Metropolis (40 page)

Harris didn’t know what to think after they left. The foreman took him aside, but it wasn’t over the police matter, which he saw as a mere nuisance. It was the vomiting and crouching down the master mechanic had seen when Harris was on the catwalk. Dizziness was a sure way to get transferred off the top. The bridge company did not want workers falling to their deaths. It was bad publicity. Harris, who had never before shown the slightest sign of vertigo, fit the description. He was grounded.

“It’s just a bad turn, sir, I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“Two weeks,” said the foreman. “Standard rest period for dizziness. And by the way, if you were so queasy, you shouldn’t have gone up this morning, Harris. Wait here and I’ll see if there’s anywhere topside to put you in the meantime. But I’m afraid it may have to be the caisson—that’s the only place we’re short right now.”

Harris sighed. Undertoe, the police and now the Manhattan caisson. The Brooklyn one was complete, but everyone said the Manhattan side was worse. It was deeper, and men were falling ill at an alarming rate and no one understood why. But then the boss came back with a smile on his lips.

“I think you’ll like this. One of the yard foremen requested you as a trimmer.”

Harris still had the taste of bile in his mouth. He’d been on the verge of collapse, death and incarceration, and just like that he got his dream. He was given the afternoon off to recover from his ailment and joined the crew trimming blocks on the ground the following day.

The granite for the bridge arrived from the quarry already cut to the basic dimensions, but they were rough, and the crews modified each block on site to fit its final location. Most of this work was done on the ground, with just the fine-tuning being left to the men up top. It was simple stonecutting, but every block was as important as those in any church tower. The safety of the countless crowds of passengers that would soon use the bridge to cross from shore to shore relied on those stones. He looked out at the harbor and wondered if the bridge would ever make the Brooklyn ferries obsolete.

When Harris first picked up the tools, he was nervous. But they were much the same as the ones he’d used in Hamburg: the mallet, the spike, the toothed chisel and the straight. No one was doing any carving here, though. The truth was, his skills far exceeded those of most of the men he was working with, and he hadn’t forgotten. Within half an hour, a couple of men had remarked at how cleanly and efficiently he did the work. “How long since you worked?” they asked, meaning with stone. But it didn’t matter: He still had the feel, and he still loved it, even the pain in his arms that night from the long hours of hammering. After his two weeks were up, Harris was given a new assignment. He’d shown his competence, but he was also obviously well enough to go back up top, where his ability to manage the heights was valued. The difference was that now he would be a trimmer, not a grunt who worked guylines and cranks.

What happened next was proof that you should never let your guard down. You can build yourself a shield, a fortress, a false identity, but it only protects you as long as you keep it up. When danger seems to have passed, that’s when it’s greatest. Danger has patience; it waits for opportunity. Then it pounces.

It wasn’t Jones’s fault. Jones had been convinced by Harris’s performance—he’d actually pitied the man his stomach ailment and gone easier on the questions than he’d planned. Though when he looked at that picture again, he did decide to leave a couple of men on duty to watch Harris a little longer, just in case he was wrong. They watched him go to work and to and from the Henleys’. They checked the records at the Sewer Division and even found the street contractor he’d worked for before that. It was a pretty large company, and the current secretary didn’t remember the man, but he went back to an old payroll ledger and confirmed that there had indeed been a Frank Harris working on one of their crews in the period in question. (That, of course, was the very Frank Harris after whom the Whyos had named him, knowing the chances of sorting the two out were slim.) The whole investigation was becoming an embarrassment for Lieutenant Jones. He’d put half a dozen men to the task of trailing a respectable and uninteresting Irish laborer under the absurd premise, probably trumped up by Undertoe on account of some odd grudge, that the man was a German incendiary. They were laughing at Jones in the department now, and he was angry. He called Undertoe in.

“No,” said Undertoe, “I swear it’s him. Have you brought him in? Have you talked to him? Do you really believe he’s Irish?”

“I’ve talked to him. He said things like
Oh, aye, that I do.
As Irish as potatoes.”

“He’s not. He’s fooled you.” He scratched for a moment. “You see, it’s brilliant. There’s a hundred Frank Harrises in this city. His name is his disguise.”

“Mr. Undertoe, do you think it’s a crime to have a common name?”

“It could be useful.”

“
Jones,
for example? Listen, Undertoe, just get out of my office and don’t return. I don’t want to see you back in this building unless it’s behind the bars.”

Undertoe backed his way out of the station in a posture of disgrace, but the moment he was around the corner he stood up straight and spat twice on the sidewalk. The whole thing made Undertoe’s ears roar. When he met up with the little punk who’d chased Harris to the dock for him, he took him straight around the corner for a chat and broke his nose. It didn’t cheer him up much, though. Then, on his way uptown later that afternoon—he was going to take a last look at the hulk of the Hippodrome before they knocked it down—he saw an old dog lying in a doorway. It looked half dead, and he kicked it. Unexpectedly, the dog snapped back to life and clamped onto his leg. Undertoe was just on the verge of slitting the thing’s throat when its owner emerged from a pub next door and whistled. The dog let go and scurried to the pub.

“I ought to kill you and your mongrel both,” Undertoe snarled. He was down on his knee, and his leg shrieked at him through his ringing ears. There were two deep, welling punctures in his calf. He put a finger in his ear and twisted it, but it had no effect on the sound within, of course. It never did.

“You stupid bastard—he wouldn’ta bit you ’less you’d kicked him.”

Undertoe would have settled the dispute right then, but the fellow was a bit big, a bit young, and the rioting pain in his leg put Undertoe at a disadvantage. Not to mention that the dog appeared to be quite well trained. He decided just to go home and get off the thing, but on the way he managed to find a vagabond to sharpen his switchblade on. He was sleeping in an empty shipping crate over on the West Side docks, and Undertoe rolled him into the drink when it was done. That made him feel slightly better at last. He always did love to hear the splash.

Harris had missed two full weeks up top—two rows laid down, six feet attained—and the day he returned he could feel the elevation even more intensely than usual. The great thing was, the tower just kept going up. Every time they completed a row of the enormous stone blocks, they casually set about laying the mortar for yet another level, and he was jacked up even higher. Sometimes he wondered whether he’d ever hear back from his father, or if he should try to contact Beatrice to tell her about Undertoe, but neither of those anxieties was all-consuming. Harris felt happy. He loved his work. He had gone back to spending time with his friends on both sides of the river.

For the time being, he just let himself be in love with the top of the bridge. It was maybe the same thing as loving the sky. The air was purer up there. It made the whole world seem reasonable and orderly, although sometimes the gusts there were so remarkable that even the very solid Harris felt he might be blown off his feet. He looked across the water at the tiny world of New York, at nearly uniform thickets of low brown buildings prickling with chimneys, punctuated here and there with something grander. Trinity’s bell tower would soon have competition from the secular spire of the new
Tribune
building and the great, tall trunk of the Western Union building that was going up. But even the largest of the city’s buildings were small compared to the bridge, and even the busiest thoroughfares were so far off that the city looked quiet. Further uptown, the buildings were sparse and the island was suffused with the bud green of spring growth.

One afternoon that summer, he was up top trimming an edge when heavy clouds rolled in over New Jersey. If they came this way, Harris thought, they’d have to quit early, but he was hoping they wouldn’t. It was hot and humid down below, but gorgeous and breezy up above. The crew still was planning to raise several more stones to be set the following day. When the ground team gave the ready signal, Harris left his trimming to help bring the next stone in. The steam winch below engaged, and Harris could only just make out the racket of the engine. Then the cable loop creaked and stretched taut, and slowly the stone groaned into the air. The tower crew landed the block easily enough, and Harris and two others were sliding it along the tracks to the north wall of the tower when they heard a loud crack. Everyone turned in fear to look down at the cable that was going under load again, but it was already bringing up the next stone and inching its way around the turn block. Harris thought,
Thunder?
and looked at the sky. But it wasn’t thunder. It was an extra derrick boom that had been tied off in the raised position. The end of the line that fastened it had gotten wrapped around the cable loop and snapped. Now the boom was swinging toward him, right at eye level. Harris bellowed a scatological expletive in German and ducked. It swung over him.

Then he stepped back to get his balance and found nothing beneath his boot heel but air.

NEW WORLD

34.

THE FALL OF MAN

O
h, God,” he said rather quietly, in English, as he rolled backward in a somersault and into the cool void at the center of the tower. He plummeted slowly at first, like a great ship just setting sail, but soon he was flying freely through the air, his speed limited only by the drag of his windmilling limbs. At one point, his foot struck a piece of hardware set into the interior wall, probably a ladder rung, and he cried out. Then he drew his arms and legs in against his belly, which only made him fall faster.

Where was the jolt of fear that would normally have flung his whole body forward the instant he lost his footing? Where was the impulse toward self-preservation? The fingers that should have shot forth and grasped at anything, anything at all, simply flexed once and conceded their failure. Perhaps it all just happened too fast; perhaps there was a will in him to fall. If he had made a decision, it fell with him as he tumbled through space.

He felt rather than saw the wall rush past, sometimes veering dangerously near. He kept his head tucked and didn’t try to reach out and break his fall. Head over heel over ass over elbow he went. He saw black and then a smudge of blue and then black again as the great dark cathedral cavern of the tower rose around him. He thought of his mother, the last thing she said to him.
I’ll see you soon, dear. Be good.
He felt cold. He had fallen past the waterline. Outside the tower walls were water, fishes, eels, algae—and somewhere, the body of Waugh. He saw black and a flash of brightness, then black as the bottom rushed toward him, black, and then a small disk of light. Three feet of standing water was all there was to cushion his impact. His spine kissed the bottom. Then the great wave his landing made engulfed him. River-cold rainwater crashed about him as fiercely as North Sea surf. And Harris was dead to the world.

The men on the tower did not gape into the hole. They shrank silently away from it and turned to the outer edges of the tower, where they cast their eyes down at the cresting scallop-edged waves, as if Harris might somehow have been transported outside the tower so that they could see and therefore more easily comprehend his death. Or perhaps they just couldn’t bear the blackness of the hole. Then finally (though it was just seconds later), one of them galloped down the footbridge
—DO NOT RUN, JUMP OR TROT—
shouting,
“Man down! Man in the tower!”
Someone found the orange flag that meant
emergency
and hoisted it on a derrick. But what was the hurry? What was there to do? Harris had fallen. Down below, as people became aware of something wrong, work stopped, machines were shut off and the yard grew silent. There were muttered discussions about whether they’d be able to recover the body. A man who knew Harris was addicted to the tower said, “They ought to let him lie.”

“Who is there to tell?” asked the foreman.

“He lives with a man in Fort Greene, in his stable apartment, doesn’t he?”

But just a landlord? They wanted to tell a widow, an orphan, an ailing mother. Then someone remembered he had a friend.

“You could ask Henley. He’ll know. That Negro blaster. He’s over on the Manhattan side now.”

So a couple of men were dispatched by ferry to inform John-Henry, thinking that maybe he knew about Harris’s family. Meanwhile, the tower crew began to rig a derrick with lines long enough to reach all the way to the bottom. They weren’t sure what they’d find, a terrible mess or just a battered body, but there was no question of allowing Harris to have the bridge as his tomb. With Waugh there’d been no choice, but it wasn’t the way the company wanted people to think of the bridge. How could the men have gone on with the job, knowing he was down there on his back in the standing water, staring unseeingly, submerging and rising according to the schedule of the microbes and the flies till most of his flesh was gone and a ragged skeleton with a few severe bone breaks at last came to rest on the roof of the caisson, at the bottom of the tower? No, knowing he
had been
down there was going to be bad enough.

When they asked for volunteers to help recover the body, only John-Henry, who’d ridden the ferry across in stunned silence, stepped forward. They drew straws for the second man, and soon the two of them were being lowered on boatswain’s chairs. They had a large tarp, a bucket, a rake and two gaff hooks with them. They were wearing headlamps, but as they descended a wind rushed up from below and both their flames died. It was pitch-black all around them and suddenly cold.

“There he goes,” said John-Henry with a shudder.

As they neared the bottom, it grew very quiet. They couldn’t hear the screeching of the block that was reeling them down anymore. When their feet touched water, they shouted up and sounded the depth of the standing water with their rake. No one knew how much rain and seeped-in river water there would be, but they were a little surprised to find it only waist high. They relit their lamps and began to look around. John-Henry saw it first: a dim hump floating in the water.

“There,” he said.

It looked as if he’d ended up facedown, meaning he had surely drowned if he hadn’t died in transit. John-Henry moved through the water. The shape was completely still. That was when he heard Harris’s voice—gibberish, but definitely Harris. The other man shouted when he heard it, and the sound ricocheted back and forth, trapped by the high, thick tower walls.

“Harris?”

Harris saw one light coming toward him and another going away. He said, “Mutti, I built this tower,” or he tried to. He was speaking German if he was speaking at all, but his ears couldn’t hear the words he meant his lips to utter.

John-Henry reached out and touched cold, wet wood—a barrel.

“Harris?” he called again, and turned around, peering into the darkness. He thought he heard something moving in the water in the far corner.

And then there were two lights, and Harris saw a face, but not the face of his mother. Two hands clasped his head, but they were not his mother’s. He felt a kiss, but not his mother’s. John-Henry’s. He groaned.

The wave of his landing had washed Harris to a corner and left him sitting propped up, head above the water. He’d smacked the back of his head, lost consciousness briefly, and now he was coming to. Improbable, yes, but it really happened—check and see. He had a very thick skull, Harris. He was carried back to Mr. Noe’s some hours later, where he was put up in a first-floor bedroom at the big house and cared for by an excellent team, including the cook, Sarah Blacksall and Mr. Noe’s own physician, who declared him the healthiest man he’d ever seen. He had sustained a concussion, but to everyone’s astonishment Harris had already gotten some of his wits back the following morning. He refused to give interviews or make a statement, but the intense public interest in death in general and danger on the bridge in particular dictated that his story was a major news event. It made every city paper. The several editors who stooped to giving it a front-page headline sold out their entire editions.

Lieutenant Jones picked up the
Tribune
when he sat down at his desk the next morning and said, “I’ll be damned!” Undertoe’s dupe had become an instant celebrity. Jones tacked the notice up on the bulletin board himself and braced himself for ribbing from the boys.

Undertoe saw the
Sun,
spat and threw his knife at a fence, where it lodged and vibrated with anger. He didn’t know whether to hope that Harris died of his injuries or not. He ate a light lunch of boiled tongue on toast, then went out and took advantage of a pretty little Negro hot-corn girl’s carnal wares. For dessert, on an impulse, he smothered her.

Johnny Dolan saw the
Times
and said, “Beanie, trouble. Your boy Harris made the news.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you’ve got to read this. It’s worse than Piker’s ear. They’re liable to write up his Goddamn life story in
Leslie’s
or
Harper’s,
and who knows where else. I don’t trust him to leave us out of it. So why don’t you put someone on him and arrange some
complications—
before he gets the chance to talk. Put Piker on it. And bring me another drink, eh?”

Beatrice snatched the paper from Johnny’s hand. His grip was soft when he was drunk, and he was indeed well on his way to that, despite the early hour. He’d been backsliding lately. After she’d read the article, she was quiet for a while, then said, “Johnny, why would he talk? What’s he got to gain by it? They say he won’t even talk to the reporters.” But Johnny had left the room to make that drink himself, since she’d ignored the request. He was drinking pretty much all day these days, and Beatrice was doing both their jobs, plus most of the work teaching Jimmy the language, but she wasn’t complaining. It brought her greater control.

The following day, Harris received calls at the Noe residence from no fewer than seven more reporters wanting to profile him; a dozen strange women bearing casseroles, pies, cakes and well-wishes; six doctors seeking to examine him for the benefit of medical science; two representatives of P. T. Barnum, who wanted to put him in his own exhibit at the new, 150 percent fireproof edifice of the new, new Hippodrome, due to be completed within the year—and Beatrice. The cook took the food and the names but turned all the visitors away. Harris was doing worse. He was in and out of consciousness and feverish, and it was just family, so to speak, at his bedside: John-Henry and Lila, Mr. Noe, plus Sarah Blacksall and Susan Smith.

There was one other visitor to the Noe place in the days after Harris’s fall, a man who didn’t leave his card or name, just watched the others come and go. He spent most of Thursday loitering around the crowded yard. When the reporters and curiosity seekers had given up for the day, he stayed around another hour, long past dark, hiding himself in a stand of trees in an undeveloped lot across the street. No one had been over to Harris’s usual apartment except a boy who came to feed the livestock at midday. He tried the door and found it open. Then a dog barked, and the man’s stomach clutched—he detested dogs. But it wasn’t him the dog was bothered by—Undertoe had been lurking in the ligustrum so long that the dog was used to him. It was a girl approaching the house, and Undertoe recognized her: B. B. O’Grady, or whatever her name was, the girlfriend of Johnny Dolan. It was no surprise to him. He watched while she waited at the door and was turned away, then he entered the stable and found his way up to Harris’s apartment.

There wasn’t much there—some spartan furniture and a few clothes folded on a shelf—but it didn’t take him long to find the one thing of greater interest than the rest: a small bundle of letters in a drawer. Some were in English, addressed to Harris, but there were a couple of them in German, too, and when he saw that, he smiled. It was settled then: Harris was Geiermeier.

Undertoe’s mother had never taught him German—she considered her Germanness the curse that had held her back—so he had no notion of what the letters said. On top of that, the Gothic handwriting was so diabolically odd he couldn’t even make out the name of the addressee, except that he was quite sure it wasn’t Harris, Williams, Koch or Geiermeier. Who was he really? Undertoe wondered.

Then he flipped to the end of one of the letters and was able to make out the signature. It looked like it was
from
Robert Koch. How strange, he thought—that was one of Geiermeier’s names—but it didn’t matter: Whatever the letters said, whomever they were from, they were incontrovertible evidence that Harris was really a German. Undertoe decided to take just one of the letters along with him. He took the first one, the one that described the fire in Fürth, the two bodies in the barn, the funeral; the one that said,
My friend, even if you’d planned to fake your death so you could vanish and never be looked for, you couldn’t have done it any better.
In short, it was exactly the sort of circumstantial evidence that could get the Barnum’s Museum case reopened, not that Undertoe knew that. He folded it and put it in his pocket.

He decided to study his subject more fully and assemble as complete a body of evidence as possible before he returned to Jones. He was being more cautious, in light of Jones’s recent dismissal of him. He followed home several of the visitors to the house, including Susan Smith to Weeksville, way out in Brooklyn, and Sarah Blacksall to her apartment off Gramercy Park. Then he turned his mind to what role the landlord might play in Harris’s affairs and tailed Mr. Noe when he left the house, took the ferry across to Manhattan, and then walked to a construction site on Broadway, inspected it and returned home again. Undertoe was baffled. What could possibly link Harris and Johnny Dolan and that crowd to a couple of blacks, an unmarried lady of the better sort and a man who oversaw what appeared to be a mercantile establishment, some sort of factory under construction?

Harris’s fever didn’t break until the third day.

“Who did you tell me came by again?” Harris was propped up on his elbows and squinting at the cook through a fog.

“Oh, awake, are you? Well, the worst was the agent from Barnum who showed up with a midget in tow—a midget! It’s an insult, Frank. To think they’d put you up next to the freaks.”

“No, not them, the lady.”

“I said a lady
of a sort.
A Miss O’Grabner? Said she was acquainted with you, but really, my dear, I’m not sure you care to remember
every
rendezvous you’ve made.”

“No, bring her in to me, please. I want to see her.” He didn’t notice Sarah Blacksall and Mr. Noe standing in the doorway, didn’t see Sarah blanch nor Mr. Noe put his hand on her arm. Mr. Noe had taken a definite liking to the lady doctor, and he wondered why he hadn’t heard more about her from Harris. Obviously, she was smitten, and she was far better than he’d hoped Harris could do for a wife. Sarah held a tray with a phial of laudanum, an envelope of aspirin powder and a pitcher. Mr. Noe was carrying a small crate.

“Well, that wasn’t even today, was it?” said the cook. “You were out cold. I don’t care to speculate where she might be now. If she wants to see you, she’ll come again.”