Metropolis (28 page)

Harris turned back to look down the corridor where Mrs. Dolan had gone, then to John-Henry. It was obvious to both of them that he hadn’t dropped the letter. John-Henry’s face held a question.

“Thank you,” Harris said, though Mrs. Dolan was gone, because that’s what’s said when something is given, whether or not it is wanted. But he wasn’t grateful. He was afraid. He didn’t want this letter, didn’t want further instructions, didn’t want to steal things or to help the Whyos steal. Above all, he didn’t want ever to hear from Beatrice again. He simply wanted to be himself, alone, unentailed. He wanted a chance to build something good and useful, a structure that would stand above the ground, visible to everyone, admired and marveled at. He wanted a job on that East River bridge like nothing he’d ever wanted before. Receiving this unwanted letter sealed his determination. It might be the Whyos would come after him, but he would take the risk. He folded the letter twice and jammed it in his pocket.

“Well,” said John-Henry, “what’s that about?”

“I don’t know,” said Harris. “I really don’t want to know. But I never dropped that letter.”

“You’re not going to read it?”

“No.”

They walked out the wide front doors and down the street. It was indeed even colder than before. The night air froze the very hair in his nostrils. He pulled his scarf over his face, and John-Henry did the same. The street seemed strangely quiet, but there were people about, here and there. It was just that the wind had died—and that John-Henry was waiting for Harris to speak.

“I guess you can walk me home while you start explaining yourself,” said John-Henry at last. “You sure do have me curious, Harris, vexed but curious. But if you don’t explain yourself, I’m going to be more than vexed.”

As they turned east toward the river and the Henleys’ street, Frank Harris opted for full disclosure. They passed the import-export companies and chandleries and markets and Coffee House Slip, where Harris’s job shoveling snow had begun, and he went back and forth in time, telling pretty much everything that had happened. John-Henry made the noises of listening: murmurs of acknowledgment,
oh
s of surprise, small groans of distress at the parts where Harris made unwise decisions or things turned for the worse. Then, just between the coffee warehouse and the fish market, they turned into a narrow alley lined with small storefront shops—a smithy, a cobbler, a sailmaker, an apothecary, a printer and stationer—all shuttered for the night. As they approached the tobacconist’s at the far end of the block, John-Henry slowed and looked up to the second-story window. All along the block, there were lights in upper-story windows, where the shopkeepers had their living quarters.

“That’s me above the smoke shop there,” said John-Henry. “We rent from the tobacconist, my cousin. And though I don’t keep secrets from Lila, and as cold as I am, I don’t much want to take this conversation inside, not till I understand it. Let’s keep walking.” Harris thought it looked like a snug little place. He tried to imagine having an apartment and a wife to come home to, but he couldn’t.

They walked on, and Harris began to tell the hard part of the story. He tried to tell it square. Now and then, he looked at John-Henry, who had fallen quiet, but he couldn’t read his face.

“I’ve decided I can’t do it,” he concluded at last. “I still don’t really know how I got into it in the first place,” he said. “It was just a mistake. Now I’m going to see what happens if I walk away. I’m going to take the risk. And what I’d really like is to work on that bridge. I’d like to go down there tomorrow and apply for a job.”

John-Henry remained silent, and so Harris stammered on nervously about working on the bridge, about the Nikolaikirche and the jobs he had done there. He had leapt into the void. He was even lapsing into his old German accent. He’d reached the end of his story, and the ending was that Harris was dreaming. There was no chance he could go off on his own and live a normal life, not now. The ending was that he had just asked his only friend to jeopardize himself and perhaps his wife by continued association with a man who was wanted by felons and cops alike. What could John-Henry possibly say?

As they neared the wharf, they began to see all manner of small boats standing precariously on poppets in the streets. The East River was going to freeze solid, maybe that night, and the harbor had been busy all week with people pulling at vessels of every shape and size. Most of the boats that could do so had sailed or steamed out of New York bay the day before, when the icebreakers gave up trying to keep the port open. At the edge of the wharf, Harris and John-Henry looked out at the harbor. The surface of the river was nearly solid with ice jams piled up by the incoming tide and, intermittently between them, smooth places where the ice floes had flooded and the newly risen water had frozen so quickly it still had a liquid gleam in the starlight. The boats that hadn’t sailed or been pulled had thick crusts of ice at their waterlines, and some were already frozen in hard, lifted up at odd angles from the river, in danger of being stove in by the shifting ice each time the tide changed. It was an even colder day and perhaps a stranger spectacle than when Barnum’s had burned, Harris thought, and he left off his nervous talk and fell silent, beholding it. The harbor was an ancient ruin, the ships and cranes and markets and warehouses its columns and temples, all marble-white with frost. John-Henry had told him the bridge office was in Brooklyn. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but if the river was frozen, the ferries couldn’t run. He couldn’t run away to the city across the river after all.

“So what is your real name then, Harris?” John-Henry asked.

He almost had to think about it. The last man who’d known his real name was the crook who sold him Georg Geiermeier’s papers, back in Hamburg. Now, slowly, Harris spoke the name his mother had given him: “Johannes.” It sounded strange in his ears.

“
John?
Like
John-
Henry, like
Johnny
Dolan?”

He shrugged. He hadn’t thought of that.

“I guess if I believe your gang can make themselves invisible with a secret language and some kind of mind control, accepting the fact that your name is John should be easy.”

Harris half laughed. “I don’t know. It’s really not my name anymore.”

“It doesn’t fit you. You’re much more of a Frank Harris.”

A patchy white mist hovered low over the river and faded off in a dark haze toward Brooklyn, where the tower of the new bridge bulged from the water like the crown of a young molar—short but sturdy and promising to keep growing till it reached its destined height. As they watched, sheets of ice groaned loudly against the pilings and piers and the sides of the remaining boats. Further out, a broad stretch of water still seemed to move, but then Harris realized it was just the swirling of snow on the surface of the ice.

“It doesn’t matter about the job. Forget it. You’d be better off not getting mixed up with me, and it doesn’t look like we could get across tomorrow anyway, even if we wanted to.”

“No, not the usual way,” said John-Henry, “but if it freezes solid, we can walk. When did it happen last?”

“I don’t know. But does that mean you still want to go? You don’t . . . mind?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s up to me to mind. I don’t
approve,
but I’m not going to shun you, Harris. What kind of man do you think I am?”

Harris nodded.

“Oh, Harris—now look at that.” John-Henry pointed to the sky.

A cloud had just passed away from the moon, which lay low over the mouth of the ghostly white harbor, and the moon was as strangely transformed from its usual state as the waterfront itself. It seemed to be a hybrid of its two extreme phases: a brilliant, thin, up-curving fingernail paring and, cradled within it, the full moon, round-faced and wide-eyed but oddly half lit, a shadow of its usual brilliance.

“How can that be?” marveled Harris. He tried to remember what phase the moon had been in the night before. “Is it the full moon or isn’t it?” It struck him as both auspicious and terribly sad.

“Haven’t you ever seen that? It’s the new moon holding the old moon in her arms.”

He’d never even heard of it before. “But listen,” Harris said, “would it be safe to go across? Won’t we have trouble getting back? What if it melts?”

“Compared to your life, it’ll be pretty safe, I’d say. It’s the tide, not the sun, we have to think about. It’s just timing. Why don’t we get up early and take a look?”

Get up early,
Harris thought, wondering where he’d be sleeping that night. There was Wah Kee’s, but the temptation to take the door to the opium den—and more than likely sleep through the rendezvous—was too great. He would have to find another place, one that didn’t make oblivion that easy.

“What time?” he asked. “I’ll come by your house.” He felt John-Henry’s eyes on him, probing.

“Where you staying tonight, Harris? Not with your girlfriend’s family anymore, I guess. Where’d you sleep last night?” That detail hadn’t made it into Harris’s narrative.

“Just a place I know, a flophouse.”

“Which one?”

Because it seemed highly unlikely to make any difference to John-Henry, he told him.

“What! The Chinaman with the pipe-smoking room? I thought something like that might be going on this morning. No wonder you was half dead when you finally showed up. You’re not going off on your own again, Harris. Not tonight. I’m not letting you. If you want to get that job on the bridge, you better come home with me. And all I can say is your gangsters better damn well steer clear of you while you’re under my roof.”

It took Harris a moment to realize that John-Henry’s strong disapproval amounted to an invitation, an absolution, an offer of what felt like salvation. Tomorrow, they could go together and apply for new jobs, new lives.

“Thank you,” Harris said. “All right.” He didn’t try to excuse his night at Wah Kee’s, and John-Henry didn’t take his reproaches any further.

“So let’s get home then, why don’t we? It’s damn cold out here.”

John-Henry laid his hand on Harris’s shoulder, and Harris extracted a hand from his pocket to wrap his arm around John-Henry’s shoulder. In so doing he discovered that his fingers numbly grasped a thick fold of paper.

“What’s that, that letter?” asked John-Henry. “What’s it say, anyway?”

Harris regarded the paper with dismay. If it had been warmer, he’d have reached out and dropped it into the drink, watched it bob and falter, grow soggy and sink. But then, if the weather could have been otherwise, what else, why stop there? Everything and anything might as well have been different. Wishing for a change in weather when so many predicaments faced him was like wishing for sausages. There were the Whyos. There was Beatrice. There was America itself, if one wanted to wish for change. There was the predicament in Germany that had driven him to flee. There was his mother—maybe that was it: He could wish that his mother hadn’t died. Of all the things he regretted, that was the earliest, sorest loss, when all his misfortune began. So long as his mother had walked with and sung to him and stroked his brow, life had been fine, better than fine: lovely. Thinking of her now, he started to go red in the face and his throat closed up. What was the point of wishing anything? he wondered. He wished he wouldn’t wish so much.

“Listen, Harris, I really don’t need to know what it says—that’s your business—but you’d better read it. You’ll be better off knowing what to expect.”

The wind lifted, rushing sharply through the cloth of their coats and tugging at the paper in Harris’s fingers, but he tightened his grip and returned the envelope to his pocket. As they climbed the stairs to the Henleys’ little apartment above the tobacconist’s shop, Harris said, “I’ll read it in the morning. I can’t bear to tonight.”

Lila Henley didn’t seem in the least surprised to have Harris show up at that late hour in need of a bed. She welcomed him, put a kettle on for tea to warm the men, and laid out a nest of extra blankets by the hearth for Harris. He thought of the way Liam and Colleen’s boys always laid out the sleeping pallets at the O’Gamhnas’, including his and Beatrice’s, regardless of whether they were home yet or not. They would have done it last night, too. What about tonight? How long would it take them to write him off? He pictured the two boys, huddled together, cold under their worn quilt, and wished he could let them know to go ahead and take his covers. He would have liked to thank the O’Gamhnas for all their help, but he wouldn’t be going back there. He couldn’t, which thought led him to think of Beatrice. He didn’t want to think about her. Why should he? Surely she wasn’t thinking of him. But it wasn’t so easy for him
not
to imagine Dandy Johnny’s fingers encircling her wrists, his hot lips bearing down on hers, his palms sliding across her milk-pale skin.

23.

FIRST GIRL

H
arris was right: Dandy Johnny did have Beatrice in his arms. But Harris couldn’t have guessed, as he took off his shoes and stepped up to the Henleys’ fire grate to warm his toes, that Beatrice and Dandy Johnny were talking, in the darkness that enveloped Johnny’s bed, about what it could mean
not
to fall in love. He had a penthouse apartment on the roof of a six-story building on Downing Street. The windows rattled in the wind, but the stove was stoked, the heavy blue drapes were drawn and Beatrice and Johnny were sweaty and warm enough to have thrown the covers off the bed. She had never been there before. Few Whyos had, probably because the luxury of the details and furnishings and fittings belied the egalitarian myth that underpinned the Whyos’ allegiance. There were actually two penthouses up there, on opposite sides of the roof, with a wide terrace between them. His mother occupied the other. Beatrice thought about Mrs. Dolan and wondered if she herself would ever bear a child. She’d actually gotten so far as to imagine having Harris’s son, in those two heady days before Johnny chose her, but now, with Johnny, children didn’t seem at all likely. Being First Girl was only a quasi-marriage, after all.

She had protected herself against such an eventuality with a small lemon that Maggie the Dove tossed her before leaving the Old Bowery the night before. First, she sliced it lengthwise with the little fish knife she usually used to cut buttonholes with promising fobs looped through them. She’d peeled the stem end smooth, then trimmed out most of the guts. The result was a hollow dome of rind and pith, and it didn’t take much to slip it in, a bit of dexterity and a long arm was all. There were several things Beatrice knew of that could prevent a quickening if the lemon failed. Herbs and elixirs were the simplest but notoriously ineffective. Drinking oneself numb and provoking a beating from some john was known among Why Nots to be quite effective. The last resort, the most certain but dangerous way, was a visit to an extractionist. Nowadays they were increasingly calling themselves
abortionists
to conceal the nature of their business, but the name mattered little; their patients got fevers and bled to death just as often. Beatrice was perhaps a little more squeamish about extractions than the average Why Not, since she’d never gone in for the quick-cash-and-slippery-thigh trade—she made plenty doing pleasanter jobs. She’d never had one. She thought of what she’d be getting back from Dandy Johnny for the sex and risk of pregnancy, for giving up her freedom: money and power, neither of which she really needed. She frowned. Then she felt the awkward silence in the room and realized Johnny had been talking to her, talking and talking, as she mused. She hadn’t heard a word of what he said. Now he was looking at her. Had he asked her a question?

“What, Johnny? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you just said.”

“You didn’t
hear
me? You weren’t listening?” He was scowling. But then he smiled. “That’s the thing about you, Beanie. That’s just the kind of thing that made me pick you. Who else would have the balls to ignore me? Who else would admit that?”

When she realized he was praising her, she laughed, and that was when the blow fell—not a palm but a fist to the side of the head. She didn’t even have a chance to flinch before her head hit the bedstead. You could argue that it worked, it got her attention. At least she listened to him, this time, when he told her the arrangements he foresaw: Their union, he explained, was to be a strategic one.

“There might be some gymnastics, when I’m in the mood, but not romance. That’s not what I picked you for. You’re not even my type, too skinny, but I guess you know that already. What you are is a lieutenant, see? Like Piker with tits—except not very big ones.” He paused, but she didn’t laugh. “See, Piker’s strong, but he’s dumb. You’re clever. We needed that, for balance. You’re gonna help me and Ma run the show.”

Her temple throbbed painfully as he spoke, but her vision came back into focus. She touched her hairline and found no blood. She thought about everything that had happened since the meeting at the Old Bowery, and she felt this wasn’t right, wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t have allowed her to go through the contortions of trying to fall in love with him. He should have told her the arrangement up front, but instead he had duped her, made her naked and vulnerable. She understood, of course, that he had done it on purpose. It put him in control. But had he really said help him
and Ma
run the show? She said, “All right, Johnny, I can do that.”

He seemed to like her acquiescence. Suddenly, the gangster who didn’t want romance was acting friendly again. He smiled at her through his hank of dark, shiny hair, grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him, ready for another round. She wanted to hate him, to reject him, but he knew how to smile, Johnny. He could make a woman feel it in her marrow like a magnet, like a craving for drink or drug. It wasn’t just his lips, which were as red as a woman’s, or his blue stare, it was the dimples of his cheeks, the crinkles at the corners, the way they worked together. It wasn’t bad at all, the way Johnny touched her, until he turned her over. Then he got selfish; there was some ripping, and there were twinges. He was the same handsome, vain, self-centered bully in bed as out. The odd thing was that as angry as she was, and even when he caused her pain, she felt a certain thrill—because of who he was, because she was alone with him, the boss of the whole gang, the highest authority she knew. When he finished, he rolled onto his back and pulled her into the crook of his armpit. The odor was strong, just tolerable, she thought. Harris had smelled so good.

“You’re a scrawny little bat, aren’t you, Beanie,” he muttered, sitting up and poking her hip, just as she thought he’d fallen asleep.

“What’s that, Johnny? I wasn’t listening.”

“I said,
You’re a scrawny bat.
You’re nothing but fucking bones. You ought to eat more.”

“Pardon me, what? I didn’t hear that.”

“Goddamnit.”

“And you’re a big vain bully and a real asshole, if we’re making observations.”

“Listen here, Miss Beatrice O’Gamhna,” he said, with a certain rigidity and a curl on his lip. She worried he was going to whack her again. Apparently he didn’t want to be talked back to. “Don’t try to charm me with your feisty little quips. I don’t need to be charmed. You work for me. You’re not in love with me. Don’t bother trying to flirt. It’s not a good idea.”

“So what do you want to fuck me for, Johnny? I’m a bit uncertain what my role is.”

“What for? Because I felt like it. That answer your question? You just do what me and Mother tell you, in your own ingenious little way, and you’ll do fine. And don’t be mooning around, not about me, not about Harris, no mooning. If running the Whyos was a romance, I’d still be with Maggie.”

Maggie the Dove. She was so much older, fleshier, more womanly than Beatrice. No wonder he called her scrawny, if Maggie was the one he thought about. But why wasn’t he with her anymore?

“If you wanted her, then why didn’t you choose her? You’re the boss.”

“I’ll tell you a story, Beanie. Something you need to know. There was a night, shortly after I took over, that I went out and got stone drunk. I was mooning over Maggie, jealous of some john she was seeing just to piss me off, you know. The result of it was, I missed check-in. Everyone was calling in to me with their figures and codes, and I was too looped to answer them, all because of love. Someone else had to cover for me.”

No one should have been capable of covering for Johnny. Not only was his voice perfect, but he used various small flourishes and private codes that made his voice instantly recognizable to the others. Telling Beatrice that someone had faked his voice was an admission that that Whyo had the ability to imitate his vocal signature and the knowledge of all those codes. So this was the beginning of power, she thought, feeling wide awake: not love, not trust,
knowledge.

“See, when I thought about Maggie, I forgot everything else. On top of missing the check-in, I botched a job. I nearly got myself and two other guys thrown in the can. You can’t keep control of a gang if you’re not the best and strongest member.”

“I would have heard that,” she protested. “Everybody would know about a thing—”

“I told you, someone covered for me,” he said. “I got quite a chewing out from the one that did it, too. I’m telling you this because now you need to know how it really is, how this gang really runs. It
is
possible for someone to cover for me. And you might just have to do it one day. I’m going to teach you how.”

Beatrice nodded, minding less and less that he had fucked her like a dog. This knowledge was going to bring her power of a sort she hadn’t envisioned before.

“What I learned that night was that I’d go down like Googy if something like a woman could distract me from my work.”

“But who covered for you, Johnny? How’d he do it? Wouldn’t he have been your rival, after that? Did you kill him?” She was thinking,
Would you kill me?

“Never mind that right now. I just want you to understand that Maggie nearly ruined everything. She sapped me, and it nearly got me killed. That’s when I realized the gang mattered a Hell of a lot more than some twat. The gang’s the thing. And I wanted to stay the boss a long time. I had plans. I couldn’t bring them off if I was being distracted by a woman. So the next morning, I told her it was up. You should have seen her, too. Maggie was gorgeous—you’d hardly recognize her now—and damn good at picking wallets. And I came to her with a broken nose and black eye, looking like a chump—because the one that covered for me made me pay—and told her it was time to move on. I guess she never figured out why. It’s a pity a man can’t have it all. But that was it.”

Beatrice had always admired Maggie the Dove. She somehow brought in twice the money anyone else did without ever compromising her dignity. And then there was the way she’d decided to carry that baby—that was brave—and then she hardly seemed to falter when she lost it. She was probably the toughest Why Not there was, and she was still a stunning woman. She pictured the beautiful set of brass knuckles she always wore on a loop at her waist, all tooled and engraved and inlaid. Beatrice’s own eye-gouger was as plain as they got, just banged out of a mold, and she didn’t really like to use it—the rings cut her fingers when she threw a punch.

It dawned on her as she thought about her own crappy set of knuckles that what she’d just heard was more than an instructive story from Johnny’s past; it was also the strangest rejection she’d ever had, at once the most thoroughgoing and the most equivocal. He had just told her he would never love her, indeed that he wasn’t attracted to her and had picked her largely because he knew he never would be. Really, it was quite annoying. Being First Girl tied her up, kept her back. She could have been with Harris and still worked for Johnny. Why had he done it?

“But you’ve got your pick of whoever you want, whenever you’re in the mood. I work hard for you already. Why do you need to fuck me, Johnny, especially if you don’t like my bones? What else do you want from me, exactly, why pick on me like that?”

“Christ, are you tiresome; you ask too many questions.”

“You knew that before, though, didn’t you? It’s one thing you like about me.”

He raised his eyebrow a little in admission of this point.

“Well then?”

“I like the way you put the caper together. Nobody’s ever going to know how we did the p.o. job. And as for the Tammany money, the way I see it, you found it for us. You ran Harris like a pro. Being First Girl, well it’s pure gravy. I guess it’s just your shit luck, my dear, but you did too good a job. You made yourself essential. Proved you could get things done without drawing notice. See, if I didn’t fuck you, Beanie, I’d have had to kill you along with your German boyfriend, because you knew about all the details.”

“That doesn’t explain this whole
scenario.
Making me your girl.
Touch her not.
You never needed that.”

“Maybe I wanted it.”

“So you don’t like me but you want me to be your lieutenant, and you’ll fuck me just to keep me in line? Is that about it?”

“That’s about it. And I would like you to shut the fuck up about it right about now. You got no complaints. You’ll get status, you’ll get money, you’ll get power. From time to time, you’ll get me. It’s a good deal for you, Beanie, admit it.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you for the honor.”

“You’d rather go with Harris.” He laughed. “I know. But I’m afraid that just wouldn’t look good. It’s me or nothing.”

“Are you really going to bring him in?”

“Yeah, well, I’m considering the Harris problem.” He smiled, knowing it made her furious. “He’s a little too honest and too stuck on you, but I’d rather Piker and the boys lay low for now. We don’t need bodies popping up through the ice all spring when we’ve just done so well for ourselves.”

“Just let him go. He won’t talk. If you kill him, the cops might make the connection between the sewers and the p.o. job, maybe even Geiermeier and the Barnum’s fire and the gang. And if you let him live, he could come in handy. He could help us out again. Your mother’s got her eye on him, after all. And he’s a perfect straight man. What if you don’t give him too much language, just run him like you run Geoghegan and the other semiretireds? Special projects only.”

“You like him too much. You’re not helping his case.”

She looked at him. “Yeah, I like him.”

“No romance, Beatrice. No romance, at all. I don’t want people even to wonder if my girl is carrying on with some sewer rat.”

“I’m not carrying on with him.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.” He pushed her back and took her shoulders and ground his stubble against her chin, then slipped his fingers behind the small of her back and yanked her against him.

“Oh Jesus, Johnny. If you insist on pinning me every time I make you a wee bit peevish, I’m going to start thinking you do have feelings for me after all.”