Metropolis (36 page)

“What about Sarah? And Lila and Susan and Liza?”

“Sarah’s helping people. She’s a doctor. She’ll be fine.”

29.

SANCTUARY

U
ndertoe sat down to peruse the sheet of newspaper his breakfast had come wrapped in. It was greasy from the meat pie, but he was pleased enough to have gotten the front page and curious to learn the details of the weekend’s disaster. The death toll had been said, on the street, to be in the hundreds, but he saw that it was actually just in the dozens. So far, only twenty-six had officially been declared dead, with roughly the same number predicted soon to expire from their injuries. It was nothing, really, compared to the number that had died the day before in the riot, which had the added advantage of taking out mostly Micks. Still, he was curious and read on. When he saw that the engineer on the boat had been a Negro, he snorted. The only wonder was that the man had worked for the ferry line so long—thirteen years, the paper said—without prior mishap. And naturally, the Negro had lived. Undertoe scanned the list of names of the dead. When he saw
Margaret Dolan,
he felt a flutter in his chest—sorrow? Or glee? Had old Mother Dolan really been exploded? There were probably any number of Margaret Dolans in New York, but he took note of the location and time of the funeral, later that evening. In this heat, there was no time to spare. As for the services not scheduled till the following week, he realized those were the cases where nothing was left and gave a little laugh. Then he balled up the sheet of newsprint and swallowed the last of his beer. He flagged down the barmaid and ordered two cups of sweet black coffee and a shot of rye.

“You know we don’t sell coffee here, Mr. U.,” she said. But both of them had been through this routine before.

“Go buy it for me, come on.” He flipped her a quarter and then, when she sneered at it, another.

The whiskey-and-coffee combination was one of his usual remedies for turning down the volume of the ringing in his ears, which had just started up again, but that day Undertoe’s cure came too late. The ringing just got louder. On another day, he might have checked into Wah Kee’s when it got this loud or at least bought himself a phial of laudanum and holed up in his room till it waned, but he wanted to attend the Dolan funeral.

All that day, in the wake of the accident, Harris thought not of Beatrice, not of Mrs. Dolan, but of his mother. He didn’t understand why he kept seeing her face, but it wasn’t unwelcome, despite the fact that the clearest image he’d retained of her came not from life but from the daguerreotype that had dominated the mantelpiece, draped in a length of black crepe, the year after she died. She looked a bit strict—as if she’d just seen him do something naughty—dramatic and terribly elegant. The photograph had been made in her hotel room at Baden-Baden, he knew, because he recognized the gleaming mahogany pineapple ornament on the back of the chair she sat in. He’d sat on her lap in that chair during his very last visit with her, and to his lasting regret he’d looked more at the pineapples than her face. He’d squirmed and jumped down and run off to play and never seen her again. It was only years later, on a Christmas visit to his father’s, that he understood the picture’s eerie sharpness, a function of its subject’s perfect stillness for the long exposure: It was posthumous. The lights had been arranged so as to cast her closed eyes in shadow—that gave the feeling of drama to her otherwise slack features. And once you understood the context, the odd drape of her gown confirmed that the image had been captured with the subject lying down, the chair laid flat on the floor so the image read correctly when displayed at ninety degrees from the truth.

And so, when Harris made up his mind to go to Mother Dolan’s funeral, he told himself it was all about grieving for his own mother, whose funeral he’d missed so long ago, being too ill himself even to know she had died. He was not going to the funeral for Mother Dolan. He was not going to see Beatrice. That’s what he told himself, at least.

The church that night was packed. People of all sorts turned out, even people who never knew her, simply because the accident and the time of the service had been in the news. The whole metropolis was grieving, and the same was true for a dozen other victims at a dozen other churches that day. The aisles were full of people searching the overflowing pews for places to sit, and he let himself be swept along with the tide of mourners past the chancel. The coffin was closed, which was unusual for the Irish. Harris tried not to think about what was in it or how light it would be. When he’d circled almost to the exit again without finding a seat anywhere, he availed himself of the small stairway at the back up to the balcony.

Just as Harris went upstairs, Luther Undertoe arrived, and he walked the same circuit, eventually ending up in the balcony, too, but on the other side, directly opposite Harris. Harris did not see him, but a short time after he felt a sudden urge to leave. He looked up, wondering if it were just a commonsense nervousness that had descended on him. He knew it was not entirely wise for him to thrust himself into a Whyo affair. Looking up, he caught the eye of a man he recognized: not Undertoe but Piker Ryan. Piker was staring at him, and it was not a welcoming look. It was slightly painful to Harris, after their warm encounter in the dirt-catcher, but it seemed clear that Piker was telling him to go. He was not wanted there. He probably shouldn’t have come in the first place. Reluctantly, he rose and made his way to the back of the balcony, toward the stairs. Before he left, though, he turned back once more—one last chance to catch a glimpse of Beatrice, but she was nowhere. What he saw instead was Piker again, who was now staring across the nave at a blond head in the far balcony. Undertoe. So Piker had not just been ejecting him; he’d been trying to keep him from Undertoe’s line of sight. Harris felt a surge of affection for the gangster he’d once thought would be the one to kill him. Piker Ryan was saving his skin. Harris bowed his head, half to hide himself, half in a gesture of wordless prayer to Mrs. Dolan, before he went downstairs.

As for Piker and the other Whyos, managing this crowd was more difficult than even the p.o. job. First of all, they were emotional, not at the top of their form. Johnny in particular was a basket case, leaving them rudderless. And the whole situation—the concentration of Whyos, the size of the crowd, the limited number of escape routes—was inadvisable. It had been problematic even before both Undertoe and Harris had arrived. It was an outright violation of the basic Whyo strategy of stealth. They were there only because Johnny had demanded it. But Johnny wasn’t helping with the crowd control. Beatrice did her best to orchestrate the efforts of the whole gang alone, but it wasn’t easy. There were police officers in the congregation, and then there was Undertoe upstairs, not to mention Harris. As far as she could tell, Piker was doing his boneheaded best to set them up to meet each other on the stairs, which was the opposite of what they wanted. She did what she could, but she didn’t have as elaborate a vocabulary as Johnny. No one had that. That was why he was the boss.

Harris looked back as the organ struck up “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and the congregation rose. He saw Beatrice now, proceeding down the center aisle with the monsignor and Johnny, and it made him feel ready to go. He shot a last furtive glance across to check on Undertoe, but now Undertoe was gone. Had he seen him, too? Harris dared not go, dared not stay. He scanned the corridor and saw a low doorway at the end of the hall, so low it seemed child-size. There were doors like that leading off the balconies of the Nikolaikirche. They led to back stairwells that enabled clergy and sextons to navigate the church quietly and unobtrusively. The knob didn’t turn, but there was no keyhole either, and it had a familiar feel. Harris lifted the knob and raised the door slightly, over a catch. It slid smoothly to the right on a runner—a clever ecclesiastical design that allowed quick access with a minimum of key rattling during services. A rush of cool, musty air hit him. Harris was blind at first, but it didn’t take long for his eyes to adjust to the small amount of light let in by the narrow, slotlike window set high in the tower wall. Spiral stairs led down; above, a ladder ascended in darkness to the belfry. Harris left footprints in the dust on the treads and kicked up divots of matted dust as he tiptoed his way down, around and around.

Undertoe had indeed also received an ill-timed subvocal suggestion from Piker. If both men had followed Piker’s guidance, they certainly would have met on the stair. But Undertoe was too ornery to respond to Piker’s urgings. He fought the uncontrollable twitching in his legs and the confusing impulse to leave the building, which seemed bafflingly, for all the world, to come from himself, although he knew he wanted to stay. He looked around as the music swelled and thought about who was there and why. It occurred to him there were an awful lot of former newsboys there, other men whose faces were vaguely familiar from the Five Points, men with knife scars and no jobs. Had they all been in the choir? Was that how they knew Mrs. Dolan? Then he noticed another face, just across from him, that was curiously familiar. He wasn’t a Five Points native or an ex-newsboy, of that Undertoe was fairly certain. He was agitated, and his skin was crawling, and his ears were ringing. He was feeling pretty awful, really, and wondered if that meat pie had been bad. What was it that was keeping him from placing the man’s face? He had seen him somewhere before. He took a couple of deep breaths and then reached down to rake an unquellable itch on his ankle. As he leaned down into the darkness, the man’s face materialized for him. Those black eyes, that beard. If only he could see him from another angle, he was sure he’d have known who he was. He sat back up and looked over to examine his face again.

Harris was just standing up, and as he navigated the aisle his jaw was briefly obscured by a lady’s hat. Undertoe blinked in astonishment. He had it: The beard was new. But the rest of it—the nose and the black eyes and the broad, bulging brow—all belonged to George the Torch Geiermeier, alias Will Williams, the elusive dupe who’d caused him so much trouble. Undertoe forgot his queasiness and the death of Mother Dolan entirely. A thrill was surging through him. Finding George Geiermeier could turn his fortunes entirely around. It could bring him back into favor with the cops and earn him a pile of money. Above all, it would give him a chance at payback. He had much to be paid for: the humiliation of looking like a fool in front of Lieutenant Jones, the unsporting way he had been rolled and drugged and set up and sent upriver, a crime for which he was now more certain than ever that the stableman was responsible. But then another shiver of recognition went through him: If the German stableman was at Mother Dolan’s funeral, then he must somehow be in cahoots with Johnny Dolan. Were they both to blame for doping him and getting him locked up? He touched the knife in his ankle holster and then stood up. He also looked around the room with fresh eyes, searching for familiar faces, that bathroom attendant, that elusive guy from the Bowery. Were they all in on it then, that whole lame group of guys that drank at the Morgue and called themselves the Whyos? The face that surprised him was the Jimster’s. He had no reason to be there, none at all, not unless he was with them, too.

Undertoe felt a wave of nausea—partly his own horror, but partly what the Whyos were doing to him. Piker had seen him notice Harris and realized the blunder. Now he was using every power he had to keep Undertoe seated. But Undertoe had at last realized that the Whyos were something larger than he’d thought. He realized he was deep in hostile terrain. Beatrice had been watching him and working on him, too. She saw the moment when his face changed.
Goddamnit,
she thought, he had identified Harris. He was peering around the room with a panicked air. How much else did he know? They were going to have to do something about him and fast, but the priest was just taking the pulpit. Now was a very bad time.

Undertoe broke free of their control and left his seat. He felt the saliva flowing fast, and he doubted he could contain the contents of his stomach till he got outside.
That Goddamned meat pie,
he thought, though in truth the pie was innocent. His gut heaved as he galloped down the stairs and into the entryway. Just outside the church doors, he spit up some sour flecks of bread and chum. His gut was writhing, and he knew he had probably lost the trail of Geiermeier for the moment, but dry heaves and bile were nothing in the face of Undertoe’s rising glee, the pleasure and power of understanding. Undertoe took some trouble to walk the streets surrounding the church on the off chance of finding Geiermeier again, but he had no luck. He was in a fine temper nonetheless. Now that he knew the guy was still in New York and in the Whyo circle and wore a beard, and now that he’d realized the Whyos were up to more than met the eye, he was confident he would find him again without much trouble. On a deserted street, a few minutes south of the church, he actually stepped over a passed-out drunk of the sort he was famous for prematurely putting down. He had no desire to gut him at all—he was in too good a mood. Beatrice had hastily sent a Why Not out to follow him, but he didn’t do much, and she didn’t learn anything. Everything of interest with regard to Luther Undertoe was going on inside his skull.

Harris, meanwhile, hadn’t left the building after all. From the stairwell, he found a passageway that led back behind the altar, and once he determined that Undertoe hadn’t followed him and no one was after him, he allowed himself to listen to the funeral mass from there. The acoustics were such that the collective murmur of the churchful of voices reverberated through his body, and he found the sensation greatly soothing. Not being able to see made it only more so. After the recessional had ended, he waited almost an hour, just to be sure he wouldn’t see anyone he ought not to, and then left the church through a back exit, life and limb quite intact, at least for the time being.

30.

THE LIONESS

B
eatrice gave Johnny a fried egg on a biscuit and a boilermaker when they got home from the funeral. He ate and drank with his shoulders stooped, ignoring a thin mix of mucus and tears that was dripping from his nose. He was still like that an hour later, when she pulled off his clothes and led him to bed. She was too weary to cry, herself. The funeral had very nearly been a disaster. She could have killed Harris for coming, and yet it had been the only bright instant in the day when she looked up and saw him. If only he could have managed to be there in a way less likely to get himself hanged and all of them locked up. But then, she thought, he wouldn’t have been Harris.

Johnny called her over to him some time later and asked her to lie beside him. She put her arms around him as he cried, and somewhat to her amazement she finally did, too, very quietly. It had been grotesque, the explosion, unreal, even more so in the context of meeting Harris on the pier. She cried for any number of reasons, not just for Mother Dolan’s death, not least because she was left with Johnny as her husband while the one person who had wanted them married was gone. Finally, he fell asleep, but she lay awake a long time, horrified, hating her life, wondering how she’d come to this. She’d started out with the best intentions, hadn’t she? Even when she’d joined the Why Nots, she had been thinking of Padric above all.

She had sent more than enough money back for him to join her by now, but he gave it all to the Fenians, the Nationalists, Parnell. When she’d sent a ticket instead of money once, he’d sold it back to the steamship line at a loss. Recently, he’d written to her to say that he was a patriot and he was never coming over. She was alone. And the justification she had given herself for leading the life she did was gone. She let her mind wander to their mum, knowing she had let her down. She hadn’t had much of a life, really—just thirty years, too short to raise her children right. Her da got a little longer, but he was more of a barfly than a homebody. She and Padric had been alone a lot at the end. It had seemed the best chance for both of them, after Da died, for her to use every last dime of their money for the passage across the Atlantic. She’d felt guilty, but she’d thought Padric would be following her soon. Instead, the cousins who took him in had dumped Padric with the Catholic brothers soon thereafter, and then in America money was harder to come by and life more expensive than she could have imagined. By the time she had the money, Padric had committed himself to his cause.

America was what her parents had left her, she thought—the insurance money, the pin. She had invested their legacy the best she knew how, but they wouldn’t have been happy with the results. She had split up with her brother. She had taken up with criminals. She
was
a criminal. It wasn’t anyone’s American dream. The only thing about her life her mother would have approved of was that she was married at last, though that was a sham. Still, it was all she had. She slipped her arms around Johnny Dolan, her husband, and tried to sleep. She told herself that she would find a way, that there was hope.

It was bright outside when Beatrice sat up again. She heard bells tolling in the two nearby church towers—the Catholic one was always just a few seconds later than the Lutheran, and so there was a kind of echo to the time. She counted the strokes: twelve. She shook Johnny awake.

“The report, Johnny. It’s noon. It’s Tuesday. You’ve got to get up and do the report or people’re going to wonder.”

He opened an eye and closed it, then just lay there flat on his back and breathed. He didn’t speak. Beatrice went and brewed a pot of tea and brought it to him, but he ignored her. Such grief was to be expected in a normal man. But this was Johnny Dolan, the boss. There was a gang to run. It wouldn’t take long for the entire system to crumble if the accounts weren’t logged and the take collected and disbursed. But Beatrice couldn’t do it herself.

“Johnny,” she urged.

“Leave me alone.”

“You can’t sleep this off like a hangover. There’s a lot of people working for you, and you’re not going to stay their boss for long if you act like this.”

After a long time, he propped himself up on his elbows. He looked awful.

“I can do the books for you, Johnny, but you have to talk to them. You’re the one with the voice.”

“I told you once that she covered for me.”

So it was his mother who’d covered for him—and given him the broken nose.

“No,” she said. “You never told me that. Not that it was her. You only told me that someone did.”

“She did it more than once.”

“What are you saying?” Beatrice was trying to picture Mother Dolan whyoing in Johnny’s voice, and to her surprise, she could: She was his mother, she had taught him to sing, he had her throat.

“Just what I said. It was really her gig. Sharing the profits, the secret codes, all that. Everything. I don’t really give a shit about any of it anymore. We’ve got enough money.”

Beatrice felt light-headed, as if she were seeing him from a distance. It was suddenly so obvious and yet totally shocking: The whole Five Points commune idea, the whole vision of the Whyos in the era since Googy Corcoran had not been Johnny’s, had never been Johnny’s. That wasn’t the kind of guy he was.

“All right, Johnny,” she said, struggling not to show her alarm. She had to find a way to keep Johnny from ruining it all, not just for her but for all of them, especially the girls. Then she thought of Harris, and it occurred to her the dissolution of the Whyos wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. It might even be better. But it wouldn’t be so easy for her, it wouldn’t be over. She wouldn’t just be free, and it wouldn’t be as simple as the gang and all it entailed vanishing overnight. There would be knife fights, turf battles, pistols fired, old feuds resumed, unfinished business to conclude. If Johnny wasn’t boss, someone else would be, at least for a while. What would her status be then? And what about her girls? A post-Dolan gang wasn’t likely to maintain such progressive policies regarding the Why Nots for long. And on the other hand, unbreakable vows would not be lightly dissolved. Nobody would want anybody who knew what the gang had done going straight. “But you can’t let the whole system collapse just because you’re not interested anymore. It’s a responsibility. Teach someone else how to run it, then you can retire. But don’t let it end just because your mother’s dead.”

He got out of bed, and at first she was encouraged; then he lunged for her. He struck the side of her head, not powerfully, but she was off guard. She stumbled and fell against the bedstead. She touched the underside of her chin and found a wet, numb flap. Her fingers were smudged red.

“Don’t ever say that, Beanie. Don’t say
dead.
I don’t like that word.”

He sounded full of rage, and she gathered herself as quickly as she could, not knowing how bad this might get. Just in case, she wanted to have something to defend herself with, something like a poker. Her knife was all the way across the room, in the drawer by the bed, inaccessible. A brass-handled walking stick in the corner was the nearest weapon. Her mind filled with dark visions of both the future and the next few minutes—how the Whyos would collapse, how she would leap up and grab for the cane and strike—but then Johnny knelt down and spoke softly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do that. I need you, as much as I needed Mother. It’s only, just don’t say anything disrespectful, all right?”

“It’s not disrespect, Johnny. I couldn’t be sorrier. But she
is
dea—”

He grabbed her by the face before she could finish the word, his fingers pinching her nose and his palm across her lips. She could feel the ripped flap of skin under her chin being stretched painfully as he turned her face to his. But the thing that mattered was the lack of breath. She felt her eyes bug, her face turn red. She struggled, but he squeezed so hard in response that she quit resisting.

He spoke slowly. Clearly, he wasn’t going to let her draw a breath until he’d said his piece. “I know she’s gone. I know it too well. But I won’t have it put crudely, not that way. You will say
she is in Heaven
or
she passed away
if you must mention it at all, which I wish you wouldn’t.”

It almost made her happy, hating him. Partly it was just the delirium of hypoxia, but it was also true that his threatening manner, his irrationality and his violence all triggered the same awful thrill she’d had down at the Bowery that first night. He was still a nasty gangster, despite crying for his dead mother, and there was something terribly erotic about that. When he let go, she fell back gasping, but then, as soon as she’d caught her breath, she turned angry. She wheeled herself around toward him, arm cocked, wanting to get a return blow in even if it meant he broke her nose in response, but then her arm floated back down to her side. He had crumpled again, collapsed like a pudding from the oven. His shoulders were hunched, and he rubbed his eyes like a child. She squinted at him, weighing pity and caution against practical concerns.

“What you’re going to do, Johnny,” she said, “is just a sort of minimal check-in tonight, not a full report, which should be fine, considering. But you have to do something. We’ll figure it out from there.”

A little while later, he actually went over to the window, took a deep breath and began to whistle and warble and sing bits of songs—it was the signature call he used to begin the report, but he wasn’t projecting much at all. No one would be able to hear it more than a block away. Then his breath failed entirely.

“I can’t,” he said. “We were going to train you to do it. We should have done that.”

“Well, train me now. It’s her legacy—you have to keep it up somehow.” To Beanie, it was much more than Mrs. Dolan’s legacy; it was two dozen girls’ freedom.

“All right.” He was a wreck, but not as pathetic as she’d thought.

Everyone in the gang thought Johnny’s voice was special, uniquely capable of switching keys and jumping octaves rapidly, creating complex messages in counterpoint. Now she learned it wasn’t really his voice that was the key. It was an extra layer of hidden meaning embedded within the common vocabulary of whyoing. Mrs. Dolan had been the private voice coach of every new initiate, and she’d trained them like the sheepdogs that were her inspiration: to perform flawlessly without ever knowing the larger picture. Johnny was the front man, but the problem was that Johnny hadn’t ever entirely mastered his mother’s repertoire. He had always let her prompt him, coach him, and he couldn’t do it alone. On the streets he might be king, but the bookkeeping, the accounts and the complex personal codes she’d devised were all her bailiwick.

“Did she keep a record of any sort, with notes about the codes?”

She did, and they found it, which meant they had something to fall back on.

“You know the script better than you think, I’d guess,” she said. She hoped so anyway. “The rest we’ll figure out. But what about Maggie the Dove? Does she know? Or Piker? Isn’t there anyone else who can help?” She was really thinking,
Who else knows? Is there a rival out there, a challenger?

“Maggie never did have the mind for it—or the voice. She’s just a beautiful, wonderful whore, not a schemer. And mother wouldn’t hear of bringing Piker in.”

And so Johnny roused himself sufficiently to start the check-in. They went out onto the terrace and he made contact with the gang, all the while looking things up in the ledger to double-check the notes and stopping to explain to Beanie what it all meant. He did know it, in a muscle-memory way, and the ledger contained enough information to remind him of the things his mother used to think of for him. But clearly he didn’t like doing it alone—that is, with Beatrice rather than his mother. For some of the easier signals, he had her practice quietly till she got it right, and then she called it out herself. She was a quick study. Her ear was good.

That night, people said Johnny sounded awful (and whether it was Johnny or Beatrice imitating him, they were right), but the performance was written off to grief. Within a week, Beatrice was pretty much there, vocally. He had to prompt her on the scripts, the codes, what to sing or whistle or say, and they both did a lot of scrambling though the codebook. More difficult calls she practiced first in the tiled bathroom, which was mostly soundproof. It soon became clear that Beatrice both had the voice for it and excelled at the mnemonic acrobatics required. Within a couple of weeks, her imitation of Johnny was nearly flawless. The last thing he taught her was about the existence of a double accounting system. There were extra rounds of calculations she’d never been privy to before, leaving the Dolan take considerably higher than anyone had ever guessed. The collective wasn’t half as egalitarian as it had seemed. The excess was kept in a couple of hidden cabinets in his mother’s apartment, as well as in safe-deposit boxes at different banks around the city. She didn’t approve of it, but she reveled in the feeling of control and the completeness of her knowledge.

For Johnny, the ascension of Beatrice to his mother’s role meant he could focus on lying on the couch and drinking rye, which were the only things he really cared about anymore. For two weeks, he barely left the apartment nor let anyone but her into it, not even Piker Ryan. She struggled to come up with excuses that somehow would not compromise his leadership, but people were talking, doubting him. Finally, she told him he had to make an appearance.

She helped him on with his suit and matching armband and ascot of black watered silk. Then she slicked back his hair with a dollop of pomade. He took a cane from the umbrella stand and a large swig of gin as a booster. He was pale as the moon and his eyes were as red as his lips, giving him a rather vampiric air. His temper was foul and short. He terrorized the Five Points that evening, brandishing his cane, growling at people who stammered their condolences and breaking a couple of noses. Then he went and drank himself numb at the Morgue, and Piker Ryan had to carry him home. After that, people said maybe it’d be better if he didn’t come out again before he was ready.