Metropolis (20 page)

Bringing in Frank Harris was an anomaly—his allegiances and vocal skills were unclear—but in fact neither Johnny nor his mother actually wanted to bring him into the gang. Johnny’s dislike for sacrificing stooges notwithstanding, they had a plan for which they needed someone expendable, someone who didn’t know Mrs. Dolan. The job was big enough that it was worth the security risk. If the man turned out to be really good, he might make it into the gang; more likely, they would be getting rid of him a few months down the line. Harris was perfect. And there was an added bonus for Johnny: Removing Harris just when he was due to take a fall for Undertoe had put Undertoe on bad footing with the cops. But that was just the gravy.

The particular job that Harris would be helping with was a departure for the gang, but using the sewers had been long in the planning. Ever since she’d gotten the job at the Sewer Division, Mrs. Dolan had been fascinated by the idea that the map of Manhattan had three dimensions, not just two. That was what had kept her there, even after Johnny’s income made it unnecessary for his mother to work. There were old tunnels, and there were new ones going in at all times, thanks to Boss Tweed and the Sanitary Commission. She saw the promise of covert mobility, myriad secret caches and a network of hideouts. If she was even half right, the sewer system could turn out to be the capstone to the Whyos’ control of the city, the foaming head on their mug of Owney Geoghegan’s ale. They just needed a mole with no known connection to the hygiene matron’s son. It was a small worksite, the Sewer Division, and she didn’t want to have to fake not knowing a man; the lie could be too easily revealed, and she didn’t want to risk compromising herself if the man blew his cover or was caught. They’d been keeping an eye out for the right person for some time. Then, shortly before Harris turned up, Mrs. Dolan had learned a secret that brought urgency to the idea.

She’d passed several top-hatted men entering the Public Works building one evening as she left, but then she realized she’d forgotten her scarf and went back to collect it. She’d never been much interested in what took place in the office of Mr. Towle, the superintendent of the Sewer Division, before, but she’d often heard him sneezing or exclaiming through the vent in the wall of her office, which shared a heating duct with Towle’s. That night, when she saw those gentlemen disappear down the corridor, she’d had a feeling there was something of interest going on. She returned quietly to her office, found her scarf and then pressed her ear to the metal grate, holding her breath. The conversation she overheard changed everything, at least for Harris. It was why Beanie and Fiona had saved him from the gallows; it was why the Whyos had let him live, even when it turned out he wasn’t quite the man they had imagined; it was why he was there.

17.

THE GROTTO

B
eatrice knew part of the Dolans’ plan, not all of it, but enough to know that Harris’s chances of surviving very long were slim. So she was well aware that it was foolish to grow attached to him, and yet she couldn’t help herself. She liked him. He made it difficult not to. And despite the eye-gouger she’d brandished at him, despite the blasé manner she affected whenever she remembered to, despite the way she always pulled away unless she needed something from him there and then, despite the fact that Harris knew perfectly well she was reporting everything back to Dandy Johnny, he kept doing it—flirting, making eyes. If she hadn’t felt anything herself, she would just have taken him to a cheap hotel, given him what he wanted and enjoyed herself. She was no prude, Beanie, and she found Harris appealing, especially the new Harris. He wasn’t pretty, he didn’t have a face like Johnny, but he was solid and clean and strong. That was fine. Sex would have been fine. Her problem was that despite her long experience in the gang, despite her excellent self-control in most situations and her generally sanguine manner, Beatrice had lately found she was
fond
of Frank Harris, inordinately fond. She knew she was encouraging him. She knew she should stop. It would only make the whole thing more horrible later. But he kept surprising her, kept turning out to be unexpectedly competent in ways that were different and better than the average Whyo. He was so mechanically inclined, what with that sewer-gaff lever he’d invented. And he was unexpectedly adventurous in his explorations underground. And occasionally he was quite funny, though she wasn’t always sure it was intentional.

Somehow, Harris had earned her allegiance in the past months. Not many people could claim to have done that, over the years. The gang, sure, as a group, as a society—that was her home. Fiona, her partner. The O’Gamhnas, more or less. Padric. Now Harris was butting quite unbidden into that space. But however she felt about him, Beatrice had to face the reality: Harris was not a Whyo. He might have become one if he’d been who they thought he was back at the brewery, but he wasn’t. She grew a bit hopeful, though, when she found out he could sing. That was a point in his favor. She’d pointed it out to Johnny when she relayed Harris’s tactic for scaring off the sewermen, adding how easily he picked up popular tunes, from the Irish songs the O’Gamhnas crooned around the flat to the lullabies Colleen sang her boys at night. But the sewermen’s ballad was the most impressive. He’d used music exactly as the Whyos did: to control other people, to get a thing he needed. In a certain sense, he’d reinvented the wheel, which was a fairly impressive if redundant accomplishment. She’d gone so far as to hint that Johnny ought to bring Harris in, give him a tryout, teach him the language, but Johnny generally didn’t like suggestions. His eyes glazed over, and he told her to scram.

Harris had had no idea, when she started to work singing into his English lessons, that Beatrice was coaching him, that she was trying to save his life. She had him teach her songs he knew, verses of the Ballad or German hymns, the words of which he translated while she worked out harmonies; or she’d teach him an Irish song, or something else with complicated key changes that she knew would be useful for whyoing. There were times when all other activity in the household stopped, and the family applauded at the end.

It was clear to Beatrice that, sooner or later, there were only going to be two ways for Harris to go: either become a proper Whyo or face Piker Ryan in an alley. Temperamentally, she knew he wasn’t Whyo material. She doubted he had the stomach for murder. Still, he worked hard. He kept coming home with promising bits of information. He’d told her of enormous tunnels eight and ten feet tall on the Upper West Side where submerged rivers sluiced out to the harbor and three men could walk abreast. There was that spring-fed grotto. After she’d shown interest in it, he’d gone back and charted its exact location on their map of the underground city: Nassau Street and Maiden Lane. He went out of his way, going quite far uptown to scout out places of possible interest to the Whyos, in particular a supposedly dry tunnel near Twenty-third Street that Johnny was extremely curious about. Beatrice sensed it had something to do with the Dolans’ big plan for the sewers. Harris hadn’t found it yet, presumably because it wasn’t hooked up to the system, but he’d made any number of special trips, just looking out for junctions where the drainage didn’t make sense. There were days when Beatrice felt certain that if she could convince Johnny how much initiative Harris had shown on the Whyos’ behalf, she could get him brought in. Then there were days she couldn’t even look at Harris because all she could think was that he was doomed. Sometimes she dreamed up various ways she might help him cut and run—the fantasy would quickly devolve into a pile of limbs, an ecstasy of long-delayed requital—but she knew her gang too well to think they’d ever really make it out of the metropolis alive.

For a whole year, she coached him, and he worked underground, and they filled in block after block of their map. Harris found his pent-up yearnings coming out in unexpected ways. It started one afternoon, when he’d gone cruising in search of unsuspected trouble spots and ended up at the Ann Street culvert, which he knew was an especially finicky and influential one, capable of causing any number of collateral problems. He didn’t know it was where McGinty had died. He wasn’t even trying to scare the others that day, but he sang as he sloshed through the pipes without thinking about what he sang. He didn’t even know how many men were in the area. He didn’t care. He was daydreaming about Beatrice’s ankles, a glimpse of one of which he’d gotten that morning while she laced her boots. He was remembering how slim her legs looked in those breeches she had worn the day he met her. He’d seen her wear them again, since he moved into the O’Gamhnas’, when she was going out on some Whyo job. They hugged her flesh in a way that drove him close to uncontrol, to action. It would be all or nothing, yes or no, he knew. He was almost ready to take the chance. As these thoughts of legs and risks occupied his mind, his lips and lungs were producing a particularly eerie and quavering rendition of a truly lewd and gloomy verse of the Ballad. It was enough to put the terror into three separate crews who overheard him, all on one day, without his even planning it or seeing a soul. Harris heard about it at quitting time, when Fergus turned to him and said, “Harris, weren’t you around City Hall today?”

“In the general area, I guess.”

“Did you
hear
anything?”

“Uh, no,” he said, dreading that he’d have to go home and tell Beanie his singing ruse no longer worked—he’d overused it, and the men had figured it out.

“Well, there you go,” said Fergus, turning back to a couple of the other men. “It’s obvious: It’s those Goddamn boots—they’re calling up McGinty’s ghost, but somehow Harris is protected. It’s unnatural.”

Once a voice shouted back at Harris, “Hey, McGinty! Leave us alone! Why don’t you go haunt the new man, Harris?
He’s
the one going around in your boots.”

“Fergus?” Harris had called in his most ghostly brogue.
“Fer-gus?”

But the only response was that of another voice saying, “Fergus, are you daft? You don’t exchange words with a hant!” and then there was the usual
slosh, clatter, bang
as the men vacated the tunnel.

Harris made a practice of haunting sewers near where he knew crews were working and testing out the Ballad. It always worked. He’d gotten so good at his job that his daily assignments barely constrained him at all, and he began conducting a little reign of underground terror on the side. He really had become McGinty, in a way. He was a loner down there, but he took a profound satisfaction in keeping New York’s sewage flowing. Harris also began covertly attending to the jobs that were left undone by the men he scared away, and with the news of so many spontaneously resolving backups even the superintendent of sewers, Mr. Towle, began to wonder if work was indeed being done by some occult force. One day, he donned boots himself and went on an inspection tour. He discovered that virtually every line south of City Hall was newly scraped and free of standing water, blockage and debris. It was inexplicable to him, and he was terrified—not so much of a sewer ghost but that someone unauthorized was poking around down there, in his domain. He made a point of checking all around the Twenty-third Street area and found some pipes mucky and slow, as usual, some clean. There was no sign, however, that anyone had found the secret dry tunnel that Mrs. Dolan had (unbeknownst to him) heard him discussing with the Tammany man some months back. Relieved that the secret was undiscovered, he went home to his wife and his highball.

In the division, only Mrs. Dolan had made sense of the fact that Harris dragged in bone-tired and smiling oddly every evening. What even she didn’t know was why he did it. He wasn’t really a Whyo, wasn’t vested, after all. She imagined he enjoyed scaring the men who’d shunned him, that he liked being good at the job, that he had guessed something of his predicament and sought to prove himself to the gang. She never saw him with Beatrice, and so she had not guessed what had evolved between them, not that it would have bothered her much. Beatrice was reliable, and she was entitled to have her fun with the sewerman, if she liked. The Whyo network was tight, and Meg Dolan had done a great deal to emancipate the Why Nots. They were grateful and loyal to the core, down to the last girl, and she trusted Beanie as much as the others. She did wish Harris would spend more of that manic energy of his focusing on her Twenty-third Street puzzle, but there was no way to urge that any more strongly without tipping her hand to Beatrice, so she just smiled and put a little extra hot in Harris’s tub at night to motivate him. She felt a bit bad about what lay in store for him, but not enough to sacrifice the plan she had made or the fortune she was certain awaited them in that dry tunnel.

Harris lived for just a few things at this point in his life: the pleasure of quietly recounting his latest ruse to Beatrice while she walked him to work in the morning, or scribbling out new discoveries in his ever better English grammar on her slate at lesson times, or sketching some new detail of the underground city’s architecture onto their sheet. He loved the way she looked at him when she approved of what he’d done. He hardly ever thought about cops or gallows anymore, nor of buildings. He thought of her legs or her squinty, slightly lopsided smile or the stray touches that set his skin to throbbing or the intentional ones that made him want to writhe because they never went far enough. When he saw a rat in the sewer now, he thought of it as a happy rat, as a sewer rat in love.

It was on a cold, damp day in December when he discovered the thing he hoped would make Beatrice do more than squeeze his knee: a blocklong tunnel on the far West Side, four feet in diameter and perfectly clean and dry. His only hesitation was that now that he saw it, he feared she would be disappointed. This dry tunnel didn’t have half the advantages of the grotto. It wasn’t a very good hiding place, really, despite the apparent comfort of not actually having sewage in it, because it wasn’t directly connected to the system. It had its own manhole, but just one, which he found from above ground and investigated, realizing it seemed out of place with the general scheme of manholes. Perhaps it had been built in the wrong place or with the wrong incline, he thought, since it was uphill from the nearest main and therefore was never hooked up to the adjacent storm sewers or houses. At any rate, the section of tunnel had remained entirely unused, and Harris found nothing of any interest within it.

That very night—and he was terribly eager to get home, to deliver his news to Beanie—Mr. Towle asked to see him in his office after his bath. Towle had heard Mrs. Dolan’s theory about who was cleaning the sewers, but he doubted it. Harris was a new man, after all, not a lifer like McGinty, not even from a sewer family. He had neither the experience nor the motivation to do what it seemed someone was doing. But there was no one else it could have been, and Towle wanted to make sure Harris was stopped before he stumbled across the dry tunnel.

“So tell me, Harris, are you doing some extracurricular work for us, by any chance? Anything I ought to thank you for? I have an idea that perhaps a bonus is in order.”

Harris denied it, but he was a terrible liar.

Towle chuckled, letting him know it could be their secret, but he was baffled. He wondered if Harris might suffer some mental imbalance that drove him to pursue this pastime. But the main thing was, he now knew it was Harris. Harris was no threat. And with a smile and a wave of relief, he told Harris he would like to reward his dedication with a special project—a job that would be perfect for an obsessed sewerman. “Now, my dear man, I gather from your application that you’ve laid pavements in this city and that you worked as a mason in your homeland?”

“Yes, sir.” The Whyos had told him he had to have a past, whoever he was, and that the most convincing lie was the one that was closest to the truth. So that was the story he had given after Beanie dropped him off the first day.

“You’ll be putting in what we call
dirt-catchers,
a new way of keeping the sewers clear. It’s a personal project of mine. You must not talk about it to the other men. We want to keep quiet about it for now, till we know if they work. And there’s a lady health reformer that wants to follow you around from time to time, to monitor the work. In fact, she’s my niece. Quite a progressive, too, Miss Blacksall. Later, I expect that her work will help us explain to the public how beneficial the new system is. Does all this interest you, Mr. Harris? Do you think you can keep a secret?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, because he knew he wasn’t really being given the option, but he was worried that this assignment would constrain what he was doing for the Whyos. He didn’t want to stop making Beatrice happy, not at all. In the end, she never came home that night, so he was compelled to keep it to himself as he lay awake once again, wondering what she was doing and with whom.