Metropolis (17 page)

Then he heard a strange wail:
Wooo-hooo.
At first he thought it was a whyo, and his stomach dropped, but no, not quite. It might be a man from another gang, although actually it hadn’t sounded very human at all.
A creature then,
he thought,
a bird.
Perhaps a heron had gone fishing near a culvert and been trapped? It came again:
Wooo-hooo.
It was no bird. He couldn’t help thinking
McGinty,
and his flesh crawled. He whipped his head around to look behind him, and the light on his forehead sputtered in the wind he had made. It was very black. He found he could not inhale; his chest seemed to be constricted by an iron hoop. In the pitch darkness, he was not so brave after all.

“Yo, Harris!” called the voice then, faintly. “You farging idiot, where are you? Christ! I’m not coming down there and let McGinty get me, too, you know.”

He breathed again. Fergus’s voice seemed to be coming from back in the other direction.

“I’m here,” called Harris, his voice bouncing and rolling through the tunnel until it, too, sounded ghostly. “I guess I went the wrong way.”

So he followed Fergus’s voice to the right hole and resumed his mucking, and Fergus went back to resentfully hauling the bucket up the shaft and dropping it back down, and the day proceeded without further haunting or jibes from Fergus, who couldn’t help wondering, with a lump in his esophagus, what or who Harris was. Harris and McGinty were the only two men he’d ever heard of opting for underground travel over street side.

The following week, they were given a job that required both men to be below. Frank Harris waited with his boots on by the locker room until ten past the whistle. Whatever his faults, Fergus had not been late before. Just as Harris was about to go into the office to inquire what to do, the door banged open, and Fergus emerged with a red face and a stubborn set to his jaw. He walked past Harris without a glance.

“That you, Mr. Harris?” called the division chief from behind his frosted-glass partition. It seemed Fergus had demanded a new partner. So Harris joined another team. The following day, those men refused to go out with him, too. By the end of the month, Harris was officially working alone, not hauling and evacuating as he’d done with Fergus, since that was a two-man job, but reaming out small pipes with long gaffs. Exactly the sort of solo work McGinty had always done.

In the mornings, before he set off, Harris spent time studying the lay of the system in the map room. He went to great lengths to memorize as much as he could of the underground metropolis. He never thought of McGinty with fear anymore. As he worked, he hummed the bits of the sewermen’s ballad he’d picked up and occasionally dared to sing a German lied or two—for who would hear him? And yet he often felt that he was not alone there in the dark. Whether it was the old curmudgeon’s ghost or just an odd family of Norway rats peering from a dark ledge, he couldn’t be sure.

He didn’t really mind working alone, not least because it greatly facilitated his mission of Whyo reconnaissance. He eventually came up with a way to open manhole covers from beneath, though it wasn’t easy or especially safe, not knowing what might be above, and he made little maps on scraps of paper he kept tucked into his boots as he sloshed through the pipes.

All of this he shared with Beatrice in their ongoing lessons and the walks they took to and from work. She nodded and asked questions and seemed pleased beyond expectation. When he brought her something especially good—a new section of map, perhaps—she rewarded him with a squeeze of the arm or a lingering touch on the hand. They had not kissed again. They were behaving like a proper pair of sweethearts, not gangsters, and that suited Harris. But they’d come close. They were always flirting—little jokes, empty laughs about things unspoken. It was delicious, and it felt real, partly because he didn’t feel used by her. She had still never asked him to do anything dangerous or illegal, to his great relief.

Then there was the fact that he was a pretty good sewerman. After two months on duty underground, Harris was on his way to becoming a kind of McGinty himself. He had a strong intuition as to where and why blockages formed, and he worked so efficiently that he usually finished his day’s assignment before lunch. Things fell in line so easily for him underground that he himself half came to believe that McGinty was guiding him. The other men certainly thought so. They muttered among themselves as they left at night, after cleaning up in the sewermen’s bath hall, and they shunned him. After all, McGinty had been a normal if ornery human being while he lived, but this Frank Harris was half on the other side already, clearly possessed. How else could he have survived wearing those boots or learned the trade so uncannily quickly?

Now and then Harris would be working quietly in a tunnel near enough to a crew of men to listen as they sang verse after verse of their ballad. By tacit agreement, they’d stopped singing it in his presence the very first week, not wanting to summon the ghost. But Harris’s location was rarely what they thought it was, and over time he heard them often enough to pick up many verses. It was a work song, meant for a gang of voices, but he sang it to himself. Then one day he heard men singing the Ballad nearby, and quite without thinking he joined them in the refrain. Suddenly, he was singing alone. The other voices had stopped, and so had the sound of the work.

“Mary, mother of Christ—it’s McGinty!” came a voice through the dark.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

There was clattering and banging and the ringing of hobnails on metal ladder rungs as every man on the crew tried to flee at once. The lid clanged shut behind them.

Now that,
thought Frank Harris, smiling,
could come in handy for the Whyos,
and he went on singing in the dark, thinking how pleased Beanie would be with this new tunnel-clearing tactic.

15.

RECONNAISSANCE

W
hen he arrived home from work, Frank Harris was unquestionably the cleanest member of the O’Gamhna household. For while the others bathed just once a week, on Sundays, that was the only day that Harris did not take a mandatory bath. As Frank Harris sat down next to Beatrice for his supposed English lesson, he was intensely aware of the soapy freshness of his own skin mingling with the salty, tangy smell of hers. A shiver came over him when he caught that faint whiff of her. He had something good to report, and he was looking forward to seeing how she expressed her approval.

When he’d first told her he’d got trapped below, she’d chewed her thumbnail for a moment before she said, “Yeah, that sounds like a problem. Find out a way around it.” He came up with a simple lever that could be rigged from two gaffs and would open almost any cover. “Clever, Harris, clever,” she said, and then she touched his forehead lightly with her index finger. All that day he felt that spot as if it were more alive than the rest of his flesh, as if it were Ash Wednesday and she a priest who had blessed him. Another time, when he was telling her how few of the pipes were actually passable, with most between one and three feet high, she suggested they keep track of just the ones that were. That had been the beginning of a great mapping project, whereby they sat up at the kitchen table late at night, carefully sketching out the metropolitan street plan on an old bedsheet and then gradually adding all the large-gauge pipes that ran beneath it. It was a rough document, but it seemed clear that they would soon have enough of underground Manhattan charted to make possible whatever the Whyos planned to do. Now, when he told her the story of how he’d frightened off the men, she listened raptly and laughed with delight. “Really? So you can sing, can you? But this is good, Harris. It means we’ll be a lot safer down there. That means we do whatever we like and almost without risk.”

He felt a wave of well-being wash over him, and then something better: She got up from the table and wrapped her arm around his shoulder. Then she bent down and gently laid a kiss on the side of his head, just by the ear. “Nice work,” she whispered. He turned to her, but she stepped away.

“Good night, Harris.”

One evening soon thereafter, he was sketching in a newly found section of tunnel on Twenty-third Street and telling her about the rules of the bath hall, which were enforced with vigor by the crotchety Mrs. Dolan. He thought he did a pretty good imitation of the old woman, but Beanie didn’t laugh. He looked up at her and decided to take a small risk, to shift the conversation toward her.

“So how’d you get into the gang? Why’d you quit school? Isn’t it free?”

“Oh, no,” she’d said. “Don’t start on that. You’re the student, not me. I didn’t come here to get educated, I came to get rich. At least rich enough to bring Padric over, too. And anyway, don’t change the subject. You were telling me about the bath hall and Mrs. Dolan.”

The last thing Harris wanted to do was push her too far, vex her, and so he resumed where he’d left off, painting the picture with all the detail he could muster, choosing his verbs and prepositions with care—this was their English lesson, after all.

Unless, like McGinty, you could conceive of the job as a calling or, like Harris, you were doing it to woo a recalcitrant girlfriend, there was really only one perk to working in the sewer: the nightly bath. What with the constant sloshing of sewage and the occasional bursts of effluvium when drains were opened or toilets flushed, there was no keeping clean down there. But then, every evening, there was Mrs. Dolan walking up and down the five gleaming, white-tiled aisles of claw-footed tubs, ten to a row, preparing for the men’s ablutions. First, she threw the common valve that opened all taps, then she dumped scoops of powdered soap into every tub from a great bucket that she pushed in front of her on a dolly. The mixture, Harris explained to Beatrice, was mostly baking soda and shavings of glycerin soap but also contained pulverized dried camphor and the oils of lavender and thyme. It smelled marvelous—not too ladylike, just lovely and clean.

“I know the smell,” said Beatrice. When he looked up, he could swear she was blushing, and it made him do so, too. She didn’t have to say that her nose was full of that scent even then, or that for Harris to discuss, at length, his own daily ablutions was for her to imagine him naked, underwater. Her foot pressed his beneath the table.

“You were telling me about Mrs. Dolan,” she said.

After she filled the tubs, the matron of baths returned to her tiled office with its window onto the bath hall, by which time the men had arranged themselves in a queue, buck naked, to await admittance. The Department of Public Works was not in the business of running a spa, as Mrs. Dolan often had occasion to remark to the men. “It’s really more of a military operation,” Harris said. Mrs. Dolan handed each man a sliver of soap, a washcloth and a single small, clean towel.

“Not the least bit daunted by all that male nudity, is she?” asked Beatrice.

He confirmed that she was not. Once the men were in their tubs, Mrs. Dolan retreated to her window, from which she enforced the departmental prohibition against shaving in the bath hall. It was a great temptation—when else were their beards so soft as after that warm soak? But Mrs. Dolan was busy enough with the greasy, grimy rings they left and would not tolerate the addition of fifty men’s myriad fallen whiskers to her burden nor hesitate to pull the common lever, opening all fifty drains at once, the moment she spotted the suspicious lathering of a chin or the illicit brandishing of a razor. Barring violations, they had ten full minutes of bliss before she rang the warning bell and opened the drain. A great slurping could be heard as the fifty steaming sewermen rose, sedated by the warmth, reluctant to touch their toes to the cold tile floor, only the faintest tinge of unsavory odor still clinging to their skin.

“All those naked men . . .” Beatrice said. He was on the verge of rising from the table and pressing her up against the wall, crushing her with the clean, naked body beneath his clothes, when she went on: “You know, Mrs. Dolan could be useful to us, Harris.” She was playing foot games again but coy ones. The heat had gone out of her voice. “You must make sure she likes you. Do you think she does?”

He shrugged, not at all sure why Mrs. Dolan mattered. For him, the whole conversation had been in code. It had been a flirtation. Mrs. Dolan was irrelevant. But once again, all the eye contact and innuendo led to nothing. Harris was so frustrated that he couldn’t remain in the room with her, and he went out and drank beer at the corner bar for an hour, till he was fairly sure she would either be asleep or, more likely, gone off on some Whyo mission that would keep her out overnight. He loathed the fact that she spent so many nights elsewhere, but she had made it very clear it was none of his business where she went.

One afternoon a short time later, Harris had finished division business early and was exploring tunnels when he found a most unusual connection. He had noticed a pipe off the Nassau Street main whose flow seemed to be running clearer and a bit faster than usual. He made his way up current the distance of a block or so, until the pipe opened out into what, in the weak glow of his headlamp, seemed to be an underground grotto, a cave with a brook flowing through it and bubbling up into a wide pool. The pipe he’d followed was apparently less a sewer than a conduit to divert the flow from the natural stream. Then he saw that part of the cave was man-made: old cement and brickwork and ancient rotting timbers. There were great stones and rusted wagon wheels embedded in the concrete. Harris had no way of knowing it, but much of the material was rock from the grading of Bunker Hill, to the north. The spring he had found was once called the Maagde Paetje for the Dutch washerwomen who scrubbed linens in its sparkling waters and laid them to dry on the grassy slope to the north. What remained of it now ran beneath Maiden Lane and out to the harbor, north of Wall Street.

The space Harris found himself in was perhaps twenty yards long and high enough to stand up in, though the footing was dubious. It seemed that the stream had eroded away much of the tunnel built to contain it. A little further on, there was a long ledge about a yard in width. When he aimed the faint circle of light from his headlamp at it, he spotted a couple of whiskey bottles. How long ago had they been left there, he wondered—or how recently? There was no reason for an ordinary sewerman to go there. Just beyond the ledge, he discovered a low arch, maybe two feet high and set into the base of the foundation wall, where the irregular cement gave way to orderly brickwork. A thin stream of sewage trickled from the opening, and he deduced that the buried stream had been used by the builders as a natural sewer. He’d heard of such serendipitous connections but never seen one till then. He wondered just where he was in relation to the streets above. The nearest manhole cover he knew of was the one he’d come through, all the way back down that long tunnel, but surely there was a way to get into the building’s cellar from beyond that arch. He would have liked to investigate, if he dallied he was liable to miss check-in and not get his bath, and he was loath to go home to Beatrice all tainted with sewage and sweat. He put off further exploration for another time, sloshed back to the manhole, then ran the whole way back, making it just in time to watch the men filing into the bath hall without him. He threw off his gear and jumped out of his boots and stepped into place, last in line. Mrs. Dolan just squinted at him. She withheld his soap and linens and waved him aside as the others stepped into their baths.

“You wait there, McGinty.” He cringed at the name and shielded his privates with his hands. “I’d like to know one thing,” she said. “Are you a man or a swine? Look at your gear.” He had left it in a heap on the floor of the locker room in his haste, it was true. “By God, you got the best boots in the division, and you can’t even hang them up to dry. It’s a disgrace! Clean that up and then come back and talk to me about a bath.”

It didn’t take him long, but he could feel the seconds pass like minutes. He was missing most if not all of his bath. Finally, when he returned to her office door, she seemed not to see him, so he cleared his throat.

“Well, God in heaven, Harris, what are you still standing there for? The pleasure of showing your big muscles and chest hair off to me? You think you’re some Adonis, do you? I’d say not! Just go take your bath!”

She was entirely unreasonable—clearly, she didn’t like him—but at any rate, she had released him. The smell of fresh-run water was in the air as he entered the room, damp but clean. His heart slowed and his skin braced at the prospect of immersion. How hot would it be, how cool? How many minutes were left before she pulled the drain? He dipped his toe in, his whole foot, his leg, his other foot and finally sat down. The water was still good and hot. He only wished he might dissolve away into it, like Mrs. Dolan’s powdered soap, and be carried off through the drain, away from the strange life he was leading. He slumped down, letting his feet slide over the edge of the basin and his shoulders sink beneath the waterline, until his entire head and torso were underwater, and he exhaled a complicated vapor of emotions that bubbled up in a thick stream.

Just a few moments later, as he sat up again, Mrs. Dolan appeared at her window and rang the warning bell, but rather than pulling the lever she announced a five-minute extension. The men responded to the news in stunned silence—such a thing had never happened before—and for the next several minutes there was no sound in the room but quiet, blissful splashing, no sensation but the delicious contrast of cool air alternating with warm water. Harris examined his physiognomy through the shimmering, refractory water of his tub and saw the body of his father at the baths in Baden, the genitals that had seemed so fearfully dark red, wrinkled and hairy to him then. They were built the same, exactly so, in body if in nothing more. Then Mrs. Dolan rang the bell for real, and the water drained out around him, as irretrievable as his childhood, leaving him high and dry. He was insoluble in water, after all.

On the way home, Harris wondered what sort of job the Whyos were planning and to what extent they were planning it according to what they learned from him. Why had they been so keen on having an outsider do the job he’d been assigned? Surely not just squeamishness. And he thought of Beatrice. Why was it that every time it seemed inevitable, every time they were on the verge of something—a kiss, a declaration—she withdrew? Was she playing him just to extract the maximum information for the gang, or was it real? Harris tried to imagine the sewermen’s bath hall full of Whyos who’d just pulled off a heist, killed a handful of bystanders and absconded with a fortune. Each man would be naked in his tub, just like the sewermen, but the ground around them would be scattered with billies and gougers, pistols and blackjacks, slungshots and all manner of knives. Mrs. Dolan wouldn’t be there to bully the Whyos into stowing their equipment neatly. The water in Piker Ryan’s tub would surely run black, if not red from the blood of some victim.

Of course, Harris didn’t really believe that the Whyos would gain access to the Public Works building or try to wash up in the bath hall, even if they did do a job using the sewers. The one thing he did know about the Whyos was that they were fixated on stealth, and except to Johnny himself, it didn’t seem that hygiene was a Whyo priority. There was no reason for them to take such a risk. No, it was a silly notion. He was just letting his mind run free.

Harris had no idea.