Metropolis (5 page)

“Well, Mr. Williams, it says here you’re the foreman, which means you’re responsible for all that property—shovels, horses and carts. I’m aware you been out of work yourself, from this referral, and that you just picked these men off the street and can’t speak for their characters, so keep an eye out, eh?”

Responsibility. This was the opposite of being an able-bodied laborer, and he was more than ready for it. He nodded, then shouted instructions to the drivers and hopped up onto the front of a cart. The going was slow through the snowy streets, but at last they reached Broadway and Wall. He looked north and south and watched the men plod through the snow beside the carts. The driver got down from his bench, and the stableman-turned-foreman was on the verge of doing so, too, but he paused. He was the foreman, not a laborer. He didn’t really like the idea of just watching other men work; he felt he ought to jump down and work alongside them; but it would hardly be possible with his hands as they were. The newly healed skin would quickly tear. He could never keep up.

Then he thought of his impromptu pulpit back at the bar. He thought of the pastor in the church in Fürth and the way his uncle had marshaled groups of hired hands to bring in the hay in the fall. Speech was a different kind of power from brawn. In every group, there was someone whose job was to talk to the others, to rouse them, to goad them. He’d gotten a taste of that back at Billy’s.
He was the foreman—
the papers in his pocket said so. He looked out at the men in their dark clothes, leaning halfheartedly into their shovels, then wrenching up and flinging loads of snow in all directions. There wasn’t much to say about shoveling snow. He’d done enough of it to know that.

Snow came early and fell heavy in Fürth. It held the whole world in a state of crystal beauty for a good five months, and the only means of travel from Wittold and Hedwig Diespeck’s farm to town was the sleigh with its shiny metal runners and tatty bearskin lap blanket. Deep drifts gathered quickly, and when the wind was from the south snow would fill the entire yard and barricade the doors to the barn. Then he and his uncle would boost his youngest cousin up to the hayloft window to feed the cows, while the rest of the family worked to free up the doors to let the animals out to water at the trough by the well. His uncle took frequent leisurely breaks to admire their progress and smoke his pipe while he and his sister, Lottie, and Tante Hedwig and the cousins grunted and sweated and shivered, all at once. He remembered one snowbound morning in Fürth when Tante Hedwig had been especially peeved. “Get back to work yourself, Wittold, you lazy man!” she’d demanded, and Uncle Wittold did so, but not before dispensing a piece of advice that made the work go easier and faster both, advice no one asked for and no one thanked him for, except in taking it, advice that Will Williams, fugitive from Europe, suspected arsonist and foreman, repeated now for the benefit of his crew:

“Remember, to squat saves the back, men—bend at the knees, not the waist!”

The crunch of metal blades was dull. Their shovels had not yet rung against the cobbles, but the snowfall seemed lighter already and the air less raw, perhaps from the slight added warmth of so many men beginning to sweat.

“You there! Squat!” he called. “It’s a long night. And throw it in the cart.” But he found he couldn’t give the order without earning his authority. His uncle had shoveled, too, after all, if not a lot. And so he jumped from the cart into a soft, white drift and bent at the knees himself. His hands would be good for a couple of minutes before the new pink skin blistered and tore.
To squat,
he crouched and buried his blade in the snow.
Saves,
grunt, he gripped the handle of his shovel as lightly as he could.
The back,
his legs lengthened, and snow flew. A few drops of blood and fluid leaked from his blisters into the cotton lining of his gloves. He gritted his teeth but did not permit himself to grimace. The load landed cleanly on the boards. Then there were ten thuds as the crew’s ten shovelfuls hit home.

“That’s the way,” he said.

To squat saves the back,
thwack,
to squat saves the back.

6.

LA VITA NUOVA

P
eople were looking at him, up to him even, and with respect, not derision. But beware what you wish for.

For it wasn’t just the men on his crew. Beatrice saw him and stared, and her interest was not benign. He had no idea of it, but she was there, in the shadows, everywhere he went that night, watching.

When she’d informed her boss, a man with ax blades embedded in his boot soles, about Geiermeier’s latest activities, he said to keep the tail up all night, to find out just what the guy was up to.

“Aw, Johnny. It’s freezing. Fiona and I have been on him all day already. Put someone else on him, why don’t you?”

“No, I don’t think so. He’s your project. You’ve got an understanding for how he operates, and I don’t want to lose track of him, so you’re stuck with the job. Go on then. I want to know what he’s up to by tomorrow morning.”

She had to admit, she’d taken the initiative on Geiermeier. The other problem was she’d gotten Fiona into it, too. Fiona was not going to be happy to hear their tour of duty had been extended. Beatrice would have to convince her that there were opportunities here—to earn some extra cash and, above all, to gain the boss’s favor.

It was worth a good deal to have Johnny on your side. When he was happy, he could be generous; when he wasn’t, people suffered. He ruled the Whyo gang with a strong hand, a well-conceived master plan and a mixture of charisma and violence. Together, it worked. He’d been the uncontested boss for over five years in a city where gangsters more often had short, explosive careers.
Dandy Johnny
he was called, on account of his white teeth, red lips and how dapper he always looked, even after a fistfight or a drinking binge or a night in jail—and no one laughed at it. His dark hair was slicked back with gleaming oil, his ice-blue eyes flashed, his smile came easy. Then, too, he did love clothes—elegant clothes, the clothes of a gentleman. Johnny dressed better for housebreaking than some men did for the opera, and it wasn’t just for vanity: His grooming had helped him walk away from more than one crime scene unnoticed. No, the boss was no ponce, flashy ascots and lavish use of pomade notwithstanding. He’d killed at least a dozen men and never even come under suspicion. And thanks to him the gang he led was more powerful and safer to be in than any other gang. Whyos almost never got arrested—they looked out for one another on the streets—and Johnny had earned their loyalty by spreading the wealth around more fairly than any other boss in New York.

The Whyos were a very good gang to be in, if you were going to be in a gang. They’d gotten their name decades before, from a queer call the first boys who banded together had used to communicate with one another from down the block or across the street. Sometimes it was actually
why-oo
or
who-woop
or
hey-oh—
each variation of the call had a different connotation—but
whyo
was the broadest and most essential term, being used to convey assent and greeting and to time an attack, just before converging on a victim. The whole thing amounted to a kind of song, which came to be known as whyoing. Over the years, the gang had refined those early calls to something approaching a language. A girl gang had eventually been formed within the gang, consisting mostly of sisters and girlfriends of the Whyos, but this was no ladies’ auxiliary. They spoke the language and did their share of the work, too. Our hot-corn girl, Beatrice, and her friend Fiona were Why Nots, and they’d been keeping tabs on the stableman pretty much continuously for the week since the fire. They’d missed his release from the Tombs but then they caught sight of him again back at the museum, giving his silent signal to Undertoe. It was odd, that, Beatrice thought—the two were obviously still working together, despite the fact that Undertoe had turned him in to the cops. It was apparently a complicated scheme they had going. She couldn’t guess exactly what it was, but clearly her man was skilled at playing roles, and she was impressed. He was operating in a manner so subtle and unexpected, with such a good cover, that his stealth rivaled the stealth of the gang that was watching him.

She knew Johnny would want a man like that either in the gang or dead—and certainly not working for Undertoe. Undertoe was a nothing compared to Johnny and the Whyos, but he was a prime snake. The way she saw it, Geiermeier’s main problem was that he was new in town, didn’t know the right people and consequently trusted Undertoe too much. He should have seen a double cross coming. The previous night, she’d tailed him from the hiring office back to a Chinese flophouse and spent a night on an upper bunk, scratching flea bites and watching the stableman sleep. He seemed so innocent, the way he snored, but there was no mistaking him. He was a contract firebug, was the word on the street, a new talent just arrived from overseas. The Whyos didn’t do fires for money—they preferred subtler schemes—but he had talent, unorthodox methods and a certain brazenness that she knew Johnny would appreciate.

The day of the snowstorm she’d been expecting her man to go back from the hiring office to the flop, and judging by his pace through the knee-deep drifts, she’d decided she could risk letting him out of her sight for a minute to warm up by ducking into Billy’s. She was confident that she could track him down again if he wandered off, and also that he was unaware of being followed, which set her up nicely to be flabbergasted when he blundered into Billy’s himself. She had been sitting at the far end of the bar, nursing a hot lemon-gin, and she nearly choked on it when she saw him. Had he seen her after all? Had he seen who-all else was there, including Luther Undertoe? Or was he
still
oblivious to the setup? Did he have some plan of his own? Then he’d started his spiel from the doorway.
So much for warming up,
she thought, gulping the rest of her gin and slapping a coin on the counter. She rose to follow the crowd of job seekers out the door.

“What, you, too, Beanie?
You’re
going to shovel snow?” said Billy. That was what they called her on the street: Beanie. Everyone had a nickname.

She’d just laughed and trailed the crowd to Coffee House Slip, waited in the shadows, taking note of the faces in the crowd, making sure they—especially Undertoe—didn’t see her. Then she followed Geiermeier to Wall Street, where he set his gang shoveling. Oddly enough, he really was doing the job, even throwing a few shovelfuls of snow himself, though it seemed to her he’d more than succeeded in creating a bluff without actually having to bother. As he headed off alone down Broadway to check on the work at the next intersection, she was thinking he really was just some dupe, some fool. Then he hailed the group of shovelers with a shout, and dammit, there was Undertoe again, stepping forward. She wasn’t sure what they were up to, yet, but the situation seemed worthy of reporting to Johnny in person. She needed Fiona.

She stepped into a doorway and began to whistle—a strange cooing-pigeon song that at once stood out from and blended in with the sounds of the night. A minute later, she heard the owl screech that told her Fiona was in earshot and would take the watch. Then she headed over to a Whyo bar called the Morgue, wondering whether Johnny would be pleased with what she’d learned or annoyed that she hadn’t yet made contact with her mark. Certainly the situation had just grown more complicated. It was illogical, improbable, this shoveling gambit—as was the entire way the man worked. But she was also starting to admire him: He’d thwarted her ability to direct people’s attention where she wanted it and make them do exactly as she bid.

He was thinking of a different girl as he watched over his men, Maria of the
Leibnitz.
He thought of her more often than she warranted, that girl. But there was something about her that drew him. Possibly it was physical—her strong arms, narrow waist, flared nostrils, pale skin—but in another sense it wasn’t about her. She was a woman who’d survived the disease his mother had succumbed to, as he had survived it. Dreaming of her blurred easily into a dream in which his mother still lived.

But whyever the stableman thought of Maria, it wasn’t mutual. She didn’t think of him, ever, especially not then, when she happened to be busy lavishing saliva on the nethers of a Pennsylvania anthracite merchant. She’d found a way to survive in the metropolis, but at considerable cost. She’d do pretty much anything, Maria—not because she liked it, mind you, but for a small extra fee. She strove to please her customers and expected ample payment in return. Maria thought of various things, to keep her mind off the chafing and the ludicrous obscenities of her clients: a pudding in the pie safe, a pair of boots she wanted, the warm loft above the kitchen of the squalid little house she’d grown up in, where she used to lie among the drying roots and herbs and daydream for hours. She was not nostalgic, Maria, not in general—it was only that she needed something to distract her while she worked. Certainly she didn’t spend her time reliving the voyage of the
Leibnitz.

But he did.

It was January when the
Leibnitz
arrived in New York harbor and moored at the quarantine station north of Sandy Hook, the decks dusted with carbolic acid. The third- and steerage-class passengers were hanging their heads, awaiting transfer to the various hospital ships and quarantine islands in the lower harbor. Some of them would be buried on Hart’s Island.

“I’ll take care of you,” he’d said, speaking far beyond his ability to follow through. But her mother had died, she was alone, and he was smitten.

She’d looked at him with a squinted eye and half a smile on her upper lip, clearly thinking he was daft. It was her independence, her fearlessness—the very qualities that precluded her from needing him—that he liked about her. Afterward, he realized he should have put it differently: He should have asked her to marry him.

“You’ll take care of me,” she’d repeated, and rolled her eyes. She wanted to start over in America, not be saddled with some German boob who’d seen her at her worst, on the boat. The truth was, Maria found him annoying.

Maria and her mother had signed aboard the ship as kitchen help and scullion, and their labor reduced the price of their passage to a pittance, but for that the duties were rather broader than advertised. Maria’s mother was still quite attractive—she had all her front teeth yet—and her daughter, well, her daughter was blond and shining. At the interview, in the galley, the cook had hacked chickens apart with his cleaver on the butcher block while the captain and the mate circumambulated the women.

“I suppose I’ll take age and experience,” the captain said to his mate after a minute or two. “You break the filly.”

The first day at sea, the mate had summoned Maria away from a mountain of potatoes and she went, not exactly sure what she was in for. Her mother found her curled up like a weevil in their tiny, windowless berth some hours later, nursing a fat, ferrous lip in addition to deeper bruises. She’d put up a pretty good fight, Maria.

The next time, she hid when she heard the mate coming, but he found her and dragged her off by her arm. He seemed to enjoy the game of hide-and-seek. “Come along you little vixen, you wolverine,” he laughed. Eventually, she grew accustomed to it, as one can to almost anything. The thing she couldn’t stand was learning that her mother had known what she was doing when she signed them on.
Just
the
price
of
getting
to
a
better
world,
schatzie,
chin
up,
she’d said. But Maria couldn’t see ahead to a better world—she was really just a girl. She saw betrayal. When it was her mother’s turn to go over the side, she didn’t weep, just frowned and heaved. When our man thought he saw her clutching at her mother’s skirts, he was wrong. It was just her ragged fingernail catching in the weave. She’d been thinking,
Goddamn
her
for
dying
so
fast—the
captain’ll
be
after
me,
too,
now.
It didn’t happen, though, as the captain was also laid low. The epidemic was in full flower.

This is how it spread: On the second-class deck, a lady who sported a consumptive complexion came down with a fever the night of the day the ship sailed. Maria and her mother took turns tending her and bringing her meals in her berth. She needed compresses, cups of hot consommé and fresh sheets at least once a day. Then there was her chamber pot, that terrible vat. They did it all and didn’t wash their hands—even less so on shipboard than normal, since fresh water was precious and must be conserved. Then they helped the cook make the vichyssoise and the apple-custard pies.

But don’t blame Maria—she knew not what she did. It made no sense at all to her, the way the sickness started. She knew what caused fevers: It was stink. And so why hadn’t it hit the steerage first? She opened portholes, hatches and doors wherever she could. She’d never heard of a
vector.
If you’d tried to tell her that she, Maria, could carry a disease from one person to the next, she’d have knelt and said a Hail Mary, quite from reflex.

The man we’re calling Will had been born into another world, a world in which he’d learned about Anton van Leeuwenhoek and his wee animalcules, Louis Pasteur and his milk. He’d peered into a squat black microscope and seen the unimaginable creatures that existed in a drop of water. The father may have sent the son away after his mother died, may have allowed his education to falter and ignored him entirely, but he couldn’t take away what the boy had seen: the laboratory, with its stone countertops, etched glass beakers and myriad fluid-filled phials, or the university student, Robert Koch, who eventually became his father’s protégé in the son’s stead and somehow nevertheless the son’s close friend. Will had not forgotten Robert Koch, but Koch was lost to him. He could never make contact with any of them again.

For as innocent as he was of the crime he was wanted for in New York, he was guilty of another crime, committed back home, and he knew that in fleeing he’d as much as confessed it. So it wasn’t entirely misguided of the Whyos to be interested in him. He had the capacity to scheme. We all do, and in some of us it blooms—cultured by neglect, by cruelty, by dumb fate, by loss. It was Beanie’s skill—and Undertoe’s, too—to be able to see that instinct in him from a mile off.