City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (68 page)

“Madness,” Freud muttered, looking furtively around himself. “Utter madness.”

“Yes. Yes, it is,” the man said, smiling as if he had just remarked upon the weather.

“How can one make any progress against it?” Freud asked, as much to himself as to his newfound companion.

“You can’t,” the slab-faced man said. “People want what they want, and all you can do is give it to them.”

“But how can anything go forward then?”

“We won’t,” the man said, dreamy as a child—and Freud noticed that despite the richness of his suit his pants pockets hung out emptily, like two white flags.

“We won’t go forward at all. Things don’t
go
forward,” he continued, as if by way of explanation. “The best you can hope is to sell people a good story about themselves, and try to get them to live up to it.”

“What about truth?” Freud insisted on arguing, even though he was beginning to think the man on the bench might well be mad. “What about science and logic, and understanding the human mind?”

“What about it?”

A young couple hurried past them, down along the boardwalk. The young man in a gaudy suit the color of a pastry glaze, holding hands with a pretty girl, in a more modest blue dress. They half ran, half walked through the crowds, glancing back over their shoulders as if fleeing invisible demons that seemed to pursue everyone in this land of hurry-up.

Freud leaned over, distracted from his hopeless conversation by the couple’s haste, trying to see what they could be running away from. The young man’s face, he thought, was almost indistinguishable from the face of the Jew he had seen down in the City’s ghetto, hauling along his huge load of garments on his head. Which, come to think of it, did not look that different from the face of the monolith, the apparition he had seen from the Cafe Landtman, staggering up the Vienna Ringstrasse—

Were they Jews, then—this young couple, hurrying along? From the clothes they looked as if they might be almost anything. A gangster and his moll? Workers in the new factory hives that could be seen all over the City, spewing clouds of steam and smoke out into its alleyways? Or both, or neither, or anything they wanted to be in this brand-new cement mixer of a country?

Freud stood up, as he had that day at the Landtman, that day the monolith had first appeared; pointing down at the fleeing couple, appealing to the big, slightly mad man beside him on the bench:

“Look! Do you see?”

—but the man was already gone, strolling off down the promenade, disappearing into the endless, shuffling crowd.

In their ranks, Freud could make out a hundred, a thousand versions of that same face from the Asian steppes. A thousand former peasants, a thousand Jews—now transplanted from their ancient, slumbering villages in Poland, and the Ukraine, and Romania and Latvia and Lithuania. Taken out of their ragtag clothes, their Old World beards and curls and wigs, and dressed up in bathing costumes and gaudy suits. And right beside them, he had no doubt, a thousand more peasants from their own savage pasts, and their own torpid villages. From Ireland and Sicily, and Africa and China, and all the other lands past human memory and knowledge.

What were they fleeing from, in such a hurry? From the past? From what they were?

And yet, it all continued. The same carnival of superstition. America should have been a new start; by its very nature, it should have put the lie to the old nationalities, the old myth of blood. Yet here it was—the same old nonsense, already starting up again. They flew their new flag everywhere, played endless martial airs and patriotic anthems—strutted about as proudly as any ancient nation. Soon, no doubt, they would have their own new “culture.” The idiot god-machine, with no one in charge.

Freud sat down on the bench again, his back rigid. It was no good, he saw that now. No matter their reconciliation, he would not be able to count on his anointed gentile. The future was here, in this park full of mindless, sensational entertainments. Jung’s poltergeists in the bookcase, his ancient skulls, and his new race would fit right in. The Cause—
his
cause, his psychology—would struggle on, backed by a few dedicated adherents, wherever they might be found—like all science, still no more than a tenuous breakwater against an ocean of mysticism and ignorance.

“Herr Doktor.”

They had discovered him again, on his last bench. Jung’s smiling face swam before him, his eyes slits behind the pince-nez.

“
Herr Doktor,
are you all right?” he asked solicitously.

“America is a mistake,” Freud said slowly, looking at him meaningfully. “A gigantic mistake, it is true, but a mistake nonetheless.”

He spotted her outside The Fighting Flames. Walking along quickly, purposefully, preoccupied—the way he remembered from when she was a little girl, as if she had somewhere important to go.

This time, he was sure, she did. He followed closely, invisibly, in his citizen’s black suit, waving the goons back. Following her right up to Carroll Terry’s dance hall, on Surf Avenue.

So this is what the great Socialist is come to

When last he had seen her she was wrestling with a whore, being hauled away in a Black Maria. Now she was hanging around cheap dance halls, waiting for gangsters. He told himself he wanted to see her face one more time when the deed was done—just to see that she knew, once and for all, that she was as bad as he was.

She went into the dance hall, and he waited for a few minutes outside, to make sure she wasn’t coming right out again. When she didn’t emerge he walked back to Whitey and Louie the Lump, and sent them around to keep an eye on the back entrance.

“When do we come in?” Whitey wanted to know.

“You don’t. Just shoot the son of a bitch if you see him come out the back. But you won’t. This will only take a minute.”

He walked on into the dance hall. The first floor was dark, and nearly deserted, the table and stage empty. There was just a bar with a couple of midday drunks slouched over their short beers. He peered back into the interior—and caught a glimpse of a woman’s dress and boot, ascending the stairs to the second floor.

Gyp followed deliberately, gripping the handle of his Iver-Johnson, moving it to his outside coat pocket. He reached the top of the stairs and looked around the second-floor dining room, which was nearly as deserted, nearly as dark as the bar downstairs. He took his time, working his finger around the trigger as he stared calmly into the gloomy room.

There she was: his sister. She sat at a table for two in the far corner of the room—all by herself. He relaxed, loosening his grip around the Iver-Johnson. So she was still waiting for him. He only wondered what he should do next. Go over to her? Just for the pleasure of watching her face, maybe seeing her beg for his life? Or just do the simplest thing: Walk back downstairs and wait at the bar, pick him off when he came in as easily as knocking off one of the bobbing tin ducks in the shooting galleries.

He looked over at Esse, thinking over his choices—and as he did he noticed that she seemed to be looking right back at him and smiling. He frowned, thinking he must be seeing wrong, it must be a trick of the shadows across the immense dining room, for even if she did see him, why would she be smiling? He was trying to figure this out when he heard a small click, just behind his right ear, and he was truly surprised for the first time since that shovel had come down on his scalp.

“Hello, Kid,” he said slowly—fingers digging frantically into his coat pocket. But the Kid was quicker—one hand plunging confidently into the right-hand pocket where he always kept his gun, while the other kept the pistol leveled just behind his ear.

“ ‘Zat it? That better be the only one.”

The voice behind him trying to sound tough, and ruthless, but falling a little short.

“ ‘Fraid so,” he admitted—which happened to be the truth, but Gyp let it sound as unconvincing as possible.

“It better be,” Kid said, giving him a rough little shove forward—confirming that he was afraid to really frisk him.

His sister had got up from her chair in the corner and came toward them now, a small grim smile on her face. Behind her, Gyp could see the waiters and the tourists scrambling for the stairs, trying to take refuge under the tables. Kid kept walking him toward the windows, holding both guns steady, not giving him any opening yet.

“Hello, Esse,” he said as she approached—then he executed a neat little pirouette, facing Kid but still moving back, away from the gun, before Kid could pull the trigger.

If he’d had another iron, even a knife, he might have gone for him, or tried using his sister for a shield. But as it was, Gyp kept backing up, ascertaining that there were no other doors, no other stairs, moving toward the large bank of windows that fronted along Surf Avenue.

“Whatsa matter?” he goaded Kid. “Hard to kill somebody when the lights are on?”

Kid kept walking after him, holding both guns steady on him, his face uncertain.

“Or is it
her?
That bitch—that
whore!”
he spat out. “Did she make you that weak in the head?”

“Do it,” Esse said, her voice sudden and loud in the still room.

“What?”

“Go ahead an’ do it. Go ahead and give him what he wants.”

“God, Esse,” Lazar laughed, his back against the window now. “Some Socialist you turned out to be.”

“Go ahead. If you won’t do it, I will,” she said—grabbing the Iver-Johnson out of Kid’s left hand, pointing it at her brother. She steadied it with both hands, but he saw there was no fear in her face, only a steady determination.

“You’re no better than me, you know that?” he told her, goading her, trying to get her to do it—to do
something,
as the red rage foamed up before him.

“You’re no goddamned better than I am!” he yelled.

The windows behind him dissolved in a shower of glass. Gyp dived out after them, backwards, deafened by the report from the Iver-Johnson, wriggling like a hooked fish as he careened down the two stories to the ground. He struggled up to his feet just in time to see them running out the front door, dodging into the startled crowds. Cursing, he hurried around to the back of the dance hall—and met Whitey and Louie coming toward him, abandoning their post.

“Gimme an iron!” he barked at them, his ears still ringing.

Gyp ran down Surf Avenue in the direction Kid and Esse had gone, the others close behind. One of his legs had been twisted in the fall, but he ignored it, moving as fast as he could now, scanning the crowd for any sign of them.

“There they go!”

Louie pointed toward the Hall of Mirrors—just in time for him to see a flash of them, a leg of Kid’s ridiculous green-checkered suit disappearing into the fun house, down by the animal cages. Now he had them. It would be dark in there, Gyp knew, but there was light enough to shoot by, and it would be easy to slip out afterwards. Now he had them.

“Whitey, you go around the other side,” he ordered, pointing at the Hall of Mirrors. “And
stay
there, this time.”

Whitey ran off, and he turned to Louie.

“You come with me,” he told him, pulling him back by the elephant’s cage, behind the animal’s huge, gray bulk, his eyes glued to the fun-house entrance.

“You gonna do him in there?” Louie the Lump stared at him.

“What’s it look like?”

“An’ her, too?”

He looked away, rolling a cigarette while he waited for Whitey to get in place. A few more seconds, and he would go in. He took a deep, bracing puff, and glanced through the cage bars at the maddened elephant, its great yellow eye glaring out at him, feeling for the world through the end of its massive trunk—those obscene, grasping nostrils.

He checked the replacement gun Whitey had handed him, making sure everything was in order. That was just one more insult, he thought. One more interference. He would not be interfered with again.

The only thing he regretted, the only thing he regretted at all was that he wouldn’t be able to see her face

“I don’ know,” Louie the Lump shook his head. “You sure you should do ’em right out here like dat? You could get fifteen months for it, easy.”

“Fifteen months,” Gyp snorted.

Now,
he thought.
Now Whitey would be in place

The long, inquiring trunk snaked out through the cage bars, out into the crisp, afternoon air. Gyp watched it idly at first—then was disgusted by its blind, hungry groping, the wet, yawning mouth he could just glimpse back in the shadows of the cage. He took another deep dragon his cigarette, then placed it carefully, mouth-end down, in one of the trunk’s grasping nostrils.

Let him take a bite outta that

“Fifteen months—” Gyp turned back to Louie. There was an enraged trumpeting behind him, but he didn’t bother to look back. He didn’t see the trunk come whipping back after him faster than a snake, faster than he could have imagined—much too fast for Louie even to get out a warning but not so fast that Gyp couldn’t finish his boast:

“—I can do that standin’ on my head!”

This is how you kill an elephant.

They tried the carrots first. Buckets of carrots. Whole bushelfuls of carrots, and each one loaded with enough strychnine to kill a man but only intended to make her stand still.

She ate them. She ladled them into her great, pointed maw by the dozen, and after an hour of carrots she was still standing—still looking as mad and dangerous as ever, and the big holiday crowd was growing restless.

Next they tried sending in the trainers—one-armed Captain Jack, and Herman Weedom, and even Mademoiselle Aurora, to smooth her huge, rough shoulders with their hands, and whisper into her enormous ears. She only stomped her feet, and waved her trunk around their heads until they turned and ran for cover. After that they tried the police, wading in with their new blue coats and their nightsticks to clap the chains around her legs like they would slap cuffs on a pickpocket. She knocked them down like ninepins, slapped and tumbled them around the ring like vaudeville mayhem players.