Metropolis (25 page)

He was startled from his trance, however, when he thought he saw Mrs. Dolan sitting at a far table. To have run into her upstairs, in public, was one thing, but now he doubted his own senses. Someone passed between them then, and when the view was clear again, another woman was sitting in the chair. He shook his head clear. But no, Harris had not been wrong. The second woman was Maggie the Dove, and she’d quickly changed places with Mother Dolan, who was now once again obscured from Frank Harris’s sight by a pillar.

Meg Dolan was very fond of Harris; Beanie had done good things with him, gotten good work out of him without letting him in on much at all about the gang; but in the end, the key fact was that he wasn’t a Whyo. And now that she’d seen his face when her Johnny had kissed Beatrice, he never would be. It was a pity. She had always liked him, but Johnny came first, of course. She took a deep breath and drained her ale. It was difficult, running things, she thought, and she much preferred doing it from afar so as not to get overly involved.

A few minutes later, she rose, congratulated her son, whispered a few words into his ear and left the rehearsal room, otherwise unnoticed. She emerged into the lobby upstairs in time to catch the entire third act of the play—it was an operetta in which a thief attempted to seduce a good girl who resisted him and eventually managed to reform him instead, and marry him. During the heroine’s final aria, Mrs. Dolan was annoyed to find her view obstructed by the reedy silhouette of someone standing up in the orchestra, several seats in front of her. And then, when the man turned to walk up the aisle, she saw that it was Luther Undertoe.

It might have been a coincidence, but it might not have. Why should Luther Undertoe be there at the Old Bowery, at this particular performance, this particular meeting? Had there been a security breach? She stood up to follow him, but the star of the show had just reached the saccharine crescendo of her song, and there was an enormously fat and engrossed theatergoer blocking Mrs. Dolan’s exit from the row. He rose only reluctantly to let her pass, and by the time she’d fought her way out, the curtain had dropped. The aisles were flooded with people, and she lost sight of Undertoe in the crowd. She headed directly for the lounges downstairs, hoping at least to confirm with the Whyo on guard at the top of the hidden staircase that Undertoe hadn’t somehow found his way downstairs, but she was too late—a line of women snaked from the ladies’ lounge. A shiny-nosed girl was leaning up against the mirror that hung in front of the utility-closet door in the foyer, applying lip color from a tin in careful little daubs. There was no way to get back through the hidden doorway, but she satisfied herself that at least the Why Not on duty passing out towels had registered no alarm—didn’t even whyo, just met her eye and smiled. Mrs. Dolan exclaimed, “Heavens, what a line,” and went home in a state of some anxiety, wishing she’d somehow made contact with the men’s-room attendant as well. She couldn’t shake the feeling of concern that had welled up within her—first Harris unexpectedly in love with Johnny’s new girl, her unreadable, then Undertoe showing up. She would have to make sure Johnny dealt with Undertoe sooner rather than later, she decided. Harris, too, alas.

She was right that Undertoe was up to something, of course. Mrs. Dolan had excellent intuition. He’d attended the show with the plan of lifting a few wallets while taking in an afternoon of amusement (he liked the bad boy–good girl theme just as well as Mother Dolan and the rest of the crowd). He’d spied a man he knew slightly as a panel thief ducking into the bathroom just before the show began, and had loitered in the hall waiting for him to come out, thinking they might do a little teamwork. But the guy never came back out.
Odd.
All through the first half, he couldn’t stop wondering where he’d gone. The only thing he could come up with was that he’d disposed of the bathroom attendant and was down there robbing every doddering theatergoer who couldn’t hold his water till intermission. And the more he thought about it, the more lucrative and amusing and delightfully risky a scheme that seemed to him, until finally, just before the show ended, he got up himself, thinking he wanted in on the action. For Undertoe, it was really just a casual foray.

He didn’t see his man when he got there—the bathroom was empty except for the attendant, a young Whyo named Horatio, who was unfamiliar to him but didn’t look too formidable. He decided to try the idea out himself. He took a leisurely leak, and then, when Horatio had turned back to polishing the mirror, he opened the broom-closet door with the idea of pretending to have mistaken it for the exit. A wet mop leaned against the wall, and there were various buckets and dust-covered brown-glass bottles of cleanser. He reached for his blackjack and waited for the towel boy to approach him and direct him to the proper door. He certainly didn’t expect the young man to be monitoring him in the mirror or to have pegged him as unfriendly from the first or to be equipped with knockout drops and a slungshot of his own under his apron. You can just imagine Undertoe’s surprise when a crack on the skull was something he received rather than dealt. Horatio dragged him into the closet and dosed him liberally. When he went slack, the young Whyo stuck his head through the rear door and called for backup, then returned, whistling, to wiping down the wet sinks, rinsing the urinals and handing out towels. He was quite pleased at the development. Guard duty was rarely so eventful, and intercepting an interloper would surely bring him to the attention of Dandy Johnny. Maybe the next time he’d actually get to attend the meeting.

Back down in the basement, the feast had been eaten and the kiss conferred, but the Whyos had still not gotten down to work. It was not, you may say, the most conventional agenda, to dance and drink before doing business, but then they were a gang of ruffians. They’d chosen that existence at least in part because it allowed them to do things the wrong way round. The tables and chairs were being pushed to the sides and the dishes were mostly cleared when Dandy Johnny said a few words into Beatrice’s ear, and she left his side to fetch two cups of ale. She had no trouble finding Harris in the crowd. She pulled up a chair.

“You look poorly, Harris,” she said. “I hope it ain’t the oysters.”

He cast his eyes up at her without moving his head and smiled cynically. It made her crumple up inside. One of the things she’d always liked about him was the absence of that bitter emotion. Now she’d added it to his repertoire.

“What happened tonight—I didn’t expect it,” she said.

He looked at her. “If you say so. But you don’t regret it.”

He had her there, both of them knew. A better chance had offered itself, and she’d shut the door on Harris.

“I have no choice, Harris, so I might as well try to make the best of it. I’m sorry. Listen, this is a big night for you—Johnny’s going to get you up on stage to show the boys a few things—just to get them to trust you, to show them you know your stuff, really. If they like you and if the job goes well, you’ll have a lot more options. So, Harris, don’t mess up.”

“So, are you his wife now?”

“Oh God, Harris,” she said. “I don’t know. Not exactly. Maybe this will be better. Now I can make sure Johnny brings you in, instead of . . .”

She trailed off, and he could think of nothing at all to say. So they
had
been going to kill him, but now she was claiming she could help him? Her concern seemed either terribly cruel or terribly false, he wasn’t sure which.

“And Harris, don’t do anything rash. Don’t go sign up for that sanitary campaign. You could still get picked up for Will Williams by the cops if someone recognized you. I want you alive.”

“Will you be—all right—with him?” he coughed.

“You can’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

He glanced at her, then looked away again.

“But Harris? Don’t
not
worry.”

“So what happens now?” he asked, looking at her with as much bluster as he could summon. “I take it they’ll spare me till the job has gone off and all the boys know how to navigate the sewers and I’m no longer useful?”

“Harris, the sewer stuff is all my plan. I based it on having you there to guide them through the tunnels, because you’re an expert. They’re going to need you alive for the next time, too, don’t you see? It’s your ticket in.”

He looked at her. She knew he was thinking he didn’t want in.

“Do it for me. If the job works, then we’ll be using the sewers again, and we’ll need you. So make it work, Harris. At least you’re not hanging by your neck at the Tombs. You would have been dead a long time ago, if Undertoe had gotten to you that day.”

“Thanks a lot,” he said. “But maybe it would have been for the best.”

Beatrice put down her cup of ale. She glanced across the room, caught Dandy Johnny’s eye, nodded to him, and then wrapped her arms around Frank Harris. She stroked his hair. It was a maternal, sisterly gesture of comfort—at least that’s what she intended outwardly to convey. Meanwhile, she was whyoing subtly but hard, throwing up a cover, and when she felt it was secure, she let her fingertips move differently for a moment, roaming along his hairline and grazing the skin behind his ear, the smooth-shaven corner of his jaw. His whole body prickled.

“I fell in love with you, Harris,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. I shouldn’t have. But I can’t help that now, any more than I can all of this tonight. But at least I can protect you. If you let me. Just help me. That’s the best we can do.”

There was no new thought in his head, just that contact, those words and the smell of her body through her dress. There was no optimism, no resolve. But he knew he would do it: sing the song, teach the men, show them the way. Maybe he would really become a Whyo after all. It was as simple as the fact that she’d asked him to help her, whatever her reasons, and he hadn’t the power to say no.

21.

THE TAMMANY JOB

T
he problem with Beatrice’s promise was that the sewers weren’t really a very good getaway route. There was no future for Harris in being a guide to the watery underworld. She’d seen that the second she went down there with him that night. The access was just too cumbersome, and soon Johnny would know it, too, from experience. In fact, he didn’t have any particular illusions about the sewers. He had begun to fill her in on a few key details of tonight’s plan the day before, and it turned out they were really only doing the big sewer job to create cover for another job—something Johnny was calling
the Tammany job
—and it had to do with the dry tunnel Harris had found.

“All right, boys,” Johnny called at last, raising his cane. A crew of the younger Whyos emerged from the wings dragging a series of large, low, amorphous objects and deposited them at intervals on either side of where Dandy Johnny stood. There were a dozen of them, and the wavery footlights cast their shadows long and ominous across the canted stage, almost like bodies. Only the boys who had helped Dandy Johnny and Beatrice bring them there knew what they were. And, of course, Harris knew. He could have identified them at any distance. Then came a series of strange, directionless whistles and noises, and men began to step forward as if they had been called—which they had. By the time the twelve principals on the job were standing next to the twelve pairs of sewermen’s boots, the rest of the crowd was watching. All twelve men stooped down and unlaced their shoes. Then they each picked up a boot and began struggling to pull it on. Having the men boot up at the meeting was something Beatrice had suggested, knowing that the Whyos had never donned sewermen’s boots before. It wasn’t an easy task for the uninitiated, as she well recalled, and she was thinking it would put Harris in a good light, that he did it so easily. But Harris hadn’t been called forward by Johnny. He was just watching from the side, steeling his resolve for whatever came next. After several tries at his boots, Piker Ryan was just standing there panting. His feet were only halfway down the legs, and both boot shoes were laid out to the sides, like useless, broken appendages. Then Piker gave it another shot. He balanced on his right leg and yanked at the left boot, but just as he tried to settle his heel in the shoe of the left boot, caught the toe in the opening of the other boot, and lost his equilibrium. The Whyos and Why Nots watched in delight. And Piker was not alone. The others were all in various states of disarray and distress as well.

“Christ, men!” said Dandy Johnny over the laughter. This was not the opening he had intended, though he guessed now that Beanie had. “What are you, Whyos or buffoons?” She wanted evidently to make Harris look good. She had a soft spot for Harris, which he had no patience for, but perhaps it had been a good idea. “Frank Harris?” called Johnny. “Harris! Get up and give these boys some instruction in putting on their new boots.”

Harris looked around the room for Beatrice, but he didn’t see her. So this was it. He stepped forward and vaulted himself up onto the proscenium.

“Harris,” said Johnny, who was standing off to the side. He pointed with his thumb to a spot just outside the footlights’ glow, another pair of boots. Remarkably, they turned out to be his boots: McGinty’s. The grain of the leather, the pattern of creases, their miraculously buttery texture were unmistakable. Had Beatrice gone back and completely raided the Sewer Division? Quite possibly. Then there was Mrs. Dolan. Perhaps he had really seen her. He was wondering what in the world she could have to do with the Whyos when he turned and looked at Dandy Johnny, and suddenly he saw the connection: It was a younger, male version of Mrs. Dolan that smiled confidently back at him from above the fancy waistcoat and yellow silk tie.

“Put your boots on, Mr. Harris,” said Johnny. “Show them the way.”

Harris pried off his shoes against his heels. He showed the men how to gather the leather boots in accordion folds and draw them upwards in smooth strokes. It was a marked contrast: The Whyos still fumbled, while Harris stepped into one boot, then the next, in two quick motions, extending his legs and letting the leather stretch tight against his thigh, just as if he happened to be walking in that direction anyhow and the boots were in his path. With a flick of the wrist, his suspenders were snugly affixed. He wore the heavy boots as if they had no weight. Johnny looked over at Beatrice and decided he was pleased. It had been a good idea. And even Beatrice smiled a little, unthinkingly, with pride.

“All right then,” said Dandy Johnny above the rising murmur of Whyos and Why Nots. “The men with the boots are the principals, but you’re all in on this job. Here’s the plan: We’re hitting the old p.o. tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to do it during business hours, in plain sight. These twelve up here in the boots will be the ones that get away with the money, but every last one of the rest of you’s going to be involved in this job, on crowd control, to ensure the getaway. The boys here will be departing via the sewers with the help of Mr. Harris, who’s an expert on that subject. That’s why he’s here. The rest of you, your job is to sow confusion and misdirect people’s attention. If you do it right, no one’s going to have the slightest idea where they went, and no one’s going to get hurt. The boys will just seem to have vanished with the money. Very neat, and I’ll have you know this little caper promises to bring us great returns. The post office brings in over ten grand a day, and they don’t empty out the cash drawers till closing time. The biggest day is Monday. Eleven of the clerks’ stations are in the main hall, but it’s the business window around the corner where nearly half the loot comes in. The whole place is crowded and disorganized—that’s why they’re putting up the new joint up at City Hall. What we’re going to do is hit all twelve windows at once, right at the end of the day. We ought to get as much as we would for a bank haul—if we did crass work like breaking banks. But no, we’re going to do this one with finesse.”

There would be three Whyos and one Why Not assigned to each clerk, he explained, a dozen people to each quadrant of the main hall, and several floaters to take care of whatever unexpected trouble might come up.

“You boys in the boots,” said Johnny, “remember, walk calmly. You’ll be gone before anyone knows what happened.”

There was a door marked
NO EXIT
that led to the basement, and that’s where they would go, rather than to the roof or the side doors, where other Whyos pretending to have seen them would point. From there, they would enter the sewer. “And from there you’ll get further directions from him.” He waved at Harris. “If for any reason you can’t get the money off your clerk by the time the others have moved on, you walk away. Don’t make a scene. It’s a little more ballsy than usual, but the secret of the job is still stealth. They won’t know what hit them. Thanks in part to Frank Harris here. He’s found us the getaway route of our dreams.”

After a moment, Piker Ryan stepped forward. “Johnny, even if we get away with it, what the Hell we going to do with all the stamps? I don’t know a fence in the city who deals in stamps.”

There was silence.

“Cash, Piker,” said Johnny. “Don’t bother with the stamps, just get the cash and move. The idea is, it’s just like a bank job, but since it’s not a bank, there’s less security.”

“Oh. Just the cash. Right.” Piker flashed a sheepish, gap-toothed smile.

“You’re so damn dumb you’re going to terrify them.”

They walked through the particulars several times, until everyone knew exactly what his or her role would be. The keg was dry, and it seemed they were ready to wrap things up when Johnny called Harris and the principals to the front of the stage and instructed Harris to sing his ballad. Harris sang and then explained the way he used the song to frighten off the superstitious sewer workers. It was odd how he felt his connection to Beatrice wrenching free as he parted his lips and crooned the first words. He had been thinking before the meeting that if he had to sing, he would do it as a kind of serenade to her, but no, it turned out to be something more like his own swan song, and as far as he could see she wasn’t even listening. He wasn’t asked to teach the lyrics to the men. Harris would be down there with the men as their guide. If the need arose, he would be there to sing them himself.

It was at this point in the meeting that Johnny was informed about the interloper who’d been apprehended in the men’s room. The senior man on watch duty had come quickly when the bathroom attendant called for help, and he recognized Undertoe. “Shit—the Undertaker,” he said. They’d added a few more drops of hydrate of chloral to a cup of whiskey and poured it into Undertoe’s mouth, but most of it dribbled down his shirtfront, so they administered a little more of the knockout potion directly onto his tongue. Then they made sure he was well trussed up and locked both of the broom-closet doors. Eventually, when the theater was empty and night had fallen, the meeting broke up more stealthily than it had been convened, with little clusters of men and women scurrying off at long intervals from a half a dozen different stage and service exits of the Old Bowery. Meanwhile, Johnny went upstairs to take a look at Undertoe, who was thoroughly out, and to debrief the Whyo who’d nabbed him.

“Did you whack him pretty good, then?” he asked, and Horatio nodded. “What do you think he was up to?”

“Actually, I think he was going to brain
me.
He had his hand on his shot. I don’t know what for, maybe just the tips. But he was definitely alone.”

“Not even a kid with him? He usually works with newsboys.”

Horatio shook his head.

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t the tips. That ain’t enough to interest this guy, but whatever he was after, you took care of him. Good work, Horatio, good job.”

Johnny was tempted to have Undertoe pitched into the river, but then he thought about the two jobs that were going off the following day. If someone saw a couple of his boys dumping a body, it would screw everything up. He needed every hand, and no complications, so he decided to take a more cautious approach to disposing of Undertoe: “Fix him up with a bunch of hot wallets and drunk-dump him somewhere the cops’ll find him fast.”

It was midnight and the streets were quiet when the unconscious Undertoe was walked out the stage door to a waiting hansom cab by two Whyos, who fed him the rest of the bottle of whiskey for a chaser and took him over to the West Side, where they left him in a doorway just around the corner from a police station. Undertoe was already being dragged to his floppy-fish feet by a cop who slapped him in the face but found him unwakable when Horatio and his compatriots stepped up to the bar at the Morgue to celebrate the unexpected excitement.

Frank Harris had tried to leave when the meeting first began to break up, but he was stopped by Piker Ryan. “Wait around, Harris. Someone wants to talk with you.” Hours passed. He sat at a table and brooded. Eventually, to his great surprise, Beatrice approached him and invited him to walk out with her and Johnny.

“No,” he said. “I need to go.”

“Johnny wants you to walk out with us. Walk out with us.”

They escorted him silently out the door and all the way to Fulton Ferry. It was cold waiting on the pier, and Harris was numb inside as well as out. Why, he wondered, should he be asked to stand there between the girl he’d just declared himself to and her new boyfriend, the boss of the gang, unless they were planning to pitch him in the drink? But they didn’t. When the boat came, they got on and insisted on sitting outside in the wind. Harris looked out at the ice in the water as the boat cast off. The harbor was thick with slush and floating ice chunks. People were saying the harbor would freeze solid if the weather held. It didn’t matter much to Harris one way or the other.

“Privacy,” said Johnny, when they were on the ferry, under way. “It’s hard to come by in this gang. Everybody knows everything. But I think we can assume we’re alone now. I’ve got a job to propose to you, Harris, on top of the heist, something I don’t want the others to know about.”

Johnny explained to Harris what he’d told Beanie earlier: that the real point of the p.o. heist was to distract attention from another job—the cops’ attention, but also the other Whyos’. Harris looked up at Johnny. He couldn’t care less about the Whyos’ plans. He thought about telling him that he couldn’t have Beatrice. She was taken. He would have done it, too, if only she hadn’t been standing next to Johnny with her arm around his waist.

“You may have noticed my mother, downstairs at the theater, Mr. Harris?”

Harris nodded, raising an eyebrow.

“She’s very fond of you, you know. But here’s the point: We’re very excited about that dry tunnel you found. My mother found out some time ago that it existed and that it’s used as a kind of secret bank vault for the Tweed ring. Meg Dolan doesn’t work in the Sewer Division for nothing, Frankie, nor do you. We’ve long thought the underground city could have its uses, but there are uses and then there are jackpots. That tunnel was never meant to be connected. It was put in by Towle, and it’s used by him and a couple other Tammany men to store money that rightfully belongs to the people of this city. Lots of it.”

Harris thought about Mr. Towle and his sanitary ideals. He could not imagine him defrauding the public. His face said as much. Johnny laughed.

“Towle? That old coot? Just because he wears a silk top hat and has a do-good niece or two doesn’t mean he’s honest. This is how it works: First, a contractor overcharges the city for work they’ve done, then someone in the racket authorizes payment of the bill—someone like Towle, who’s got a big construction budget. The contractor, who’s in on it for a percentage, kicks back the difference, in cash of course. The word is that with the new courthouse going up on Chambers, and now the new p.o. building, they’re tripling all the bills and getting away with it. That money’s going to be ours.”

“So why do you need me at all? She knows where the tunnel is.” His eyes shifted to Beatrice, but she was looking out at the water.