Metropolis (29 page)

“You want to feel something, you want me to feel something for you?” His grip tightened and then, with no further warning, he jammed himself into her.

The starburst of pain that radiated through her was a function of the lemon rind, which in their earlier contortions had become misaligned. The angle he was coming from meant that he was jamming the edge of it into her cervix, but all Beanie knew was that every thrust felt like rending flesh. This time, she cried silently. At least he didn’t have much stamina left. When he was done he said, “That’s all for today. You can go now. Stay at my mother’s.” And then he cracked one of his gorgeous smiles and kicked her onto the floor.

It was something most Why Nots would have killed for—to be ravished and kicked out of bed by Dandy Johnny—but she was not most Why Nots. She was furious. She was wondering whether the knife in her skirt pocket was near enough to grab before he saw what she was up to and sharp enough to kill a man by throwing. But she didn’t lunge for it; she just lay there on the floor thinking, gathering her dignity. She knew she couldn’t kill him. The Whyos would not allow it. But could she take this? She thought so. It was only her body. And she had to agree that, as he had said, she had much to gain from the alliance. Maybe she could save Harris, for starters.

“I want to make a deal, Johnny.”

He snorted.

“Excuse me?” she asked, but the snort had been only the prelude to a vast snore. He was dead asleep, the bastard. It would have been so easy to walk right up and slit his throat, even with just her small blade. The thing that made her maddest was that he wasn’t even worried enough about her to stay awake. Before she dressed, she looked around for something with which to wipe the mess from between her legs. She chose a clean, pressed, monogrammed shirtfront from his dresser. Then she saw an ascot dangling from the bedpost and finished the job with that. She looked at herself in his dresser mirror. She wasn’t scrawny, just slim. She was going to have quite a black eye by morning, but that was no huge surprise. No one in the gang would think twice. Johnny was famously violent in bed.

Out on the freezing terrace between the twin penthouse apartments, she thought about Harris again. He would be hating her now. She’d been smiling the other night, riding on the thrill of being chosen; she knew he had seen it, and she regretted it. She couldn’t bear the idea that Harris thought she’d chosen Johnny, that she loved him. The only reason she hadn’t given him more of a sign when they were cleaning out the Tammany cache was she didn’t want Johnny to catch on to her feelings for him. But she’d miscalculated there. Johnny had her figured perfectly, in advance. The only person she’d deceived was Harris. She’d made him think her only interest was to use him for the gang. It had started that way, but it couldn’t have been less true by the end. She would have liked to tell him the truth now, but it wouldn’t be fair. It would string out his attachment. He wasn’t a crook, not like the rest of them. He deserved to be free. She resolved to do one honest thing for him, whatever it cost her: to make Johnny set him free. If only she could let Harris know why she was doing it, but Harris was such a straightforward man. She knew him. He just wouldn’t understand.

THE LOVE OF HEIGHTS

24.

ON THE ICE

H
arris smelled biscuits and coffee.

Certainly there had been no biscuits, no breakfast, wherever he was dreaming of being, not even porridge. He opened an eye and saw a dark room with an unfamiliar low ceiling, a rough wooden molding lit by the glowing red embers in the grate. He opened the other eye and saw John-Henry emerge from the door to the bedroom—a coat pulled over his dressing gown, boots untied—and shuffle toward the stairs.

Ah,
thought Harris, knowing where he was now but torn between relief and anxiety. He was safe, for the moment. He thought about the job the Whyos had just pulled in plain sight—their vocal powers were greater than he’d realized—and wondered to what extent his beard and Irish accent could really protect him. How much of a cover had Beatrice been providing for him the past year? Was Brooklyn far enough away? It certainly wasn’t California, but still it was another city, another police force, another world, and he’d never heard of Beanie or the Whyos working over there.

“Harris, get up, man,” said John-Henry, returning from the privy.

And so he got up and began what he hoped was a new era in his life. It was coffee not tea, blacks not Irish, Henleys in place of O’Gamhnas. Maybe it would be Brooklyn instead of New York and towers not tunnels, an honest life in lieu of sordid gangsters’ kisses and wads of stolen cash. He knew going to Brooklyn wouldn’t hide him if they really looked, but he could make a try of it. He also needed a new name, another common one, he thought, using the Whyos’ theory of hiding in plain sight—maybe Jones or Smith. He was going to have to decide on it today. He heard Lila Henley humming as she tapped a spoon against a pan, and the warmth of the Henleys’ acceptance buoyed him up. He rose, determined to make good, to move ahead, not to let yet another surrogate family down. As soon as he was on his feet, however, John-Henry was badgering him to read Beatrice’s letter.

“All right,” he said, “just give me a minute to wake up,” and he stuffed his bare feet into his boots, threw his coat over his shoulders and excused himself to use the outhouse. There were low fences between the yards of all the buildings on this block, each of which also had a privy and various outbuildings. The Henleys’ outhouse was whitewashed and irreproachable, the privy itself so deep he didn’t have to think about the pile of shit at the bottom. If he’d had the letter with him, he would have dropped it straight into the hole. He didn’t want to know what it said. He felt he’d rather take his chances, let his fate surprise him in an alley one day, than know what was coming—but John-Henry had saved him from that urge by confiscating the envelope the night before.

“You ready?” asked John-Henry when he returned. Harris shrugged and shot his eyes toward Lila Henley as if to ask,
Now? In her presence?

“Don’t worry about me, Mr. Harris,” she said. “Ain’t no secrets ’twixt John-Henry and myself.”

John-Henry went over to the corner cupboard and extracted the letter from a covered casserole. “What do you say I slit it for you?”

The sound of the paper tearing was like ripping skin. The letter slid from its wrinkled sheath into his fingers with a dry rasp. It seemed unduly heavy, like a book or a bludgeon, but he figured that was just a feeling. He pulled out the letter and saw green. More money. On the sheet of paper there were words, but they swam before his eyes. Harris couldn’t make sense of them.

“Why don’t you tell us, Mr. Harris,” Lila Henley said. Finally, he laid the paper on the table, gesturing that someone else should look at it first, and so Lila read it aloud.

“You have done what we required. You have your independence. Keep your mouth shut, stay out of our affairs and expect no further contact.”

There was no greeting and no signature, just a slash, as if to underscore the message, but after so many hours of chalkboard lessons, there was no mistaking who had written it. Harris fanned out the bills: ten twenties. It was the third time in the past two days that the Whyos had paid him off. He had never been so rich, but he didn’t want this money. With Piker and the boys, they had simply been sharing the bounty of the job—that was all right, he felt. But Johnny had been trying to buy his soul, and he wished he’d thrown that money back in his face. Now Beatrice was paying him to go away. He tried to conceive of a world in which he was grateful that she had set him free, but in this world he was angry, crushed. There was no hint of loss or regret in her words, nothing.

After a moment, John-Henry began to chuckle, quietly but steadily, and eventually Mrs. Henley joined in. Their pent-up worry had turned to relief and then mirth, but if they thought Harris would join them, they were disappointed. Harris’s face remained blank as he digested what the letter meant. It was complicated: The very fact that she’d taken the trouble to do this suggested that she cared for him after all, wanted him to live and even to be happy, perhaps. But she didn’t care enough to want to be with him. She had made her choice, and she had chosen Johnny. Harris took a deep breath. What he felt was messy, neither happiness or gloom. This was what he’d wanted just a short time before. Now he had it, and he wished he didn’t. He looked up at John-Henry and his wife and tried his hardest to smile.

After breakfast, John-Henry lent Harris a clean shirt and his razor while Mrs. Henley thoroughly brushed his coat and pants. By the time the sun was up, they were ready to leave, and the thought of the bridge had Harris feeling more optimistic. The air outside was so cold it seemed to strip both the romance and the tragedy away from Harris’s situation—it was just about survival. As they neared the river’s edge, they saw a man clambering up a ladder from the ice to the pier.

“How is it?” John-Henry asked.

“Solid. You won’t believe it till you’ve been out there.”

Then they stepped out onto the white ice. It was rock hard.

It was cold and hard in the drunk tank, too. Undertoe opened his mouth and let out a gust of foul, frozen breath and a groan. He tasted rotting bits of gristle that had stuck in his teeth at his last meal, two days before. His tongue was carpeted with fur, and his head was ringed with a metal band, like a whiskey barrel. Undertoe struggled to breathe, to see. He touched his chin and felt long whiskers poking through a crust of dried vomit trailing all the way down and around the back of his neck. His rash was itching fiercely. When he sat up, his forehead smacked the bunk above him. When he tried to roll over, he realized he was sharing the bunk with a couple of pathetic, snoring derelicts. And that was when he grasped where he’d spent the night and began to fume. He could taste and feel that he’d been doped, which was even worse. Little did he realize, then, but he’d been there
two
nights and days. The officers at the station had been unable to rouse him the morning before, and so they’d left him there, puking intermittently in his sleep, while the rest of the previous night’s drunks went free. It wasn’t quite protocol, but Undertoe was far from the first man they’d logged into their booking sheet as Rip van Winkle.

How in the world had he gotten here? he wondered, just as the aftereffects of the Whyos’ hydrate of chloral once again boiled through his stomach and his mouth began to water. He gagged and spat on the floor and wiped his lips on the shirttail of the whimpering old codger beside him. Gently, he palpated his own head and found several tender regions and the grit of dried blood in his hair. So he’d been poisoned and walloped both. He rubbed his chin again, and only then, when he considered how long the stubble was, did it dawn on him that he’d lost an entire day. It had to have been a Hell of a lot of drops. That just wasn’t right. That was the way that gangsters treated dupes, not one another. The right side of his lip began to twitch. He felt itchy all over now, and in his ears that faint, infuriating ringing rose up once again. He fought his way across the sea of bodies lining the floor to the barred cell door and rattled its iron frame.

“Jailer!
Jailer!
” It took several minutes of shouting for anyone to respond, and then it was the stupidest, most slothlike, least corruptible-looking officer Undertoe had ever seen. He was rosy cheeked and smiling. Undertoe was unable to contain himself and swore aloud.

“Oh, ho—Rip van Winkle wakes at last. But I must advise you, sir, your fancy vocabulary won’t curry favors from me. You’ll be charged by the booking officer at seven thirty, like all the rest, no two ways about it. You’re lucky we let you stay this long, you know. We could have sent you straight to the morgue, you were out so cold.”

“You mean I was out for a whole day?” The cop nodded. “Yeah, well, it may be too late, but I got something to report. I got information, about a job.”

“Oh, do you?” The guard crossed his arms in front of his chest.

Undertoe hadn’t planned it, but his tongue was an adept prevaricator, and he let it buy him time while he tried to reconstruct what exactly
had
happened to him two nights before: There was the guy he’d seen ducking into the men’s room, who in retrospect wouldn’t have been such a good choice for a partner in crime—he hung around with that fool Dandy Johnny and his crowd down at the Morgue. He tried to recollect the bathroom attendant. Was he one of them, too? He didn’t think so. But there had been quite a number of familiar faces at the Bowery, come to think of it. Something must have been going on, something someone wanted to keep him out of, something that was hidden in the men’s room, perhaps. Whatever it was, he’d nearly walked in on it, and so they’d doped him, rolled him and dumped him like a vic. He wished to Hell he’d seen the papers yesterday. With a shred or two of information, he was sure he could have gotten himself out of the slammer and back in his friend Sergeant Jones’s favor. He picked a scab off his neck and felt the stickiness of blood rising—there were bedbugs in jail—and then he went for it.

“A little heist that took place yesterday?” he ventured, as if referring to a piece of common knowledge.

“What?” asked the cop. “The p.o. job? You call that
little
?”

Undertoe thrilled—the man was dumber than a woodchuck.

“Yeah, well, I know who done it. I don’t mind telling you I’ve got it in for them. I would have come in with it before, but Hell, they knocked me out for over a day just so I wouldn’t rat on them. Let me talk to your captain. Or actually, the one I really want to talk to is Jones, from the Tenth Precinct.”

“Jones, eh? You mean Lieutenant Jones?”

“He knows me.”

“I bet he does. What’s your name, pal?”

The man walked off, returning just a few minutes later with a ring of keys in his hand. Undertoe was practically beaming as the copper led him down the hallway. His mind was spinning fast. Once again, he needed a dupe, but this time it was going to be tricky. It had to plausible, but he didn’t have much to go on. They were sticklers for plausibility, the cops, though whether it was true or not was irrelevant.

Undertoe followed the jailer down a winding course of dim stone passageways to a small interrogation room. His confidence lagged at little when he saw they weren’t planning to take him straight to Jones, but he sang anyway. He didn’t know a damn thing about the heist, but what he told them wasn’t all that far-fetched. Life falls into certain patterns, after all, and he told a tale he’d lived out a hundred times, about a bunch of men in cahoots for the sake of a bunch of money that wasn’t theirs.

It made a certain sense to the cop, at first, all except for the part about Dandy Johnny Dolan and his crowd being the toughs. And then, as Undertoe blabbed on, revealing his total ignorance of any salient details, the story began to make a very particular kind of sense to the cop. As far as the officer could tell, this guy knew nothing at all about the p.o. job. Undertoe’s story was thin as water, especially in light of the collection of empty wallets that had been found on his person when they brought him in. Clearly, he was the loser of some Five Points turf battle, and now he was trying to talk his way out of trouble by pinning a job on his enemies. Sure, the department wanted to solve the case, but the police did not allow themselves to be used for the purposes of crooks and lowlifes.

Of all the drunks in the tank that morning, Undertoe was the only one who was kept behind. They booked him for the wallets (which had naturally been lifted by Why Nots passing time in the Old Bowery lobby). Then they threw him in another cell to await a hearing. He paced back and forth, thinking that someone, somehow, soon, would pay for this. He was Luther Undertoe. He didn’t know who it would be yet, but he’d figure that out in time. He was going to have a lot of it on his hands.

Harris and John-Henry, by contrast, were moving quickly, crossing the river that had become an impossibly wide white road. The ice bridge was at once terrifying and joyous. It was nothing like making the river crossing on a ferry, though they followed more or less the route of the Fulton Ferry line. There were scores, maybe even hundreds of people out, scattered in groups as far up the river and down the harbor as the eye could see. The ice bridge had turned the weekday morning into a holiday. A few determined boys were out on skates, taking high, funny steps instead of gliding, because the surface of the ice was rough. A man pulled a small sled past them that was piled high with children screaming
giddyup
and laughing so hard they kept rolling off the side. John-Henry laughed, too, and turned to Harris, who was plodding along, dragging his feet, brooding.

“Lord, Frank Harris. I know you lost your girlfriend, but she sounded like nothing but trouble anyhow. Get over it, man. They’re not going to mess with you anymore. You can do what you want now, work on the bridge, whatever. So snap out of it.”

“The bridge office is probably closed in this weather.”

John-Henry looked at him hard. “Yeah, probably is. And this ice bridge is probably going to melt right out from under us, and we’ll likely drown or freeze to death, and I doubt they hire niggers, much less ex-sewerman–gangsters at the bridge, even if we do survive. Jesus Christ, Harris, where’s your optimism? I’ll tell you what: If they’re closed, we’ll try again in a day or two, and we’ll have had an incredible walk. And you just got your freedom. I think you ought to appreciate that a little more. Think about it.”