Metropolis (10 page)

“Hey again, Jimster,” she said.

“I’d gladly buy a piece of corn off you, Fifi, but I don’t see no sign of it, do I? What’re you up to?”

“Nothing.” Then she asked him would he like a kiss. He said he was too busy to let himself get beat up again, and she frowned, smiled, puckered, dodged, moved back and forth, laughing, prattling, never allowing his eye to wander from her.

“Say, Jimster, have you got a cigarette for a girl? I could use one.”

He reached into his pants, pulled out his one half-smoked butt and started to light it, but Fiona winced, and the Jimster thought better.

“Yeah, all I got’s this sick butt off the street. Wait, and I’ll get you a fresh one.”

He darted into Billy’s, not at all sure what was wrong with him, to go off abandoning his post and squandering his pennies on a girl. But then again, he did know: He hadn’t had a better morning, ever.

All he knew of the brief scuffle that occurred on the street as he stepped through the door was a vague peripheral glimpse of two dark figures moving against the gray-white snow. When he came back out, ears ringing from Undertoe’s boxing but with a cigarette he’d begged off the policeman, Fiona was gone. That was when it dawned on him that something interesting was going on. Fiona had been doing quite a lot to distract him. He figured he probably ought to go in and tell Undertoe, but then again Undertoe had just boxed his ears. Whereas Fiona, even if she wasn’t completely on the up-and-up, had just expanded his universe in a most pleasant direction. So what if she’d had an ulterior motive for tackling him; she hadn’t had to take it quite where she did. No, whatever she was up to, the whole thing made him like her more.

“Well then, see ya,” he said in the direction he thought she might have gone. He dug in his pocket for a match and lit the cigarette. When Undertoe asked him later, he’d say he hadn’t seen a thing. After all, he hadn’t.

Will Williams didn’t see much either. He had still been gazing up at the snow slide when two small, stealthy figures in brown dusters and outsize bowler hats had appeared, one on either side of him. They would have preferred greater privacy, but he wasn’t cooperating, so the Why Nots had made their move. No one on the street noticed anything untoward as they flanked him, pinned his arms to his sides and lifted him straight off the ground. He’d barely gotten a look at them himself. And when he did look at one of them, his abductor met his gaze with a frown and the swift jab of a fist with a metal band across the knuckles. His head snapped back. He was dazed—not quite out, but not in any condition to fight back. Before he knew it, they’d twisted his arms behind his back and were leaning hard into him, one on each side, the general effect being something between a lever and a vise. The most he could do was flex his toes, bug his eyes and blink. His feet were off the ground. He was unprepared for this. They turned in unison, ran into an alley and spirited him through a door so black with soot it was almost invisible against the filthy stone of the building it opened into. The door closed behind them, and one of them slid home a bolt, locking it.

They were in a stairwell that was dimly lit from a window far overhead. They released him in a pile in the corner, and he braced himself for another blow, but it didn’t come. His kidnappers sat down together on the steps to watch while he stumbled to his knees. He was surprised to see that they were just boys. Then one of them—Beatrice—took her hat off, and red-gold braids tumbled down.

“Jesus God, that was almost too easy.” She spoke in a rather gravelly voice for a girl of her size, and with a light brogue. “You want to do the talking, Fifi?”

“Oh, go ahead, you do it.”

This one’s voice was higher. So they were both girls. His head was swimming.

The first girl turned to Will. Her face was very young and delicate. “All right then, you bleeding idget,” she said. “Tell me what the hell you was thinking of, going back into Billy’s? What’s your strategy here? Are you nuts?”

He wondered if it could be a dream. Why should this girl care where he went? Perhaps he’d been knocked cold by actual thugs, and this was the queer place his mind had taken him while his body once again drifted.

“Well?” she demanded. “I’m asking you.”

“But I didn’t go in, did I?” He was being cautious. His mouth hurt.

“No, but you nearly did, right into the arms of the police. If you were meeting the Undertaker there, all I can say is you don’t know a damned thing.”

“The
Undertaker
? You mean Undertoe?” It was a very strange robbery, so far.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, spare me! Yes,
Undertoe.
You know what, I don’t care who you say you are, Mr. Jeermeer, or what your racket is. You can take it up with Johnny. As far as I’m concerned, you’re an idget who don’t know nothing. Less than nothing. Let’s just get moving.”

“Yeah, move it,” said the dark one, standing up and pulling out a knife. “We’re gonna be late.”

“But first, there’s one fact I want to inform you of: From here on out, your name’s going to be Frank Harris.
Frank Harris.
Don’t forget it. Don’t change it. And definitely don’t use any of the other names you’ve been using. Because although you seem to be unaware of it, you’re famous citywide by now. You’re leaving a pretty wide trail—plenty too wide for the way we work. So, forget Geiermeier, Koch, Williams, whatever the Hell else you’ve ever called yourself. Your one and only name is Frank Harris.”

“What about
Frankie—
that would be okay, wouldn’t it, Beanie? He looks like a Frankie.”

“Jesus, I haven’t the patience. Just shut up, Fifi.”

“Uh—” he began.

“Shut up, you, too.”

“Fifi?” he said.
“Beanie?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not to you—it’s
Beatrice
to you. Or
Miss O’Gamhna
.”

“All right, but about Undertoe, I think he’s—”

This time she raised her slender fist and thrust it toward his nose, stopping just a fraction of an inch away. He saw her three-knuckle ring in sharp focus, and then she tapped a trigger somewhere on the palm side, and a short, scooped blade popped up between the middle and index fingers. Its cold edge grazed his cheek, and it made him feel cold all the way through.

“This here is my
eye-gouger,
Frank Harris. I don’t want to have to show you how I use it, so would you please shut up and get moving.”

He nodded and swallowed a thousand questions.

She gestured toward the stairs and then, as he began to ascend, she asked him what his name was.

“You mean really? . . . Geiermeier.” He stuttered: “Georg Geier—” He stopped. Was it possible they knew his
real
real name?

“No, not Geiermeier. I told you you’re done with that.
Harris.
State your name, Mr. Harris.”

He said it.
Frank Harris.
It sounded awfully foreign to him, but then again so had all the others, at first.

“No, not
Frahnk Hah-
ris. You sound like a fucking Prussian.”

“I’m not Prussian, I’m from Göttingen.”

“Oh, well, congratulations. How fascinating. Jesus Christ. Just say it right: Frank
Hair-
ris.”

He said it again, carefully trying to imitate her tones, and this time he got it right.

“Oh, aye, that’s better,” she said. He could almost hear her smiling, though her lips maintained a scowl. “You do have a good ear, if you want to. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Harris.”

He stole a glance at Fiona, wondering if he was still at knifepoint. He was.

“Just keep moving,” said Fiona.

He had no idea whatsoever what was happening to him as he hurried up the endless flights of stairs, but in a way it didn’t matter. Being abducted by these girls was oddly enough no worse than anything else that had happened to him lately. He’d begun to grow accustomed to this life in which emergency followed close on the heels of luck and disaster alike, where catastrophe seemed to lurk in every shadow.

UNDERWORLD

11.

THE WHYOS

I
t wouldn’t have taken long to travel overland where Beanie and Fiona were taking him, but they led him instead through an up-and-down maze of frigid stairwells, dank basements and snowbound alleys. They entered a warehouse through an unlocked window and climbed three flights to a loft full of barrels and sacks of grain. Harris was baffled by it, incredulous, really, that he had fallen into the hands of these two girls. He tried to imagine the man they were working for, Johnny. What did he want with him? He twisted his hands in his pockets and felt the silky lining split on one side, his thumb poking through to graze the facing. He thought of the small things that could be lost to such a hole, coins rattling in coattails, keys. He extracted his thumb and tried not to show he was afraid. Finally, from the top floor of the warehouse, they ascended a rickety ladder to a hatch in the ceiling. Fiona went up first, then Harris.
Harris,
he reminded himself.

Beatrice brought up the rear, and she was ready not just with her gouger but with a fish knife she kept in a sheath up her sleeve, just in case the prisoner should balk or bolt. She didn’t have to use it. The stableman went along more or less quietly. When Fiona reached the top of the shaft, she unlatched the hatch and yanked it open, dumping a load of heavy snow upon them. It was startling but refreshing. He realized as it hit him that he could seize the opportunity to jump down and run, but he didn’t do it. A stream of what must have been Irish curses issued from the one called Beatrice, below. He smiled and decided he would go along without a fight, at least for now. His curiosity outstripped his fear.

The rectangle of sky the stableman saw through the hatch was that amazing blue that comes in the wake of a storm. Fiona stuck her head out the opening and then hoisted herself through the hole. The man whose name was now Frank Harris followed. Up on the roof, they trudged through the crisp snow all the way to the edge, where he saw that there was a wooden conduit connecting the warehouse to another large building across the street; from the narrow gauge of it, he gathered it was used to transfer goods, not people. A slogan was painted along its length, where anyone traversing the Bowery could see it if they looked up, not that the stableman ever had:
O. GEOGHEGAN’S BEST AMERICAN ALE.

“You first, Harris,” Beatrice commanded.

When he turned back to look at her, eyebrows raised, he saw she had drawn the long, thin fish knife and thrust it at his nose. She gestured at Fiona, who reached into her coat and brought out her dagger.

“Get going,” Beatrice said, flashing a cold smile. “We’re late.” But he couldn’t quite be terrified. There was snow in her rust-colored hair and a certain reassuring quality to her voice, despite the knife. They were awfully young, these girl gangsters, and they were bullying him, but somehow he trusted them. And then, as if to prove him right, Fiona offered him a bit of friendly advice as he began to climb onto the narrow conduit: “It’s greater than shoulder width, see, not that bad. But with the snow, you can’t trust your footing—you’ll want to crawl across, not walk.”

Only a few notable events would not have taken place, had he slipped. The world would have managed to fill in around him just fine. The great chunks of crusted snow that fell to the street as the threesome crawled across went undetected, except by a cart horse that startled and broke its stride. No one looked up. No one saw them, not unless you count a cold brown dog that barked three times.

On the other side, the girls dug at the snow with their bowler hats until they’d uncovered a hatch. A sour steam of yeast, hops, malt and sawdust rose from below, and they descended into it. He had the feeling of being on the verge of something, and whether terrible or promising he was eager for it. He was ready.

They came into a dim room almost as large and high as the building itself and threaded their way among rows of giant copper cauldrons and hulking iron tanks studded with valves and gauges. From somewhere in the ill-defined, echoey space, the stableman thought he could make out voices murmuring behind the occasional hissing of a pressure valve. Then behind them, footsteps, coming at a run. It occurred to him that perhaps he ought to try to break away from his kidnappers after all, but before he could make up his mind to do it, they’d entered a wide-open central area where a hundred or more men and quite a few women whispered in the semidarkness.

A single lantern stood on the floor in their midst, more casting shadows than illuminating faces. Beatrice whistled slowly, sliding her notes around the musical scale in a manner that seemed to have three dimensions. A moment later, someone whistled back, short and shrill and simple, in a way that clearly addressed not just her but the entire crowd. At once, the assembly began to sit on the floor, and a man stepped forward into the lantern light while the others receded into darkness.

He looked very like an actor taking the stage. Then he leaned down and turned up the wick. His boots flashed. His black hair glistened with pomade. He held a cane in one hand, and it was clear from his posture and the absolute silence that fell over the room when he raised that cane above his head that he was in charge.
Johnny,
thought Harris. The man whistled a few more notes that seemed to draw the room’s rapt attention even tighter. He looked left, then right, surveying the crowd.

Johnny, certainly. But who was Johnny? What was this group? What did they want with him?

“Anybody got a reason I shouldn’t have O’Gamhna here drowned in a vat of ale for waltzing in on her own Goddamned schedule?”

No one spoke.

“Piker, if you would take care of that for me, then . . .”

A man stood up and began to come forward, but then Johnny waved him back.

“Oh well, I suppose we ought to hear her story, first. Beanie? Fifi? Why don’t you floozies tell us just what the fuck’s been keeping you?”

The girls rose.

“We’ve been on him for over a couple of days now,” said Beatrice, stepping forward. “He’s cagey, or he’s got horse sense. He didn’t make it easy to grab him without attracting notice.”

It was strange to Harris suddenly to see anxiety in the face of the girl who’d been so handy with the brass knuckles and the fish knife. But she stood her ground, and her lip quivered only slightly when Dandy Johnny’s cane slashed through the air toward her.

“Dammit!” he said, stopping just a hairsbreadth before he brained her. He let his arm fall, then flicked the cane in a gesture of disgust. “Is that your excuse? He didn’t make it
eas
y
? We’ve had the entire membership of the Whyos waiting on you. I don’t convene such meetings lightly, or hadn’t you remembered that?”

“If stealth is the chief concern in any operation, not speed or bravado, then I’m quite confident you will approve of the delay. I judged the stealth of picking up our man here to outweigh the risk of keeping the assembled waiting a wee while. I mean Jesus F. Christus, Johnny, he had Undertoe and a couple of police sergeants after him, whereas I assume you all arrived here according to protocol, undetected.” Her tone was confident, too confident. It was clear that Johnny didn’t like her defiance, even if it did sound to Harris like the girl was right. Fiona spoke next, before her partner could anger the boss any further.

“She’s right, Johnny. This here fucker, well, he’s either an addle-headed idget or a genius. Anyway, he isn’t normal. He’s got a way about him.”

“An idget or a genius, is it? Go on then, Fifi, tell us about it. I’m waiting.”

“Well, for one thing he paid a visit to the morgue this morning—”

“The Morgue? Half the men in this room were at the Morgue all morning, myself included. I never saw him. Anyone else see him?” he asked of the room at large. There was no reply.

Beatrice laughed then, almost a snort. It was risky to show such attitude—she was still in striking range—but that was the way she was. Johnny just tossed his cane to the other hand, raised an eyebrow, frowned.

“You don’t get it,” said Beatrice. “The
morgue—
the city morgue itself, not the bar. He went down and viewed a body at the morgue
—
Pearl. And then he went to straight to the German church and took Communion. Body and the blood.”

“Oh, did he?” There was perhaps a tinge of respect in Johnny’s voice. “That’s pretty brazen. And without even confessing.” He looked over at the stableman for the first time, furrowed his brow and smiled slightly. The stableman got the impression that this glance was less murderous than impressed. But why? He was increasingly puzzled. Clearly, these were not nice people. Clearly, they were also under some strange misconception about who he was and what he was doing. They had followed him, seen his day’s activities and deduced things that made no sense at all. Their interest in him and what they were saying made no sense. Surely there was some mistake here, but he was far from certain about the prospects of his resolving it.

“Yeah, well, it was Lutherans,” she said. “I don’t believe they have to confess.” She turned to look at the stableman. “Do you?”

He shook his head. Why were they talking about this? Why did they care?

“Listen,” said Fiona. “Beanie’s making him sound clever, but I cut the other way, toward stupid. What if he’s got no idea? What if he’s just a dupe?” His stomach began to quiver then, and he realized this was the most dangerous thing anyone had said.

“What makes you say that, Fifi?”

“Well, for example, after church, we trailed him straight down to Billy’s—”

“You met with Undertoe, today?” said Johnny, turning to Harris. “You don’t know your friends from your enemies, do you?”

Harris thought it was the truest thing said of him since the gangsters’ meeting began, but he just shrugged. He didn’t trust himself to speak, not knowing what they wanted him to do or be.

“Step up here, Harris. I hope you like that name—we picked it special. Sounds like some day you’ve had. Why don’t you tell me your version of it?”

“It wasn’t my usual day.”

As soon as he stepped into the lamplight, Harris’s size and strength were obvious, especially when he stood next to Johnny, who was lean and wiry. He was confident in his body, and that showed, masking the utter unclarity of everything else. There was so much he didn’t know, including that this wasn’t the usual procedure for new inductees and that many of those gathered had been skeptical of him. He also couldn’t sense that they liked his reticence and approved of his brawn. He could no better read the minds of the Whyo gang than they could perceive that his power and restraint stemmed from wielding a pitchfork and working with cows, not breaking into houses or defying the odds on the street, from years of disappointment, not excitement.

After an awkward silence, Johnny laughed. “Listen, Fifi here aside, we like your style. You’ve done some big things lately. But you see, you’re working with the wrong man. Undertoe’s a user. He’s been trying to get someone to do that Barnum’s job for him for a while now, and he was always going to turn the guy in for it. If you hadn’t been so new in town, you’d have known and stayed away. He’s on the inside there, you know—he’s head of security. Here’s the thing: Your lapse of judgment with regard to the Undertaker aside, we like your work. We think you ought to be working for us. The money’s better, and we all get along, no double-crossing, no funny stuff. This little assembly of men and women calls itself the Whyos, by the way, and if you haven’t heard of us, we’re proud of that. No Whyo’s been convicted of so much as a petty larceny in three years. The short of it is, it’s the best outfit in town, and we want you to join us. That’s why the girls there brought you here.”

His mind raced to find words sufficiently vague to suggest that he might be the man they thought he was, a man whose villainy this gang respected enough to conscript him by force. Perhaps there was some other man called Will Williams, he thought, or some actual associate of Undertoe they had confused with him. But it was too late now for him to be anyone else.
Not
being that man would likely prove fatal. His goal for the moment was to keep them in the dark just long enough to make another escape. Missouri maybe, this time. Or Kansas.

“So,” he said slowly, “which thing . . . that I did . . .” He winced inwardly, knowing his accent was too thick, his speech awkward, his tentativeness a giveaway. What would it be like, he wondered, actually to be a man whom so many others wanted to join them? He wasn’t thinking about blood and crime but acceptance and honor when he felt an odd twinge of regret that he
wasn’t
a sought-after criminal mastermind. He did not allow himself to wonder what had happened to his dreams of working stone and making good the promise he knew he’d once had. He couldn’t take that risk right then and survive the present encounter. Then he realized they were still waiting for him to finish his sentence. He cleared his throat. “Which thing that I did did you like?”

“
Which
thing?” said Dandy Johnny. “Which
thing
? I thought you just arrived in this town. But do tell us what other capers you’ve been the author of, besides doing away with a nice little hooker called Pearly Button and torching Barnum’s museum?”

Barnum’s. The girl. So
someone
knew who she was. He couldn’t plumb the connection they’d made, but it made an absurd sort of sense that the forces of the underworld and the metropolitan police had each managed separately to arrive at the same false conclusion. And somehow, Undertoe was involved in all of it.

A strategy,
he thought,
I need a strategy.
Dandy Johnny awaited his response with a smile of anticipation on his lips, or was it a sneer? The stableman thought of the way Johnny had slashed that cane at the girl Beatrice’s face, and of all the people surrounding him.

“Is that the way you see it then, I’m a firebug? You know, I don’t really like fire,” the stableman said. He was lucky his figure was so imposing, smart in allowing his tongue to be slow. It made him seem tougher than he was, Harris. “Why don’t you forget what I’ve done,” he said, “and tell me what you really want. That and why you’re all set on calling me
Harris.
”