Metropolis (34 page)

“You know, you got some mail, Frank. In fact, two letters in one day, and one of them looks to be from Germany.”

“Really?”

“Really. Your timing is good. You were going to have to explain that one.”

The first letter was a short note from John-Henry, urging Harris to join the Henleys for supper that night. The other letter was from Koch, and when he said he wanted to open it alone, Mr. Noe seemed to understand.

“Just let me know if I can do anything for you, my boy. Anything at all.”

Under the whiteness of the February sky, Harris wandered up to the Heights, past the thorny, leafless rugosas, to Montague Street, once again a letter burning in his pocket that he did not dare to open. Several times, he took the letter out and looked at it, its envelope addressed in Koch’s pared-down Gothic script, and then returned it again to his pocket. He dreaded reading his old friend’s reaction to the mass of lies he’d sent him. Why couldn’t he have started that letter over and told something closer to the truth?

It was perhaps the fourth time that he stopped and paused to consider the envelope that he looked up to see a familiar face, a girl’s, staring straight at him from the doorway of a butcher shop, beckoning. Fiona.

He dropped the letter in surprise. She stepped forward, picked it up, then receded into the shop. Cautiously, he followed her inside and saw that she was buying a ham steak. He got in line behind her and cleared his throat, but she didn’t acknowledge him. Harris looked around at the skinned rabbits and plucked geese hanging in the window, the side of beef on its hook in the back. Then Fiona took her paper package under her arm and left, without turning back to look at Harris again.

“Yes, sir?” said the butcher.

But Harris turned and left the shop in pursuit of Fiona. She was loitering at the corner, waiting for him.

“Just look straight ahead of you, listen and walk,” she said. “I have a message for you: You’ve been getting careless. First of all, don’t go sleeping with German hussies. It doesn’t look good, and all you’ll get is the clap. But your main problem is that the Undertaker’s back in town.”

Harris hadn’t even known the man had gone anywhere. He could hardly believe that the Whyos were still following him. He looked behind him, imagining Beatrice might be there, too. He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to be.

“A few bad things have happened to Luther lately, thanks to us, but I’m afraid he thinks it’s you—thinks you were after revenge, and now he wants some of his own.”

“But—”

“Whether it’s true doesn’t matter, Mr. Harris. He’s a problem for you, always will be, and since you’ve worked with us, if he finds you, that would make both of you
our
problem. See? We don’t want problems. You very nearly walked into his arms the other day, what with your jabbering in German. You were on his turf. His boys are all around. Have some sense, Harris. Don’t break your cover. All right? Because you don’t get another chance.”

Harris opened his mouth.

“Shut up, Mr. Harris.”

It was just the way Beatrice had said it the day they abducted him, and he felt it in his gut like a wire. She held out his letter, he grabbed it dumbly, and then Fiona was gone. She just seemed to vanish. He turned in place on the bluestone sidewalk, but there was no one in sight who could have been her. Once, the Whyos had wanted him to join them; once, they had saved him from both Undertoe and the police; later, they’d respected him enough to let him walk away. They were still helping him, watching over him, but why? Did they still want something from him? He wasn’t sure he liked that idea, but for the first time in a long time he felt grateful to them.

Then he went over to the Henleys’ with his letter. They had helped him deal with the last letter he’d gotten, and he figured he would let them do the same with this one, if they were willing. When he got there, it was a little early for dinner, but there was a large pot of stew bubbling on the stove, and he could see that they were expecting more company than just himself.

“Oh, Harris, I’m glad you did come after all,” said Lila. “John-Henry got a couple of rabbits. The lady doctors are coming over, too.”

“A party, today?” He looked at John-Henry. Harris was not in any mood for a party.

“Now come on, we didn’t plan it. It just came together.”

Harris cringed at the idea of having to see people. He had been looking forward to the comfort of the Henleys’ company, not socializing with a couple of do-gooders. He didn’t want to have to retell the story of Waugh’s death, and their presence would prevent him from discussing his German problem.

“Listen, John-Henry, before they get here, I got another letter I can’t stand to open. It’s from home. Germany.”

“Your father? How’d he find you?”

“Not my father.”

Looking at the letter, Harris had no idea what to expect, knew nothing except that he must have been mad to write Koch in the first place. As Fiona had just made clear to him, it was a grave risk he had taken with his new identity and therefore his life. What had made him think that telling a man an ocean away a pack of lies about himself would ameliorate his solitude?

“Well, go sit in the bedroom by yourself and read it. Then come tell us what it says. Go on.”

The letter itself was several pages long, but even before he began to read the greeting overwhelmed him. His very name looked foreign to him. There followed long paragraphs of Koch’s fine, elegant Gothic script. “As you are well, you will hardly be able to imagine what we believed befell you in 1868.” Koch went on to describe the fire at the Diespeck farm. “Now I realize that second man who died must have been a laborer, hired on after you left, but perhaps you can understand how we all came to believe what we did.” So it had all gone off exactly as he had planned back then, except for the toll his faked death had exacted on Koch. Clearly, it had caused Koch grief, although now Koch expressed only joy at the mix-up, relief at learning of his friend’s survival. He had no sense of having been tricked or abandoned. Koch wrote of his own life, too: the hardships of the war between Germany and France, the survival rate of his patients at the typhoid hospital in Neufchâteau, his work with cowpox and anthrax, and his personal difficulties in the past years—two of his children had died.

Reading his friend’s words, Harris saw the war raging across his homeland in a way he never had from reading the newspapers, and he tried to imagine towns he knew as battlefields and entire valleys being swept by typhoid on a scale greater than the scourges of his childhood. Finally, he reached the part where Koch responded directly to what he had written, and he grew embarrassed. The New York–to–Brooklyn bridge was famous even in Europe, and Koch congratulated him on finding such worthy employment. He congratulated him on his fictional engagement. At the end, tentatively, Koch gave news of his father. He suffered arthritis but was otherwise still healthy, still working on mapping the microstructures of the kidney. Koch said he would not betray his whereabouts to his father, knowing of their old estrangement, but urged him to write his father himself. “He would derive great happiness from hearing that you thrive, if a world away.” Harris found that unlikely, but Koch said his father had regretted their estrangement more and more as time passed.

When he’d finished reading, Harris folded the letter back into the envelope. He looked up and saw John-Henry and Lila in the doorway, staring at him.

“Well?”

“It’s better than I thought, except I wish I hadn’t lied so much in my own letter.”

Then the two doctors arrived, and the topic of Harris’s letter was put aside in favor of Liza’s daily antics, the bridge disaster, the horrible diseases afflicting the prostitutes the doctors had seen as patients. Hearing the doctors talk about their cases, he wished he could send Maria to their clinic, but he wouldn’t be seeing Maria again. The evening did not draw on late, but Harris was glad when the ladies got up to go, so that he could, too, without being rude. He was exhausted by the past two days’ ups and downs, and he felt nervous on the way home, as if everyone he encountered might be Undertoe or a Whyo, watching him.

The following week, he and John-Henry met early at Lorraine’s cart. There was quite a crowd of them gathered there, shivering in the wind while drinking coffee and eating pastries—in fact, everyone who had been down there when Waugh was lost. It was their first day back.

“I don’t feel much like going back down, you?” one man asked Harris.

“No, me neither,” he said. Then the whistle blew and they filed through the gate.

But before Harris got a chance to go down, a man in a black frock coat called him over to the office. “Mr. Harris! You’re the same Harris who was working with the nigger on that boulder last week, before the blowout, is that right?” He wanted to cover his face with his hands. “Come into the office a moment, Harris.”

He glanced around for John-Henry, but he was already down below.

“Now, Mr. Harris, you’ll be glad to hear we’re changing some of the safety rules around here, given what happened. But that doesn’t help that poor bastard, Waugh, does it now?”

“No.” Harris had the feeling the man wanted him to laugh ironically, but he just couldn’t muster it. He was about to be sacked, and apparently this was how they let you down: with morbid ruminations. He thought about the street-paving crew. That job had been all right. They were putting in pavement all across Brooklyn, it seemed. Surely he could get that kind of work again. “I’ll just pack up my tools and clothes and things and go.”

“What? No, no, Mr. Harris. You
are
going to need a new set of tools, but don’t go off on us. You’ve got your transfer topside, starting today—even if it’s not the finest weather for it. This is the time of year we lose the tower workers, see. Damn cold up there. People in the company were impressed with the way you went after Waugh, tried to save him. That took some courage, showed dedication. And you do have experience with heights, I believe? We figure you could use a change, Mr. Harris. Welcome back aboveground.”

Harris looked at the sky, which had started to throw down something approaching sleet. Now he did manage the quiet, ironic laugh he couldn’t get out before.

Harris shook the supervisor’s hand. He wasn’t going to have to go down below anymore. It was like a miracle. Instead of digging down he’d be looking up at the dizzying sky, craning his neck, reaching overhead. He stood up straighter already at the prospect.

Topside didn’t mean the top of the tower, though, and it didn’t mean he was cutting stone. He was assigned to a crew that worked the derricks and cranes to raise the enormous blocks to the top of the tower. All day, he fastened the straps and wires and buckles that held the big stones. He hauled in and let out guylines as they were raised, up and up and up, to the top, where another crew laid the cement and did final trimming and set the great stones down perfectly in place. Harris wasn’t cutting stone, and the blocks were larger and the rigs more complex than the ones he remembered from the Nikolaikirche, but the activity was a lot like what had gone on in Hamburg. He was full of awe and wonder and hope.

The following morning, a mild itch he’d been trying not to scratch since his visit to Maria blossomed into a terrible, florid case of what he hoped were only crabs. Harris was forced to see an apothecary, who gave him a stinking oily salve and a fine comb. When he stopped in to tell Mr. Noe about his promotion, his landlord raised a hand and sniffed the air exaggeratedly.

“Harris, my boy, I’m afraid I know that perfume . . . all too well. Terribly sorry.”

They had a brief laugh over the costs and complications entailed by encounters such as Harris’s with Maria.

“What you need, my boy, is a wife, hmmn?”

Harris didn’t have an answer to that, so he told Mr. Noe about the job. Mr. Noe was delighted—half proud father, half enthusiastic friend.

So Harris was doing almost the job he’d dreamt of, living in relative calm with a couple of loyal friends. At least some of the lies he’d written to Koch had serendipitously come true. Perhaps it was good to envision fresh starts.

28.

THE
WESTFIELD

“
B
eanie, I saw him.”

“Who?”

Fiona looked at her.

“Harris? Where? How did he look?”

“Actually, he was half drunk and nearly got himself run over the other day, so not too good, I’d say. But that’s not the point. This time it’s—”

“ ‘The other day’? ‘This time’?”

At Fiona’s request, the two Why Nots had met at the zoological garden in the park uptown. The newly planted cherry trees were still barren, the fields that were to become lawns were unseeded and muddy. They were standing in front of a cage where a family of cold-looking monkeys sat picking one another’s nits. Down the path, a nervous-looking pair of zebras looked on. Otherwise, it was deserted. In a month or two, the crowds of people peering into the cages would make it well worth the time it took to get up there, from a pickpocket’s point of view, but in early March the park was a place to go not to be seen or overheard.

“Yeah, there’s a couple things I haven’t told you. I’ve been keeping an eye on him as a favor to Mother D. I was under orders not to tell you. Plus, I didn’t think it would do you any good to hear about it anyway. There was never really anything to report before.”

“You’ve been watching him all this time? Working for Johnny, and I was kept out? What the Hell is the plan?”

The monkeys began to cackle, and Beatrice found it infuriating. She turned away and walked toward the zebras. She had been working her ass off for the Whyos in the past months, coming up with jobs, going out on jobs, keeping all the girls in line and making sure they were happy, adjudicating Why Not disputes. On top of which she had to play accountant at check-in. Every Tuesday at 2:00
P.M.,
everyone reported their earnings, and Johnny had taught her to record the information in a giant logbook; by 6:00, the tithings had been deposited at the till of the Morgue; her job was to calculate the account balance and credit line of every Whyo and Why Not to reflect their cut of the grand total. To be honest, she didn’t know how he’d had time for it all before. It wasn’t very glamorous, but the one thing she’d liked was that she thought she knew now pretty much everything that was going on. Apparently, she didn’t. It made her angry, and she kicked a bench so hard it hurt her toe, despite the steel tips in her boots—a First Girl perk. Her chest felt wide open, empty. She didn’t want Fiona to see her eyes well up, her face turn red, but Fiona followed her.

“Wait, come on. Don’t go off. I need to talk to you.”

“Why tell me now? Why ever tell me? Why not just let them fuck me over?”

“Beanie.”

“All right then,
what
is going on? Why was I kept out? Am I the First fucking Girl, or are you?”

Fiona looked at her feet. “I don’t really know what the plan is. She never told me. But I don’t think Johnny’s in on this. Mother Dolan just wanted me to keep an eye out and make sure he didn’t rat us out. Maybe she, uh—I think she wanted to be sure you weren’t seeing him. Harris, you know? But she also mentioned that it would good for us to know ahead of time if Undertoe did track him down, which I agreed with. Sorry.” Fiona could barely maintain eye contact. She knew it sounded awful. It was awful. She had betrayed her friend.

“So if I had seen him, you would have reported me?”

“I don’t know, I think I would have told you not to.”

“Dammit, we told him he was free to go. I can’t believe you.”

“I’m sorry. But listen, the reason I’m telling you now is something’s happened. Harris was in an accident at the bridge. And then he got hit by a carriage in the street. It’s kind of like he was trying to get himself killed. And then, well, it was quite a spectacle. Everyone was staring, and Jimmy was there. And Harris spoke German to some hooker who recognized him. I think Jimmy recognized him, too, almost—he just couldn’t quite place him. And since then he keeps saying he’s sure he’ll remember who it was, like it’s eating him.”

“So Harris’s cover’s wrecked? Shit. But the Jimster hasn’t gone to Undertoe yet? What does he want? What’s he going to do? I can get my hands on a lot of money, Fiona.”

“First of all, Jimmy hasn’t quite put it together yet. And I don’t think we need money, really. The thing is, Jimmy’s turned against Undertoe. He might not mind getting that bounty, but we’d be able to trust him if we brought him in. Can’t you convince Johnny to try him out? He’s a good guy.”

Fiona and Beatrice decided to bring Jimmy into contact with Johnny, casually, at first, to plant the seed. It wasn’t easy to arrange the outing—Johnny wasn’t much for outings or dates—and in the meantime Beatrice considered confronting Mrs. Dolan, but she doubted it would gain her anything.

Instead, she made a point of eavesdropping on Johnny’s audiences with his mother. She heard quite a lot—including that they were still skimming money from the gang revenue, though she didn’t see any need for it, much less how they did it or where it came from. They said nothing at all about Harris, so far as she could learn, but she herself was one of their topics. Apparently, Mrs. Dolan wanted Johnny to marry her. Beatrice recoiled at the idea. Being First Girl had turned out not to be a romance at all, and she had to admit Johnny had been right that they weren’t suited to each other in that way. He hadn’t touched her in an age, and she was grateful. She didn’t think she could brook the charade of a wedding to legitimize a business arrangement, especially when it just didn’t seem necessary. Why would Mother Dolan want that? She’d always thought of her as such a feminist. She was the one who’d always insisted the Why Nots weren’t chattel, after all; that this was America, and women should be free. The awful thing was, Beatrice found herself compelled to go out of her way to be sweet to Johnny, to butter him up, the very night she heard that, since she wanted him to join her and Fiona and Jimmy on an outing. She told herself as she half flirted with and half provoked him—for she’d learned that that was what he liked—that she was doing it for Harris’s sake. It was essential that Johnny get to know Jimmy so Jimmy wouldn’t jump back to Undertoe’s camp. That night, she traded flesh and prostration and a few degrading remarks for Johnny’s agreement to come to Coney Island on a little jaunt a fortnight hence. Not that Johnny knew the bargain worked that way—he was just feeling magnanimous—and not that there was any guarantee he would keep it.

In the meantime, Fiona’s assignment was at once the same and much better: to cling to Jimmy’s side, to do everything she could to make sure he didn’t have a chance to think about that face and somehow suddenly remember that bounty and put the two together. It wasn’t too difficult for her; the man she was manipulating with her wiles was also the man she wanted. She was mad about him, especially his arms, his muscled abdomen, his way of goofing off. She managed to distract him pretty well, she thought. She certainly exhausted herself.

It was a Sunday, just after the first spring buds had let loose, when the foursome finally took the ferry across to Brooklyn and then the train to Coney Island. It was before the season, but quite a few places were already open. They ate lobster at a little shack, then ventured down to the sand—just like regular people, not even working the crowd, not like gangsters at all. Beanie had told Johnny that the Jimster had feuded with Undertoe, setting the stage for Johnny’s interest. It worked. They all had a good time, and the Jimster, though he was in the dark about it all, happened to say a couple of things that made his enmity for Undertoe obvious. Johnny thought it was a good idea the following week when Beatrice suggested that they take in an operetta at the Old Bowery as a group. Afterward, as they strolled, Jimmy and Johnny got to singing one of the bawdier tunes from the show, and together the two of them were considerably better than what they’d heard onstage. Johnny was obviously pleased. Beatrice and Fiona exchanged glances: It was almost too good. After serenading Five Points for a while, the foursome parted ways at the door of the Morgue. It was the start of the workday for all of them: Beatrice and Johnny started out at the bar, overseeing the settling of accounts. Fiona was headed out to roam the streets in search of her evening’s mark, preferring to go by intuition rather than plan. As for the Jimster, he had a few ideas for how to kill the night, maybe try to get a faro game going. The Jimster had no real idea of how big the Whyos were, how much brighter his nightly prospects might soon be, or what exactly it might entail to work side by side with Fiona. He had no idea even that an interview had taken place, much less that Beatrice and Fiona had arranged it.

Undertoe was doing a bit of research of his own that night: He was over in Brooklyn again, taking in the sights at Barnum’s latest venue, a three-ring circus under a tent that had just opened and was apparently meant to tide Barnum over till construction on his next museum was complete. Undertoe had to laugh at the idea of a tent—it was a uniquely, laughably inflammable sort of structure, in an ideal location for his purposes. He had not enjoyed the unceremonious way the Barnum’s organization let him go, implying his security work was lax, when the American Museum wreckage was finally cleared away. He didn’t even get an audience with the boss, which was just the latest in a long list of slights that bastard Barnum had perpetrated against him. Since his pesky friend Geiermeier was still eluding him and he was eager for a taste of vengeance, Undertoe had decided that Barnum’s tent might be a nice opportunity to make things even again.

The night was humid, which was merciful on his eczema, and unseasonably warm, which was not. He scratched his neck gingerly with his long nails as he thought about who the dupe ought to be this time. He wasn’t going to haul in a stranger again, that was for sure. Geiermeier was still a thorn he was hoping to pry out of his hide, but until that time he had no wish to repeat his mistake. Also, there was no question that he’d been wrong; he had entirely misjudged the man. From now on, he would stick to people he knew a little better. Appearances could be so deceiving. He took in the acrobatics and the animal shows, and they weren’t half bad—though as usual none of them could compare to the brilliance of his mother’s soprano-contortionist act, back in the day. He thought about the pride and happiness it had brought him as a boy to hear the Fabulous Lola Unterzeh sing Mozart arias while standing on her hands with her legs entwined in the air, all decked out in red velvet sequinned jodhpurs. She’d been incomparable, had never been surpassed. Nowadays, all Barnum could manage was a fat lady who pierced her cheeks with nails and a boy who jumped between the backs of two trotting horses, as if anyone wanted to see that junk. The real art of it, of course, was to combine the high and the low, culture and acrobatics, but apparently such multitalented performers were rare. When the circus shut down for the night, Undertoe took a final stroll around, casing the periphery, then caught a hansom cab back to the ferry pier. As he boarded the
Robert Fulton,
an idea came to him.
The Jimster.
He’d more than once noticed him down around Fulton Ferry, meeting a Five Points girl who had apparently moved to Brooklyn. Undertoe had a bad feeling toward the kid. He had distanced himself ever since Undertoe had graduated Sing Sing, as if he were too good to work with his old pal now. The Jimster would deserve whatever he got. First, he thought he’d put a little pressure on the wench and get her in on it, against Jimmy—it shouldn’t be too difficult, with some decent money and a threat or two, just to be sure. She didn’t look all too pure. From there, it would be a cinch, and in the end he could dump the girl, too, just for neatness. Yes, thought Undertoe, it was just about time for the Jimster to go.

When he looked into it, however, he encountered certain unexpected twists. Following the girl around Brooklyn took him to the Noe house, but she clearly didn’t live there. (The only female in residence was the crone who worked in the kitchen.) In fact, it seemed she was there for reasons akin to his own: surveillance. But of what, exactly? Undertoe was puzzled. The house wasn’t wealthy enough to merit such close scrutiny. Perhaps the girl wasn’t in love with the Jimster at all but the stableboy who lived in the barn, he thought. Or possibly she was the illegitimate daughter of the house’s master, plotting her blackmail. At any rate, he tailed her home to Manhattan one night, and that was how he learned she was associated with Johnny Dolan. As he watched her go up to the top-floor apartment, he scowled, raked a scab on his neck and dabbed it with his fingers when it bled. This made the whole idea of setting them up more appealing, more pressing, but also more delicate.

Harris was having a lovely summer, working on the floating pier that surrounded the Brooklyn tower. Even when the streets were hot and stank of rotting trash, the river was glorious and breezy. On the most sweltering days, the men would jump in for a swim at the end of their shifts. All day long, Harris stood in the wind, moving great stone blocks on flatcars from the delivery scow to the hoisting station, fitting the edges into the wire harness for lifting or working the controls of the boom derricks. He was fascinated by the workings of the various steam-driven engines and boom rigs. Everything was vastly more modern and mechanized than what had been used on the Nikolaikirche, but he was a fast learner, a good worker, and at the end of summer he was tapped to work at the top of the tower.

The day that he first picked his way across the catwalk that stretched thrillingly far out over the river, the tower itself was shrouded in fog and low-lying clouds, so that the space seemed almost walled in, as if one could walk upon the lead-colored ocean of air that surrounded the tower. By midday, however, it had burned off, and the two cities and their river reappeared. Harris and his fellow workmen were standing as high as any man yet had ever stood above New York harbor, or for that matter anyplace in the world. When he saw that view, his exultation was almost suicidal—he had to fight the urge to see if he could fly. But of course he didn’t do it. His depression had long since lifted. The glorious act of watching the tower rise above the city, a bit higher and farther away from Five Points every day, saved him from himself.