Metropolis (4 page)

5.

TO SQUAT SAVES THE BACK

H
is luck had turned again. In fact, he realized, it had turned for the better several hours, maybe even days, before. He’d only failed to notice it, by failing to hear his name when it was called. It was a lesson he told himself to keep in mind. Now he had to get to work, but where on such a night could a man who knew no one in the whole metropolis find a handful of able-bodied men? He had no idea. It didn’t matter. He would find them.

His employer was the city itself, a curious idea to him. He was to hand his documents over to the night manager at the Street Cleaning office, once he had his men—if he could assemble twenty men. The street was entirely depopulated. The city was shut down, which was at once his problem and his opportunity. Clearly he wouldn’t have gotten this job if the storm hadn’t worsened, if he hadn’t been the last man there. And yet his assignment was made difficult by the very fact that there was no one abroad. He wished he knew where to find the men from Barnum’s, even the ones who’d let him sleep while the stable burned, the ones who now suspected him. They would all be out of work, too, and needing money. He imagined being in a position to offer them work—to offer them anything, really—and wondered what it would take, exactly, to convert the weak bond of acquaintance he had with them into something stronger. But none of them had been forthcoming enough before the fire for him to know where they lived, much less where they might hole up to drink for the night. He thought of the thin German, the one with the beautiful voice, and the odd look he’d gotten from him when he saw him up at Barnum’s. His name was something like Ludwig, if he remembered correctly. What he would have given, just then, for a conversation in German. Now and then he heard a female voice speaking German on the street, and he thought of Maria. If only he knew where to look for her. He had thought about going to a German church and asking, but he remembered that she wasn’t religious as far as he knew. He hadn’t the slightest notion where to start.

He told himself to concentrate. He was an American now, his name was Williams. There was no point searching for people in his past. He was starting over, again. He had problems to solve in the present, like how to clear himself of the arson charges and how to do this job he’d been given. To start with, he would comb the streets for as long as it took to find twenty men.

Half an hour later, he’d seen no one remotely likely to join a shoveling crew—just a gentleman in a top hat and a couple of girls out late playing in the snow. Little did he guess that the girls weren’t really having a snowball fight—Beatrice and Fiona had been watching him since he showed up at the scene of the crime, monitoring everything he did. They’d found out about his new name almost as soon as he’d gotten it, but to them he was still Geiermeier. He wasn’t in the least sure about his name himself. He had long since given up his real name, but suddenly the thought of his new name—his
two
new names—appalled him. If the police caught up to him again, they would surely see all this name changing as a further sign of guilt. Could a clerk in a hiring office give him an entirely new name, just like that? Was it legal? America was an insane place, he felt, a place with no sense of history or past, and it dawned on him that he still did take some pride in being a doctor’s son, after all, even a down-and-out, disinherited one. At home, he had at least been secure in knowing himself to be a person of a certain class, with a certain education—truncated, yes, but he’d studied Latin, French and English. Even on his uncle’s farm, where he’d been treated so unkindly, his education and his father’s social position had bought him a certain respect. The clerk who’d named him couldn’t make out the letters of the German Gothic alphabet
—Greek,
he’d said!
Chinese!
The stableman’s Gothic script was elegant and flawless, he knew, but here everything was upside down. What was once an asset had become a liability.

He made his way up Broadway in the general direction of Mott Street, thinking that at least there were sure to be men needing work at the flophouse, if not the fittest specimens. The wind had died, and it was cold and quiet on the street; even when a horse and carriage struggled past him through the drifts, the only sounds were those of the jingling harness and the creaking springs. He walked in the middle of the street where the sparse traffic had somewhat dispersed the heavy snow. Then he turned the corner and spotted a group of figures emerging from a basement door in a cloud of smoke, hot air and laughter. There was a saloon on the lower level, he saw—Billy’s, it was called. He must have passed it before but had never noticed the place.

A saloon might not be the best place to find workers, he thought, as he ventured across the street toward the doorway, but it was surely a place to find men and quite possibly a better one than an opium den. He heaved open the door. It was actually hot inside, and noisy and crowded. His cold cheeks flushed, and he took in a deep breath redolent of old sweat and sour beer. He paused there in the threshold at the sight of the barkeep, who cocked his head at him, asking in gesture what he would have. But the man whose name was now Will Williams had no money, none at all—not even enough to buy a single glass of beer—and thus, he knew, he had no right to enter.

To hesitate on the doorstep of a warm locale on such a night, to hold the door open and let in the cold air while the hot flies out—such actions can only detract from one’s welcome. There was a chorus of shouts
—“Close that door, you fricken idget! In or out!”—
but he was pleased to see so many potential shovelers. Dozens and dozens of men, most still wearing their hats, stood at the bar or sat on stools or leaned against the columns down the middle of the room. Off in the corners, they crouched in small groups and threw dice. And toward the back, a few women in fancy bonnets and bright-colored dresses stood out amidst all the black and brown. Will Williams smiled at the sight of them all as the warm air rushed past him and out the open door.

The bartender, Billy himself, wiped his fingers on his white apron and said, “Leave then, why don’t you, if you ain’t comin’ in!”

But instead, Will Williams shut the door behind him. He looked around the barroom, surveying the population, groping for a strategy. He ought simply to have slipped to the rear of the room and quietly inquired if anyone sought a job for the night. He would have gotten takers. But it was too late for that.

“All right then, now that you’ve ventilated the joint for us,
what’ll you have
?”

He couldn’t very well say
Nothing, thank you
without being evicted. His odd silence was almost as bad, but as a result of it the hubbub in the room quieted down a bit and nearly every pair of eyes glanced toward the door.

“Listen, men!” he said, surprising himself. His voice sounded strong. He felt as if he were standing on a pulpit, and he started to preach: “I’m not here to drink. I have one offer to make! I have twenty jobs for twenty men—shoveling the snow for good hourly wages. You’ll be working for the city. I have all the paperwork to hire an emergency crew. I’m looking for men who want work tonight!”

Billy went purple—this guy was doing his best to rob him of his customers—and then he came out from behind the bar, white apron flying. The stableman backed up to the door. No one had risen in response to his announcement, and now Billy was plowing his way through the crowd toward him, but this was his only chance; he seized it. “The first twenty men to meet me at Coffee House Slip will have paying work this night!” he shouted, even as he half tumbled onto the street. He slammed the door behind him just an instant before Billy would have wrapped his fingers around his throat.

On the street, once he realized the bartender wasn’t going to chase him down, he felt a thrill rush through him. Even if he hadn’t drummed up a single worker, seeing that crowded barroom had given him an idea: He would walk over to the Bowery, where there were countless bars. From here on out, though, he’d be a little more subtle about his pitch. He would stop at as many places as it took until he’d gathered a crew.

He’d only gone a half block when he heard the door of Billy’s bang open again. He glanced back and saw several men moving quickly in his direction, coats flapping open in the wind. The snow was still so thick that their brims were trimmed in white in just a few seconds. He kept walking, looking backward. Were they hoping to take up his offer of work or to carry out the wishes of the barman? He heard a shout and saw a couple of waving hands. As he watched, more emerged, running to catch up to the others. Then another cluster of overcoats stepped out into the snow. If they were angry, he was in trouble, but it looked like they were with him, in which case, he was set—there were nearly twenty already.

He kept walking, slowly, doing his best to project a feeling of confidence, and the men kept coming toward him. It worked. Despite his unimpressive dress and his foreign voice, they came to him like supplicants. He had offered money for work, no commitment, no questions asked. There were more than twenty. The bar had been full of men needing exactly what he offered, men who’d been laid off that day because of weather or earlier on other grounds, men who’d drunk up their wages, men with too many children, men who were broke or unreliable in a dozen ways. Now, on the sidewalk, they jostled one another jockeying for position, and an unanticipated problem occurred to Will: How would he decide among them? He could try to weed out the drunkest ones, or ask who had children at home and favor them. But when he looked at them, they seemed a small group in the wide, snow-filled expanse of street. The clerk had said
say, twenty,
but he guessed that if the people who’d hired him had any sense, they’d appreciate every man who could wield a shovel.

“Follow me!” And he started off.

In his pocket was the piece of paper referring him to the street-cleaning authority of the City Inspector’s Office. He had no name, and only a vague idea of where Coffee House Slip was, but the men seemed to know where to go, and they steered him from behind like a rudder, south to Wall Street, east to the river, and then toward the one office with windows still aglow. When he turned to look at them, before he went in, he could no longer count how many men there were. Perhaps twice the number he’d had with him outside Billy’s. He felt power and a tinge of anxiety. All those pairs of eyes. As long as they’d followed him, he was Moses, but the thread of his control was thin. If it broke, they could turn in an instant from herd to angry mob.

He gathered himself and barked out, “Make a line! Anyone not in the line when I come back won’t be taken on.” He entered the building.

“What the heck’s going on out there?” asked the man at the desk.

“I was sent by the city hiring office to find some men—to shovel the snow.” His accent made it obvious where he was from, but he spoke calmly, which was remarkable. He wasn’t calm at all. He felt he was on a ledge, on the verge of something either very good or very humiliating. “They said you wanted twenty, but I found more. With such a weather, I thought maybe more is better.” He pulled out the papers.

A grunt slipped from the old man’s lips. It was very warm in the office, and Will found he was dripping with melting snow.

“Well, sir, I’m amazed,” the old man said. “You certainly found some men, all right—I thought it was a riot. I was starting to figure there was no one left over at the hiring office by the time they got the order. I was just about to send over to the Tombs, but that wouldn’ta been till tomorrow because jailbirds, they don’t work at night. Public safety, you know—so, it warn’t the ideal situation. How many you got out there, anyhow?”

“I don’t know. They kept joining up with me all the way here. Quite a number.”

“Well, like you say, the more the better. The first job’s to free up the Broadway streetcar tracks. It’d be almost a miracle if we got it clear up to Chambers Street tonight. All right, I’ll tell you how we’ll do this.” The old man handed Will a clipboard and a large, blunt pencil, and together they walked outside where they encountered the implausibly orderly line that had taken shape in the dockyard. To Will’s surprise, there were a couple of familiar faces in the line. He’d happened to stumble into the bar that some of the stablehands frequented. He got a couple of curious looks, a couple of scowls and one warm greeting.

“Hello again,” said the blond man he remembered from the stable.
Not Ludwig,
he thought, now that he got a look at him, and not a nice-looking face, either. His eyes were small and pink-rimmed, and the skin around his neck was at once flaky, oily and inflamed. Maybe his name was Martin? Considering that they had never exactly been friendly, it was odd the way the man now reached out and grasped his hand.

“I was glad to see you made it out of there the other night,” he said.

Out of there? Out of where? The Tombs? Barnum’s? Who was this guy exactly, and why was he suddenly making overtures? Quite frankly Will would have been inclined to warm to any such gesture on a normal day. But then it occurred to him that he had a twofold problem: First, he didn’t trust him; second, this Martin Ludwig knew him as Geiermeier. It wouldn’t look good if the night manager found out
Williams
was an alias. He stepped back, nodded and moved to the next man, though he listened while the manager took this one’s name. He’d been pretty close—it wasn’t Martin, not Ludwig, but
Luther.
Luther Undertoe. Just seeing the name made the hackles on the back of his neck go up. He wasn’t sure why, but he filed the feeling away and then continued reviewing the names.

They signed up the men in teams of ten, one horse and cart to a team, one shovel to a man, one team to each cross street from Wall to Reade. The first job of all was to clear Broadway all the way down to the streetcar tracks. After that, the crews would work east, then west, if they got to it. When the orders had all been given and the men were ready to set out, the old man looked down at Will’s paper once more and then directly into his eyes.