Metropolis (11 page)

Dandy Johnny laughed.

“I’d say you’re a firebug, a jailbreaker and generally a ruthless bastard. I’ll grant you, you got a good act, what with the down-and-out stableboy routine, the pious churchgoer. What I know is, fires and murders are up since you got into town. The cops are all in a dither, thanks to you. Maybe you think that’s impressive. But you’re not quite stealthy enough, Mr. Harris. Because we know about you: when you came over, under what name. We know what jobs you’ve done for Undertoe, and we know you did them clean and neat. But you’re new around here, and it turns out you signed up with the wrong man. Undertoe doesn’t work with people, he tosses them to the cops. That’s what he’s doing with you. And about this thing with the aliases—Williams, Koch and, uh,
addle-headed idget—
” He looked over at Fiona. “Well, a name’s no good if everybody knows it. The cops ain’t all that stupid, especially not when Undertoe’s whispering in their ear. He’s setting you up for the fall.”

The stableman blinked. Going along with these people might well be a terrible error, but Harris suddenly saw it as his best chance of finding out what was going on, his only chance of clearing his name.

“All right, Harris, fine. Don’t say a word. Just listen then. I’ll tell you about the secret of this gang’s success: it’s stealth. It’s the most important part of any job, as even Beanie over there knows. Anytime anybody in town does a messy job, the cops have got to work overtime to make the public happy again. They don’t like it; we don’t like it. It’s not good for anyone. Undertoe got you to do a very messy job for him, a job that didn’t make a damn bit of sense, and then he went and told the cops just where to find you. I thought you were trying to ditch him at first, with the alias; now I’m not sure what you were up to. But what I can see is that you’re just starting out here and that you’re working for hire. You did your part right. No one would have suspected you, if Undertoe hadn’t ratted. That was clever, the way you let yourself get caught in the fire. You’ve got some sense in an odd way. As for what we want, well, first of all I don’t like Mr. Undertoe. Nor should you. But that’s the least of it. We want the best men working for us, not someone else. If you want an example of how we work, look at how the girls here snatched you off the street and brought you here: broad daylight, but no one saw it. That’s the kind of work we do. Being a Whyo is lucrative, safe and considerably more amusing—what with the girls and all—than working with any other gang in town.”

Geiermeier. Barnum’s. Undertoe. Arson. Murder. Williams. Stealth. The stableman was amazed at all they knew and all that they had somehow misunderstood or invented. In some ways it seemed they did have the right man, then again not at all.

“Undertoe’s got nothing on me,” he said.

“Yeah, well, whether he does or he doesn’t, he was behind the warrant they’ve got out on you. Did you know that? Or that he told them you were more than just a stableboy, way back on the night of the fire? He doesn’t need evidence, they don’t care about that. The last couple days he’s been working overtime to set you up, and you didn’t even see it.”

“Why should I trust you?”

The man called Frank Harris was learning a lot from this conversation. He was also sweating profusely with agitation. It took an enormous effort for him not to scream,
What are you talking about?
but he didn’t. He didn’t even let his hand tremble. He stood rigid, and though he was close to being ill, he looked strong.

“For one thing, we just saved your ass, Mr. Harris. You were about to walk into Billy’s, and the joint was full of cops with warrants for your arrest in their pockets. What’s your attraction to Undertoe anyway, some German thing?”

“Maybe I wasn’t going in.” Had they really saved him? It all seemed so improbable.

“Aw, jeez. You know your problem? You’re kind of smart but you’re also kind of stupid. Because you’re a foreigner. Because you don’t read the damn papers.” Johnny reached inside his coat, extracted a folded page torn from
Harper’s
and tossed it at the stableman’s chest. Harris managed to catch it without fumbling. The fire story was just below the fold in large type; his own face stared back at him. He frowned. That picture. All those names.

He found his voice. “Where’d you get this new name,
Harris,
anyway?”

“Well, you ran through quite a few of them yourself. Look, man, we figure you got some skill, some experience, some interesting methods, maybe some information about Undertoe we’d like to know. We want you to join us, but then you went and got notorious. You’re going to need serious cover now.
Frank Harris,
well, it’s ideal. It’s so common a name it would be impossible to find all the Frank Harrises in New York. And it was a cinch to get the full set of papers, and all the vitals match. But we have to make it stick. You can’t be a German with that name—or with
Williams
either—and not stand out. Let’s just say we’re going to make it stick. You’re going to become a nice Irishman, like the rest of us.”

“I can’t pass as an Irishman,” he said, now losing hope for a positive outcome.

“You’ll be surprised. You’ll hole up a while, grow you a beard. We’ll get you some speaking lessons, the right clothes. You’ll be a needle in an Irish haystack. Don’t worry about that part, because like I said, it’s our specialty. Stealth. Cover. Lying low. As long as you stay in character, no one will ever notice you. Eventually, when the cops have pinned the job on someone else and Undertoe’s forgotten all about it, we’ll even wait and let you settle your score with the Undertaker yourself, if you like. But the idea is you’ll come into business with us. We got a couple places we could use a complete unknown, a man willing to lose his identity and start over. And that’s exactly what you need to do, if you don’t want to hang for the Barnum’s mess.” Dandy Johnny smiled. It was a delicately woven web of threats and enticements in which he was trying to snare our man, and it was a strong one.

“What if I say no?”

Johnny began to toss his cane impatiently back and forth. The stableman swallowed a mouthful of nervous saliva, but he didn’t look a bit timid or panicky, standing there facing a hundred crooks. Actually, the stableman wasn’t half as scared as he ought to have been, considering the circle of men that had already begun inching forward, blackjacks dropping from their sleeves, eye-gougers glinting in the lantern light, brass knuckles sprouting on their fists, lead-weighted slungshots at the ready. The Whyos were prepared to swoop upon him the moment Johnny gave the signal, but there were plenty among them who admired the stableman’s sangfroid. They were thinking he was holding his own damn well in the situation, whoever he was. They were thinking he was their kind of man. The room waited for Johnny to react.

“As much as I like you, Mr. Harris, you’re starting to annoy me,” Johnny said. “We both know you did the girl and set the fire. Problem is, the cops know it, too. You don’t seem to get it, that without us you’re dead in the water. Here’s something else you might not know: Until you showed up in this town, no one would take on that job. Not even the stupidest goons would trust the Undertaker. He’s been looking for a firebug for months now. Whether it’s because he works for Barnum or because he hates him is the only question. It was stupid to take that job in the first place, Frank, but we’re still interested in you. You see, to us, you’re either a problem or an asset. We’d prefer an asset, naturally. And here’s the thing: It’s not optional. Now that you’re here, well, we’re not about to let you go back out and keep on causing problems, drawing attention, helping Undertoe pull off jobs.”

“I thought you said he was going to double-cross me.”

“Sooner or later. Listen—you need us, we like you. Why not make it easy?”

“You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.” He was afraid as soon as he heard how it came out—somehow gutsy when what he’d wanted was just to make it clear how wrong they were in their assessment of the situation—and he hastened to add, “I’ll take you up on your offer, though. Like you say, I need you and you like me. How could I not?”

How could he not? The stableman looked out at the army of dim forms, each one ready to murder him if given the slightest signal. He had no idea how to torch a building to make it burn fast. Were they going to require that of him? What was going to happen when they figured him out? He looked at the girl Beatrice across the dim space and saw a queer, skeptical expression on her face. She knew what was going on, he thought. She understood who he was in a way her boss did not. It wasn’t going to last long, this reprieve. But for now Dandy Johnny was smiling.

“All right then,” he said. “That’s good. Now let me introduce you to the Whyos, the unofficial rulers of the city. And our lovely sisters and partners in all things, the Why Nots.”

There was a profound silence, perhaps as long as a minute, before the great brewing hall began to echo with a quiet, sinuous whispering, half wind, half whistle. It was not quite a word or a call. They did not simply say the name of their gang,
Whyo,
over and over till the word became a chant. Some of them sang it and some of them seemed just to breathe those two rhythmic syllables: the initial wind of the interrogative
—why—
and the slightly elongated sigh of surprise
—oh—
or was it a sign of despair?

Why-o.
The many baritone and tenor voices were set off by the counterpoint of the sopranos and mezzos in the corner. Just as he was beginning to understand that there was some sort of statement being made, an utterance in a language that suggested the existence of an entire hidden world, the sound faded and stopped. But he could still hear it in his head, and he realized it had been there for some time already. It was the eerie voice of the streets, a noise he’d been vaguely aware of and had variously attributed to the whine of swiftly spinning carriage spokes, the rustling of dusty acacia leaves or the distant screech of ferries sliding up against sodden pilings, the background noise that had defined the feel of the metropolis for him. Who were they really, he wondered, the Whyos? What were they saying? Was there any way he could escape them, when they figured out he wasn’t the man they thought? And then again, who was he?

12.

ABOUT FACE

J
ohnny fondled the silver-headed, ruby-eyed serpent that was the knob of his cane and mentally tallied the voices, each of which was distinct and identifiable to him. He noted the degree of enthusiasm and also listened for silences—abstentions. As far as he could tell, every last man and woman, boy and girl, had joined in the welcoming of Frank Harris. He smiled. Of course, he didn’t need the gang’s assent to bring a new man in. Johnny could make or murder a man at will. He could do anything he damn well liked, and no question would ever be asked. But it was good politics, this voice vote. Allowing the gang members to make their wishes known in a sort of plebiscite from time to time was an effective means of shoring up their loyalty.

He whistled, bringing the gang to silence, and dismissed them. They left the brewery quietly, in twos and threes, by several exits. Ten minutes later, there were just four of them left standing in the center of the room: Johnny, Beatrice, Frank Harris and Johnny’s henchman, Piker Ryan.

For Johnny’s purposes, Frank Harris could have been anyone. Frank Harris was but a cog in a scheme. And if it worked, it would enrich them all beyond their wildest imaginations. Or really, Harris could have been
almost
anyone, but not quite. There were a few criteria, the most important of which was that the cog be an outsider, not a Whyo, but also not just an average citizen, not just a dupe—he had to have a fairly hardened character, a stomach for crime, and to be tough enough to win the approval of the other Whyos. So far, Johnny was pleased with what he’d seen. He’d been looking for a man like Harris for some time—perhaps about as long as Undertoe had been looking for a man to do
his
dirty work—and then Williams turned up, thanks to Beanie. The Undertoe connection was an added twist—a bit of a complication on the one hand, an added incentive on the other—for there was no man in New York whom Johnny loathed the way he loathed Luther Undertoe.

But Undertoe aside, the job Johnny wanted Harris for had been long in the planning, and it was to be the biggest heist the Whyos had ever pulled. Johnny had done well for the Whyos, enriching himself and all of them far beyond expectations, maintaining exquisite control and keeping peace among his people. The most important factor in this success was Johnny’s expansion of the original whyo, a song that served the gang as a war cry, a cheer and a secret handshake, into an elaborate language. To be fair, the whole idea of expanding the whyo had been started by his predecessor, Googy Corcoran, may he rest in peace.

Johnny remembered the feeling of twisting the knife and levering it up through Corcoran’s kidney, toward his lungs. He’d used that little jab and twist any number of times, but it had never felt as good as on the day he delivered it to his boss and ascended to power himself. Corcoran blew bloody foam as he whispered, “You, too, Johnny?” Then he fell to his knees, and Johnny gave him a couple of kicks before walking away. It was over. It may have been Corcoran who first began to introduce more complex sounds as signals with varying meanings, but when Johnny took over, the vocabulary contained only six or seven terms, including an owl hoot that meant
We meet up at the rendezvous in a quarter hour
and a rutting-cat howl that warned
Abort the plan, someone’s watching.

Under Johnny’s reign, whyoing became a fully articulate, sophisticated means of covert communication, and with that the gang’s power grew exponentially. Communication was everything. Johnny had developed a secret weapon that was far more powerful than anything in the gang’s conventional arsenal of pistols, knives and blackjacks. They could communicate with one another when pulling jobs; they could post lookouts who were able to deliver detailed situation reports without blowing cover. They also found ways of distracting and misleading witnesses. Every job they pulled was a winner suddenly, and no one ever got arrested. Dandy Johnny was a gifted singer, as were many of the boys in the original Whyos. They’d all sung in the Newsboys’ Choir together, back when they were kids, and Johnny’s mother had been choirmistress. So it was natural to introduce elements of music into the language when they wanted to be able to say more. For a certain job, singing “Danny Boy” in C while strolling north on Mulberry Street might mean
Everyone’s in place, as soon as the roundsman turns the corner, we strike.
Whereas doing it in G minor might mean
Go to plan two, the watchman is still awake.
The only hitch was, it took some musical talent to speak this new language, and so certain Whyos—guys with tin ears or no rhythm or an inability to carry a tune—were phased out. Dandy Johnny was widely known to have perfect pitch, a keen ear and great vocal technique. His ability to trace the warbling trajectories of an individual voice back to its owner was uncanny. Standing at Broadway and Houston, he could discern if a man was sending his signal from the corner of Howard and Crosby or Howard and Elm. It was the inverse of ventriloquism, an art at which the Whyos also gradually became adept, as they saw its potential for distracting witnesses, policemen and the like. By this time, some five years since Johnny had taken over, the universe of whyo terms included every sort of sound you could imagine, from creaks and sighs and whistles to songs and subvocal tones. And as a result, the Whyos and the Why Nots could easily pass information among them without anyone else even knowing they were talking at all. That was what was going on when they whyoed their approval of Frank Harris. Of course, they had no idea that Harris hadn’t passed the vocal test, no idea that Johnny had a different sort of role in mind for him.

Nor did Frank Harris have the slightest idea what the whyoing had meant. He’d heard the eerie, uncanny sound. He’d glanced up at the one called Beanie as it was dying down and seen that she was staring at him coldly, taking his measure. He felt something prickle through him then, from his scalp to his groin. His chest broke out in a clammy sweat. She was at once beautiful and nasty, alluring and awful. Indeed, he found the whole situation frightening. But he didn’t begin to suspect what he was messing with when he decided to speak, to blurt out the truth, now that it was just the four of them: “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you waste your welcome.”

What he struggled to say next, in his broken English, was: You’re probably going to kill me, but I can’t go along with this. You’ve got the wrong man and the wrong story. I’m not working with Mr. Undertoe. I didn’t do the fire. I didn’t kill the girl. I almost died in that fire. I’m not the one you want. Maybe Undertoe is, but I don’t know anything about it. I just happened to be there, to get mixed up in it somehow. I’m not the master criminal you think I am, and frankly, I wouldn’t join you even if I were.

The bottom of Beatrice’s stomach seemed to open up, to drop and keep on dropping. She’d guessed something was funny about him, that his seeming wile was rooted in luck, not strategy, but he’d been playing along up till now. What in the world did it mean that the man had just come out with it? Was
this
a strategy? It was very strange, but even stranger was the powerful impulse she suddenly felt toward the man she had dubbed Frank Harris: the impulse to protect him. For reasons not entirely clear to her, she stepped between Harris and Johnny. She was not at all sure what she was about to do.

“You think we ought to kill you, eh?” said Dandy Johnny with no expression on his face as he watched Beanie reposition herself. “Why does that strike me as odd?”

Piker Ryan was smiling. “No problem, Johnny, I’ll take care of it,” he said, but Johnny put his arm out.

The stableman felt he heard that distant whispering again, the way it sounded when they first entered the brewery but quieter. He almost thought he made out the words
Kill him, kill him.
After all, he’d invited them to do just that. Was he mad? Was it the wind? What did the real wind sound like? he wondered, and he found he wasn’t sure anymore. He wished he’d been a little less impressed by the spectacle they’d just offered him, their strange method of communication, the seriousness of their malice. Some of their information was bad, yes, but that made them only more dangerous.

Of course, Harris didn’t know what was going on in the minds of the Whyos standing around him. How could he have guessed that Beatrice wanted but feared to believe him, while Johnny suspected a bluff and Piker Ryan, being rather simple of mind, took his statement at exactly face value? How could he have known that his denial suggested a crucial Whyo agent had passed on false information? How could he know how much Johnny had at stake? For the boss could not be seen to have been duped—especially not by Undertoe. Johnny didn’t want to believe it was possible, and so he was thinking,
What’s this guy trying to pull? What could he have to gain from leading us astray?
Beatrice was wondering if the Jimster was in on it. Could he be cleverer than they’d thought, not a double but a triple agent? He certainly had gotten down to Billy’s quickly. And as for Piker Ryan, he was just feeling that old itch in his fingers, waiting for Johnny to give him the signal.

Meantime, the face Frank Harris presented them was blank. He had been honest. He had nothing to hide anymore but his fear, and that he managed to conceal. He stood there, determined not to blink, and waited for something to happen, preferably not his own sudden loss of consciousness, which he imagined as a dull, spreading pain at the back of his skull, a blow to the back of the knees, his legs collapsing. He was acutely aware of Piker Ryan, the way his fingers undulated, unable to control their eagerness. He thought of all he would haved liked to become in his life, the man his mother had expected him to be when he grew up: someone good, someone kind, who cared about people and was cared about, someone who had done his best, whatever that might be. He hadn’t managed any of that yet. It was too soon to die, but that’s the way death was, killing his mother before she could raise him, his sister before she had lived. He asked himself if he would really rather die than survive by joining forces with a gang of thieves, but the question seemed wider than the sky. He couldn’t answer it.

“So tell us who you really are, then,” Johnny said at last.

It was almost funny, that request, it was so impossible. But Harris went ahead and gave them an accurate account of his history since landing in New York. Afterward, Johnny was still unclear on what to believe, but he decided that even if he accepted the story, he was interested in a man who claimed to be a stonecutter-turned-stableman, nothing more, and yet somehow had the guts to hold his own in front of the assembled Whyos. If it was a ruse of some sort, it was masterful. The man had a certain tact, an odd subtlety to the way he operated, and very good timing. He might not be quite fish or fowl, but Johnny was thinking he’d make an excellent man for the job at hand.

“Piker,” he said. “Miss O’Gamhna. This here fellow presents us with a problem—a couple of problems. The gang liked him, but now, if we believe him, it looks like he’s not quite the man we thought. I could just let Piker kill him, but how do we explain that to the others tomorrow? I don’t like that scenario too much. He’s kind of unpredictable, but that can be an asset. Then there’s the fact that it looks like the Undertaker’s up to something, and one way or other our friend here figures into it. Not to mention he’s just the right man for a job I’ve been planning. I don’t know why, but I still like him. The way I see it, it’s all good. Only problem is, I think he just said he wouldn’t work with us.” Dandy Johnny looked at him. “Is that true, or are you willing to live, Mr. Harris?”

Harris swallowed. Johnny switched his cane to his left hand.

“I’ll do what you want,” Harris said.

The boss of the Whyos extended his right hand, and the man now named Frank Harris shook it.

“Beanie,” said Johnny then, “is your cousin still working on the new east side sewers?”

“No, he’s laying pavement.”

“That’s all right. That’s fine. You’ll be bringing Frank Harris home with you tonight. The first stage is going to be about getting him under cover.”

“Johnny, they’ll kick me out again if they know I’m still with the gang.”

“You can tell your aunt and cousins our friend got mixed up with some bad men in Five Points, but now he wants out, wants to go clean, just like you did, and you’re trying to help him. That’ll explain why you’ve got to keep him indoors for a month or so—just till he’s grown a beard and got control of that accent. I want him to come off like an Irishman. After that, I want you to see to it Liam finds him a post wherever Liam’s working. I’d like to get him a bit of a job history, references and what, before we put him on the sewer job.”

She wasn’t in on what the sewer job was, and she wasn’t happy about this assignment. “Didn’t I do enough, finding him for you? Why don’t you send him home with Fifi?”

“I’m sending him home with you, so shut the fuck up about it.”

“What about the accent, how’s that going to work?”

“You’re going to coach him.”

She rolled her eyes—so it wasn’t a real assignment, it was being a governess.

“And now, Harris,” said Dandy Johnny. “Mr. Harris?”

Harris didn’t respond.

“
Harris!
” Johnny jabbed him with his cane.

“What?” said the stableman, as if he hadn’t heard. He’d been asking himself if he’d just sold his soul, and anyway Harris wasn’t his name.

“First thing you’ve got to do is learn your Goddamn name. You’re going to have it easy for a while, work on your accent, your cover. But there’s something I want you to remember: You agreed to something just now. You’re one of us. You don’t move on, you don’t quit your little job that Beanie’s cousin’s going to get you. You don’t decide to find your own place to live. You don’t use your old name, ever. In fact, you don’t do a damn thing unless the Whyos are in on it. Not next year, not ten years from now, never. It’s for life. It’s got its pleasures as well as its responsibilities, just like a marriage, and just like marriage there’s no getting out. So congratulations. You’re a lucky man, Frank Harris, to be marrying the Whyos. Don’t ever think you’re not. Your chances of longevity just went up.”