Metropolis (9 page)

A few blocks downtown, his eye was caught by the top halves of two young boys bobbing along at a fast clip on the far side of the street, their lower bodies obscured by the snowbank. Now and then, they stopped to gather snowballs and hurl them at each other, rather fiercely. There was something enlivening about watching those boys. They seemed so innocent, the way they played. At the corner, the boy out front broke left and crossed the street, then vanished down an alley. There was some shouting that the stableman couldn’t make out, and the second boy followed.

It was a trick of Fiona’s that the stableman never realized she was a girl, much less the nature of her attack on the Jimster. The two seeming boys appeared to the stableman to be playing around, but in fact the Jimster was fleeing. Fiona had just offered to pry out his eyeballs, if he didn’t move along. The stableman looked both ways for them at the corner. Where had they gone? Then he spotted a shoe—a boy’s shoe, much worn, resting on its side on the fresh crust of snow, having flown off the wearer’s foot as he rounded the corner. Certainly it belonged to one of the two who had just run past, he thought, but they weren’t the kind of boys likely to have extra shoes in their closets, if they had closets at all. He thought about what he’d do if one of his shoes were lost, and wondered if it really had been a game. Now he wasn’t sure. He reenvisioned the scene with the first boy running away from a bully, which was much closer to the truth, but he still wasn’t able to glean that the bully was a girl, nor that she’d chased the Jimster into a basement entry and then tackled him.

“What the—” the Jimster said. Fiona had been pelting him so hard with snowballs and epithets, he hadn’t even noticed losing his shoe. Now she had him pinned by his arms. She was also laughing. Then she pulled out one final snowball and shoved it down his neck. There was no sign of sharper hardware anymore. When he shouted, she leaned down and called him a Billy noodle. Then she breathed something lewder in his ear, and he broke free, and they were wrestling, and then kissing, and then they were struggling to shed just enough of their clothing to stay warm and yet to have access. Access was gained. They spent a quarter hour in the dusty basement—it wasn’t a place that made you want to linger—and at the end of it, the Jimster didn’t care anymore that he’d dropped his papers and allowed Undertoe’s man to get away.

That had been the point, of course. Fiona and Beanie had decided it was time to get the Undertaker’s toady off their man’s tail. They’d flipped a coin to see who would do the honors, and as a result, well, the Jimster had quite a morning. (Suffice it to say, Beatrice would not have handled the job the same way.)

“See you around, Fifi,” he said.

“All right then, Jimmy. See you.”

While Fiona and the Jimster had their assignation, Beanie stuck to Williams. She watched him squat down and pick up the shoe the Jimster had lost.

Its laces were broken and knotted in a couple of places. The toe was scuffed, and Will pictured how the boy must drag his feet. He thought it was the loneliest, saddest shoe he’d ever seen. He hung it up on the black painted spike of a wrought-iron fence at the corner, then he crossed the street, and plowed on toward the Cooper Union.

He did the right thing, the stableman, in hanging up the shoe, the kind and helpful thing. After the Jimster took his leave of Fiona, he went back outside and searched the route they’d come, a little wobbly in the knees, puzzled about his footwear. Where had that left shoe gone? He was surprised when he found it—and it wasn’t even wet, though the same could not be said for his sock. The best thing that came of the Jimster’s finding his shoe, however, was that it spared him having to rob some other, weaker boy for his pair of shoes. For he was the Undertaker’s boy, after all, on assignment. The better shod he was, the better off he was in general, the worse for Williams.

Will trudged south, unaware of his tail, imagining tufted leather armchairs at the library. He wasn’t even thinking about reading the papers or solving the case now, just falling asleep in a chair. When at last he arrived at Cooper Square, he passed the great arched windows, approached the front door and tugged on the handle, but it didn’t give. Then he saw the small printed sign that was posted in the window:
8:00
A.M. TO
9:00
P.M. MONDAY TO SATURDAY—
workingmen’s hours. But today was Sunday. The library was closed.

10.

PROTEUS

T
heir man was moving south, and they were on him. They’d ditched the Jimster, and they were ready to make their move. They just needed to follow him onto some quiet street where no one would see them approach him. But the stableman defied them. He would not be distracted. Would not be guided. Would not cooperate. Who was this man?

“Let’s give him a bit longer before we do it by force,” said Beatrice at last, puzzled at how difficult this was proving. Fiona nodded.

Williams turned away from the library, coughed and spat in the snow. His lungs were healing slowly but surely. It was just his luck that the library was closed, but not having a warm place to sit suddenly wasn’t the obstacle it might have been a short time before. He knew whom he was after, and he was going to see him again that night. He felt warm and determined. He had overcome exhaustion. It was quite the stunt he’d just pulled, and he found himself shaking his head, nearly laughing in bleary disbelief at some of the things he’d claimed. His nerve had served him well, gotten him the information he needed. Then he laughed aloud at the image of himself lying prostrate on the marble floor with Louie leaning over him, slapping his wrist like a girl’s. From there, he found he had much more to laugh at: He laughed at the name Will Williams. He laughed at the way he’d let Undertoe get to him the night before. The damned song was the least of his problems, he now saw. He laughed so hard he had to wipe the tears from his face before they froze there, and as he did he noticed that the street was more crowded than it had been, more crowded than it ought to have been in such weather. It also seemed he was suddenly obstructing the paths of innumerable somberly dressed people who were bustling around him on the narrow path between snowbanks. He felt their disapproving stares. He was still chuckling, just regaining his composure, when he overheard a woman mutter in German that madmen should be kept off the streets on Sundays at least—they profaned the Sabbath.

Of course, he thought—these were churchgoers on their way to some nearby house of worship. And if it was Sunday, he, too, could sit in a pew for an hour or two and be warm. He could use the time to think about his next move, and he wouldn’t be able to get himself into any further trouble.

He followed the last few pairs of upright shoulders around the corner and through the doorway of a strange, unimposing little Lutheran church devoid of a spire or other inspirational details. It was situated in a modest brownstone row house, with just a few religious phrases carved into the lintel over the door. Organ music swelled from within, and the bell began to ring the hour. Someone was closing the door behind the congregation. It was in or out, once again, and once again he stepped in.

What kind of a flibbertigibbet was this man, you may ask, who had renounced his faith but now attended Sunday services? He asked it of himself. A cold and tired one, was the answer. Then, too, he didn’t mind that the place was filled with German voices. It made it easier to atone for some of the things he regretted having done. He felt oddly at home when an usher welcomed him in his old language and escorted him to a seat. And so it was that the stableman, who was suspected of arson, murder and more, came to stand like a supplicant in a side pew. When the congregation sat, he sat, when they knelt, he knelt, and when they stood to sing, he stood and sang the hymns from memory. It was strange even to him, the way he did it after so much time, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he did belong there after all. For the moment, he was happy smelling the beeswax candles, hearing the collective voice of the congregation. His fatigue had given birth to clarity of a sort. He thought,
I am who I am, and this quick-change thing is something else entirely, not an identity but a skill I’ve inadvertently acquired.
It wasn’t inherently bad, just a way of adapting to life in the New World.

He was resolved to make it work for him, but there were a couple of pieces missing yet from his puzzle: He had failed to notice the several tails that were onto him, was oblivious to the fact that his face was in the papers and had no idea whatsoever of the storm that would soon be massing down at Coffee House Slip, where he was still planning to show up for work. He was thinking he had a surprise for Undertoe, not the inverse.

But Fifi and Beanie knew better. It was Undertoe’s storm, and their mission was to make sure it didn’t happen. The Whyos had other plans for Mr. Geiermeier.

When the two of them saw him duck into the church, they exchanged inaudible signals, followed him inside and slipped into a pew at the rear. As the service droned on, they watched him closely, but he remained as oblivious of them as he was of the tsking German matrons.

The truth was, he had fallen into a light doze. The cadences of the Lutheran service lulled him like the nursery rhymes his mother had read him in his earliest, happiest days. The music and the liturgy carried him home, and in that home he rested. When the time came for Communion, he contemplated whether he should take it and decided yes; in the absence of any hope for another meal that day, he would not forsake a holy lunch of bread and wine. It was the lightest of meals, the headiest of meals. It sated him better than a feast. He felt pure, restored.

A funny thing was that despite being surrounded by their common language, he didn’t think of Maria just then, never wondered whether any of the congregants knew her, which they might well have. She’d quite predictably fallen in with the German-speaking community and briefly worked as a second cook to a family that attended the church. She had even gone to services there herself. Maria had no patience with religious mummery, but a job was a job and the mistress wanted churchgoing girls in her kitchen. She’d met other servants at the church, with one of whom she’d swapped her instructions for upside-down cake for an apple-tart recipe that gave her considerable trouble. She hadn’t the patience for rolling out pastry. From another, she learned she ought to be receiving fatter tips from the master, who came to her room half the nights of the week. She hinted at this, was ignored, and made up her mind to seek another position.

She regretted not having the financial wherewithal to quit on the spot, in protest, but the following Sunday, she inadvertently hastened the changeover in the course of cooking supper. She killed and plucked and cleaned the goose that her mistress had chosen at market. She kneaded dough and swirled hot oil in the bottoms of pots. She rolled out dumplings like the ones once made by Will’s cousins and lined them up, dusted with flour, to be popped into the gravy when the time came. From time to time, between dicing the onions, shucking the oysters and slicing the cake, she reached down her shirtwaist and gave her crotch a scratch. On top of all the rest, the man of the house had given her the crabs.

Maria had an unpleasant habit of spitting when vexed, and as she slid the bowl of undone mollusks into sizzling roux, a gob of her ill will passed between her lips and landed in the pan with a hiss. She had no idea that her latent case of typhoid was in the final throes of activity, despite her outward good health. She stirred the pan twice, tasted once—delicious, if requiring a dash more salt—then added the liquor and cream. Three minutes later, she turned the oysters out into a silver tureen, which she set on the sideboard amidst a forest of beef-tallow candles. Her spittle had melded invisibly with the broth, and the dish was so very lightly cooked that ample bacilli survived to lay half the household low for a couple of days. The master did not recover. But Maria was innocent, wasn’t she? There are crimes of omission and crimes of commission, but surely there are no crimes of oblivion. Maria didn’t know her gallbladder was boiling with bacilli.

But Will did not think of Maria. Didn’t even feel a tingle up his spine, a half hour after church had let out, when she crossed his path a dozen yards behind. The cook at the so-called ladies’ rooming house where she now worked and lived had found a mouse drowned in the milk pail in the pantry and sent Maria out in search of more. There he went, there she went, but they were out of sync. If he’d known how close he came to finding her, he’d have sat down and wept, but to what avail? It’s as simple as this: When people are not meant to meet, they don’t meet. His fated appointment was with two other young ladies, that day.

The snow muffled their footsteps, but their dark-clad forms stood out in stark contrast to its brightness. He never saw them. He walked down Mott Street to the corner of Pell, just opposite Wah Kee’s flophouse. He allowed himself to hope that the Chinaman would extend him a night’s credit till the following morning, when he would be paid.

The shop had a bell on the door, and Wah Kee himself looked up from behind the counter when it jangled. He recognized the stableman, and he looked annoyed.

“Too early. Come back five o’clock.” Wah Kee didn’t want the bums scaring off his shop trade. Will had known the flop was closed during the day, but now it occurred to him that the opium smokers were allowed to languish on their couches at all hours. Tendrils of the strange, sweet smoke had filtered through the walls to the bunk room now and then, and the smell was seductive. He and Robert Koch had sipped acrid purple tinctures from his father’s pharmacopoeia a couple of times, and he well remembered the pleasant buzz of the poppy.

“Wait, Mr. Kee,” he said. “You see, I’d like to go upstairs, not down to the bunk room.”

“Ah. Smoke the opium, yes? Very good. All day, half dollar. Good price, great pleasure.”

He nodded, to show that the money was no problem—he would have it tomorrow, after all—but Wah Kee held out his hand.

He pulled out his city voucher to show he was good for it. Wah Kee laughed.

“Credit?” he said. And then he laughed again, and kept on laughing until finally Will left the store.

So dissipation was not an option. He decided he would try making the rounds of several churches, since that had worked so well for him once. He was a few blocks north of Trinity. On his way there, he passed Billy’s, the bar where his luck had taken its first, brief upward spike, and he imagined someday stopping in and ordering a drink, thanking the barkeep, handing him a generous tip this time to make up for the trouble. He slowed his pace and peered in the window, curious to see what the crowd was like during the day. It was a good thing he still didn’t have the price of a beer on him, for even if the barman hadn’t had it out for him, Undertoe had just sat down with a couple of officers of the metropolitan police for the express purpose of talking about George “the Torch” Geiermeier—more precisely, where they could find him that night. If he’d walked in, the arrest would have happened then and there, and everything that followed would have been otherwise. But it didn’t; he walked by. In the meantime, the sergeant and Undertoe had business to conduct.

“It’s the price of crime, Undertoe,” laughed Sergeant Jones as Undertoe grudgingly slid an envelope of money across the table. A good portion of what he’d gotten from his gentleman was in there. He’d been hoping not to have to give so much, considering the information he offered, but Jones was not going to be impressed till the firebug was back behind bars. He still hadn’t made up his mind exactly what to tell the police when the sergeant called for boilermakers, “to stimulate your loquacity, my friend. And now let’s get to business. When and where?”

Undertoe thought about his options. From the Jimster’s latest report, Geiermeier was out making an awfully strange tour. There was no reason he should have gone to the morgue. And if Geiermeier was going to behave erratically, it might be time to draw on his backlog of stooges, most of them with records as long and outstanding charges as black and plentiful as the hairs of their girlfriends’ armpits. He could try to do a switcheroo and give the cops one of those guys—a guy like the Jimster’d be to him in a couple of years. That would be safer.

“Now hold on—don’t think so hard, Luther. No pissants. We want the real thing, the kraut. We got his mug in the papers, and there’s no shilly-shallying now, dammit. We need an arrest, and not just any arrest. You’re going to deliver him if I have to break your few remaining teeth to make it happen.”

Undertoe forced a smile. It was true his teeth had some gaps. It was true he’d gone and gotten Geiermeier’s name and picture into the papers. He’d gotten himself into this, and he could well appreciate that no one would be satisfied now if some measly junior safe-breaker from the Five Points rotted in prison. He had made sure that they
wanted
a nefarious German incendiary with multiple aliases, that they wanted to hang him by his neck. He’d had it all set up, but he was feeling uneasy now. He feared he had miscalculated. Given the Jimster’s observations, it seemed possible Geiermeier wouldn’t show up for work that night after all.

“You’ll get your man,” he said. But he didn’t sound convincing.

“Let me be more specific, you piece of dirt. We know well enough it’s a double cross, and you’re in with him one way or other. You’re clearly experiencing some cold feet here, Luther, but see, I don’t give a fuck about your feet. There’s a special election coming up, and the chief wants a Sunday bust in the Monday papers. Unless you’d rather go down yourself, you’ll provide it. After all, you’re German, too, if I’m not mistaken, and that could work for us, in a pinch.”

“All right all right all right, goddammit, Jones, all right. . . .”

All this while, the Jimster was gamely standing guard across the street from Billy’s, seeing nothing much. His head was in the clouds. He was thinking about Fiona. He stamped his feet with the thought of getting some feeling back in the toes. He’d shown up right on schedule, twenty minutes before Undertoe was supposed to meet Sergeant Jones, and delivered his freelance report on Geiermeier’s peregrinations. Then Undertoe had posted him outside. Undertoe’s main concern was a double cross by the cops, but truth was there was little the Jimster could do, if it came to that.

Then the Jimster heard a crash and looked up to see a cascade of snow falling to the sidewalk. So did Williams, who had just walked past the Jimster unobserved. Both of them were gawping up at the roof, wondering what caused the avalanche, when Beanie faded into a nearby doorway and Fiona approached the Jimster. She was still wearing the man’s bowler she’d had on when she chased him before, but now she whipped it off and let her hair fall down as she strode up to the Jimster, hips a-swivel, lewdly calling, “Hot corn! Hot corn!” though she had nothing of the kind to offer. It was a joke of some sort, even if Fiona herself didn’t quite know what made it funny. Anyway, it worked—he rolled his eyes, smiled.