Metropolis (24 page)

And then he described his appointment with Mr. Towle and Dr. Blacksall. He’d tried to tell her the day before, but she wouldn’t talk to him. He looked at her, thinking of all those things he had wanted to say, questions he had needed to ask. This conversation, the big meeting—it was all beside the point. “Beatrice, since the other night”—his face went red—“you wouldn’t talk to me. Why?”

The corners of her lips drew down.

“They’re going to kill me at that meeting, aren’t they?” he asked. His question was not the right one, he knew that as soon as he’d uttered it. He should have worried about her, about them, not himself. He should have made a declaration, not asked a question at all. He should at least have tried.

“Don’t be ridiculous. The Whyos aren’t done with you yet.”

As for his explanation, she found it believable. As for trusting him, she did. There was no need to worry about cops or rivals tracking them to the meeting, she felt. She reached into her shirtwaist and extracted a watch. She bit her lip and refrained from reaching out to touch his arm to reassure him. She could just imagine the sexual jolt that would spring through her, and this was not the time for that. What she wanted for herself and whether she’d be able to act on it were separate matters entirely. Partly, it depended on Harris’s performance at the meeting. There was no point declaring herself now. “We’re late now, let’s go.”

They walked on silently, Harris in a state of suspense, not at all sure how to interpret her words, until they came to the Old Bowery Theater, where a play called
The Outcast Lover
was opening that day. She told him to go buy them the cheapest orchestra tickets he could get, in back, on an aisle. He nodded and turned toward the ticket window. There, in the lobby of the theater, he felt he was very close to learning his fate.
The Whyos aren’t done with you yet,
she had said. He looked back at her and thought,
She’s ruthless, she’s unfathomable, she’s so beautiful.
He suspected he was about to give his final performance of McGinty’s ballad before an audience of his own executioners. He understood, better than ever before, that however much she truly felt for him, she answered first to her gang. But he didn’t think seducing him had been part of her mission.

“Whatever happens now,” he said, rejoining her, reaching into his pocket and handing her the red leather case, “I want you to know that I love you.”

She looked at him and slipped the picture into her reticule without looking at it. Her face was unreadable.

“Harris,” she said flatly, “my God. This is neither the place nor the time for such a statement.” Why couldn’t he have said that out on the street, before they were there, when she could have done something? She felt she might burst into tears.

His face was very red as he looked at his feet. When he took her elbow and led her to the orchestra, they looked for all the world like what he wished they were: two average people, a couple in danger of falling in love. But they were anything but what they appeared, those two, anything but what he’d have wished for. He still had no idea where the meeting was going to be held—certainly not in this theater full of people—and yet an image formed in his mind: himself up there on the stage of the Old Bowery, limelights blazing, bucolic backdrop at his back, Piker Ryan in the wings, a slungshot ready to hand. And then the room filled with terrible, whooping whyos, and the gang descended upon him as a throng.

Their seats were indeed the worst in the house: at the very rear of the orchestra, their view of the stage interrupted by two separate columns. In short, not much for taking in the show but perfectly suited to Beatrice’s purposes.

“Nice job on the seats,” she said, but of course they had been prearranged.

Harris looked around, wondering which of the other audience members were Whyos, and he spotted an unexpected face passing down the aisle: Mrs. Dolan. It made him blush, to be with Beatrice and see Mrs. Dolan, it brought back the vivid memories of what had transpired on the tiled floor of the bath hall. It had been real. He knew what he felt had been real. He turned to Beatrice and whispered, “I meant that, what I said before, you know. What happens now?”

But she ignored him until finally the lights were dimmed and the curtain rose. As the room filled with shouts and applause, he felt a jab in his side, and he turned.

“Suddenly, I’m not feeling very well, Mr. Harris,” said Beatrice, not too quietly, in a quavery feminine voice that didn’t match her at all. “Would you be so kind as to escort me to the lounge?”

20.

BODY IN THE BROOM CLOSET

B
eatrice steered him down the worn, stained, red-plush-carpeted stairs to the basement, where the lounges and the bathrooms were. There were still a few latecomers hurrying to their seats. Harris wasn’t at all sure whether what she did next was for their benefit or his, but at the door to the ladies’ room she slipped her arms around his waist and pulled him toward her. Then, with a showy, unseemly passion, she kissed him. His heart was beating, and his lungs were pumping, and he was kissing her back as if it was real. When they broke apart, she looked straight into his eyes. He felt a surge of hope and anxiety so great it made him dizzy. Maybe they were going to make him a Whyo. Maybe they weren’t going to kill him. Maybe this was love.

She leaned into him again, but what she whispered into his ear was just instructions: “The entry hall to the men’s room. Wait until no one’s in there but the attendant—he’s one of us—then step into the utility closet to the left of the door. Close the door behind you, walk to the back and push up against the rear wall—it swings open into a stairwell. Someone will be waiting for you.”

Then she kissed him again, as firmly and sweetly on the lips as if she’d just told him she loved him madly. Was it possible she
had
told him that, he wondered, with her body at least, or some silent whyo? He couldn’t rule it out. And then she traipsed toward the ladies’ lounge—to follow a parallel route, he presumed.

Away from her, when he faced the utility-closet door, the clammy feeling of distrust returned. But he opened it anyway, an optimist, a fool. He was so smitten with her kisses that it wasn’t till he’d pushed through the rear door of the closet and found himself looking at Piker Ryan’s ugly face that it occurred to him what an idiot he was; once she’d left him, he could have run back up to the lobby of the theater and out the door, onto the street. It might not have lasted, he didn’t have any place of refuge in mind, but something had always turned up before. He looked at his assassin, unable to speak.

“Well, well,” said Piker Ryan, “Frankie the Devil, right on schedule. Let’s go.” There was no sharp blow to the head, but of course that might come later. Instead, Piker turned into the darkness, and Harris followed him down the dark stairwell. He heard another door open and close in the darkness, and Piker turned and pressed his hand over Harris’s mouth, stopping him dead. Harris listened, thinking it must be Beatrice, but the footsteps ringing on the stairs above were not hers. Harris knew her gait too well to be mistaken. They went down and down until it seemed to Harris they were deeper than any sewer tunnel he’d been in. The stairs finally ended in a long hallway with a single kerosene lamp hanging on the wall. After he’d passed it, he looked back and saw the glimmer of Beatrice’s hair. He had been wrong to think it wasn’t her, to think she wasn’t capable of hiding herself from him. She’d been directly behind him all the time.

They came out into a large rehearsal room lit brightly with gas fixtures on the walls. It had a stage just like the theater above them but no seating for a real audience, just a couple of rows of chairs. The stage itself was set up with tables, as if for a banquet, and there was a savory if slightly fishy aroma wafting from some back corner. Many of the Whyos had been there before. This rehearsal room was where Dandy Johnny had been formally anointed the successor to Googy Corcoran. The Old Bowery itself was owned by an old guy named Mike Sweeney, an original Whyo who’d eagerly gone over to Johnny’s side when he came to power. The place had been a frequent Whyo meeting place in the transition period, before Mother Dolan started getting strict about not holding so many meetings. It was a perfect location, completely secluded and out of the way, and in the event of a raid there were numerous stairwells they could flee up, plus two vast scenery elevators and a dumbwaiter that was used for conveying props between rehearsal rooms and the main stage. The Whyos liked it there—it was a festive space for them—and they were glad to be back.

Why Nots were setting out bowls on the tables, and Whyos were arranging chairs, stools, boxes and benches around them. They were apparently going to dine before they held their meeting. A keg of Owney Geoghegan’s was tapped, and soon everyone was drinking. Harris found a seat off to the side and watched the crowd, keeping an eye out for Johnny, who had taken on a kind of vague and mythic aspect in his mind—he wondered if he’d recognize him—and, of course, for Beanie, but neither was anywhere to be seen. After what seemed a long time, two Whyos went over to the dumbwaiter and hauled out two enormous vats of stew. The nutty, saline scent of oysters wafted through the room. Harris was still looking for Beanie when people began to take seats. He was alone in the crowded room, but people seemed to know who he was and to be kindly disposed toward him. Indeed, it was hard to imagine that all these people were killers. The longer he watched them, the less he believed it. All around him, the Whyos and Why Nots slurped their soup and told stories and laughed, just like people.

Harris himself was so preoccupied with watching the scene that he’d barely tasted his stew when a singularly unattractive Why Not offered him more. (He shook his head and suspected her of being Piker Ryan’s sister.) As the meal drew to a close, he found himself repeating the refrain of the sewermen’s ballad over and over in his head
—All I want is to di
e/
With my dogs clean and dr
y/
Snoring alongside sweet Sally.
He sang it beautifully, in his mind. When the time came to perform, he wanted it to come out as a serenade to Beatrice. If only he were sitting with her, he thought, and if only he knew where he stood, he might be able to enjoy this. Maybe the Whyos weren’t so bad, and he would join them after all. As he brought the last bite of his oyster stew to his lips, two fat bodies floating in the spoon, someone rose from an adjacent table, and suddenly he had a clear line of sight to where she sat, all the way across the stage from him. She was looking the other way. Just as Harris took the final oyster between his teeth, Dandy Johnny squatted down beside him and wrapped his arm around his shoulder. “Welcome to the Old Bowery, Frank Harris. I’d like to have a few words with you later on, sort out some details, eh?” Harris nodded but couldn’t speak—he was choking on the oyster, going purple. Johnny had stood up and was moving on—he was just doing the rounds, not stopping long with anyone—but he paused to slap Harris on the back. Harris grunted, and the oyster dislodged and arced across the table to land, with a small, unseen splash, in the bowl of Piker Ryan’s sister. All eyes in the room were on Dandy Johnny, who had crossed the stage and was now standing beside Beatrice. He tapped Fiona on the shoulder and gestured at the piano bench she was sharing with Beatrice.

“Fiona, my bat, why don’t you scram.” He looked down at Beatrice and smiled.

When she realized he was going to give her credit for her work using Harris as a mole, Beatrice blushed. She hadn’t expected that. But she probably should have. Johnny knew just when to reward people, just when to punish them, to play them to his need. He had a certain charisma that enabled him always to seem magnanimous, handsome, desirable, and it was a great part of his ability to lead.

“Don’t you look fresh and victorious tonight, Beanie,” he said to her, but loudly, publicly, too, and curled his fingers around the flesh of her upper arm.

That was odd,
she thought—he’d hardly ever touched her before. Johnny took his pleasure with pretty much whomever he chose; he had physically initiated almost every Why Not into the gang (and the prettier boy sopranos among the Whyo recruits, too). He took them into the back room at the Morgue, which was soundproof, and taught them their first set of personal codes and Whyo passwords. Then he did exactly as he pleased, depending on the initiate’s looks and his own appetite. Invariably, the new gangster came out adjusting his or her clothes, showing off the brand-new eye-gouger Johnny gave as a token and smiling. Yet when Beanie had gone back there, he’d simply taught her what she needed to know and sent her on her way. She’d looked at him, not wanting more, but wondering.

“You’re a bit scrawny for me, no thanks,” was what he’d said. She would never forget it. She’d even had to buy her own eye-gouger. So it was abundantly clear that Johnny had never found her attractive, and yet there was definitely something sexual, something proprietary, in the way he now held her arm. She was a little horrified to think that after all this time she would suddenly have to prove her loyalty to him
that
way—tonight of all nights, when her head was full of Harris. But she smiled at Johnny. He was the boss.

He gave a short little whoop of a whyo that served to stop every whispered conversation in the room. He leapt up onto the table. “I’d like to propose a toast, to the lovely Beatrice O’Gamhna. She came up with the plan I’ll be describing to you shortly, and she’s taken excellent care of our friend and guest Mr. Harris, over there, putting him up in her aunt’s home while he did a bit of spying for us and generally masterminding his efforts on our behalf. But before we get down to business, I’ve got a little surprise for you: After long ambivalence, I’ve chosen myself a First Girl.”

There was a general murmuring. The boss’s public selection of his consort was a popular tradition that the first Whyos, long before Googy and Johnny’s day, had carried over from the gangs they started out in, the Chichesters and Dead Rabbits.

“It’s not what anyone will have expected,” said Johnny, “but, well,
why not
?” He laughed at his own joke. “So, let it be known:
Beatrice O’Gamhna is mine alone.
” As Johnny pronounced this ritual phrase, his grip tightened on Beatrice’s arm. The murmuring turned to whyos and quite a few wolf whistles, too, bouncing off the walls. Beatrice went pale and then, slowly, her cheeks flushed bright red.

Harris couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He couldn’t look at her. He watched Piker Ryan’s sister pause in her cheering to take a bite of her soup. He felt nothing. After the hoopla had gone on for a minute or so, Dandy Johnny gave a loud whistle, pulled Beanie up onto the table with him and kissed her. He bent her over backwards, holding her with one arm and letting the other hand slide from her back to her shoulders to her cheek and then down her front, across her breasts. It was an act of possession. She did what she realized she had to, given the situation: She kissed him back. Then he lifted her right off her feet. She hiked her skirt, clamped her legs around him and laughed. They spun around in place several times like that, Dandy Johnny and his new First Girl. The noise in the rehearsal room just mounted and mounted.

And in this way, Beatrice became the only Why Not in the organization who was not, in fact, a free woman, not in charge of her own body or life. To be the First Girl was to trade that freedom for power, for glamour, for influence. It was not her choice, but when at last he put her down, she whyoed herself, lewdly and loudly, as if she had won a prize long lusted after. There were just a few silent voices in the room: Mrs. Dolan, who never engaged in that crass sort of whyoing herself, a couple of disappointed Why Nots and Frank Harris.

Harris had no way of knowing that Beatrice had never even kissed Dandy Johnny before, that she was as surprised as anyone there. How could he have guessed any of that, poor Harris, because there she stood, beaming? She certainly didn’t looked dismayed or brokenhearted. And she wasn’t, exactly.

The truth was, this was a prize no Why Not would ever turn down, even if she could have. Beatrice was stunned. She was overwhelmed. She buzzed in anticipation of all that Johnny’s decision would bring her: the power, the money and Johnny himself. His arm felt good about her waist, tight but not too tight. She looked down at his boots, smooth, shiny and elegant. They glimmered at the toes where small fragments of ax blades had been embedded in the soles. The legend was that he’d cobbled his first pair himself from a rusty ax head and a pair of old boots with the soles flapping loose in front. Now there was a Whyo cobbler who made them specially, though of course Johnny rarely had to kick heads in anymore—that was what the likes of Piker Ryan were for. Beatrice wasn’t thinking of Harris at all; she couldn’t. She let herself relax into Johnny’s arm. She felt his power flow into her. She might even learn to like it, she thought.

There were a couple of inarticulate toasts and then someone brought out a harmonica and someone else a fiddle. Beatrice and Johnny danced across the tabletops, leaping from one to the next, sending bowls, spoons and oyster crackers flying. She didn’t think of Harris again until Johnny had finally concluded the celebration and began to bring the meeting to order. There was other business that night than dancing and drinking, after all.

That was why Harris was there: They were going to lay out their plan to use the sewers at last. As soon as Beatrice began to look for him, she realized how fully she’d abandoned him rather than shepherded him as she’d intended. Earlier it might just have been that she couldn’t handle his declaration of love and simultaneously make sure he made it out the other end of the night alive. Now, with Johnny’s pinkie ring snugly on her thumb, she found she couldn’t bear to look in his direction. But she forced her mind to be practical. She put aside the eagerness she’d felt for so long to see him in the evenings, so clean and tired. And she shelved the memory of the night in the sewers. There was no hope for any of that now. The best she could do was use her new power to help him to survive.

Frank Harris, meanwhile, saw the room grow bleary and unreal. He had drunk down a pint of Owney’s ale in a single gulp, and it had not agreed with him. It seemed possible it would all come back up equally quickly. The sick feeling reminded him of nothing so much as his father and stepmother’s wedding day, when he and his sister, Lottie, had been seated in the first row and expected to dance and smile, curtsy and bow, though they knew that the day was their last at home, that this event was the reason that they were being sent away to the farm in the country. It was a feeling of displacement, dispossession and lost potential that boiled down to nausea. The one conclusion he did come to, sitting there, was that it didn’t much matter to him anymore what happened next. He wouldn’t sing, he wouldn’t fight, he wouldn’t struggle when Piker Ryan took him into a dark corridor to get rid of him. He would even be grateful, perhaps. Indeed, he was so fully absorbed by his own dismay that he didn’t hear a word of the peculiar plan that Dandy Johnny was laying out.