Metropolis (18 page)

16.

MOTHER DOLAN AND THE GRAND PLAN

H
ow could Harris have guessed that Dandy Johnny’s full name was John Dolan or that the matron of the sewermen’s bath hall was fondly called
Mother Dolan
by Whyos and Why Nots alike? No better than he could have known the plan the Whyos had for the sewers or what a beauty old Mother Dolan had been in her day, how pure her soprano voice.

Meg Dolan was the penultimate child of a large sheep-farming clan, all but forgotten by her parents amidst the throng. The boys were the ones the family counted on; girls just did the washing. But Meg distinguished herself early as a star of the parish church choir. At sixteen, she said good-bye without many tears and made her way to Dublin to live with a cousin and pursue her singing. She was luckier than her father had predicted: She soon became a paid soloist at St. Francis Xavier. Even so, she wasn’t paid much, just pin money, and she still had to scrub floors during the week to pay her rent. She dreamt of grander things. Like every singer alive, no doubt, she wanted to follow in the footsteps of Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale and international sensation. She was thrifty with her money and stole a little from the collection plate every week when she was changing out of her choir robes. In a couple of years, she had enough to book her passage to America.

She’d been naïve back then, she’d freely admit, quite a little fool. Upon her arrival in New York, Meg Dolan (who never married or changed her name, despite her eventual use of
Missus
) was disappointed to find that openings for divas were few and far between. She became a servant in a wealthy house on Washington Square. She cried every night for a month, so badly did she miss Ireland, her six brothers, three sisters and, above all, the family’s twenty-odd sheepdogs. In New York, too, she gravitated to the pets of the family she worked for, for solace. One evening, the master’s son found her glumly scratching the neck of the house’s retriever and put his arm around her shoulder. She’d been on the edge of tears, and this bit of human comfort pushed her over it. He was her age, after all, and if not for the thousand and one circumstances that put them in different worlds, he might have been her friend. Indeed, for several minutes, he seemed to be her friend. He patted her back and offered her his handkerchief, and she was glad for his sympathy. But it was what he did next that made the night a pivotal one for Meg Dolan: He let his palm slide across her breast and whispered that she could earn twice her weekly wages that night if she joined him in the loft of the carriage house at midnight. She stood and stalked off without another word, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and her nose on her apron. Then she thought it over. She kept the rendezvous but negotiated the amount. Her encounter with the master’s son was not particularly pleasant, but she’d made as much money on her back in an hour as she would have in a month of twelve-hour days on her knees with a bucket. To her, it seemed a bargain.

It wasn’t long before she’d forsaken the bucket altogether and taken up residence in a house of women. She was a good-looking girl, and it was a high-class establishment. She soon had several regular clients and carefully cultivated her relationship with the most attentive one. Within the year, he offered to pay her expenses in full for the privilege of exclusivity. When she told him those expenses would include a private apartment, singing lessons, season tickets to the opera and a recital gown, he chuckled and got out his checkbook. He liked her ambition. He put her in a sweet, out-of-the-way brownstone on the far West Side, met her at her box at the opera twice a month in season and bought all her clothes. He spent two nights a week in her bed, an arrangement which also suited his wife. When he died in her arms of what the coroner termed apoplexy five years later, he’d just signed over the deed to her apartment in exchange for her agreement to abort the child she was expecting. She wanted the baby, even out of wedlock, but he was unwilling to indulge his mistress there—he had a name in society to protect, after all, a wife, proper children. He was thinking of running for office eventually.

“All right,” she said. “Of course I understand. And thank you for the house, pet. It’s lovely of you. I’m going to show you how grateful I can be, don’t worry.”

He had no idea of the potency of the dappled purple foxglove that bloomed in her little brownstone’s rear yard. He’d never paid much attention to it, really, and wasn’t suspicious by nature; she’d never given him reason to be. He never even considered that his Meg might be the reason he began to feel iffy that evening after dinner, to see the world through a greenish haze. He put it down to a bad oyster and took to his bed. When he began to vomit, Meg had suggested they call for a doctor, but (as she well knew) his physician was his brother-in-law, which would have made things awkward. He declined. In short, it all went according to plan, and that night, while her benefactor lay dying, Meg felt the first stirring of the baby in her own belly. She called on the unsuspecting wife the following morning in tears—and at the servants’ entrance, out of respect. She offered total discretion, asked for nothing. In gratitude, the widow sent a large check the following week. The death was not investigated by the police, partly because it seemed natural that a man of his years and portly stature might pass in his sleep, but largely, too, because his wife preferred to hush it up.

So suddenly Meg Dolan owned her own house and was free: two nearly impossible dreams. She was also pregnant and without work, but she had thought out the problem of how to generate a regular income to cover her living costs. She opened her rooms to a couple of women she knew from her previous lodgings, charging them in lieu of rent a percentage of the earnings they generated under her aegis. She didn’t join in their toils, however, and not just because she was by then enormous with child. (There were plenty of men who would have paid extra on account of that.) No, she had decided she was getting out of the business for the sake of her baby. Through her singing teacher, she found part-time work at the Newsboys Lodging House, where she led their choir of street-hardened, beer-drinking, pint-sized sopranos and helped out with the housekeeping. The lady lodgers stayed on, however—they were paying for Johnny’s sailor suits and shiny shoes. When Johnny was five, she finally managed to parlay her connection to a regular customer of one of her lodgers into the job as housekeeper at the Department of Public Works, but she kept on leading the Newsboys Choir because she liked it. It gave her a chance to remain involved with music and to keep Johnny busy with a wholesome activity. He was one of her top soloists, and it wasn’t favoritism; he was good.

They weren’t wealthy by any means, but regardless of their financial situation she always bought her son the finest clothes and shoes and made sure he looked like a little gentleman, whether he was at school, at choir practice or playing stickball with his mates. The only problem was, Johnny wasn’t a little gentleman; little gentlemen didn’t play stickball or fraternize with newsboys or grow up fatherless in houses of ill repute. He just looked like one. At the age of seven, Johnny Dolan was already known for his temper and his tendency to break noses. He might have looked like a ponce, the way his mother dressed him, but no one dared make any remark but “Looking dandy today, Johnny.” At ten, he dropped out of the Newsboys Choir. It didn’t matter how Mrs. Dolan groomed him, how sweet his soprano or how respectable her present job; Johnny was drawn to the streets. He continued to dress fastidiously and to preen like an aristocrat as he grew older, but he took increasingly to fighting, to women and to drink—in short, to everything his mother had hoped to save him from. She’d compromised the means for the end, and it had backfired: She’d not even gotten the end. There were years when she wept herself to sleep every night with worry and regret.

When Johnny first fell in with Googy Corcoran and the Whyos, his mother tried to rein him in. She badgered. She slapped. She threw crockery. She yelled. She tried pecuniary and culinary rewards to keep him home at night. She failed. He was sixteen and not eager to spend time with his mother—pork chops, potatoes and battery notwithstanding. Once, she overheard the details of a job the gang was planning to pull and spilled it to the cops, hoping the lesson of it would put an end to such things for once and all. Johnny was arrested, but a few days later he was back out of jail, charges nimbly evaded, with a new friend and recruit for Googy’s gang: a pure thug named Piker Ryan. Piker took to Johnny right from the start and was loyal as a sheepdog. Together, they made piles of money. They made a perfect team—brains and beauty plus brawn—and were particularly adept at using the Whyo songs to bring their plans off without detection. As a result, they got away with everything from petty larceny to murder. It wasn’t long before others in the gang began to look to Johnny instead of Googy for leadership.

Johnny had been in the gang several years when his mother finally accepted that in spite of herself, she’d raised a son who would have nothing to do with the straight and narrow. From then on, she turned her efforts to ensuring that her son became the top gangster in the city. It was a brilliant stroke for her as a mother: It brought her wayward, distant son back to her. Once she’d shown him she was proud of him no matter what work he did, he stopped slamming doors and sulking entirely. Indeed, no son could have been more solicitous of his mother than Johnny or more eager to take her advice. It turned out that Meg Dolan’s advice was excellent.

As for Googy Corcoran, he never saw Mrs. Dolan coming. No one did. She stayed in the shadows, just a dowdy housekeeper for a city agency, letting Johnny appear to do it all on his own. But the truth was that before long she was in on everything Piker and Johnny did, advising if not directing the action. Then came the knife fight at the Morgue bar, a spring day the Whyos would never forget. How could they, when it ended with Johnny kicking Googy’s head in? Johnny had found out Googy was keeping money and information about jobs from the other guys, which made him mad to start, but the last straw was that Googy had set up one of the younger boys, a kid Johnny was friendly with, to take a fall with the cops and distract attention from himself. It so happened that the kid was shot. The cops had been expecting a hardened criminal—Googy Corcoran—not a twelve-year-old. The kid died. Johnny challenged Googy about it in the basement of the Morgue the next night, and before long they were circling, knees bent, knives drawn. At dawn, a bloody mop head and a body cast in cement were dumped off Corlear’s Hook by Piker Ryan.

With Dandy Johnny in charge and his mother covertly guiding him, the Whyos thrived, becoming more effective in their heists, more secretive in their ways, more moderate in their violence, pickier about their victims. They rarely went after weaklings anymore, except odiously rich ones, and they avoided small fry altogether. Mrs. Dolan had denounced the robbing of the poor as neither moral nor profitable. Some of this happened through subtle changes, but most of it was the result of straightforward policy implementations introduced gradually but unequivocally over the course of Johnny’s first year in power.

The first rule was the one against pimping. The second they called the Tithe, under which all Whyos and Why Nots were obligated to turn a portion of their earnings back to the organization. It wasn’t simply a tenth, though—it was progressive, based on the amount each person had earned. In exchange for paying this tax, every Whyo and Why Not could count on a steady weekly income from the gang, with the exact amount being a function of need, merit and overall gang revenue. If a Whyo made nothing at all one week, for whatever reason, he could still always count on a minimum draw; if a Why Not hit it big, half was hers to keep. The rest went into the communal pot. And all were entitled to aid in the face of financial, legal, medical or other adversity. A few Whyos tried to make their way around the new regulations at first, accustomed as they were to living off the fat of their girlfriends’ hard-won earnings. They got their noses broken. The funny thing was, the no-pimping rule brought most people’s revenue up. In the very first months, the Why Nots’ contributions to the till rose by 25 percent. All of them were skilled pickpockets, an occupation which was often more lucrative than whoring and far less likely to lead to dissipation, drunkenness, depression and late sleeping.

At the same time these reforms were being introduced, Dandy Johnny and his mother began working on refinements and variations on the traditional song signal, the whyo. In Googy’s day, the most common deployment of the whyo had still been as a musical war cry, a signature that proudly linked the gang to the deeds it committed. Mrs. Dolan told Johnny what she thought of that: “It’s idiotic.” And yet she saw great potential in the whyo, if used intelligently, especially combined with the fact that most of the boys could sing. She had trained many of them herself in the Newsboys Choir. One night, as she lay in her bed thinking about how much she knew the boys loved to yodel, whyo and hoot and what a liability it was, her mind drifted to the farm in County Sligo where she’d grown up.

All those brothers, even more dogs, countless sheep. Her father’d had more than a hundred whistle patterns for the roughly two dozen dogs and pups, and all but a basic few of the commands were unique to individual dogs. The signals that told Orkney to go left, right, forward, lie down and come were each Orkney’s alone. No other dog understood or would respond to them, for each had its own set of whistles, thus enabling the shepherd to choreograph the dogs’ movements with exquisite precision. The dogs could be told to move the sheep exactly where the shepherd wanted them. Whenever a dog died, a new pup was named after him and trained in his commands, so that there was always an Orkney, always a Queenie, always a Hal, and every Orkney’s
Sit!
was always three short, high pipes and a long trill. Lying there in her bed that night, twenty-five years since she’d last laid eyes on Ireland, Meg Dolan envisioned an ideal gang, in which the Whyos and their girls were more or less the boss’s sheepdogs. They would communicate openly yet specifically—indeed,
privately.
It would shore up the boss’s power on the one hand and enable the commission of nearly perfect crimes on the other.