Metropolis (27 page)

“You done good, Harris, thanks,” he said.

Then Harris took a last swig of rye off Piker’s flask and went off down the tunnel alone. He exited the sewer in an alley and hopped a Broadway omnibus uptown.

Beatrice and Johnny were already at the rendezvous, sitting in the window of a café near the dry tunnel’s manhole. Harris went ahead and silently opened the cover without making contact, but they were watching for him, and as soon as it was open they were there with him, slipping below so quickly and subtly no one could have seen them, even if the street hadn’t suddenly been so empty.

The Tammany tunnel. He could see how wrong it was, now that he understood why it had been built. It was graded far too steeply for proper flow, and there were no conduits for sewage from the buildings on that block. Once they were in, Johnny instructed Harris and Beanie to inspect for loose mortar. Beatrice soon discovered a place where there seemed to be none at all, and the bricks were pried out easily enough, revealing a deep cavity stuffed with canvas sacks of money. Countless sacks of money. And there were several of these caches. To Harris, it appeared they had wanted him along purely for brawn, to help carry away the winnings, which they piled up under the manhole. It was a big pile, but Harris felt none of the pleasure or camaraderie he’d had in the dirt-catcher. There was a cold feeling in his stomach. When they were ready to leave, he preceded Beatrice up the ladder to open the manhole. He was nearly at the top when Beatrice squeezed past him. He felt her curly hair and the softness of her breast brush his cheek. He smelled that old tangy smell. With Beatrice above, Harris on the ladder and Johnny down below, they passed the bags of money up and out into the cargo area, where a cart had been parked nearby. When Johnny finally handed him the last bag, Harris began to climb out of the hole. He was fantasizing that perhaps he and Beanie could run together and leave Johnny trapped down below when he felt something heavy on his shoulder. Her boot. He looked up. Beatrice was looming over him with her eye-gouger out.

“You need to go back down there and have a few words with Johnny, Harris. I’m sorry.”

“Harris,” called Johnny, “where the fuck you think you’re going? Get back here.”

He went back down the ladder and Beatrice closed the lid above them. Johnny was approaching him, but Harris couldn’t see his face for the glare of Johnny’s headlamp. Johnny came closer than there was any good reason to. Harris’s back was up against the ladder when Johnny reached forward. There was something in his fist. It was an eye-gouger, and he pressed it into Harris’s hand. And then a thick wad of the money. And then Johnny grabbed Harris’s shoulder and pulled him close. He could feel Johnny’s lips graze his own, wet and hot, then his tongue. There was rye and a faint carrion smell on his breath. It seemed to Harris that Johnny sucked out his soul.

“Nothing to run from, Frankie,” Johnny said. “Hell, I don’t even mind you ogling my girl—so long as you keep your pants on, from now on. I like you. We’ll work it all out. You’re in.”

Harris swallowed. He had never felt so dirty in his life.

22.

NEW MOON, OLD MOON

B
ack up on the street, alone, after Johnny and Beatrice had driven off with the cart full of money, Harris realized he had nowhere to go again. He certainly didn’t feel he could return to the O’Gamhnas’. And so he let his feet take him toward familiar territory: Wah Kee’s flop. He was carrying more money on him than he’d ever had in his possession before, but that didn’t mean he could go check in someplace better. They wouldn’t let a tradesman like him into the lobby at a decent hotel, even if he wasn’t soiled with sewage.

He had accepted Johnny’s kiss, down in the tunnel, and then he had sworn his fealty. What, he wondered, did a promise made under duress mean? Not much. He was still thinking about getting out of town, disappearing. He should have done it long before. Now, at last, there was nothing left to keep him, no more hope of redeeming anything he’d started in this city. He certainly wasn’t going to stand by and serve as a lackey for Beatrice and Johnny the rest of his life.

When he got to Pell Street, he saw Wah Kee’s storefront. He’d never had the money to go downstairs to the opium den before. Now he did, and the choice was easy. Harris had taken his share of laudanum syrups as a boy, when he was sick, and as a young man, experimenting. Smoking it, he knew, would have a stronger effect. He could use something strong about now. Taking opium wasn’t very far beyond the pale, particularly compared to the grand larceny he’d just engaged in—just an escape, just a little bit bad. Harris felt the need to be bad in some way that indulged himself rather than served the Whyos. Yes, he thought, a bit of oblivion, a night of freedom and forgetting, would be just the thing.

A red-eyed Chinese boy took his money and showed him to a couch in a smoky, windowless room lined with padded niches. It was quiet except for occasional coughing and one man’s light snore. The cushions were velvet but shiny and worn through in patches. Harris picked a spot and gave the boy an extra quarter for some additional blankets, tea and a hot-water bottle. Then he hung his coat on a hook at the back of his niche and settled in. The cushions exuded a sour, sweaty smell, but he was quickly distracted from that by other sensations: the bitter flavor that bubbled up through the water of his hookah, the sweet tingling that dawned throughout his body, the miraculously smooth flow of his breath. Soon, every cell of his body—yes, every cell—was buzzing with bliss, with optimism. The change was swift but not overwhelming. His focus simply clicked over into a better place, where everything was tolerable, even beautiful. At first, his imagination turned to thoughts of the occult world of cells and queer animalcules. The microbes swimming in Sarah Blacksall’s phials of sewage merged with the patterns of living color he’d seen through his father’s microscope. He drew in a universe of acrid smoke through the mouthpiece of the water pipe, and worlds long shut off were opened: He thought of his mother without sorrow for the first time in years. Her face, its solid beauty; her arms, their dimpled elbows and firm embrace. Somehow, without having forgotten his woes, he’d ceased to mind them. He was full of the sensation of pleasure. How had he gone so long without it, when it was obviously essential? Why had he waited so long? He thought of Beatrice, too—not bitterly, not about the fact that she’d gone with Johnny, but ecstatically. She’d made him so entirely happy just a few days before. He remembered exactly what they’d done on the bath-hall floor. The opium transformed Wah Kee’s couch into a marriage bed, and he nestled himself down in the seamy velvet cushions and dreamed. While the opium held him in its arms, everything was fine. Better than fine.

He dreamed and smoked and mused and slept for uncounted hours. He woke thirsty and queasy and confused. His situation was blurry to him. His first thought was that he wanted another pipeful of opium, badly, but there was an underbelly to that urge, a greater, lower need: to vomit. A large spittoon awaited him just by his bunk, and the truth was it was far more often puked than spat into. For who needed a plug of tobacco in his lip when euphoria itself could be sucked from the hookah’s lips? But vomiting didn’t put an end to Harris’s distress. There was something cruel about the beautiful haze he’d been in, he realized: It wasn’t real. Now the bliss was gone, and dread had returned, even worse; gravity was, if anything, greater. He remembered the facts of his life in a flash and cringed. He could imagine only one antidote, and he called out for it. The boy was at his side in a moment with a battered lacquer box. But by the time he saw the scoop of opium being leveled, Harris had remembered another fact of his life: John-Henry, who would be waiting for him at the job site if indeed, as he suspected, it was morning. John-Henry would be worried, rightly worried. Rightly annoyed, too. It was the thought of his friend that freed him from the opium’s sway. That was what it was to have a friend. But to be a friend?

“Wait. I can’t pay you.” That was a lie. He had more money than he’d ever had before. But it stopped the boy. The scoop of opium hovered above the burner. The boy’s eyes narrowed.

“No credit. Time to go.”

Harris put on his coat and then went out to use the wretched old latrine in the yard, the same one he’d used as a lodger at the flophouse. Outside, it was indeed day: bright and overcast and bitter. As he voided his bladder, he considered the way Beatrice had ordered him back into the tunnel, the nature of Johnny’s kiss. He had been used and used again, and he had gone along. He had acquiesced to something awful. He felt a self-loathing that was new. His first impulse was to leave town, the same way he’d left Germany. But how much of his life could he spend running?

To his surprise, when he went back inside, Harris found a cup of tea, a bowl of warm water and a small towel on a bench by his couch. It wasn’t exactly the sewermen’s bath hall, but the tea killed the flavor of bile in his mouth and the sponge bath helped a good deal, inwardly as well as out.

He shivered as he walked. The temperature had dropped even further. As he went, he heard a bell begin to toll and keep on going—to his dismay, twelve times. He wasn’t just late, he had slept the entire morning away, and he began to run. Soon, he was warm. He was opening the collar of his coat when he felt the unfamiliar bulk in his inner vest pocket. Considering the two gifts, Piker’s and Johnny’s, there was a lot, possibly hundreds of dollars, in that pocket. Blood money.

“Where the Hell you been, Harris? And what the Hell have you done to yourself?”

Harris knew he looked bad—he felt bad—but he couldn’t have envisioned the redness of his eyes, the slackness of his face, the plod of his gait. John-Henry sucked his teeth in disgust.

“Can I tell you later?” He could neither stomach explaining the truth nor imagine an adequate lie.

“You better have a good story when you do, boy.”

They worked through the afternoon without saying more than was necessary. Clearly, John-Henry was waiting for Harris to tell him what was going on, but Harris was not up to the task. It wasn’t just John-Henry he was ashamed in front of; he was worried about encountering Mrs. Dolan at quitting time. Seeing her would be tantamount to confirming that he was doing what the Whyos expected, that he was ready to begin his training whenever they called on him. Johnny had told him he would call on him soon and begin to teach him the language. But even last night, while Beatrice was fetching the cart, he had made Harris try the most basic vocabulary word, the old Whyo war cry. He didn’t want to do it, but he had, and he could feel the vibration of it still, echoing in his chest. In Whyo terms, he had agreed to something irrevocable.

When they arrived back at the Sewer Division that evening, it was quiet, as usual, and the door to the bath hall was standing wide open. Mrs. Dolan stepped from her office and waved them over. Harris approached with his eyes cast down, not at all sure what to expect, not eager to acknowledge the events of last night, but there was no meaningful look from her. She proceeded to the bath hall, where she drew two steaming tubs—with considerably more hot water than was common—and handed them their towels.

“Take twenty tonight, boys.” Not ten.
Twenty.

John-Henry didn’t know whether to be pleased at this mysterious generosity or vexed that Harris was inexplicably getting off scot-free for offenses that would have gotten John-Henry fired. After all, he’d failed to turn his boots in or take his mandated bath the night before, and today, since he’d had his boots out all night, he’d obviously shown up at the site without having clocked in. Harris, meanwhile, was reeling. Her voice, her face, her manner. Her bullying and her queer generosities. It was so obvious to him now that Mrs. Dolan was Dandy Johnny’s mother; he couldn’t believe he’d never put it together. But the worst part of it was that it meant she had never been his friend either, just another agent of the devil in disguise, using him, her every kindness an instrument.

While the two men soaked in silence, John-Henry peered at Harris, trying to see the problem, the same way he’d once read his romantic anguish so clearly from his gait and face. This was more complex, but he didn’t have to know whatever it was that Harris was mixed up in to disapprove of it. But his annoyance softened as he soaked. Clearly, Harris had gotten into trouble, but he wasn’t the first person in the world to do that. How bad could it be, since he’d shown up eventually, and there they were, bathing peacefully under Mrs. Dolan’s unexpectedly indulgent eye. Soon John-Henry had succumbed to the steam and heat and was thinking only of the contrasting sensations of warm water and cool porcelain where the rim of the tub touched his neck. This was the warmest he’d been all day, the warmest he would be till tomorrow’s bath. The papers said last night was the coldest in years, a record low, and it hadn’t gotten any warmer. He wished his wife, Lila, could enjoy such a bath as he got daily, just once, just tonight. He took his bar of soap and lathered himself all over, in stages, from head to arms to underarms, belly to crotch, legs to toes. Then he submerged himself entirely and wallowed for a few seconds, rinsing and scrubbing his hair underwater with his knuckles. It did feel good. A bit of bliss. Underwater, he imagined smuggling Lila in there when no one was around, running her a bath, helping her step up over the high lip and washing her smooth, shining back, kneading suds through her braids. A lovely thought, but when he came back up, the impossibility of it riled him. Lila would never get a bath like this in her life, whereas a white man like Harris could pull all manner of nonsense and still get ten extra minutes for no reason at all. But then John-Henry stole a glance at Harris—his big, kind potato head, the regret that was so often etched on his features, especially so today, the sadness of his posture, apparent even when he was lying in the bath—and he let his anger diffuse. It leached out into the water and settled to the bottom like silt; soon it would rush through the pipes to the sewer, then the ocean—the invisible liquid systems that made the world run.

As for Harris, he was rummaging around within himself, mustering up the guts to ask John-Henry for a favor. That job on the bridge seemed so ideal. John-Henry was angry at him, he knew, and he would have to satisfy John-Henry’s curiosity if he wanted his goodwill. The problem was how to do it without either lying or telling the truth. How little could he tell him without bald deceit, how much without saddling his friend with dangerous knowledge? Was it even possible to be honest and remain John-Henry’s friend? Harris filled his lungs with air and let his torso slide down the back of his tub until his head was underwater and his feet stuck over the edge. He opened his eyes and looked out through the clear water at a blurry, bluish world. His thoughts floated free, and his hair swirled in tendrils around his head. He let go of thinking about Whyos, let go of Beatrice, let go of John-Henry, let go of wanting to explain himself to the world. He was just an embryo, floating guiltlessly, all options open. And this illusion seemed so real to him that when his lungs demanded oxygen, he opened his lips, let his chest expand, and his bronchioli sucked in bathwater. The quiet surface of the water exploded with Frank Harris: his thrashing arms and legs, his coughing, gasping head, his grown man’s hands clutching at the lip of the tub.

The commotion brought Mrs. Dolan in from the office, but not before she’d thrown the master drain wide—always her reflex when anything out of the ordinary went on. John-Henry sprang from his tub to Harris’s side, wondering if Harris could actually have been trying to drown himself—in which case he was both stupider and in worse trouble than John-Henry thought. But Harris was breathing again, if raggedly. Mrs. Dolan stood to the side.

“Everyone alive in here? I guess twenty minutes was too long.” She shooed them into the locker room and went for her mop.

Harris was still sputtering slightly and clearing his throat as he and John-Henry dressed. And he was too busy fretting about what he would say to John-Henry as they made their way out of the building to notice that Mrs. Dolan had positioned herself before the door.

“I think this must have fallen out of your pocket, Mr. McGinty.” She handed him an envelope, at which Harris suffered a relapse and began choking again. She strolled away, unconcerned.

Harris had not received a single letter since he’d come to America, and few enough prior to that that he remembered every one. There was the postcard from his mother with the picture of the Windbath Terrace at Haus Berghof on the back, which he’d lost in the fire at Barnum’s; there were the curt paternal invitations to spend Christmas in Göttingen that came each November, in the years after his mother had died, and the letter he’d found the day he left the farm; there was the stack of letters he’d received from Robert Koch, full of enthusiasm for nature, obsession with scientific method, and always, confusingly, respect for his father. There was the suspicion of letters from his father that Wittold had never given him. But all these letters had been more or less expected, explicable. The one he’d taken from Mrs. Dolan’s outstretched hand was different. No postmark or address, just clean vellum with the words
Frank Harris
written on the outside of the sealed envelope. He had not dropped it; he had never seen it before—but he knew the hand.