Metropolis (21 page)

The following morning, when the other sewermen had set off, he lingered, and a short time later Towle introduced him to Sarah Blacksall. Harris had read Louie’s register, but he didn’t recall that she was the doctor who’d examined the body of Pearl Button at the morgue; Luther Undertoe’s was the only other name he’d come away with, and so he had no notion of how tight the net of his life was drawn. Dr. Blacksall was interested, she told Harris, in all manner of health reforms but especially concerned with the condition of the sewers. Towle explained that she would document various sanitary indicators, from the clarity and content of the sewage to variations in the death rate per capita in the wards where the dirt-catchers were installed. Together, the three of them rode up to East Twenty-seventh Street, where they pulled up behind a sturdy cart that was hitched up behind a mule, standing at the corner. There was a black driver sitting on the bench, smoking.

“Well, Sergeant Henley!” called Towle. Harris wasn’t sure to whom he was talking. “You’re looking well!”

“I am well,” said the cart driver, swinging down from his bench and extending his large hand to the sewer chief. They clapped each other on the shoulder. Then Sergeant Henley turned toward Dr. Blacksall, lifted his hat and bowed slightly in greeting. “Good morning, Sarah.”

She took his hand and shook it quite as if he were an old friend of hers and she were a man. Harris watched, tried to absorb the situation. This Henley wasn’t a sewer worker, that was for sure. To his knowledge, the division had never hired even a German (unless you counted him), much less a Negro, only Irish. On top of that, he’d never witnessed this level of amicability between the races, not once since he’d been in New York. How did they all know one another? Henley was wearing a Union Army cap whose brass gleamed in the winter sun, so perhaps he had fought for the North in the war and met the superintendent then. The cap did seem to fit the man’s head exceptionally well, as if it had sat there a long time.

Harris listened closely to their banter and picked up a good deal in the next minutes: There was talk of other men with military titles, common acquaintances, apparently both black and white. As for the doctor, she knew Henley first through her uncle, but now it sounded like she helped to run a clinic near where the sergeant lived. Her partner was another lady doctor and, he gathered, a Negro.

None of the circles Harris had been in, high or low, in New York or in Germany, had included blacks or ladies with advanced degrees and jobs such as doctor. He thought of how much an outsider he was in this metropolis and was intrigued that this black man, so different physically, could be so clearly at home. He looked at this young woman and felt a squeezing in his chest. He was to have been a doctor, once. Adversity had derailed him, yes, a thousand different times, but he had let it happen. Surely a black man in this country, fighting in the War Between the States, had suffered great travails. And Sarah Blacksall must have surmounted innumerable obstacles. And what of her colleague, both female and black? He felt deeply ashamed of himself. What was his ambition? Not to save the poor from disease but to do high-quality reconnaissance for a gang—and why? To make a girl he was in love with happy, even though he suspected, no
knew,
that she was using him.

“Well, let me tell you about these dirt-catchers,” Towle began, pulling out a diagram and pointing at various details. A dirt-catcher was a deep pit directly beneath a manhole cover, a catch basin that allowed grit and debris to settle out of the effluent. It could be collected by sewer workers from a platform built around the edge of the collecting pools, eliminating virtually all need for travel through the tunnels and greatly minimizing the need to use the long-handled gaffs in narrower pipes. Several of them had been installed more than a decade before, and they still worked perfectly, but there had been a miasma theorist on the Common Council who was worried that the deep pits of sewage debris would breed dangerous gases, and he had succeeded in getting the design banned. “That’s why all this is being done, shall we say,
subtly,
with funds we’ve borrowed from other accounts. I’m convinced this design is the way of the future, but I don’t want to ruffle any feathers till we’ve got real evidence of its public-health benefits. I must be able to rely on your discretion. Are you all with me?”

They all nodded and said, “Of course, of course,” but inwardly Harris marveled. How was it that he was about to be indoctrinated into yet another covert activity? He was frankly becoming impatient with vows of secrecy and silence.

“So let’s go take a look. You’ll see, Harris, that it’s not your usual manhole. You hardly need your boots.” He handed out headlamps all around, helping his niece to fit hers on over her coiffure.

Was the lady doctor going down the manhole, too? It was the kind of thing Harris could imagine Beatrice doing, but this woman was probably thirty or even older, not a sassy girl gangster who sometimes wore trousers. These people were peculiar, he decided, and he liked them. They weren’t quite as colorful as the Whyos, perhaps, but for that they were a lot less dangerous. They were not killers. They were trying to save lives through better sanitation, through medicine. They had fought in the war, for the cause of good. It was inspiring. It reminded him of Robert Koch, whom he imagined tending the wounds of dying soldiers somewhere on the Franco-Prussian front, curing their infections through some miracle research he’d done.

Sergeant Henley moved the horse cart into the street, so that the traffic was diverted around them. Harris used his gaff to open the manhole. Then they lit their lamps and climbed down one after another, Dr. Blacksall last, with her skirts rigged up in an impromptu bustle. The men averted their eyes from her ankles. The whole space was much wider and somewhat deeper than most of the sewer holes Frank Harris had seen. There was a narrow stone ledge just wide enough to stand on and a rusty iron catwalk that bridged the pool. At the bottom, in the darkness, a quiet river of sewage flowed smoothly from the pipe at the north wall into a large pool and drained into another pipe at the south side. The smell was not sewagey at all—more like a freshwater lake with just a bit of muck at the bottom.

“This is our model. It was put in in the mid-fifties,” Towle said. “And I’ll tell you something: It’s never been serviced, ever. And it’s never backed up. But even if it did, it’d be far easier to clean than the widest-gauge pipe there is. Ideally, what we’d like to do is put these babies in at regular intervals all across the city. Of course, that would cost a lot and ultimately put some men out of work, which is never popular, but I am convinced it will save both money and lives.”

Harris looked around and saw that there were also rings and pulleys built into the masonry for hauling up buckets of debris. It was perfect. How many of these were there? he wondered. And where? He wasn’t thinking the least bit about the sanitary consequences, though; his mind was spinning at the prospect of such large spaces that were almost entirely unknown, even by the sewermen, since they never got called on to service them. It didn’t have all the space of the dry tunnel or the grotto, but in a pinch you could get out of there by any of three different routes. Maybe this assignment wouldn’t be fruitless after all.

Dr. Blacksall brought out a glass phial and a pair of tongs and leaned down and submerged the phial in the water. Harris was on the verge of laughing at the tongs—after all, he spent his days crawling through much worse than this—but then something about her gesture struck him. He thought of his father and Robert Koch and the microbes they’d collected, bred and studied.

“Mr. Harris, since we’ll be working together, I’d like to explain part of my research to you. I want to collect samples from the sewers on a regular basis—daily or weekly, depending, in numerous locations. Then I’ll examine them under a kind of very strong magnifying glass called a microscope, to see if I can find traces of certain tiny creatures that are invisible to the naked eye but can cause disease. These are very newly discovered theories, but I assure you, it’s the truth. It’s modern science we’re doing, Mr. Harris.”

Harris winced. His pride could not tolerate allowing this woman to think him only barely able to understand her science. He was tired of being an able-bodied laborer, a criminal. He wasn’t thinking about who Frank Harris was supposed to be when he spoke.

“I know all about the work of Pasteur, Dr. Blacksall,” he said. “The wee animalcules of van Leeuwenhoek. I may look like a brute to you, but my father was a doctor. I worked in his lab. I’d be glad to help you collect your samples.”

“Oh,” said Sarah Blacksall. “Well, that’s wonderful.”

“Van Leeuwenhoek indeed,” Towle said, thinking of the man’s paperwork, trying to recall if he’d had any schooling. “I’ll be damned.”

Sergeant Henley just raised his eyebrows and smiled. He always liked it when a person proved to be slightly more than he appeared. But to the others, Harris’s announcement was as unfathomable as it had been for Harris to see a black man in friendly acquaintance with upper-class whites. Towle couldn’t help wondering if Harris had done something awful to have come down so far in the world.

There was snow the next day, when Harris finally got to tell Beatrice about the tunnel and dirt-catchers, and it gave him an eerie feeling, reminding him of the blizzard of the previous spring, when he’d first been abducted. He drew in the location of the dry tunnel’s manhole on their map. He waited for his reward, but she was sitting up at the table, at rapt attention, not leaning in.

“Yes, and what about the dirt-catchers, where are they?”

He visualized the roughly traced map of downtown that Mr. Towle had drawn for them when they climbed out of the hole and marked the sheet
D-C
in nine places. She remained silent. He had expected excitement, laughter, the sense of common purpose, but she was somewhere else, thinking, planning. He suggested that he would pay a visit to each of them in the following days, to determine its condition and suitability for use by the gang, and finally he got what he was after: her hand on his thigh, again, her smile. He swallowed, trying not to imagine more, but when she told him she wanted him to take her on a tour, his mouth went dry.

“What?”

“Didn’t you just tell me some stuffy lady physician went down in the catcher?”

“But it’s no place—”

“Nonsense. We’ll have the proper equipment, too. You’re just going to have to borrow me some boots. I want to see it all: the dry tunnel and the dirt-catcher and the grotto.”

“You can’t go to the grotto. It’s not easy to get to, and it’s not even near the other tunnel. And, Beatrice, I can’t just borrow a pair of boots.”

“Harris.” She let her finger drift a little higher up his leg than before. All the hairs of his body seemed to stand on end. “Come on, Harris. You think I’m not tough enough? But you’re right about not borrowing the equipment. The boots are huge, right? They’d be awkward to drag around, and we want to do this quietly, without fuss. I think it would be better if you just got hold of the keys somehow, so we could let ourselves into the building at our leisure and take what we needed. Don’t you think?”

Suffice it to say that Mrs. Dolan was in on the arrangement and more or less encouraged Harris to make off with her keys one night shortly thereafter, but Harris didn’t know that. He was shaking with nerves when he spotted them dangling from the lock of a closet door adjacent to his locker. She had made a show of having misplaced the key ring and was searching for it everywhere. With trembling hands but the whisper of Beatrice echoing in his ears, he slipped the closet key from its hole, dropped the entire ring into his satchel and left the building thinking himself undetected. Mother Dolan was quite aware of what he’d done, however. She had her backup set in her desk drawer and locked up the Sewer Division that night as usual.

When Harris got home, he made sure to jingle the keys. Beanie smiled at him. A short time later she went out, but they both knew this would not be an ordinary night. They had made a plan.

After midnight, when the others were asleep, Harris rose and left the apartment. He arrived at the designated corner, two blocks from the Public Works building, at a quarter to one. She stepped out of a shadowy doorway. He handed her the keys, and she went ahead of him. She’d been watching for hours, and there was no one around. The policeman on patrol was safely ensconced in the bed of Maggie the Dove, whom Beatrice had enlisted to support this operation. A few minutes after she entered, he followed her, and they locked the door behind them.

It was difficult moving around the building in the pitch darkness. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, and there were large windows facing onto the street. It turned out Harris was better at working with keys and operating locks in the darkness—he was used to functioning in the sewers with only minimal use of his eyesight. In the locker room, there were no windows, so they closed the door behind them and lit the gas lamp. They found headlights, gaffs and the smallest pair of boots available, which was still several sizes too large for Beatrice. Harris also found a shelf with a stack of the light breeches that the men wore under their boots and blushingly gave her a pair. She had been wearing pants the first time they met and he’d seen her wear them since, but still it was risqué. Then it became even more so, as they both needed to undress to get their boots on. At the O’Gamhnas’, the men and women took turns changing in Aunt Penelope’s bedroom. Harris looked around the locker room, then tried the door to the bath hall. It was locked. He tried several keys before he found the right one.

“Why don’t you change in here?” he suggested, waving her through the door.

“Wow,” she said, looking around. “I had no idea.” In the oblique light from the locker room’s gas lamp and the faint moonlight that shone through the milk-glass windows, the bath hall’s white tile and marble gleamed.

“It’s not bad, is it?”

He had his pants off and his boots on in a half a minute; she took considerably longer and emerged looking rumpled. The suspenders that held her boots up were badly twisted, and the tops of her breeches were bunched at the crotch.