Metropolis (44 page)

He walked away smiling as the woman spat in the gutter and cursed. It was broad daylight, after all, and he was in such a good mood already. There was really no reason to kill her.

37.

RATTUS RATTUS

A
t the Noe house that evening, the police were gone when Mr. Noe finally woke up again. He was lucid for a few minutes, then faded, and the doctor shooed everyone from the room. Harris was painfully aware, as he followed the corpulent preacher into the hall, that although Mr. Noe had treated him like family since he’d come there, to the world he was just a lodger, a part-time stablehand who had traded work for room and board. Or worse: He had been welcomed by Mr. Noe, been helped by him, and then had brought trouble to his vicinity, the result of which being that Mr. Noe was now near death.

The preacher and the lawyer went into the study and closed the door behind them. Harris, John-Henry and Beatrice filed awkwardly into the dining room to wait, and the cook returned to her kitchen. Soon, the cook returned with Sarah Blacksall. She had come as soon as she got word. She recognized Beatrice immediately and looked her over while Harris did what propriety required—even among social reformers and members of the Manhattan underworld—and made the introductions. If this was her competition, thought Sarah Blacksall, there was little she could do but accept it.

“Miss O’Gamhna, I do believe you need a pack of ice for that nose.” With that, Sarah Blacksall turned for the kitchen. She was a practical woman. She saw what she saw, and what she saw was that Harris was in love with the girl with the broken nose. It was, at least, an explanation for why she had never managed to get closer to him, despite all their mutual interests and her attentions. She also saw, however, that the situation was complicated. The girl was clearly in trouble, which might mean that Harris was, too.

Beatrice took the ice-filled dish towel. “Thank you, ma’am.”

That was when the somber-faced lawyer came to the door.

“He’s going, we think.” And they all returned to the bedroom, where Mr. Noe’s eyes were open but glazed over. His hand was hot but flaccid in Harris’s.

“Mr. Noe fancied himself a kind of paternal figure to you,” said the lawyer. “And since the Lord in his infinite wisdom has seen fit to separate him from his family and you from yours, he made certain provisions for you in his estate. I don’t believe he had time to inform you of that before this occurred.”

Harris peered into Mr. Noe’s face, but there was no sight in his eyes, just a quivering of the irises. Then Mr. Noe coughed and seemed to want to speak himself. Everyone in the room drew to his bedside, but Mr. Noe’s mouth just hung there, gaping the way dead mouths gape.

A few moments later, Mr. Beecher said a short prayer, and the doctor drew the sheet across Mr. Noe’s face. But Harris couldn’t stand that. He sat down beside his friend and pulled the bedclothes back down, then took his hand one last time. It was still so warm it seemed it wasn’t dead, so heavy Harris knew it was. He took Mr. Noe’s slack face in his two hands and whispered quietly, “Forgive me.” Then he settled Mr. Noe’s features in such a way that his lips and eyes were softly closed. The skin was already distinctly less warm than a living person’s.
Maybe it’s the radiating heat that carries the spirit from the body,
he thought, in which case Mr. Noe wasn’t entirely gone yet. Maybe there was something left of him that could perceive Harris’s gratitude, his loyalty, his love, and so Harris stayed there by the bedside while, one by one, the others left. He waited till all the heat was gone from Mr. Noe’s body, hours, before finally pulling the sheet back over his face. As he did so, he felt strangely absolved, as if Mr. Noe had released him, as if he had said,
It’s enough. Now bury me and go on.

When Sarah got up to go, she made a point of asking Beatrice if she had somewhere to go that night and offered her a place to stay.

“No, I’m fine, thank you, ma’am.” Sarah winced—she didn’t think herself that much older or more respectable than Harris’s little friend—but certainly she was relieved.

As for Beatrice, her night had just begun when she left the Noe house. She tried not to think about Harris’s girlfriend. She had no right to mind. And she had much to do to ensure that Harris didn’t become Johnny and Piker’s next victim. She’d told the policeman who interviewed her, a Lieutenant Jones, that she would make sure Johnny was at home and off his guard at ten o’clock. Of course, Jones could have found Johnny at home and off his guard right then, too—he’d be out for several more hours, she figured—but she needed time to get back there herself and tie up a few loose ends as well as to prepare Jimmy and Fiona to step forward rather sooner than expected. It was going to take a major effort to ensure the Jimster performed well enough that the Whyos accepted him as their boss.

She was relieved that it was quiet when she turned onto their block—so they hadn’t jumped the gun on her, thank God. But then a Whyo kid who lived nearby nodded to her and said that Piker was upstairs with Johnny. She mounted the creaky stairs with a fluttering terror in her chest, but as soon as she entered the apartment she saw that she was safe. Piker was out, too. He must have come in and helped himself to some of the doctored rum. She redosed them both with another bottle from the larder, just in case, and then went out onto the roof to think. She was going to have to give Jimmy a crash course in Johnny’s lingo, but that could start tomorrow. For tonight, she was pretty sure she could get away with teaching him just one short sequence that would prove to the others he knew Johnny’s codes and thus that he was Johnny’s appointed lieutenant. The major trick was that she couldn’t allow Jimmy and Fiona to know that she had set Johnny up; she couldn’t be sure they’d go along with her if they knew. And so she would have to wait till the cops had come and gone to start teaching him.

At ten to ten, she went downstairs and made a point of saying hello to an old lady sitting on her stoop. Beatrice was going for a growler of beer. Could she bring another one back with her? She surely could. At ten sharp, Lieutenant Jones arrived. Indeed, Lieutenant Jones kicked the door down himself, though he could well have assigned the job to one of his underlings. All six men on his squad had their pistols drawn. They were wearing headlamps, lit but shaded. Johnny Dolan’s monkey-headed cane was grimacing in the darkness from the corner by the door rather than the umbrella stand where it belonged, and when the wood of the lintel splintered and the screws popped from the brass lock plate and the door banged open into the dark apartment, the cane slid—slowly at first, with just a scraping sound, then clattering to the floor in a silver and mahogany explosion of noise. Jones fired first. He shot into the darkness that was the kitchen—and killed the icebox. Cold water burbled from a hole in its side. The man that had aimed down the side hall took out a wardrobe, putting holes through two of Beatrice’s shirtwaists. There was no return fire.

They shone their lights around and made their way cautiously through the apartment. They found them under the kitchen table. Lieutenant Jones’s bullet had whistled across the tabletop at the level of the gut of anyone seated there, but Johnny had keeled off his chair and onto the floor long before the cops arrived, as had Piker Ryan.

When Piker had got there, Johnny was sitting in his chair with his head tipped back. “Johnny?” Piker said. “Oh fuck, that far gone already? Don’t you want to spiffy up, man, and go out? We got a little business we was wanting to take care of, don’t we? Come on now.” But Johnny was in no condition, so Piker Ryan had sat down with him and polished off Johnny’s drink. Then he poured himself a little more. A half hour later, he’d been blowing bubbles in a puddle of drool of his own. Beatrice had told Lieutenant Jones he’d find Johnny and Piker out cold, but Jones didn’t trust her that much. He had been expecting an ambush.

When Beatrice returned, two police wagons were parked out front. She delivered the old lady’s beer and then approached the penthouse cautiously, not sure if she would be dragged off to jail, too, by association. From out on the roof, she watched the police moving through her house. She didn’t feel violated at all. She had removed the few things she wanted hidden from the police. The rest of it was theirs to do with as they pleased. Mainly, though, they were interested in Johnny and Piker. It seemed no amount of nudging with nightsticks nor even several sharp blows could wake them. Eventually, four of the six cops dragged the two weirdly smiling, conked-out gangsters past her to the stairwell and down five flights by their arms, heels whomping with every step.

Lieutenant Jones was twirling the monkey-headed cane like a baton, while his second in command struggled behind him on the stairs with a crate containing most of the contents of the Dolan family larder. The eye-gougers in particular impressed them. There were a number of unsolved murders on the books in which the victims had been missing their eyeballs—their very neatly excised eyeballs. This could be the beginning of something, Jones was thinking, like a promotion to commander.

“What do you say, Lieutenant?” asked the shirtwaist shooter. “We bringing the wife in, too?” Beatrice was still out on the roof, watching and listening. It was a crucial juncture. If it sounded like they were going to arrest her, too, she planned to jump to the next roof over and follow one of the Dolans’ long-established escape plans. She had little to lose.

“Bring her in? I don’t think so,” said the lieutenant. “I was thinking, send posies. It was easy pickings, thanks to her. She drugged those boys to half an inch of their lives. You know, what amazes me is, I’ve watched the Points for years and never saw what those two was. Just brawlers, just crooners, I thought, nobodies.”

“Yeah, people’ll surprise you, won’t they?”

And then they drove the two Whyos to the Tombs.

For the initial alarm, Beatrice used her own voice. She let forth with a yowl of a rutting tomcat in C-sharp, followed by the first two verses of “Willy the Weeper”—a song that was never sung by Whyos except to call secret meetings at Geoghegan’s. Beatrice didn’t normally call meetings (at least not in her own voice), so the urgency of the message was obvious. A short time later, Fiona and Jimmy met her at the penthouse, worried and pale. She told them she didn’t know anything other than that the cops had broken in and carted the men away while she was out. “But we don’t have time to think about how it happened right now,” she said. “We have less than two hours.” And then she began, quietly, to teach Jimmy the song he would need to sing.

Where’s Johnny?
The Whyos were furiously whispering among the copper fermenting vats when Beatrice stepped forward with Jimmy at her side. She told herself she wasn’t nervous, she was excited. She knew that calling the meeting for Geoghegan’s would put the Whyos on edge, and she was right. People were already starting to get ideas. Obviously, something had happened to Johnny. They were thinking of the power that Johnny had had and seeing opportunity, wondering what jobs they could get that Johnny’d never let them do, whose boss they could be, what girls they could run and imagining how much richer they might be if they didn’t have to pay the fucking tithe practically every other night at the Morgue. Beatrice was right about at least one thing: The collective was fragile. People weren’t thinking about what they got back from the gang or all the times their weekly cut of the tithe had kept them afloat when they were otherwise broke or the times when the gang had worked together to get them out of some trouble or jail. What do you expect of a bunch of criminals? She could already feel the riot starting in their minds as she picked up two lanterns, one in each hand, and raised her arms. Fiona had made sure all the other lights in the brewery were extinguished.

“I have a message from the Tombs,” she said, though Johnny probably wasn’t even there yet. A murmur went through the assembly.
So it was true.
“Johnny has asked me to let you all know he’s been
temporarily inconvenienced.
Him and Piker. But not to worry. He’s provided us with a way to carry on uninterrupted in his absence. He asked me to introduce the man who’s going to command us till this gets sorted out.” And then she passed the Jimster the lanterns, and he sang her song.

A half hour later, Beatrice O’Gamhna slipped out of Owney Geoghegan’s alone and went home to the penthouse, where she slept dreamlessly in Johnny’s bed. It had worked. Order was restored before it had even broken down.

The following morning, she kept her ears open, listening for sounds of discontent in the gang, but as far as she could tell, no one had figured out what she’d done, not even Jimmy and Fiona. They came by at ten, while she was out on the roof again with a cup of tea, and told her that so far the Jimster had been welcomed with surprise and a certain amazement by the gang. Then they got down to work. Tomorrow was the biweekly report, and the Jimster wasn’t nearly ready. Beatrice reminded herself that the Jimster didn’t have to impersonate Johnny’s voice, which meant even a fairly stumbling performance would probably impress them. It was nothing like her own debut, which had had to be perfect. She went over the book with both of them, spent an hour coaching Jimmy on all the standard phrases, then sat down with Fiona and cracked a brand-new account book. She carried over the balances from a sheet of paper she’d prepared but didn’t show Fiona the old book—she didn’t want her getting ideas about the kind of graft the Dolans had benefited from. When the time came the following afternoon, she stood next to Jimmy and prompted him whenever he needed it, while Fiona recorded the figures. It went pretty well, she thought.

As for what Piker Ryan and Dandy Johnny thought when they came to at the Tombs, it wasn’t what you might have expected. Johnny was so self-confident and Piker so confident in Johnny that neither of them could imagine such a thing as Beatrice turning rat. Of course, they could taste the hydrate of chloral on their tongues, but the fact that she’d doped Johnny’s whiskey wasn’t so out of line. He’d just broken her nose, after all. It had cracked pretty loud and looked like Hell the next morning, he thought. She had reason to be mad. And he had always encouraged her feistiness. It was only the terrible timing of it all that made him want to kill her. From what Johnny and Piker had heard in the joint, they were being held for something totally random. Some fool shopkeeper’d gotten himself killed, and when the murder weapon was announced in the papers, it happened to be a cane just like the one he’d bought at the Hippodrome and had been carrying that night. It was all in the paper, and someone who had seen him with the cane had told the cops.