Metropolis (8 page)

Undertoe had choreographed a role for the man he knew as Geiermeier in one of his plans. He’d sized him up early on at Barnum’s, long before the fire: a foreigner, utterly without connections and splendidly naïve. The guy actually tried to chat Undertoe up in
German,
a language which, though it was his mother’s first, Undertoe wouldn’t have deigned to speak, even if he had known how. Germans were treated like scum in America, second only to Irish, and in his opinion those who didn’t manage to leave that cumbrous tongue behind them actually
were
scum. You didn’t stand a chance in New York unless you could talk fast and understand everything everyone said, unless you could hustle. Why, the stableman was so daft he’d spoken to the animals at Barnum’s in German. Undertoe had gotten the gist of some of the sentimental things he’d said—they were exactly the kinds of things Undertoe’s mother had cooed to her lovers and to him, as a boy, though the tone of her voice had varied with the listener.

To Undertoe, our stableman was a reminder of his Germanness, which was an embarrassment, but above all he was a tool. The guy was weak, he was accessible, he was friendless, he was penniless. He was perfect. Keeping track of him had become a little more difficult since he’d gotten out of jail—that was a hitch—but now he’d found him again. In fact, all Undertoe had really needed to do, the night before, was to put someone like the Jimster on his tail to watch him. Joining the shoveling crew had been just for kicks—he was playing with him then. Getting to know him. Learning how to make him mad. And now he knew where to find him later on.

As for Williams being predictable, his feet had led him right back up Broadway toward Barnum’s. He was figuring things would be quieter now, given the hour and the storm and the passage of time. Perhaps he’d be able to poke around the rubble. Instead, there was a veritable crowd milling around in front of the ice- and char-bound museum, and not just men at work on the demolition. Too much time had passed for so many gawkers still to be thronging the site, he thought. Then he noticed that almost half the crowd consisted of police inspectors, and his stomach lurched.
We’ll nab you back,
the clerk at the Tombs had warned him. What was he doing there? Could he learn anything without compromising himself? He hadn’t quite decided when a kid walked up to him and looked at him strangely, as if he knew exactly who he was. It was the Jimster, and he sang out the headline tunefully, as all the newsboys did—the louder and sweeter the voice, the more scandalous the headlines, the faster the papers sold.

“Special edition—arson to murder—body of girl found in wreckage of Barnum’s fire! Read all about it, only in the
Sun—
or the
Trib.
” (He carried both.) Then he shifted to a speaking voice. “Paper, mister?” He was wondering if he could be this lucky, if this could really be who he thought it was.

The stableman had no money to buy a paper, but he badly wanted to read the whole story. A girl in the stable? He didn’t believe it. It wasn’t right. He had done his rounds, and there was no girl there. How could she have gotten in and he not known it, unless she was the girlfriend of some cabbie or other, but in that case wouldn’t the cabbie have gotten her out? Then he thought of the barn doors that were not especially secure, and he thought about the bitter cold of that night. He thought of Maria. Of course it was just a fantasy, but he pictured her, proud, stubborn and in trouble of some kind, finding herself at large on the coldest night of the year, searching out a nook of her own and coming, whether by chance or design, to the very place he worked and lived. Would he now be held responsible for having needlessly allowed not just the animals but a person to burn to death? No, he was more certain than ever that it wasn’t his fault, but whose was it? He had to find out, but he had no idea how.

But the Why Nots did.

“One of each, if you please,
Jimmy,
” Fiona had said with an extra bit of lilt for good measure. Moments later, she was turning to the second page of the
Sun
’s front-page story,
BODY OF GIRL FOUND IN BARNUM’S FIRE—ARSON TURNS TO MURDER,
while across the street catty-corner Beanie leaned against a lamppost, perusing the latest number of
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated,
which had a special spread on the fire investigation. There was a picture on page three, and it wasn’t of the victim (those were only just going into production). No, the picture was of our stableman, and it was an odd one, if you knew the sitter, for he was smiling in it, and perhaps as a result it didn’t quite resemble him. It had been drawn from that tintype photo he’d had made on his day off. Never a very good likeness, and then, too, when the cops found it in the rubble, it was partly charred.

The drawing in
Harper’s
was a little closer to life, thanks to the editorializing of the artist, who had taken a flyer and given him a rather grim expression, but it was printed only on the inside continuation, not on the cover. The article was lengthy, for just then the editors were waging a clean-up-the-city campaign, continually touting some urgent social issue, praising the technical advances of the fire brigade, deploring the state of the city’s sanitation or decrying the plight of the deserving poor (which they distinguished, and sharply, from the indigent, the criminal and the fallen). The body of the girl, estimated to be twenty years old, was a priceless propaganda tool: fodder for every mother’s nightmare and every man’s fantasy that he might have protected her from danger. (Nobody had told the papers till after press time that the girl was bursting with child and wore no ring on her finger—the cops were sitting on that little detail, wanting to get the message out, to up the interest in the case, which they were virtually assured of solving. They would
find
someone to convict, if need be.) The editors were all over the story. They smelled a skunk and named it Phineas—Phineas T. Barnum, that was—a fancy name for a member of the species
Mephitis malodorus,
as one columnist wrote, but fitting for a showman, even if he tended to abbreviate it. Sure, someone might have a grudge against him. Sure, the girl was an added twist. But so was the enormity of Barnum’s fire-insurance policy. There were observers who had noted, even before this latest incident, that every time his ticket sales diminished, his circuses, his museums, even his domiciles flared up like hay in August. Even before the body was recovered, the
Sun
had committed to following the story as far as it would go. Now, with the added boost of scandal and intrigue, it was really having fun.

Meanwhile, the girls were no longer actually reading the papers. They’d learned all they needed to. Beanie was holding her copy high before her face, pretending to glance through the corset ads while she actually peered through a hole torn in the crease. She wanted to watch what Will would do, to stay close enough to intervene if needed. She didn’t want to be seen. She’d have given quite a lot to know just what he was thinking, but that was one thing her street skills couldn’t gain her.

He was wishing he had the pennies to buy a paper and read all about it. And rightly so. Information changes everything. If only he’d had a paper, he’d have known that the cops had gotten his likeness and wanted to bring him back in, and thus that he ought to be behaving a little more covertly. He’d also have read that the girl’s hair was dark, not blond, as he was morbidly imagining, and spared himself the worry that Maria was the victim. He didn’t have the pennies, but he had an idea where to start if he was going to try to solve the crime himself. He was tired, and he was worried, but he did not have a guilty conscience. On the contrary, he had a plan. And he was suddenly looking forward to the rest of his day.

As he turned away from the intersection of Broadway and Spring, he was under the observation of several people who knew exactly who he was: Luther Undertoe, the Jimster, Beatrice and Fiona. There were a half dozen other newsboys in earshot, all selling papers containing his description, and some of them hawking the illustrateds with his likeness to boot. There was a reward of five hundred dollars on his head. But his oblivion was his shield, for of all the myriad New Yorkers who passed him as he set off through the snow, only the four who already knew him were able to match his face to the pictures of the villain the
Herald
had dubbed “George the Torch.” And each of them had reasons for sitting on the information—at least for now.

9.

MORGUE

U
ndertoe hopped a streetcar heading north. It was going to be a long trip up to Central Park, what with the snow, but at least the car wasn’t crowded. He found a place and spread his legs wide, taking three seats.

He’d passed a note to the police sergeant as they left the morgue, suggesting a rendezvous later in the day to discuss some important new information, including exactly where they could find their man that evening. He was looking forward to reaping the five-hundred-dollar reward for leading the cops to a killer. Undertoe slipped into a light doze. It had been a long night. He was jolted to awareness again just north of Thirty-fourth Street, when one of the streetcar’s metal wheels derailed—the tracks were jammed with ice and compacted snow. The whole coach skidded sideways, threatening to topple, then righted itself. Undertoe retrieved his hat from the floor where it had fallen. The horses plodded forward. The wheels lurched back into their metal grooves.

He had been interrupted in a dream—there was a blond German girl with soft warm flesh, and he hadn’t gotten to enjoy her yet. He crossed his legs and rearranged his overcoat, cleared his throat, annoyed. He was late when he got to the menagerie in Central Park, but he found the man he expected to meet exactly where they’d planned: at the cat cages, between the American panther and the African lion. The panther looked angry as it paced; the lion was listless; his customer seemed nervous.

“Would have been easier just to shoot them and stuff them, if you ask me,” remarked Undertoe as he approached the lion. His tone implied that the man was a perfect stranger.

“Possibly. I’ll grant you it must have taken courage to capture them alive.” The man dropped a copy of the morning paper on the park bench that faced the big cats. His top hat gleamed. His collar was silk velvet, his gloves black kid. That morning, his valet had brushed his topcoat till the nap was soft and smooth. He’d made a killing in textiles during the War Between the States—all those uniforms and blankets—and now he was parlaying that income and the expertise he’d gained into the launch of an upscale haberdashers with a wholesale business on the side. His dealings with Undertoe concerned a girl, a certain Pearl Budd, known better in the Five Points as Pearl Button, whose acquaintance he’d made at a downtown bordello. She’d been his favorite escort for a period of months preceding his marriage that winter. She was a better class of working girl, Pearl, knew how to dress for the opera and kept up with the serial novels in the better periodicals. He wouldn’t have taken her to dine at a society hotel, naturally, but she wasn’t an embarrassment to be seen with. Such relationships were understood. She had commanded a rather high price, which he willingly paid, and thus he’d been baffled—no, disappointed—when she’d written him that winter, from a new address, complaining of
irregularity
and implying she expected something more. He regretted, then, having allowed her to play the role of wife once or twice, though it had certainly inspired her in bed. It had been stimulating for him as well, to imagine marrying a common tart. He sent sufficient money to take care of the problem and an unsigned letter saying he wanted to hear nothing more of it but suggesting as a consolation that eventually, when his new wife became indisposed with child, as he surely hoped would happen soon, he’d gladly seek her company again. Pearl did not understand his preference for an imagined child in his wife’s belly over the actual one in her own. She wanted out of whoring, and she did not use the money as he had intended. On the contrary, she wrote him again, demanding a regular upkeep and threatening to appeal to his wife if he ignored her.

Unfortunately for Pearl, she had overestimated his nerves. Her gentleman had panicked and tracked down Undertoe, who had taken care of Pearl, a simple matter of an overdose of hydrate of chloral slipped into her gin. Disposing of her body in the fire had been an afterthought. Now Undertoe was collecting his final payment.

“Can you assure me it was her?” asked the gentleman under his breath.

“You could always stop in at the morgue and see for yourself.” Undertoe laughed, knowing that was hardly an option. He picked up the paper, which had a certain heft other copies of the early edition did not, and dropped a small object on the bench in its place: a pearl button. “Or, you could trust me.” Then he walked off.

The entire encounter had taken about a minute, and to an outside observer it would hardly have seemed to be a detour from the ostensible purpose of Undertoe’s visit uptown: a pop-in visit to the back barn of the park menagerie, where the surviving animals from Barnum’s were being housed. He let himself into the barn and went directly to a horse stall that appeared, at first, to be empty.

“Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.”

He clucked his tongue, and from a warm nest of hay at the back of the stall, a small goat stood up and stepped forward. Undertoe held out a cube of sugar, and after the goat had taken it in her rubbery lips, he scratched her in the space between the four horns that sprouted up, two to a side, in a manner at once freakish and sweetly appealing, which was to say absolutely perfect for Barnum’s. The stableman’s goat nuzzled Undertoe’s palm.

The stableman had decided to commence his investigation at the morgue. If visiting the crime scene was going to pose problems, he would go and see what he could find out about the victim. Knowing who she was and exactly how she’d died ought to give him something to go on, to track down the person who had really set the fire. At Twenty-fifth Street, he admired the golden letters carved above the door. They were deeply, crisply, elegantly executed and freshly gilded, at once a piece of work he could appreciate and dreadful.

The moment he walked through the door, he had a new set of worries, however: the ledger on the front desk and the man who was obviously there to make visitors sign it. He was rightly afraid to leave the name Geiermeier. And not wanting to associate the name Williams with the fire or its victim, he searched his brain for a new name, a story, a relationship to justify the visit. It would have to be German. Anyone could hear he was German. The name he chose was that of his old friend from his father’s lab: Robert Koch. It was unnoticeable, Germanic, plausible, and at least he had some connection to it, unlike Williams. Perhaps, too, the clinical air of the morgue brought to his mind the laboratory where he and Koch had first become friends, the doctor’s son assisting the doctor’s assistant.

In fact,
Robert Koch
was a terrible idea. Any new name would have been. For if he was really innocent, why should he feel the need to create yet another alias? It wouldn’t look good if he did have to face the authorities again, but he was banking on whatever he learned here to help him enough so that it wouldn’t matter.

“Yeah?” said the man sitting at the front desk. Louie had been sitting at that desk for years, and every day had been rife with tragic scenarios and macabre spectacles. Louie was long inured to grief. The main things he cared about were keeping the visitors upright and getting the bodies off his shelves before they spoiled. But he did have a heart. Whenever he could manage it, if the volume wasn’t high and the weather not too hot, he’d let the unclaimed ones stay a little longer than their allotted ten days, on the off chance that someone would come in at last, see one of them, and start to cry. For Louie, a good day was when he saw someone cry, but it didn’t happen often enough. Every now and then, at closing time, after a day of shrugs and sighs but no reunions, he’d wander the dead rooms alone and offer up a teardrop or two of his own. You’d never have guessed it, though, from the blank way he stared at Will.

“Well?”

The ex-stableman turned rookie detective gave a spiel about a missing sister. Louie nodded and wrote something down in his logbook, then left him. There was a vague hint of rot in the air, and something sour and antiseptic, but they hadn’t even gotten to the door of the dead room when Will’s knees went soft, like noodles. He felt himself blanch and go suddenly cold. He reached out for the wall and took a deep breath, but it was too late. His body collapsed in a pile on the floor, leaving his mind to hover unmoored somewhere over near the window, then venture out into the icy wind. It wove between the snow-shrouded chimneys, and somehow it found Maria. So he need not be afraid of that; it wasn’t she who was dead.

No, in fact, she was nodding at the signal of a man, tucking his folded bills into the torn lining of her rabbit muff and inviting him up to her room. She was running her fingers down his rashy chest, laughing when he reached out and slapped her and commanded her to kneel. The stableman’s swoon was brief, and though it was not a dream, it was like a dream in that he mercifully forgot what he’d seen when he roused. The splay-legged, Undertoed truth about Maria evaporated swiftly, like a volatile solvent, and he came to with the domed white ceiling of the foyer above him, the marble chill of the floor in his limbs, a new pounding in his cranium. Louie was standing over him.

“Bud. Hey, bud. Get up.”

Louie brought him a glass of water, then gave him his tour of the morgue: not just the one girl from the Barnum’s fire—for why would the one who received the most publicity be any likelier to be his sister? Williams had said his sister was twenty years old, and there were several girls that age in residence. The thing about corpses is that, one way or other, they’re disasters. They’re no good anymore, except to a small group of professionals: doctors, grave diggers, police, priests. The stableman had seen death before, but somehow this was different. He thought of the body of the vagrant who had died of the flux, still lying in the barn awaiting burial when his uncle’s farm had caught fire. He’d made use of that body, knowing it was wrong—bodies should not be used, they should be buried. But he had known the man bore a certain resemblance to him and hoped no one would guess the difference when the fire had done its job.

He looked at each girl’s body and shook his head sadly. But then, when Louie pulled the sheet off Pearl, the stableman was overwhelmed. Who was she? he wondered. Whose baby did she carry? Why had this happened? There was no purpose this death could possibly serve. He covered his eyes, and his shoulders shook.

Louie looked at him. He’d been suspicious before. Now he felt chagrin and relief. One more identity was about to be confirmed, one more lonely body taken off the roster of those he felt obliged to mourn.

“She was found in the Barnum’s fire, in the basement,” he volunteered.

When our man asked him a series of quiet questions—how she had died, if she had worn any jewelry, could he look at her clothes—Louie made himself as helpful as he could be, but the truth was there wasn’t much to be learned from Pearl’s singed garments and bare fingers, and Undertoe had been sure to dispose of her reticule.

“So what was her name?” Louie said quietly,
kindly,
at last.

Will just shook his head. He thought,
No
—no in denial, no in despair, no in disgust at himself for coming there and prying. No at her slightly open, empty eyes. No at the soft concavity in the top of her skull and the great, dead convexity of her womb. No at her failure to procreate or to survive. No because, despite it all, he’d learned nothing he could use in his defense.

“Sir? I need her name.”

He realized now that if he didn’t give a name, he would make himself very suspicious. “Lottie,” he said, though it tainted his sister to give her name to this pregnant girl. It was the first girl’s name that came into his head. “Charlotte Koch.”

“Well, I’m very sorry, sir. I’m afraid you’re going to need to sit down and fill out some paperwork with me before we can release the body. Do you have an undertaker? If not, your church may know of one, or we can make a recommendation.”

“I can’t. I have to go. I have to tell my mother.” He was reeling with the way the lies and transgressions multiplied. He didn’t want to speak anymore for fear of what he would say.

“It’ll just take a few minutes. . . .”

Will shook his head and backed out of the dead room. Before returning to the street he leaned over Louie’s desk. He peered at the logbook, scanning the names on the two facing pages, and what he saw made all his other concerns fade: Luther Undertoe had been there.

He left the building in a hurry then. Suddenly, he was certain that Undertoe was the one. It explained a good deal. But how could he turn these bits of circumstantial evidence into a case that might convince a policeman or a judge, when he himself was surely a suspect? What he needed was information, but he couldn’t even afford to buy himself a copy of the paper. He could read the paper for free, however. He could go to the public library at the Cooper Union. From the entry in his
Stranger’s Guide,
he remembered that it welcomed working men and women in particular and was designed in the grandest of styles, with the intent of uplifting its constituents. He imagined the place had washrooms fit for the aristocrats that had funded its construction, and his head was suddenly filled with visions of shining silver taps with hot running water and a brightly lit reading room furnished with padded leather wing chairs, where he would sit while he found the crucial information that would lead him out of his predicament, and which would then cradle his head while he fell deliciously asleep for a few hours, to rest up for the coming night.

He passed a newsboy on his way down the block, but it wasn’t just any newsboy—it was the Jimster, who on his own initiative had decided to keep the stableman under continuing surveillance. Now his ingenuity was rewarded. Undertoe would like hearing he’d been at the morgue. The Jimster had nothing in particular against the stableman—he understood that Undertoe was framing him, in fact, and he found it unpleasant—but he was an entrepreneur, just trying to keep himself fed and housed and shod. His only problem, which he was fully unaware of, was Fiona.

The stableman wasn’t in the mood to frolic in the snow anymore as he walked south. He was worried he’d drawn attention to himself by fainting; he was stumped about how to use the information he’d gathered; he was exhausted. He decided his judgment had been impaired by lack of sleep and that he would put off further sleuthing for the moment. For now, he needed somewhere to rest till the night shift was due to start shoveling.