Metropolis (15 page)

“What about a little more time, just till frost, when the work dries up anyway?”

“Harris. One way or other, you’ve got to be done with that job by tomorrow. If you don’t handle it, I will.” Instead of seducing him, she bullied him.

“But why would they fire me? I work hard. I don’t want to quit.”

“You think this is about your happiness?” she said. “You are right about one thing, though—simply quitting won’t work. Liam would be suspicious. And Johnny wants you to keep on living here, with the family. Stability’s good cover. A man who changes both his job and his living quarters at once looks shifty, might have to explain himself. So somehow you need to do it without getting Liam too mad.”

He looked at her. Her eyes were very bright, but he couldn’t read the emotion in the rest of her face. Who was she, really? Was it remotely possible that she wanted him in the gang so they could be together at last, might she be waiting for that to let things progress? On the other hand, it seemed possible that he had wasted three months of smoldering attraction on someone who was not even his friend.

“Pick a fight with the foreman, punch someone. Ruin something large.”

He shook his head. “Liam would mind that. And anyway, I could never—”

“Then show up drunk. Really drunk. Liam won’t like it, but he could forgive it. It’s his own father’s vice, and he still loves Leon.”

“Beanie—”

But suddenly, she wasn’t having the same conversation. “Harris!” she said shrilly, as if he had done the sort of thing he’d often dreamed of and never dared—as if he had touched her in some too intimate way. It was as if she’d read his mind, and it filled him with shame to realize that she knew exactly how he’d felt all that time. She had seen it but ignored it, only now to use it against him. Of course, the others had seen him falling for her, too—it was obvious from the way he mooned and huffed when she stayed out all night, the way he jumped when she said to. Her shriek had been loud enough to wake the family—it was meant to—and it could be understood only one way. His face grew red with embarrassment and frustration.

“What? Are you sure?” she said next. He looked at her, at once betrayed and confused. She was doing something different now. “Come on, Harris, it’s been three months. You look totally different. I don’t care what you say, I don’t believe he recognized you. How could he have? Now listen, you’ve got to get ahold of yourself.” There were rustlings of bedcovers from the front room. Everyone was awake, listening.

When she spoke next, it was very quietly, just for him: “Talk back,” she told him. “Argue. Loudly. Then get dressed and go. I’ll follow. And Harris? Just do it, no questions. If you don’t, you’re very likely going to be a dead man by tomorrow.”

“What?” he said.
“Why?”

She just looked at him. Her chin was pointy, and her eyes were unyielding. He remembered the way she wielded her eye-gouger, that first day. He realized that he had fallen for her even way back then. She was a monster of some sort, a beautiful, seductive, duplicitous murderer, but he had always known that, and he still just wanted to take her in his arms. He wanted to be able to talk to her, freely, to know what she truly felt. As he was thinking this, she rose and came over to him. She touched his lips gently, then she hauled back and slapped him with all her might. “Get ahold of yourself, Harris!” she said.

He raised his fingers to his face and silently got up, found his coat and shoes and hat, and left the apartment. It was too much. He was at the front door when he heard her following, and he began to run. He wanted no truck with her after all, whatever she had in mind for him. He thought about going and turning himself in to the cops right then, just to get it over with. Better that than to be the pawn of this baffling woman and her gang. Better nothingness than coming close to happiness and having it rescinded. It was time to act, and to act according to some objective measure of what was right. He was finished with letting things happen to him, surviving on luck. He would not just go along anymore.

But Beatrice was, among other things, an incredibly fast runner. She caught up with him before he’d passed the pump at the corner. When he still wouldn’t stop, she grabbed his coattail. When he let it rip rather than be stopped, she deployed her right leg and entwined her ankle around his. He found himself flat on the sidewalk. She was sitting on his chest, smiling. His hands stung. And there was that eye-gouger, almost as if he’d summoned it by his thoughts.

“Jesus, Harris. Just where do you think you’re going? Have you lost your mind? Do I need Fiona and Piker Ryan? Do I need to strong-arm you? It’s not all that bad, your fate, you know. There’s no need.”

“A man has to make his own choices in life. I don’t choose to be a criminal in a gang, I don’t choose to let you manipulate me. I’d rather be hanged, if that’s the choice.”

“A person’s got to be damned lucky to get to choose his own life. That’s rare, and you’re not that lucky. But there’s other things that make it worth it, Harris. There are.” And she bent down and kissed him for a long minute. She breathed in deeply with her nose in his neck. She gently took his lip between her teeth. She ran her fingers through his hair. All the gestures he’d been craving and more. “Come on, Harris, I’m sorry. There’s so many things I have to hide, from so many people, to make it all work. But don’t you know I need you? Do it for me.”

“Can you put that thing away?”

She did.

They stayed like that on the street, kissing, until they heard footsteps coming. Then she took him to an alehouse and fed him gin. He drank it. When he asked her what they wanted him to do, she said, “Don’t worry about that. Right now, just drink. Until you can’t stand up. I want you to stay overnight at the Sunnyside Hotel. And have another drink or two in the morning, before you go over to the site, and
don’t
be on time. Make a bit of a show of it. That should do the trick.”

After that, they didn’t talk much. Beatrice just ordered gin upon gin. He tried to sit close to her, to kiss her again, but she wasn’t having it. “Not here,” she said. “Not now.” When Harris was bleary and reeling and on the verge of tears, she went into his wallet, removed most of the money, then sent him off. She put a young Why Not on the job of watching out for him and headed back down to the Morgue to let Johnny know that Harris was cooperating.

Instead of the Sunnyside, Harris gravitated to his old haunt, Wah Kee’s, perhaps because of the sweet, pungent odor of oblivion that he remembered wafting from the opium den. That was the scale of his defiance, in the wake of her kiss—to go to a different hotel than she told him, to crave delirium—and she’d predicted it. That was why she took his money. With what Beatrice had left him, he didn’t have enough to gain entry to temporary nirvana. Wah Kee didn’t even recognize him, didn’t look him in the eye, just took the coin he laid on the counter and waved him into the bunk room.

The following morning, Fiona was assigned to ensure that Harris stuck to the plan, which he did. His head felt awful as he headed for the construction site, but on the way he did what she’d told him to: stopped at a saloon for the hair of the dog. He stayed for three rounds, raising his glass in turn, in three silent toasts, to Beatrice’s lips, her teeth and her persistence. He didn’t understand her in the least, but perhaps he didn’t need to. By the time he got to the site, he was an hour late as well as half drunk. He greeted the baffled foreman with a suitably incoherent string of excuses. Liam had been prepared by Beatrice with a story about Harris having relapsed in his ways as a result of an encounter with someone he’d had trouble with before he went into hiding. He came over to intervene on Harris’s behalf, but Harris made himself unhelpable. Within ten minutes, it was over. No job, no future as a minor artisan, no respect from his coworkers, no reference from the foreman. Nothing but the promise of those kisses.

As he wandered away from the site, he thought,
I’m free,
but in truth he knew better. He was the opposite of free. The Whyos wouldn’t ever let him go, and he would never have the strength to say no to Beatrice. He had made the choice he told himself he wouldn’t, and made it for the second time. This time there was no excuse. Harris spent the next two days slumped on the sofa in the O’Gamhnas’ front room, carving his most hideous gargoyle yet. It had warts upon its very teeth, it was so foul. Beatrice made herself scarce, but on the third day she returned. She told him to get up and shave. She had gotten him another job.

“What is that?” she asked, putting her hand out for the gargoyle.

“Nothing,” he said—he didn’t want her job, whatever it was—and threw his creation in the stove.

Once they were out on the street, she told him that he would be cleaning sewers for his supper and spying for the Whyos on the sly. Harris had graduated from cathedrals to circuses to roads and landed finally in the gutter. It was a pretty depressing trajectory—until she slipped her hand into his. Then she escorted him to his job interview, explaining the arrangements and all the while playing little games with his fingers as they walked.

14.

DOWN THE MANHOLE

H
is first assignment was to learn how the Whyos could gain access to the sewers without detection and to identify several navigable tunnels and areas suitable for hiding out in or stashing loot. He was to deliver information to Beatrice in the course of their English lessons. At other times, she would accompany him to or from work, like today. To justify spending so much time together, she said, taking his arm and snugging up against him, she thought it made sense that they appear to be sweethearts. “But Harris,” she added, “if you really were courting me in earnest, it wouldn’t be proper for you to live with us—and Johnny wants you to stay—so don’t go too far.”

He nodded and took her arm, but something seemed to drop away from him with this strangely overt and highly calculated expression of what had been ineffable. And had she had to mention Johnny? This was what Harris wanted, wasn’t it? He wanted her. But was it real, even now, or was it just manipulation? Would he ever know? Was it all in his head? He wasn’t sure.

The office where he signed the name
Frank Harris
to a year’s contract as a sewerman stank faintly of some chemical—a clean but unpleasant smell that suggested something rotten was being kept at bay. The more he considered it, the more her affection seemed false. She wasn’t his sweetheart; she was on the job for the Whyos. But he resolved to take things one by one as they came, not to panic or despair. He’d gotten himself into another unfortunate situation, but as long as he was alive there was a chance things would work out. He wasn’t dying of consumption or awaiting his hanging or bobbing facedown beneath a West Side pier, a knife hole in his side and eels slithering through his beard. Maybe there was hope with Beatrice. Maybe it didn’t matter if she was using him, so long as she also wanted him.

In the locker room at the Sewer Division, his new boots dangled side by side like two hanged men, heels to the ceiling, long leather uppers stretching lifelessly to within a few inches of the ground, ankles cocked like broken necks where the great brass boot hooks grabbed them. They were thigh high and built of cowhide as thick as his thumb, as supple as one of the fine silk ascots that graced Dandy Johnny’s throat.
Buttery
is the word for finely tanned leather goods, but it isn’t butter that softens the hide. It’s repeated baths in stinking solvents and acids that could chew through your skin in a minute flat. In the case of the boots assigned to Harris, the effects of the usual caustic tanning agents had been augmented by long exposure to other organic conditioners. For Harris’s boots were new only to him; they’d seen years of duty in the sewers already—and this was an asset. They were the first tools of his new trade to be issued to him and would prove essential, in the coming months, in ways that even the Whyos couldn’t have guessed.

Generally, sewage runs thin and gray, not half as bad as you’d think. It smells more like a damp basement than a latrine. It’s only when there are problems that the brew thickens and festers and stinks like Hell. But since the sewermen spent the bulk of their time at just such trouble spots, resolving clogs and preventing blockages, their boots were basted daily in a powerful stew. It was commonly known in the department, as young as it was, that the older the boots and the longer their exposure to the dark, turbid waters, the softer they became, the more like second skin, the greater the agility they permitted their wearer, and the drier they kept his feet. Like barrel staves in whiskey, the boot seams swelled with immersion, and Frank Harris’s new boots were the oldest and best maintained in the system, as soft and as pungent as a baby’s butt crack on the outside, smooth with wear within. They weighed in at thirteen pounds each and were perfectly impermeable and incredibly tough. Protection meant a great deal in the low pipeways and cramped crawl spaces, where rough edges and sharp objects abounded.

Frank Harris didn’t deserve such a prodigious pair of boots, not by a mile. Normally, foot size and seniority would have been the factors that determined who got a dead or retired man’s boots, but Harris, on his first day of work, had acquired the most estimable boots in the division. All this he learned from Mrs. Dolan, the matron of equipment and hygiene officer, when she gave him his locker number in exchange for his signature the day before. Then she told him to put them on. He looked at his pants and blushed at the notion of taking them off in front of her.

“Go ahead. Just put them on. It’s awkward. You don’t want to do it the first time in front of the others, trust me.”

The boots were cut slim to the top of the thigh, which made them devilishly hard to get into. He jumped and hopped and landed on his ass. His drawers were horribly twisted, and he only had one leg in. He looked at her with some desperation.

“Sit,” she said, pointing to a bench, and he sat and let her show him how to bunch and fold them and roll them up his leg the way a lady dons her stockings. When he finally strapped on his suspenders, he was amazed how free and light and limber he felt, how well protected. The boots fit him like a glove.

In the following days, Harris came to learn much more about his boots—in particular, why he had gotten them. Despite their merits as boots, they were considered unlucky. None of the other men would go near them. The complete story of what had befallen their previous owner had washed out to the bottom of the harbor with the soul of Solomon McGinty, the oldest, orneriest and most experienced of all the city’s sewermen, but you didn’t have to know all the details. The problem with the boots was simple: McGinty had died in them. It was bad luck to wear boots a man had died in.

Long before the city even had a Sewer Division, McGinty had been a private contractor specializing in “clogs, floods and inconveniences.” That was how he put it in the weekly ad he ran in the
Sun
for twenty straight years of Mondays. When the sewer maintenance unit was started, he was hired on as an expert. McGinty was the one who recommended that every sewerman be outfitted with a pair of boots similar to the ones he’d had made for himself years before, and so the boots became the sewermen’s uniform. Their primary tool was a long, hooked gaff, also of McGinty’s design. There was a narrow, hoelike spade at the handle end for shoveling muck, levering crotchety manhole covers and dispatching rats. When the city put in standard-gauge manhole covers, the basic-issue gaff became a kind of key, too, with a perpendicular spur that undid the bolts. The gaffs had continued to evolve over the years, and by Harris’s time they were made in various sizes, long for distant reaches and short for tight spots, but the mainstay of every sewerman’s arsenal remained the basic McGinty model, the Number 1, which was just a little longer than Harris’s forearm. This was the tool that Harris would carry with him every day from now on, and it was formidable. The first thing that struck him as he passed his new gaff back and forth between his hands was that it was more than a tool. It was a weapon.

As for McGinty, though he’d shaped the division in essential ways in the early days, he hadn’t the least bit of talent for or interest in administration, and he soon got himself returned to the field, where his seniority and legendary bad temper earned him the privilege of working alone, answering to no man, and generally doing exactly as he pleased. He was undeniably something of a genius underground, so he was often consulted on difficult problems, but he was always careful to be as unpleasant as he was helpful, with the result that he was left largely to his own devices.

There was at least one other oddity about McGinty: In addition to his remarkable attunement to the hydrodynamics of sewage, the man had an extraordinary voice. He was popularly credited as the originator and chief lyricist of a song known underground simply as the Ballad. Its numerous verses chronicled the daily drudgery, occasional excitements and perils of the work, and the refrain, “All I want is to die / With my dogs clean and dry,” gave voice to every sewerman’s greatest fear: perishing down in the hole.

As is common with work songs, people were always coming up with new verses based on notable incidents or characters, but only the best of them stuck, and even though he worked alone, most of those were McGinty’s. The old man’s presence in an adjacent tunnel would be made known to his fellows when they heard the strains of the Ballad echoing through the conduits, and they would fill their lungs with the dank air and bellow back at McGinty, repeating his lyrics as he spun them out, by turns lewd and mournful. On such days, the murky pipes rang with their gloriously, sinuously echoing call-and-response explosion of sound, loud enough that now and then on the streets above, people thought they heard a humming or a wailing sound.

There were plenty of songs being sung in the metropolis. There were the songs of God sung by evangelists and converts; there were political ditties touting candidates espoused by party men; there were the varied songs of commerce—the hot-corn girls, fruit and flower vendors, knife sharpeners and oyster shuckers—and then there were the quieter, more covert songs, the ones people couldn’t quite make out, nor were they meant to. If the sound was echoing off the buildings, it was probably from a Whyo, and you’d better watch your wallet and your back; but if it was coming from a manhole cover, it was the sewermen, just easing the passage of time. It’s hard to say which would have seemed less probable to the average New Yorker, a corps of subterranean city workers with a tradition of ballad singing or the elaborate secret language of the Whyo gang. People were likelier to conjure up fanciful images of unquiet ghosts of murdered slaves, early colonists or Manhattan Indians than believe in either reality.

McGinty’s last day had been a cool, pleasant one in late spring, an ample month before Harris joined the brotherhood of sewer muckers, and he was working to clear a clogged pipe just south of Chambers. He was humming quietly, well out of earshot of any other men. That morning, the foreman had sent out a crew to clear accumulated silt and muck from the mains in the City Hall area, where several gutters near prominent buildings had lately begun to overflow. A fully stopped pipe junction was the most likely explanation—that could create a vacuum seal in several directions—but they hadn’t been able to find one, so the problem had been attributed to what they called
systemic malaise,
meaning generally high sludge levels. McGinty dismissed that interpretation and the foreman’s plan of scraping out all the major pipes in the area and disappeared down a manhole without a word of explanation. That disappearing act was one of his trademarks: No one but McGinty ever traveled further than he absolutely had to inside a tunnel—the tunnels just weren’t designed for it, most being three feet or less in diameter—but he did it wherever the pipe gauge was large enough to let him pass. He enjoyed the stealth and the privacy. It also meant he knew the submetropolitan terrain like no one else.

Thanks to that knowledge, McGinty understood that the City Hall backup was most likely caused by a problem in a small culvert off the main line, and he found it fairly swiftly. He was just about to penetrate the offending clog with his Number 8 gaff—the longest of several he’d brought along—when he began to feel tightness in his ribs and a stabbing pain down his left arm. Soon, he was sweating and breathless, but he refused to be thwarted from proving his diagnosis. He grimaced and grunted and redoubled his efforts, ratcheting the gaff back and forth. Finally, a draft of ghastly air escaped with a sucking sound, and water began to flow slowly around his knees. He flared his nostrils, smiled with satisfaction, and inhaled deeply. He liked the loamy smell of fresh, clean sewage well enough—it indicated a vigorous, healthy flow—but the truth was that nothing in McGinty’s world satisfied him more than the sucking, slurping and burbling of foul air and stagnant water, moving at last in opposite directions through a narrow channel of his own making. The heaviness in his chest was immense, but he plunged his gaff in again and felt the flow of fetid water begin to run faster through the chink, eroding it. Something was in there, something solid enough to have collected silt, shit and sand until the pipe was fully sealed. He’d seen cats do it, dogs, of course, and inanimate objects from a bushel basket to a burlap sack to a lady’s dress. Once, a coon that was swollen up fat as a hog. He was always curious to find the culprit.

He reamed and madly reamed, but even as McGinty was restoring circulation to the sewer pipe, another smaller, more intimate clog was forming, diminishing the flow of blood to his heart to a trickle. Sweat ran down his brow and into his eyes as his heart pumped harder, straining to keep up the output volume despite the tightening vessel. A hard, greasy plaque afflicted his left anterior descending artery, or
widowmaker,
as a physician like the good Dr. Blacksall, who had examined poor Pearl at the morgue, would have called it. The coating of epithelian cells that once kept the plaque in check had failed. At the Women’s Medical College, they learned to identify this pathology in their freshman anatomy lab, noting carefully in their lab books that such clogs were common in the cadavers of portly men of mature age. As McGinty’s widowmaker swelled gradually shut, tiny clots were formed by the turbulence, and crumbs of the loosened plaque broke free and then were caught again, as if by a sieve, adding to the problem, cutting off the flow a little more with each lub, each dub. When the artery was finally fully constricted, McGinty stood up straight for a moment in surprise and hit his head on the roof of the pipe, a thing he never did. His eyes bulged a little, and he managed to give one final tug on his gaff, freeing the last detritus that was packed around the seed of the clog.

Like the grain of sand that turns the oyster’s mother-of-pearl inwardness to a gem, to a commodity, to a thing whose outward value is all out of order with that of its component parts, the source of this blockage was different in nature from the problem it engendered. Even McGinty would have marveled, if he’d recognized the thing for what it was, that the delicate skeleton of a newborn babe could have caused so large and odious a problem. All that remained of the baby, as McGinty died, were the bones, but it had been a plump and proper baby when first it had been consigned to the Ann Street culvert—big enough, anyway, to catch a sodden newspaper in its outspread arms, and then a thousand other bits of flotsam that had flowed up against it to lodge between its fingers and toes and the news of the day, gradually reinforcing the dam, layer upon layer upon layer of sad papier-mâché.