Metropolis (3 page)

There in his cell in the Tombs, he lay on his bunk and pictured her face and imagined various ways he might try to track her down, assuming he ever got out of jail. It didn’t seem very easy. Finally, exhausted, he pulled his bedclothes over his head and slept. His body had work to do, repairing its various breaches.

Several days later, when he descended the broad front stairs of the Tombs just past noon, he kept his eyes to his boots. He felt ashamed to be coming out of that place. Leaving implied having been there, after all, and being an inmate of the Tombs implied a good deal. He still felt congested from the smoke, too. First thing on breathing the fresh, cold outside air, he had a painful coughing fit and spat up a pink and gray object. After that his breath came easier but more raw. He was sore, exhausted and demoralized, but the thing that troubled him most was the arrest itself. Or had he ever been arrested? He wasn’t sure.
Goddamn Irish arsonist,
the policeman had said. Clearly they thought he’d burned the museum down, but he was never brought before a judge or formally charged. It was all very odd. There were crimes he
had
committed, to be sure, but not this one. He had no earthly reason to do such a thing. The place was his job, his home; everyone he knew worked there, and, if you included the animals, so did his only friends.

“You have now the true incendiary, you have found him?” he had asked of the desk clerk who signed him out.

The man looked at him. “Yeah, I have him—right before mine eyes.”

“But it is agreed I did not do this. I am free.”

“Agreed? No, I wouldn’t go that far. They ain’t no charges ’cause they ain’t got nothing on you. Can’t keep ya without a lawyer, ain’t nobody going to get you one—so you’re outa here. But don’t get too relaxed. We’ll nab you back when we’re ready. We got your address.”

He had protested. He had said he preferred to stay in jail for as long as it took to clear his name, argued that it shouldn’t take long at all, considering how simple it all was. He attempted to ask for the captain of police, but with his English as it was, and his anxiety about not being cleared and Tom Thumb somehow in mind, he muddled it and asked not for the captain but “the general.”

“Oh sure,” said the officer. “The general. Which one would you prefer, maybe Grant? Let me call him for you.”

He shook his head. “No, I mean . . .”

“Just go. Go on, go, get outa here.”

He left. His first plan was to find someone who
knew
him—the menagerie manager, even one of the hack drivers—someone who could vouch for his character and explain that he’d been in the building because he lived and worked there. But as he walked away from the Palace of Justice, it began to dawn on him: They were going to make an example of him, guilty or not. They hadn’t even questioned him, after all. Probably they knew quite well he was innocent but had chosen to hold him since they had no other suspect. Crimes like arson just couldn’t be left unsolved in New York—they were too political, too terrifying to the people of the wall-to-wall wooden-frame city. Just the month before, he’d followed the show trial of an incendiary in
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated.
The man had been tried, convicted and hanged in a public spectacle. The main illustration in the issue that covered the hanging was a collage of several scenes: a sparking match and can of oil; the charred frame of the house that had burned; the bodies of the victims laid out at the morgue; a gaggle of urchins and ne’er-do-wells vying for a view of the gallows; and, in the center medallion, a vile-looking character dangling by his neck. If he didn’t find some way to clear himself, he feared that could be him.

But then he had it: If all they really wanted was a hanging, perhaps he could save himself by finding the actual arsonist. Just so long as it hadn’t been an accident. But the more he thought about it, the more he knew it hadn’t been: the direction the heat had been moving, the dying embers in the stove, the cold, the empty coal bin. Candles weren’t allowed in that part of the building at all, and lanterns were awfully safe. Were there any accidents, he wondered, or did every fire have an arsonist behind it—this one and the one that had destroyed his uncle’s farm in Fürth alike? No, he thought, and then again yes. There had to be a cause; there had to be a guilty party somewhere.

And then, as he walked, another notion came into his head: The officer had said, “We got your address.” But where he’d lived was gone. They only thought they had his address. He’d filled out the stable address of Barnum’s in pencil on the back of his paper of naturalization, which they’d gotten from his pocket. But he’d not be sleeping there again. He was homeless, but for the moment that meant he was free. He didn’t have anywhere to be, and there was nowhere anyone could find him.

He walked and walked, until he realized he smelled smoke. Then he came to a halt. The smell was strong—acrid and meaty—and the streets even there, around the corner from the building, were thickly paved with cinders and ice. Opportunistic children—a lucky few in ice skates, most glad just to have shoes—laughed, slid and sprawled across it, running for their lives to the sidewalk when the occasional carriage rumbled past. He asked himself what he was doing going back to the museum, the way a criminal returns to the scene or a man on the run stops foolishly by his old dwelling. Was it habit? Was there any way he could investigate? Did he just want to see the destruction, the remains? He wasn’t sure. He was full of curiosity, nostalgia, disbelief. But yes, he thought, it did seem the only place to go if he wanted to figure out what happened.

He pressed ahead, around the curve. The wreckage was beautiful, in a way. In places, nothing remained but blackened posts and beams, whittled by the flames to delicate proportions and decked out in shimmering ice stalactites that tapered like the fingers of his uncle’s beard. Where the walls still stood, they were coated with thick, even layers of ice that gleamed in the sun.

That was when the hot-corn girl saw him. She’d been peering up at a singed canvas banner fringed with icicles. You could still make out the word
CURIOSITIES.
Then she turned and saw him. It was eerie—she didn’t even know he was out of jail, yet it seemed as if she’d known exactly when he’d appear, where he’d be standing. He felt her stare and looked at her, blinked. She was no one, just some girl, but she met his gaze. It almost seemed to him she was going to say something, and he smiled. She was pretty, despite the way she stared. But then she turned, and he felt ashamed of the loneliness that made him hope to turn every onlooker into a friend. He never heard the signal she gave to her friend, standing on the opposite side of the street, to keep him in her sights. He never saw the two detectives who had recognized him while combing through the rubble for evidence and taken note of his appearance—another bit of circumstantial evidence for the file.

He walked around the block to the back of the building and saw that the area where his room had been was largely gone, eliminating any hope of salvaging his few possessions. The only one worth saving was the
Stranger’s Guide,
and that mostly because of the postcard from his mother. He certainly didn’t care about the figurines. There was a tintype picture of himself he’d had taken at a photo studio on a whim on his day off. It was a novelty to be able to have a picture made so quickly and inexpensively, but the likeness had been poor, he’d thought, comparing it in his mind to the vivid daguerreotype of his mother that once sat on the mantel of his parents’ house. And anyway, what need could he have for a picture of himself? It was really only the postcard he’d miss. He noticed the mare Alice, struggling to budge her load—the charred, frozen carcass of a camel—and seeing her alive made him feel slightly better. He wondered about his goat. He heard the slightly off-key strains of a hymn being sung by a high male voice, a tenor, and watched the singer emerge from the blackened interior. It was a fellow he recognized, a man who’d never driven a coach, curried a horse or lifted a pitchfork but had always seemed to think he was in charge. Now he was dragging a beam and carrying a hatchet over his shoulder. It looked like he’d been chipping in for once. Then he stepped into the winter sunlight, looked straight across the street and fixed the stableman in a glare.

It hadn’t occurred to the stableman till then that people might know he’d been detained as a suspect. Now he wondered if it was possible that people who knew him believed he was guilty. Of course they did. Rumors would be flying. What he didn’t guess was that this was the man who had spread the rumors and given the tip that had landed him in jail rather than the charity ward. The stableman felt a chill crawl down his back. He had an awful feeling that everyone in the vicinity recognized him and held him to blame. He turned and walked quickly away.

What he needed now was some dinner and a warm place to spend the night. Then a job, a plan for building his life back up from nothing. A few blocks north of the museum, he stopped to count his money. He had less now than when he’d stepped off the boat. Fewer possessions and less hope, too. He was sore, lonely and worried about what would happen next.

He had no idea, of course, just how much he had to fear—and from how many other people, in addition to the police. Beatrice, the hot-corn con girl, for one, was on her way, even then, to tell her boss of the stableman’s release from the Tombs and his visit to the scene of the crime; the capstone of her story would be the meaningful glance he’d exchanged with his countryman, the one everyone called the Undertaker, who was supposedly one of Barnum’s security guards. And the Undertaker, too, would be a problem for our man. No, he hadn’t a clue, yet, about the underworld of the metropolis.

4.

WILL

H
e slumped on the bench in the hiring office and sighed; it hadn’t been his name called after all.

The clerk at the desk gazed out in another direction, and another man across the room inhaled loudly, straightened his cap, placed his hands on his thighs and buttressed himself to stand after long sitting. But the stableman had been there longer—all day yesterday, all day today. He watched the other man at the counter, listening, nodding, mumbling, taking pen in hand.
What can he do that I cannot?
he asked himself, and stamped a foot against the floorboards, not in a disorderly way, but he was frustrated and discouraged, and it did feel good to express it. He thumped his boots a couple more times, under the pretense of trying to drum up warmth, which was not too far-fetched in that room. Another name was called, vaguely French-sounding. At first it made him angry, but then he told himself his turn would come eventually. What he dreamed of, of course, was a job on a church or as a mason, anything working with stone, and his hope was that his long wait would be rewarded when the hiring office matched him with the perfect job. But he couldn’t afford to be so choosy; for now any work would do.

Perhaps, he thought, the tongue-twisting syllables of his borrowed name were simply unpronounceable to the clerk. At Barnum’s they’d called him George Jerrymerry, and he’d answered to it. He didn’t much care how the name was pronounced. It wasn’t really his, after all—just the name on the passport he carried, which listed physical dimensions close to his own. The stableman had given his own documents away to the identity vendor in Hamburg in partial payment for the Geiermeier papers, which meant someone else was probably now traveling as him. Who? he wondered. What was the real Geiermeier’s name now? Had he passed the burden of his own terrible crimes off onto the stableman, like a curse? They both had brown hair and black eyes, stood five ten, but didn’t half the world? The stableman wished he’d thought a little more about how the vowel-plagued name on his papers would be sounded out by an American tongue, but it was too late now. At least he wasn’t alone. He’d sat all day listening to squashed-sounding versions of European names—Polish, Hungarian, it was hard to tell, the way they came out. There were Germans—he’d heard Schultz, Franck and Handel called—and of course plenty of English and Irish: Evans, Jones, Callahan and even two Harrises. A small squabble had broken out over that, but soon enough the second Harris had gotten his turn and set off with a letter of reference and a certain hopeful spring in his stride. That had been hours ago.

The stableman looked at the broad hands lying in his lap. Despite the burns, which were healing, they were good, honest hands. He wore his considerable physical strength as overtly as he could and concealed his foreignness and the unexpected contents of his mind with a quiet tongue. He knew he looked like a man who could work, but what good did that do, when the man who stood watch at the desk wouldn’t look at him? Or was there some aura of having been in the Tombs still lingering around him? In the week since the fire, it seemed no one at all had met his eye or even looked at the wide contours of his face, which had taken on a tinge of desperation of late.

What exactly did he look like, our man? Well, with the scorching of the fire and the freezing of the weather and the chapping of his cheeks, I’m afraid his face resembled nothing so much as a scrubbed potato from the fields of the country he’d left behind, a potato that had battered around a long time in a barrel. His forehead was prominent; his eyes were dark and glimmering; his nose was straight. There was something there, beneath the tired surface of his features, that had made Beatrice take an interest in him. A certain intelligence was revealed by the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had shed his name, he had grown calluses and now blisters, but the rest was still him: the soul that animated his face, the body that sustained him, the beating of his heart, the silent whirring of his mind. Yes, he looked clever, which had not helped him at the Tombs, but he didn’t look half as well educated as he was, and that suited him, for now. All he wanted was a job, any job.

Time and again, whenever the clerk rose to call a name, he raised his head, eager for his chance, optimism rising, willing to do almost anything, but the clerk never called his name.

It was five days now since he’d left the Tombs, over two weeks since the fire. White flakes had just begun to filter from the clouds that morning when he’d set out from Wah Kee’s flophouse on Mott Street. It was the cheapest thing anywhere—full of Chinese, Italians, sailors, drunks, bedbugs and the likes of him. There was also a general store at the street level, but Wah Kee made most of his money selling opium in the basement to people of every background—men and women almost as broke as our hero and adventurous bon vivants as wealthy as the Astor whose cell he’d mistakenly inhabited. The stableman had watched them stumble up from the cellar room with the sweet, acrid whiff of opium on their clothes and seen the strange justice of the drug. The poppy was a great democratizer—for however divergent the quality and state of their wardrobes, they all looked the same when they left: not happy, not anxious, just blissfully blank, regardless of their station. The look implied a feeling that the stableman envied, and he’d have joined them in a moment if he’d ever had the extra money. But the remnants of his wages had gone, coin by coin, to Wah Kee for his bunk, to bowls of soup, to a plate of salty kippers, to a shave in a barber shop before heading to the hiring office, to coffee and eggs. As of noontime, when he’d eaten from a pushcart, he’d reached the very end. All of the expenditures had seemed essential, but all were fleeting, and now he didn’t even have the money to sleep in the flop another night.

His timing was particularly poor. Of all recent nights, this would surely be the worst one to go without shelter. The snow had grown heavy and the day bright white as a storm settled in. By afternoon, hardly anyone was still abroad, and the stragglers were nearly hidden from sight by the white haze. The door opened only now and then to let out a man with an assignment. As the winter sun crested and slid around fast and low, the stableman could almost feel his whiskers creeping out. There was no end to their growing, and suddenly that most trivial fact was an emergency. Tomorrow, after sleeping on the street or, with luck, in some church foyer, he’d be a bristly hedgehog, a lowlife without even the cost of a morning shave to his name. It seemed that unless he found work that afternoon, and it was waning fast, he never would.

Finally, late in the day, he felt his hope fail. No one would look at him. At least before, he had had the animals. They had known him and in just the short time he had worked for Barnum’s had come to trust him. But all his gentleness, which had made them lose their skittishness around him, had done no good. He had let them die. It’s better, surely, that he couldn’t imagine what came next, at the soap and glue houses over by the river, where the animals’ bones would fall apart from one another and sink to the bottom, their severed heads bobbing in the bubbling foam, their eyes hard-boiled.

The waiting area grew colder and emptier as dark fell, and he moved closer to the smoking stove by the clerk’s counter. Soon there would be nothing left to do but knock on church doors and seek lodging for the night. Station houses offered shelter, too, but he couldn’t very well imagine going there, unless he wanted to be hanged. He brooded over other possible avenues but came up only with cold alleyways. Well, it was warmer by the stove at least, and he stretched out his legs toward the heat.

He surprised himself suddenly with a twitch—he’d been asleep. He raised his head from his chest. Strange shadows flickered. The room was quiet and unfamiliar. Gaslight illuminated the counter, and orange coals glowed through the nearby grate. Something had stirred him. He looked to the far corner and saw the clerk at the desk beckon at him.

“You. Yeah,
you.
”

He had been called.

“Yes, sir.” Hands on thighs, optimism rising, he stood.

“You been here all day. Didn’t you sign in? Don’t you realize we’re closed?” He looked about and saw that the other benches sat vacant and the hall was empty but for himself and the clerk. The optimism dwindled away. The man was just kicking him out.

“Sorry. Sorry, I’ll go.”

“No—wait. Turns out you’re lucky. See, I only let you snore because of the rotten weather, but now it seems
I’m
lucky. You noticed the snow? Well, someone at Street Cleaning only just looked out the window, and they sent a boy over here with an order for an overnight shoveling crew—just in time for closing. So what about it? Shoveling snow for the city. You want the job?”

It took him a moment to follow. “Snow, a job, shoveling,” he repeated, and then he understood. “
Ja, danke, danke,
” he said.

“Is that a yes? You better stop speaking Dutch and learn some English.”

He thought of the pink, tissue-thin, new-grown skin on his hands.

“Yes. Yes, sir.”

“All right, good. You can start now and go till the regulars show up at six, see? Anyway, you’ve had your beauty sleep, and I think I can tell from looking that you ain’t got evening plans.”
Beauty sleep?
the stableman wondered.
Evening plans?
He wasn’t sure how he should respond.

“Or don’t you want a night job? You want I find some other lug?”

“A lug? No . . . or, yes. I mean, yes, I’ll do it—and no, no one else.”

“You’ll take the job.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Good. The thing of it is, you’re the only man left. You think you’re man enough to shovel the city alone?”

“The city, alone?” He thought a moment. Perhaps it was a joke. “That would take a long time, sir,” he finally said. His English might have been better if only the few people who talked to him had made more sense.

“You’re right, it would. So, first thing you do is round up, say, twenty men and take ’em down to the dock at Coffee House Slip, East River off of Wall Street. You’ll get the carts and shovels there and sign up with the fellow at the office. The others get paid for the time they shovel, you get paid foreman’s wages, starting right now.”

Foreman’s wages.

“What’s your name?”

“Geiermeier,” he said, and leaning over the clerk’s ledger, he saw it written out in the beautiful Gothic script he’d learned as a boy and pointed to the entry. “I signed in this morning.”

“You got to be kidding. Is that how you say that? I must have tried to call you five times today, yesterday, too. I started to think it was Chinese, all that up and down and curlicue around, no way of knowing what letters is meant. Where’d you learn to write like that anyhow? You don’t know how to give yourself a leg up, do you?”

A leg up
? Americans said much that he didn’t understand. He had listened almost obsessively to the names being called. But then the clerk uttered a strange, vaguely familiar word, and it dawned on him: This was how the clerk had been pronouncing his name, with the
g
misinterpreted as
h,
the vowels collapsed, the
m
transmuted, and the sounds and stresses generally so different from the actual pronunciation that it hadn’t even registered on him. He frowned slightly with frustration—how many opportunities had he missed in the past two days because of this?

“That’s a
G,
” he said weakly, pointing to the page. “I never realized you were calling me.”

“What kind of writing is that, Greek? You ain’t Greek, are you?”

“It’s German.”

“Aw, jeez. Now, there’s plenty of Germans in New York, and they seem to get along. But where are you going to get with a name no one can read, and you can’t even tell when they’re trying to? It just won’t do, that name. Or the handwriting either.”

“But it’s my name,” the stableman said and then smiled faintly to himself because in fact it wasn’t.

“No, no, forget it. I’m going to do you a favor here. I’m just going to put you down as . . . yeah, that’ll do . . . that was my father’s name, why not? And then there’s the prince. Mr. William ‘Willin’ to Work at Night’ Williams. Or Prince William of Prince Street, if you’d rather.” He tittered to himself, but the man he was naming was slow on the uptake.

“Wilhelm is your father’s name?”

“Yeah, but no—not
Vil-helm.
Just
Will.
See, it’s a free country over here—you don’t have to be a German. You can be whoever you want to be.”

Will,
the former stableman thought.
Will Williams. All right.
He looked up at the clerk with gratitude and was disconcerted to see the man staring straight at him. It might have been an unpleasant feeling for some men, but for him to be looked at, at all, was a rare intimacy, a comfort—certainly not an affront. This man had named him, he thought, and after his own father. This man would not forget his face. If they met again, they would trade nods of recognition, smiles even, hellos.

He was still slightly skeptical as he took the new name into his mouth—gingerly, like a bite of sausage with mustard. He let it rise to the back of his throat and his sinuses, opened his mouth a crack to let it mingle with his breath.

“Will ‘Willin’ to Work at Night’ Williams,” he said, mimicking the clerk so closely that his accent almost vanished. He had a good ear, the stableman.

The clerk raised his eyebrows and laughed. “Oh, so now you’re a quick study, eh? I guess you’ll do all right.”

And maybe he would. At least he had a name now.

Call him Will.