Against the Day (9 page)

His companion introduced himself as
Nate Privett, personnel director at White City Investigations, a detective
agency.

In the near and far distance, explosions,
not always to be identified in the next day’s newspapers, now and then sent
leisurely rips through the fabric of the day, to which Nate Privett pretended
to be listening. “Ironworkers’ Union,” he nodded. “After enough of ’em, a man
begins to develop an ear.” He poured syrup on a towering stack of pancakes out
of which butter melted and ran. “See, it’s not safecrackers, embezzlers,
murderers, spouses on the run, none of the dimenovel stuff, put all that out of
your head. Here in Chi, this year of our Lord, it’s all about the labor unions,
or as we like to call them, anarchistic scum,” said Nate Privett.

“No experience with any of that.”

“You appear qualified, I should say.”
Nate’s mouth went sly for a second. “Can’t believe you haven’t been approached
about Pinkerton work, pay over there’s almost too good for a man
not
to
sign up.”

“Don’t know. Too much of the modern
economics for me, for there’s surely more to life than just wages.”

“Oh? What?”

“Well, give me a few minutes with
that one.”

“You think working for the Eye’s a
life of moral squalor, you ought to have a look at our shop.”

Lew nodded and took him up on it.
Next thing he knew, he was on the payroll, noticing how every time he entered a
room somebody was sure to remark, ostensibly to somebody else, “Gravy, a man
could get
killed
out there!” By the time he got that pleasantry all
decoded, Lew found he was more than able to shrug it off. His office and field
skills weren’t the worst in the shop, but he knew that what distinguished him
was a keen sympathy for the invisible.

At White City Investigations,
invisibility was a sacred condition, whole darn floors of office buildings
being given over to its art and science—resources for disguise that
outdid any theatrical dressing room west of the Hudson, rows of commodes and
mirrors extending into the distant shadows, acres of costumes, forests of
hatracks bearing an entire Museum of Hat History, countless cabinets stuffed
full of wigs, false beards, putty, powder, kohl and rouge, dyes for skin and hair,
adjustable gaslight at each mirror that could be taken from a lawn party at a
millionaire’s cottage in Newport to a badlands saloon at midnight with just a
tweak to a valve or two. Lew enjoyed wandering around, trying on different
rigs, like every day was Hallowe’en, but he understood after a while that he
didn’t have to. He had learned to step to the side of the day. Wherever it was
he stepped to had its own vast, incomprehensible history, its perils and
ecstasies, its potential for unannounced romance and early funerals, but when
he was there, it was apparently not as easy for anyone in “Chicago” to be that
certain of his whereabouts. Not exactly invisibility. Excursion.

ate showed up at Lew’s desk one day with a thick folder that
had some kind of royal crest on it, featuring a twoheaded eagle.
 
“Not me,” Lew edging away.

“Austrian Archduke is in town, we
need somebody to keep an eye on him.”

“Fellows like that don’t have
bodyguards of their own?”

“Sure do, they call em ‘Trabants’
over there, but have a lawyer explain civil liability to you, Lew, I’m just an
old gumshoe guy, all’s I know is there’s a couple a thousand hunkies down to
the Yards come over here with hate in their hearts for this bird and his
family, maybe with good reason, too. If it was just the wholesome educational
exhibits on the Fairgrounds and all why I wouldn’t be too concerned, but the
book on young Francis Ferdinand is, is he prefers our own New Levee and
highlife neighborhoods like that. So every alleyway down here, every shadow big
enough to hide a shive artist with a grudge, is a warm invitation to rewrite
history.”

“I get any backup on this, Nate?”

“I can spare Quirkel.”

“Somebody get Rewrite!” Lew pretended
to cry, affably enough.

F.F., as he was termed in his
dossier, was out on a world tour whose officially stated purpose was to “learn
about foreign peoples.” How Chicago fit the bill was about to become clearer.
The Archduke had put in an appearance at the Austrian Pavilion, sat through
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with a certain amount of impatience, and lingered
at the Colorado Silver Camp exhibit, where, imagining that camps must
necessarily include campfollowers, he proceeded to lead his entourage on a
lively search after ladies of flagrant repute that would have taxed the abilities
of even a seasoned spotter, let alone

a greenhorn like Lew—running up
and down and eventually out into the Midway, accosting amateur actors who had
never been west of Joliet with untranslatable ravings in Viennese dialect and
gesticulations which could easily be—well, were—taken the wrong
way. Uniformed handlers, fooling elaborately with their whiskers, gazed
anywhere but at the demented princeling. Lew slid like a snake from one
architectural falsehood to the next, his working suits by the end of each day
smudged white from rubbing against so much “staff,” a mixture of plaster and
hemp fibers, ubiquitous at the White City that season, meant to counterfeit
some deathless white stone.

“What I am really looking for in
Chicago,” the Archduke finally got around to confessing, “is something new and
interesting to kill. At home we kill boars, bears, stags, the usual—while
here in America, so I am told, are enormous
herds of bison, ja?
”

“Not around Chicago anymore, Your
Highness, I’m sorry to say,” Lew replied.

“Ah. But, at present, working here in
your famous slaughterhouse district
. . .
are
many
. . .
Hungarians, not true?”

“Y— maybe. I’d have to go look
up the figures,” Lew trying not to get into eye contact with this customer.

“In Austria,” the Archduke was
explaining, “we have forests full of game, and hundreds of beaters who drive
the animals toward the hunters such as myself who are waiting to shoot them.”
He beamed at Lew, as if mischievously withholding the final line of a joke.
Lew’s ears began to itch. “Hungarians occupy the lowest level of brute
existence,” Francis Ferdinand declared—“the wild swine by comparison
exhibits refinement and nobility—do you think the Chicago Stockyards
might possibly be rented out to me and my friends, for a weekend’s amusement?
We would of course compensate the owners for any loss of revenue.”

“Your Royal Highness, I’ll sure ask
about that, and somebody’ll get back to you.”

Nate Privett thought this was just a
kneeslapper. “Gonna be Emperor one of these days, can you beat that!”

“Like there ain’t enough Hungarians
back home to keep him busy?” Lew was wondering.

“Well, not that he wouldn’t be doing
us
a favor.”

“How’s that, boss?”

“With more them damned anarchistic
foreignborn south of Fortyseventh than you could point a Mannlicher at,”
chuckled Nate, “sure’d be a few less of em to worry about, wouldn’t it?”

Curious
himself about who might be his opposite number on the Austrian side of this
exercise, Lew nosed around and picked up an item or two. Young Max Khäutsch,
newly commissioned a captain in the Trabants, was here on his first overseas
assignment, as field chief of “K&K Special Security,” having already proven
himself useful at home as an assassin, an especially deadly one, it seemed.
Standard Habsburg procedure would have been to put him out of the way at some
agreedupon point of diminishing usefulness, but nobody was willing to try.
Despite his youth he was said to give an impression of access to resources
beyond his own, of being comfortable in the shadows and absolutely
unprincipled, with an abiding contempt for any distinction between life and
death. Sending him to America seemed appropriate.

Lew found him sympathetic
. . .
the oblique planes of his face
revealing an origin somewhere in the Slavic vastnesses of Europe as yet but
lightly traveled by the recreational visitor
.
. . .
They got into the habit of earlymorning coffee at the Austrian
Pavilion, accompanied by a variety of baked goods. “And
this
might be of
particular interest to you, Mr. Basnight, considering the widely known
KuchenteigsVerderbtheit
or pastrydepravity of the American detective
. . . .
”

“Well we
. . .
we try not to talk about that.”

“
So?
in Austria it is widely remarked upon.”

Despite young Khäutsch’s police
skills, somehow the Archduke kept giving him the slip. “Perhaps I am too clever
to deal efficiently with Habsburg stupidity,” mused Khäutsch. One night when it
seemed Franz Ferdinand had dropped off the map of greater Chicago, Khäutsch got
on the telephone and began calling around town, eventually reaching White City
Investigations.

“I’ll go have a look,” said Lew.

After a lengthy search including
obvious favorites like the Silver Dollar and Everleigh House, Lew found the
Archduke at last in the Boll Weevil Lounge, a Negro bar down on South State in
the Thirties, the heart of the vaudeville and black entertainment district in
those days, hollering his way into an evening which promised at least a
troublesome moment or two. Barrelhouse piano, green beer, a couple of pool
tables, girls in rooms upstairs, smoke from twoforapenny cigars. “Squalid!”
screamed the Archduke. “I love it!”

Lew kind of enjoyed it himself in
this part of town, unlike some of the ops at White City, who seemed skittish
around Negroes, who’d been arriving lately in everincreasing numbers from down
South. Something about the neighborhood drew him, maybe the food—surely
the only place in Chicago a man could find a decent orange
phosphate—although right at the moment you could not call the atmosphere
welcoming.

“
What here are you looking at, you
wish to steal
eine
. . .
Wassermelone,
perhaps?”

“Ooooo,” went several folks in
earshot. The insultee, a large and dangerouslooking individual, could not
believe he was hearing this. His mouth began to open slowly as the Austrian
prince continued—

“Something about. . . your
. . .
wait. . .
deine Mutti,
as you
would say, your
. . .
your mama,
she
plays third base for the Chicago White Stockings,
nicht wahr?
”
as customers begin
tentatively to move toward the egresses, “a quite unappealing woman, indeed she
is so fat, that to get from her tits to her ass, one has to take the ‘El’!
Tried once to get into the Exposition, they say, no, no, lady, this is the
World’s Fair, not the World’s Ugly!”

“Whatchyou doin, you fool, you can
get y’ass killed talking like that, what are you, from
England
or some
shit?”

“Um, Your Royal Highness?” Lew
murmured, “if we could just have a word—”

“It is all right! I know how to talk
to these people! I have studied their culture! Listen—
’
st los, Hund?
Boogieboogie,
ja?
”

Lew, supposed to be disciplined in
the ways of the East, would not allow himself the luxury of panic, but at
times, like now, could’ve used maybe a homeopathic dose, just to keep his
immunity up. “Hopelessly insane,” he announced, waving a thumb F.F.’s way,
“escaped in his time from some of the fanciest bughouses of Europe, very little
remaining of the brains he was born with, except possibly,” lowering his voice,
“how much money you bring with you, there, Highness?”

“Ah, I understand,” murmured the imperial
scapegrace. Turning to the room, “When Franz Ferdinand drinks,” he cried,
“everybody drinks!”

Which helped to restore a level of
civility in the room, and soon even of cheer, as smart neckties were soaked in
suds, the piano player came back out from under the bar, and people in the room
resumed dancing syncopated twosteps. After a while somebody started singing
“All Pimps Look Alike to Me,” and half the room joined in. Lew, however,
noticing the way the Archduke seemed to keep inching stealthily but unmistakably
toward the street door, thought it wise to do the same. Sure enough, just
before sliding out the door, Der F.F. with a demonic grin screamed, “And when
Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!” whereupon he disappeared, and it was a
near thing that Lew got out with his keester intact.