City for Ransom (8 page)

But unlike Stead, Ransom had to work under these conditions and to live with them. Stead could write his book and feel good about himself, feel he'd served man and reportage gods, and could be on his way…onto the next social problem or issue in another city in another part of the world. Stead had left his manuscript with Laird and Lee, a small Chicago publishing concern likely to go bankrupt, while he'd returned to England. Ransom held out little hope his friend would ever work on Haymarket, and he imagined that Stead's book on political corruption would likely never see light of day. But even were it published, Alastair predicted the sum total would be a mere ripple effect; certainly not
enough to embarrass Chicago's elitists. Nothing substantive came of Reform with a capital
R,
of new laws, new resolutions, of cleaning house, and all the clichés of politicians caught hands down. That only happened when someone died, as in the Haymarket reforms.

Chicago's wheels turned on the greased axle of corruption, and with graft came all manner of crime. Nothing against Stead or his naiveté, but the chances of his brave and devastating tirade against Chicago's politicians, money changers, officials, city councilmen, aldermen, her underworld and upper-world bosses would likely get fifteen minutes of anyone's attention. Chicago's corrupt nature somehow endeared it to those who lived here, even as it alienated and disenfranchised its own.

Amid this growing mad dragon of a city, with booming skyscraper construction reaching these days to twenty and thirty stories, people tried to make a living in an economy that favored those with resources, but circumstances only favored a widening gap between takers and the taken. And those who were
without
came flooding into the city from every conceivable direction on a daily basis. Every business in the city was exploding. Every school growing. Every trade erupting. Including the black markets along Maxwell Street, but hardly at the clip of the increasing population. As a result, every human vice had its own district, and professions like gambling and prostitution were as rampant as the opium trade.

The cab Ransom rode in bumped about the brick streets. The rhythmic
clop-clop-clop
put him near asleep, but then another pothole would wake him. The work at the train station had been grueling on a body he warred with daily.

Ransom had lived with pain since '86—seven years now. He experienced no relief save the dance with the occasional opium pipe, or the bedroom dance with Merielle, and sometimes he combined the two, and she joined him fully in the ballet.

The cabbie snatched open the latch and called out, “Clark Street, sir. You'll be departin' soon, sir.”

Ransom contemplated a good stiff drink as he fished out payment for the cabbie. He dropped two bits into a paybox with a jingly bell attached. He needed to lie down with Merielle…get everything off his mind.

The carriage passed through the noise and bustle of new construction. While there was a great deal to recommend Chicago to newcomers with ready capital to invest in real estate or some new undertaking, the explosion of construction, land speculation, and development only made Ransom uneasy in his own home and in his own skin. He'd always imagined that Chicago would never become another New York, that it would always maintain a kind of small Midwestern flavor and friendliness, but such romantic notions had burst just after the Great Fire and multiplied after the Civil War.

Neither the Civil War nor the Great Chicago Fire could be set straight, but Ransom had been secretly investigating the cause of the
murders
at Haymarket since the day he'd walked out of Cook County Hospital on wooden crutches. Five friends who'd also been taken to County that day never walked out, victims of the bomb supposedly set off by agitators—union rabble, heads full with communistic ideals and radical notions of fair work practices. Two other cops dead on the street. No one ever learned the truth of it. No one ever claimed responsibility, and no one ever pinned that responsibility on anyone either, despite their hanging one man for each killed police officer. All Ransom knew was the single fact that seven good cops died that day. A devil's bargain that left him wounded and wondering who to lay it on. Official reports left as many questions as physical injuries. He gave little thought to emotional injury. But he gave a great deal of thought to what'd become a crusade to get the CPD to pay restitution to the families of the slain officers, but in his zeal to do so, he'd raised the ire of the mayor, his lieutenants, city fathers, and Chief Kohler.

Oddly, the more he poked and prodded, the greater the protests against him, which only led Ransom to dig in his heels to uncover the truth surrounding Haymarket.

As he dug deeper into a past that wouldn't let go, Alastair began to suspect the unimaginable…that the highest authorities in Chicago may have wantonly conspired against the labor movement in an effort to make them all out to be anarchists, and thus hatched the idea for the anarchist bomb in Haymarket Square. Could it have been conceived and implemented by labor bosses and by men in his own department?

A horrid notion when Alastair first came to it; it'd hit him like a stone wall. He refused to believe it, and for a long time it'd sat—while he pursued other leads, talked to other sources, went down other paths…

Each only led back to a single persistent and ugly conclusion. As actual eyewitnesses disappeared, moved on, died, became mentally unfit, or had graduated from incarceration to death itself, memories and details and so-called facts had become scarce, drying up.

But he remembered the doctor who'd patched him up and tended his burns, Dr. Christian Fenger. What Fenger knew, however, he had no intention of telling Alastair Ransom. He felt the matter rightly belonged in the grave of time, better left with those dead on both sides of the labor wars. On this score, Dr. Fenger had all these years remained adamant.

The cab stopped abruptly. The end of movement and the sudden silence against the cobblestones raised Ransom from his reverie. He climbed from the cab, tipped the faceless, silent cabbie and walked from the tavern address fronting the street to the back alleyway. Here he climbed stairs to the second floor atop the tavern, and knocked on Polly Pete's door in the sure belief that Polly no longer lived here, replaced by his beloved Merielle instead.

No answer came at the door.

This surprised him.

He checked his watch.

He'd given her everything she needed to pursue her fasci
nation and interest in painting oils, and she was an amazing artist, after all. He'd seen the result of his patronage; his benevolence such as it was on a detective's pay. She simply needed to be discovered by Crocea or Barhid or any of the major galleries now legion here. Along with commerce and industrialization, the interest in opera, theater, ballet, and the arts had blossomed. In fact, Chicago's new art institute was this year completed in Lake Park, standing alone and set apart on the lakeside of Michigan Avenue facing the buildings of commerce and banking. The arts building at Congress and Michigan Avenue also stood out in his thoughts now as he again knocked at Merielle's door.

Where might she be?

Then he heard someone on the inside.

He banged louder.

Louder still.

Finally, the door crept open, wide enough he could see her eye in shadow. It was swollen red and cut so badly as to be closed. Opening her injured eye sent a shock of pain through Merielle that she could not mask, contorting her soft features. Someone had beaten her, and he knew exactly the man—if the term could be applied to Elias Jervis.

“Don't say anything, Alastair,” she said. “Just listen. I'm no good for you. I let you down.”

“Jervis did this to you! The bastard. I'll kill the
sonofa
—”

“No, it wasn't Elias!”

“Who then?” Jervis had been the last man who'd tried to keep her, but he only knew her as Polly Pete. It was rumored he'd once put her up as partial payment on a bad debt. Ransom goaded Elias to toss her in as a prize during a heated poker game when both men were drunk. Ransom had had his eye on her since seeing a photograph that Philo had sold him. But at that poker game, he saw something pained and solitary and quivering and in need when he gazed into her eyes. He cajoled Elias into the bet, upping the ante, saying it must be a permanent arrangement, and Polly's eyes lit up with the possibility. And so he'd won her fairly, and once
they were alone, he offered her enough money to leave Chicago, to go home. But she continually claimed there was no home—that it no longer existed.

That had been the night they'd first made love, but also the night they'd watched dawn arrive together. The night Alastair learned her real name.

“I slipped back, Alastair,” she now tearfully said. “I don't know why…don't know what's wrong with me, but he got ugly, the bastard, but I swear it never came to nothing but a beating. It's all my own fault. I shouldn't've let him through the door, but…but he was going to go forty bloody dollars. Damn me! Damn my—”

He pulled open the door and took her in his arms. When he'd first met her, his friend Stead had warned him off, characterizing her as a woman “shut up in sin,” one destined to tread the “cinder path of sin,” as he'd called it. But Ransom refused to give her up.

She stood shivering, surprised, expecting him to hit her.

“It was Elias, wasn't it? I want a piece of the bastard.”

“Forget him, Ransom. My own stupidity and foolishness got me this way.”

“No, Merielle! No man has a right to do this to you!” He shoved the door closed. “No one!”

“You don't know my final secret, Alastair…sweet, dear Alastair.”

“Christ…I thought we'd gotten through all your secrets.”

“We got through all of Merielle's secrets, yes. But not…”

“—not Polly's?”

“'Fraid so.”

“Whatever will make you happy?”

“Something's wrong in my blood…in my head even, Alastair. I need someone to tell me why…”

“Why?”

“W-why I like to be hurt…why I like pain. Why I want to be treated like dirt. Ground beneath your boots, Alastair.”

“Baby, it's—”

“Shut up and listen! I'm telling you the truth, finally, so listen!”

“All right…go ahead, sweetheart.”

“Can you, old man, tell me why I want to be Polly and not…not this princess you want me to be, Alastair, the one I've been trying to be! Like your bloody dream of some child I once was?”

“We can talk to Dr. Fenger.”

“No! Not him!”

“Then another doctor. Chicago's full of doctors.”

“A doctor for the soul? How many treat your soul, Alastair?”

“What're you talking about, baby?”

She went to her bureau drawer and snatched out a piece of soiled, torn paper. She held up the advertisement to his stunned eyes. A frayed flier for the services of Dr. J. Phineas Tewes.

“Tewes…why'd it have to be Tewes?”

“I've been seeing him.”

“How long? For how bloody long?”

“Two weeks, a little more. He's helped tremendously!”

“I can see that,” he replied sarcastically. He snatched the flier, ripped it up, and paced the floor boards above the London Royale Arms Tavern like a bull caged in a stall.

Given what he'd gone through today with the quack at the train station, it felt like a blow, this desire of Merielle's to visit Dr. Tewes for a phrenological exam to determine why she felt mentally scattered. It was as if two people occupied her cranium: Merielle a cultured, educated, and sweet young woman Ransom might take to any cotillion in the city, and Polly, the brash, dirty-talking, crude, uncultured, unread, uneducated poisonous wench who
enjoyed
dirty money for dirty sex.

“He says you're just using me, Alastair.”

“Tewes said that?”

“He says a lot of things about you, yes.”

“Bastard. What else?”

“Says you beat people to within an inch of their lives when you interrogate them.”

“It's only what everyone on the street says. He knows no more 'bout me than what I want people to think. If they think that way, I get 'em talking, believe me, without laying a hand on 'em.”

“Dr. Tewes says you're only after one thing from me, Alastair.”

“Really? And what might that be?”

“What lies between my—”

“Why the
squirmy little runt quack
! What business is it of his to get involved in our affairs? Last time you held me, you called me a comfort, said you loved me, Mere! And I believed you, and I've never lied to you, ever, and—”

“Dr. Tewes says your attention and help is only trading one kind of bondage for another—”

“Just tell me, who in hell beat your eye to a pulp!”

“Dr. Tewes thought it was you.”

“Who?”

“I ain't tellin'. I don't want you going raging off like my—my father to slay the dragon. Merielle might, but I don't!”

“I'll just find out another way, Mere.” He refused any longer to call her Polly. “It's what I do, after all.”

“You won't get it from me.”

“Stubborn little…”

“Bitch? Now that's the kind of talk I like, Ransom. Call me dirty names and be as rough as you can be, and you'll please Polly, and with Polly in your bed, you'll have the buckin'est best time of your—”

He grabbed her up in a bear hug and stole her breath away with a passionate kiss. He hurled her onto her back and ripped away the robe she wore, revealing her red lace lingerie. He tore away at his own clothes even as he kissed and touched and held her down all at once. “As rough as you want it,” he hoarsely whispered in her ear. “Maybe after this, Dr. Tewes can go to hell, Polly!”

“Oh, god, Ransom! Yes, yes! Being Polly for you”—she caught her breath—“that could work…”