Memorial Bridge (3 page)

"I'll hold your hat, Jack." Dillon plucked Hanley's hat from his bald head. That baldness was always a surprise, and so was the recognition that gruff Jack Hanley wore his hat out of vanity.

"Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph." Hanley had himself braced between the walls of the box basin, and was working his feet. "Something squishy is what it is. Something's there, though. Oh, Jesus, God, this is awful."

Clotted blood, Dillon thought. A slimy concretion had blocked the downpipe. Coagulation.

But he dismissed the idea. The diameter of the pipe was too large.

Hanley sank deeper into the ooze.

But what was it? Nothing solid could come into this basin. Not unless it came, instead of through the feeder pipes, through this hole here.

Dillon looked up when he heard the men barreling down the corridor toward them. Moran was in the lead, a short, fat man with a cigar in his face, a man Dillon had made a point of staying clear of. Behind him were two others, each wearing a bandana around his nose, like holdup men. They were dressed in business suits—the boys, therefore, from State Street.

Hanley said, "Keep the light on me." Then he ducked into the hole, disappearing in the black liquid.

"What'd you find?" Moran demanded.

"This is it, all right," Dillon said. "Jack had it figured."

"So is it clear?" Moran peered down into the hole. The liquid swirled now with Hanley's movement. The two Swift's executives stood warily back. Each man's eyes above the stretched material of his kerchief danced wildly.

Hanley burst from under with an explosion, and the foul liquid splashed up onto all of them. Hanley collapsed onto the lip of the pit, gagging. "It's a carcass!" he croaked before a fit of coughing overtook him.

"A carcass?" Moran stooped down to him. "What do you mean? A whole carcass?"

Hanley ignored Moran for Dillon. He stared right up into the beam of the flashlight, and once more Dillon saw his eyes as those of a near-panicked animal. "It's whole," Hanley gasped. "A hog, I think. Really jammed. I can't get it out alone."

Dillon stepped back, thinking, Hell no. But Hanley's eyes held him.

And Moran swung to look up at him. "Get down there, you. Help him haul the goddamn thing out of there."

"How would an entire hog get in this pit?" It was one of the boys from downtown. No one answered his question or acknowledged hearing it.

Nor did Dillon acknowledge Moran. As always, it was something in Hanley's mute plea that tore at his defenses. Still he did not move. He thought of the stupid cattle following their Judas to the slaughter.

"What's your name?" Moran demanded.

Now Dillon looked at him, and he saw that this crisis was his excuse, only his latest, to lash out at underlings. Stuff yourself, Dillon thought. He felt the freedom of a man who was quitting soon anyway. But Moran would hold Hanley responsible for the impudence of his helper. Hanley wasn't quitting, and Dillon knew he'd be a fool to make enemies at Swift's.

"Who me, sir?" Dillon said, Charlie Chaplin coming to.

"I said get in there and help him."

"Oh yessir, I see, sir," he said, fluttering the handkerchief that covered his nose and mouth. Dillon handed the flashlight to Moran and indicated the toolbox at his feet. "Watch me tools, would you kindly?" He spoke with a stagy brogue, suddenly one of those Irishmen who clothed his hatred thinly in mock ingratiation. He stooped to untie and remove his boots, then quickly unbuttoned his overalls and slid out of them, abruptly naked. When he'd removed the handkerchief from his face, he grinned stupidly at Moran. "Whatever you say, sir." And he climbed into the pit gingerly, like a lad into the lake on a cold spring morning. In fact, Dillon hated going into water.

Dillon's feet nearly slipped out from under him when they landed on a soft squishy mass. He looked at Hanley. "This is one you owe me, Jack." Then he gulped air and went under. Despite his tightly closed mouth, the sharp taste of blood revolted him beyond what any foul odor had done.

Together they tugged at the beast that was jammed head-first into the downpipe. Blood had coagulated around the head in the ring of the pipe, sealing off the tankage flow completely and holding the animal fast. They had to force it loose.

"Animal" was the word Dillon used in his mind, but he knew better. He knew better when his feet first touched the thing.

"Oh, Jesus," Hanley gasped when they broke into air again.

They had to work to maintain the hold they had on the slippery carcass. The pit full of blood had become a whirlpool, sucking the liquid downward and out at last through the opening below. They had only to stand there, straddling the downpipe, as the level of the blood dropped, exposing them and the naked white hulk they were holding.

"A man!" Moran gasped.

"Oh, Christ!" one of the boys from downtown muttered, while the other one fell back against the wall, then down to the floor in a dead faint.

Moran aimed the flashlight beam at the figure slumped between Hanley and Dillon. He stooped down for a handful of the dead man's matted hair, to pull its head back, to see the face. But when he laid eyes on the swollen black mass into which all of this body's blood had run, he gagged. He straightened up and stepped back. "Get him out of there."

Hanley and Dillon had to lock their arms around the corpse to heave it up to the floor. The side of Dillon's face pressed into the dead man's buttock. Hanley seemed to be in shock, and Dillon had to lift him out too. Hanley collapsed on the cold concrete next to the carcass, gasping. It was Moran, the cigar still in his face, who then reached a hand down for Dillon. Moran hauled him up easily, and Dillon understood for the first time that the superintendent's toughness was real.

While Dillon got back into his overalls, Moran satisfied himself that the blood pipes were running freely now, then he slid the heavy iron cover back into place without help. It clanged shut.

In the silence it was Jack Hanley's inability to catch his breath that the others focused on. The front-office man who'd fainted came to slowly and got to his feet, leaning on his colleague. Moran ignored them, waiting for Hanley to compose himself. Finally he said, more to Dillon than Hanley, "You two wait here. I'll send a wagon down for..." He looked at the maggot-like corpse and winced. "...this thing."

Dillon asked, "Who is he, do you think?"

Moran shook his head. "His own mother wouldn't know at this point. Whoever he is, he crossed the wrong people, that's sure." He shifted his glance to Dillon. "He was flogged."

Dillon looked again and saw the grid of slivered skin on the corpse's back. Drained of blood, the welts were white, like the slats of Venetian blinds.

"You know whose mark a flogging is, don't you?" Moran seemed to be testing Dillon. When Dillon only shook his head, Moran said, "You wait here until my blokes come." He turned abruptly toward the pair in business suits. When he pointed along the corridor they went obediently, as if they too were his inferiors. Here—and at this—they were.

When the others were gone, and when Hanley was sitting up against the wall, having put some space between himself and the cadaver, Dillon said quietly, "I have to go, Jack." He began wiping his hands on his kerchief.

Hanley looked up at him helplessly.

"I told you before. I have to get downtown. It's not just a routine class tonight. It's an exam."

"Exam?" The word had reference to a world Hanley had nothing to do with.

"I have to go right now."

Hanley made his plea with his eyes.

For once Dillon had a plea of his own, if no way to make it. The exam was the last thing standing between Dillon and the other man it was long past time for him to be. This was the end of his fifth year of night school. He was nearly thirty years old, and if he didn't get out of the pit soon, the blood was going to swallow him. He said quietly, "Moran's people will be here before you know it, Jack. You'll be all right with . . . "Dillon's voice trailed off.

"Who is the guy, do you think?" Hanley had roused himself to stare blearily at the corpse.

Dillon shook his head, but his eye fell upon a blue mark. The pasty, wrinkled body was lying face-down, but its puffy arm, clearly out of its socket, was bent perversely back across its own shoulder blade. Instead of the palm of that hand, such was the break that the back of it was showing. And that was where Dillon saw the mark, a blue tattoo. The taste of blood shot into his mouth again, and he retched violently, as if, finally, he was going to vomit. The tattoo was of a Celtic cross with a sprouting lily. Whatever the creature was now, once he'd been a man; once he'd been one of Jack Hanley's boys at St. Gabe's.

Dillon looked back at his partner. The dumb bastard's clothes were
soaked through, and now he was shivering. Dillon reached down to the tool chest onto which Hanley's hat had fallen. He picked it up and crossed to him, wishing it was a bottle of booze. "Here's your hat, Jack."

Hanley took it and put it on. Dillon saw something in the way he did so—covering himself, hiding his baldness, hiding his face—that seemed as hideous as anything he'd seen in that grotesque hour. His old friend, to whom in fact he had never spoken the word "friend," felt ashamed.

Dillon leaned his shoulder against the rough cinder wall and slid slowly down it, to sit by Hanley, to wait with him who said nothing.

At the beginning of the century the Union Elevated Railroad had built a continuous double-track line that made a closed rectangle above Lake, Van Buren, Wabash and Wells streets. This elevated ring was called the Union Loop when it opened, but before long it and the urban core it served were commonly referred to simply as the Loop. Every store, office building and theater in the heart of Chicago were within a short walk of one of ten Loop stations, and at first the downtown Elevated was regarded as an absolute boon. But it brought such a concentration of building within its limits that eventually the Loop began to strangle itself. By 1939 pedestrian and automobile traffic inside its boundaries was always congested, and at rush hour it barely moved.

So now, late on that August afternoon, as the warm sun mellowed, a Chicago redhead had to cut through the tides of the crowded sidewalk on her way home from work. From an office window above the street, from a passing bus, from the United Cigar Store on the corner, from within the throng itself, men and women noticed her. Mainly they noticed her flashing crimson hair, the downpour to her shoulders, which from a distance, set against the sea of dark fedoras, seemed the center of a moving circle of light.

She was slender, but her body wasn't punctuated with angles, and she had no need to lead with her elbows like others, because the rough
crowd parted slightly just ahead of her. It would have seemed a presumption to bump her, as if she were Maureen O'Hara or the Luxite Hosiery Girl. She walked with a steady serenity, oblivious, taking for granted the small deference that others unconsciously showed her. She had the vibrancy of a woman on the brink of her first society curtsy.

Her name was Cassie Ryan, and she wasn't what she seemed. She had never made a curtsy in her life, much less a movie. She was a working girl, and except for what she saw in films and magazines, she knew nothing of society. If she arranged her hairstyle, clothing and makeup to imitate the looks of screen stars and the lovelies of soap ads—Djer-Kiss Talc and Mum Cream were the Guardians of Her Personal Daintiness—that was because she was just like all the other girls who worked for a living in the Loop, where the sweethearts of the dress balls and cotillions wouldn't be caught dead.

Cassie was glad for the summer air and glad to have her face back after its eight-hour stint inside the wire-and-leather headset of a telephone operator. She was only twenty-four years old, but she had eight years seniority with the phone company. That and her easy way with her fellow switchboard girls had led to her appointment as supervisor of her shift, with thirty operators on her rotation. They were would-be Myrna Loys and Janet Gaynors, but they were unmusical Kate Smiths too. After a day of tending to her girls, checking on the old-timers, cajoling the new ones to be peppy, being peppy herself; after a day of taking the public's complaints—Cassie's trick was to be half again as courteous as the malcontent was rude—it was a relief to be out and moving. toward the El. She was unaware that the eyes of others were unrolling a carpet for her; she walked on it nonetheless like it was hers.

Cassie Ryan's office, the stolid American Bell Building, was on North La Salle Street near the intersecting train line. Most girls regarded having the El so close as an advantage, but she hated the way the hulking mass of steel cast its shadow on the street like a permanent tent. In the summer, as now, that shadow made the street cooler, it was true, but who would want to tarry there? Cassie remembered from excursions downtown as a child that the Loop's boundary streets were blighted even before the Depression, but now those streets were full of cheap stores, flophouses and deteriorating buildings. In their alcoves panhandlers huddled between forays out into the crowd, and they were a particular problem for Cassie.

Most commuters seemed able to push through those outstretched, palsied hands as if they were the branches of bushes, but Cassie could not. The respectably dressed office workers and shop girls, in their refusal even to see the derelicts, seemed certain of their superiority, but she knew better than to feel that way. She knew how desolate those men were from the way they looked at her when she gave them coins. Her girlfriends chided Cassie for doing that, and more than once her mother had forbidden her to give money to men on the streets. Handouts, she said, were what enabled them to stay away from home. Which of course was the point. Cassie's mother wasn't stingy. Her bitter attitude came from the hurt of what had happened in
their
home.

And not only theirs. By that phase of the Depression most of the girls Cassie knew had lost men to those alcoves and those alleys and those eerie circles around oil-drum fires. Cassie's loss—her mother's—had come early. She had had to go to work in the first place when her father disappeared way back in 1932. She hadn't finished high school and had had to lie about her age to get the switchboard job. When, after her first raise, she'd begun putting pennies into the chapped hands of beggars, it was to make them look at her. She wouldn't release her coin until the man looked up. Then she would stare carefully into his face, hoping it was familiar. Her green eyes had been her father's first.