there were still something unexplored, just beneath the surface.

When he finally found his sister’s apartment, in another new, well-appointed building in Harlem, it was locked up tight as a drum. They, too, had left on vacation, the landlady informed him, Anna and his two little nieces, Martha and Hella. She thought perhaps Eli was still in town; if he wanted, she could leave a message for him—

“That’s quite all right,” he thanked her.

The idea of having to spend an evening alone with his brother-in-law, without even Anna and the children to intervene, was too appalling to contemplate.

“I will see them on our way back through the city.”

He tipped his hat and walked out into the late-summer sunlight, intending to walk back downtown to the hotel. But he took a wrong turn off Amsterdam Avenue and found himself lost again, wandering through a beautiful, rambling park built ingeniously into a hillside.

When he emerged, he realized that everyone on the street around him was dark-skinned. A whole city of black people, brown people, tan people, larger than any in Africa, he realized—yet still contained easily within the greater City of New York.

He was astonished most of all at how European, how
American
they all seemed: the same clothes, the same foods, the same stores. The same manners or better than the whites downtown—men and women bowing politely, tipping their hats to each other on the street.

Bleach their skin, put them out on the Ringstrasse, and no doubt they would be indistinguishable from the cream of Viennese society. Put them in Berlin and they would be proper little Germans—