City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (69 page)

Finally they sent in the pygmies—figuring, hell, that even if they weren’t in the same weight class, at least it was their game. No one was sure if they had ever seen an elephant before, but they were troupers: racing around the beast, hooting and gesticulating, yelling at it in their strange heathen tongues until she was so distracted the roustabouts could slip in and knot a chain around one of her immense legs.

She broke it off like a thread, but there was another one. Then another, and another, until the thick black coils of iron held each of her legs in place. Another one weighing down that deadly trunk and even her tail, until she was as completely immobilized as her tin image, the hotel down the beach. They soaked her with fire hoses, and wrapped the cables around her hide—smooth black rubber lines, bright copper wires sticking out of the ends like a bagful of eels.

Then they stepped back to see the show.

The Wizard of Menlo Park himself stood on the platform above the impatient crowd, tolerating the photographers’ flashes all around him.

“This will prove again that Westinghouse’s alternating current is too lethal for household use,” he told the ladies and gentlemen of the press in his loud, odd, deaf man’s voice, wispy white hair blowing in the crisp fall breeze.

—the old man still fighting that fight, even though it had been lost years ago. He shook hands with his former apprentice for the cameras: Dr. Poole, drawn away from his egg-white enamel engines and his gold oil cups for the occasion. Smiling sheepishly under his necromancer’s cap, with the stars and crescent moons that Brinckerhoff had insisted that he wear—smiling for the Wizard despite the smell of Kemmler’s roasting flesh still in his nostrils, the dogs and cats of West Orange frying on a tin sheet, while little boys bobbed up and down outside the windows.

“This will prove that I was right—”

The cameras clicked wildly.

“Professah, can we get one a you wit’ de elephant?”

She must have known it was coming: The crowd gone still with anticipation. The workmen stepping back as quickly and gingerly as cats. For all they denied it later—claiming she was just a dumb beast who never knew what hit her.

You could see it in the great, unblinking eyes, yellow with hatred and bile. Knowing, and hating, and staring at me as the moving picture cameras began to roll, and the Wizard’s hand went up, and I pranced out in front of the crowd.

Someone noticed a battered, dog-eared book sticking out of the great man’s coat pocket:
Ragged Dick.

“Great stuff for boys,” he quacked at the reporters. “It happened like that for me, you know—”

—though they knew every detail of his life; every schoolchild in America knew the story of the penniless boy, selling notions and candies and newspapers car to car on the train—

“I saved the stationmaster’s son from getting run over by the express. Gave me a job, and a car to work on my experiments, and that was all I needed to rise—”

The band struck up the overture from
Aïda,
the favorite opera of the ghetto—the opera of elephants—and the crowd grew quiet. The Wizard went over the controls, setting the last fuses. All that remained was for someone to go out and pull the gigantic, ornamental prop switch, set up for the benefit of the restive holiday crowd.

“I can’t watch it. What a horrible thing to do!”

Out on the periphery of the crowd, Esther strolled arm-in-arm with Kid—now wearing a respectable, somber, citizen’s suit. She put a hand on his shoulder, and they walked away, out along the boardwalk in the clean fall air—even though he was dying with curiosity.

The rides kept running in the three vast parks, all of them filled with customers, still humming and spinning and whirring like so many mechanical gears. The bathers still staggering out into the surf, clutching onto the guidelines, braving the chilly, late-season water. More crowds still coming, all the dry-goods clerks, and the ladies’ maids, and the cigar rollers and the factory girls and the day laborers and the streetcar conductors—still pouring into the park with each train, and trolley, and excursion boat.

There was something for everybody at Coney Island.

All it required was a fool, a freak—a dwarf in a harlequin’s suit, to trip the switch and set off the spark.

I danced out before the big, eager holiday crowd, my face painted harlequin white.

I danced out—grinning evilly, watching the furious yellow eye of the elephant watching me, and knowing what was going to happen next.

Not knowing everything, of course: Not knowing that when the big, fake switch was pulled it would seem to the crowd like nothing had happened at first, even with ten thousand volts now pulsing through her body. Nor that eventually she would begin to twitch, ever so slightly, within the chains wound round and round her ankles. Or that the smoke would then begin to trickle out of her ears, and the great, moist yaw of her mouth, and the groping nostrils of her trunk. Or that finally, like an expertly cut tree, she would fall over suddenly, even quietly—as quietly as an elephant can fall—the great trunks of her legs toppling over, her convulsive, splitting muscles snapping every last layer of chain and cable, thick as they were, so that in her death throes she would be, at last, completely unchained. If only she could rise—

No, she did not know everything. After all, she was only an elephant.

She knew enough.

He heard the nightingales in their silver birches, calling to each other across the moonlit backyard. It was the first warm night of spring, and that restless hour toward morning, when he found himself lying fully awake, unsure of where, or who, or what he was.

He had been up late playing cards with his keepers. Sullivan would play only for matchsticks—they were good fellows and he didn’t want to take their money. Instead he had heaped up a great pyramid of the little wooden matchboxes before him.

“Jay-sus, Tim, but they said you was off yer head,” Tommy Condon teased him, shaking his head in mock amazement.

“Any man who can play poker like that can at least be mayor,” the other
bhoy,
whose name was Jack McGrath, snorted.

“Ah, yer flatterin’ me, boys,” he told them. “But any man who couldn’t take you two right down to yer drawers in a rubber has not only lost his mind but his vital signs as well.”

They were good boys, he liked them both. It had been like that throughout the winter, the three of them joshing gently back and forth, living quietly in the little house up in Eastchester. Brother Paddy and the rest had done all right by him; he had no complaints. There were plenty of books, and the food was good, and these two fine lads were always on hand, to see to his every need and entertain him when he wanted company.

“He’s comin’ along just fine,” he’d heard Tommy Condon tell Paddy at the door when he left that afternoon. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t back and about an’ in his old place before the summer.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s a comfort, after Florrie and Little Tim,” Paddy had told him, shuffling a little uncomfortably in the doorway. “Sure, that’s been tragedy enough for everyone, them both goin’ stark ravin’. I don’t know as there’s any remedy for the curse, though.”

Big Tim had heard all of it, sitting in the little nook under the stairs, and he thought it a balanced assessment of the situation. So Cousin Florrie and Little Tim had finally cracked up. That still left Paddy, though, and maybe with a little seasoning he and Dinny and Larry Mulligan could run the district, at least while he was away.

He had been away for a while. First there had been the asylum, then another house in the country; then Paddy had taken him to Europe for the cure.

That had been a time. He hadn’t been over since he’d taken Nell, nearly twenty years before, but to his surprise and immense pleasure, he had found that he was known in all the great capitals of the Continent. Everywhere they went, sightseeing around the great cathedrals and the historical staircases, some of his countrymen had recognized Big Tim Sullivan. It had been just like the Bowery, they’d come up to shake his hand and tell him how often they had voted for him, and what good Democrats they were.

And so what if they all claimed to be down on their luck—when in fact he knew most of them for broken-down rummies and ne’er-do-wells, who would never have known luck in the first place long enough to hit it up for an Indian nickel. He had gathered them up as he had gone, carted them with him from spa to spa, and ancient site to ancient site, and finally crated them home, all at his own expense.

That was when the Wise Ones had started to really get frightened, the way he was passing out the boodle. He could hear them talking: it was one thing to grease the wheels, but he was handing out bills like they were calling cards.

He knew they didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help himself anymore, he
had
to give it away. And not just to the old boys from home, but to the beggars, the down-and-outs, the street musicians and the flower girls and the children, everywhere he went.

So what if they weren’t from the Old Fourth Ward—so what if they weren’t even Americans. They still needed it, didn’t they? It was still up to him to look out for them, for if he didn’t, after all, who would—

They hauled him back on the next boat—and ever since then Paddy had had him up at the little house with Tom and Jack. They were good boys, it was a good arrangement, nice and peaceful. They got him all the city papers, and kept him informed of the doings in town.

“Didja see about the plate Mrs. Becker put on Charlie’s coffin?” Tommy asked him, his exuberant face betraying the flush he held in his hand,

“Yes.”

“ ‘Here Lies Charles Becker—Murdered By Governor Whitman.’
Now ain’t that a thing?”

“Yes.” Big Tim smiled benignly, and drew to an inside straight.

“They’re sayin’ the governor’s gonna make her take it off,” Jack put in. “They’re sayin’ it’s libel, an’ the D.A.’ll put her in the Tombs unless it comes down.”

“Libel? On her own husband’s coffin?” Tommy scoffed. “Put a widow in jail for tellin’ the truth?”

Why indeed? They had all ridden far enough on poor Charlie Becker. Whitman, the idjiot D.A., had indeed been elected governor, for his unflinching, incorruptible zeal in sticking every gangster in town in the Tombs until, one by one, they had “confessed” that it was Charlie Becker who had fingered poor Beansy. There was even talk of Whitman being nominated for president, God help the poor Republicans.

Mr. Murphy, meanwhile, had played the whole thing six ways to Sunday, as usual. He had pumped just enough money into Becker’s defense fund to see that he kept clammed up—but not enough, as it were, to see that he was acquitted. When Roosevelt had come back from Europe and split the forces of Reform, both in the City and all across the country, the Grand Sachem’s triumph was complete. Everything was confused, and the balance of power, once again, lay neatly in Tammany’s paw—at least for the time being.

Sullivan liked hearing the stories, the stories from the City—as far away now as if they were from Vienna, or Madrid, or one of the other great capitals he had visited on the Continent. He tried to pump them for more, but Tommy and Jack had fallen asleep at their places, their mediocre cards still in their hands. They had been pulling slowly at a whiskey jug all evening, and now they snored contentedly in their chairs.

Big Tim pushed his own chair quietly away from the table, leaving his great pot of matchsticks where it was. He had only had tea himself. He felt quite awake, but he headed upstairs anyway, to his little room under the eaves. He had even fallen into a light, pleasant sleep—when he heard the nightingales calling from across the yard.

He found himself walking out in the bright moonlight, toward the birch grove. He didn’t quite remember how he had got there, but then he often lost minutes, or hours, even whole days, now. They said it was natural, they said it was to be expected. He had gone out through the kitchen door, he remembered, leaving Tommy and Jack still dozing at the table.

Like Pilate’s guards at the Tomb—

He wondered if they, too, would miss a resurrection, and tramped on into the little grove of trees.

For some reason, he realized, he had put on his good coat and top hat. Well, it was just as well, he figured. Too bad he could not come up with a sash to boot.

All around him now, in the trees, he could still hear the little birds and their soft, insistent call, though he could not see them. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be—though the moon was so bright tonight that he could see well enough to read a newspaper by it—if that were what he wanted, if he had not already wasted enough hours of his life scanning the columns of tiny newsprint, with their meaningless words scattered like horse manure.

It was such a fine night, he decided to go on with his stroll. There was a path that led out the backyard, down through the woods to something shiny—a river, he thought. He walked placidly on down. His groin didn’t hurt so much anymore, not since the surgery, though it was still all bandaged up, and sore to the touch, and they said it didn’t satisfy.

It was a fine night, an incomparable night, the moon seeming to warm up everything in its path. It had been a night like this the first time he had ever won an election. Not a general election, or a primary, but something even more important: a clubhouse nomination to the state senate, from the Organization.

It had been touch-and-go. Even with Croker’s backing, there had been plenty of competition for such a plum spot, and plenty of money on the table, and it wasn’t clear right to the end who was going to take the day.