Metropolis (33 page)

What seemed like an endless time later, bubbles began percolating through the water from the central tubes. John-Henry laughed. “Do you hear that?” And soon they all did: Water was flowing up and out through the debris chute. Another hour later, they were just ankle deep, and they heard banging on the other side of the air lock. At last, the jammed hatch fell open, and down came five figures with lamps strapped to their foreheads, casting light on the flooded caisson. The stranded men put up a shout, and the rescuers began distributing blankets, pouring hot coffee from a large kettle and handing out torches. The most shocking thing to Harris when torches were lit was that the space looked hardly different than usual. It had always been wet down there; now it was more so, but really the only other difference was the disarray of the tools and the disturbing half-moon pool at the bulkhead where the blowout had occurred: the ghost of the boulder, the grave of Waugh.

Aboveground, Harris and the others were seen by a doctor. There were several broken bones and lots of cuts and abrasions. Harris was fine, except for his hearing. He was deaf in one ear. The doctor shouted into his other ear (though it was perfectly fine) that it was likely temporary, but the explosion might have damaged his eardrum. Then he patted his arm and sent him on his way with a week’s paid leave. How was it, Harris wondered, that now that he’d actually murdered a man, no one bothered to arrest him? On the contrary, he’d been given a vacation.

“Why don’t you come stay with us tonight?” John-Henry offered, but Harris felt too awful to tolerate solace or company of any sort. He knew Mr. Noe would be concerned, but he couldn’t bring himself to return to Fort Greene either. Instead, he went across to Manhattan by himself and stopped at the first bar he came to. He downed several whiskeys, which made him feel better for a while. He told the rapt bartender and cluster of other men the story of how a man had been killed on the bridge that day, and the barkeep poured his glass full again, on the house. The men toasted Waugh and clapped Harris on the back consolingly, but it did no good. Waugh was dead, gone, floating free in the river with the fishes and the slime.

In fact, however, Waugh had not been shot free into the river. The air that escaped the caisson had sent up a small geyser of debris, but a man’s body was a large thing, too large. Waugh had been caught in the bubble that briefly gaped between the great outside wall of the caisson and the riverbed—the blowhole Harris had visited, but larger. Then most of it closed up again, an instant later, and the enormous pressures involved had rendered Waugh a smear, his belt buckle up near what had been his left ear.

Eventually, the bartender told Harris to go home and sleep it off, and he left. Suddenly, Harris was very tired and wanted to go to bed. As he crossed the street, the traffic seemed overwhelming. It had something to do with only being able to hear on one side, perhaps, something to do with how much he had drunk. Harris was distinctly off-kilter.

He was crossing Broadway when he looked up and beheld the carriage looming: a black city ambulance tipped up on its side wheels, threatening to topple over, recklessly whipping around the corner in its mad rush to rescue. The red insignia of the ambulance corps was bearing down on him, but he thought only,
Someone, somewhere, is dying.
The ambulance’s horse team reared up to avoid him, very nearly trampling him nonetheless. He saw their yellow teeth, enthroned by their black and pink lips and a white fury of spittle. They were close upon him, and yet their hooves were so quiet on the pavement it seemed he couldn’t possibly be in danger. He heard no grinding of wheels, hardly any sound at all. They must be further off than they appeared, he thought, but then he could smell the horses’ breath, their hair. A black flank filled his field of vision, a rear hoof reached out to his rib cage. He was about to be crushed by the shoulder-high carriage wheels when he finally flung himself clear. He flew backward. He landed, and his head snapped back and clonked against a cast-iron hitching post set into the curb.

The breath had been driven from his lungs, and his lips could not draw air; his heart raced; his vision swam. He felt a warm liquid trickle slowly down his neck. Then Harris realized there was a terrible clamor all around, like the world rushing in one last time before leaving him finally behind, even louder than the din in the caisson.

People converged upon him—arms and noses, hats and canes—as if they could help, as if he were not about to die, as if his death might be a sight worth seeing. Spectacles and eyes, bulging and shining, all gawking at Harris. A man in a beaver coat reached out his hand to him, and a girl in a gaudy dress kneeled down. He squeezed shut his eyes to hide from the throbbing, demanding voices. “Are you all right, sir? Can you breathe? Move? Stand? Move your fingers? Toes? Give me your hand now. Someone call the police or an ambulance. Wasn’t that an ambulance that hit him? Did you see?”

He was limp with shock as the man and the girl and various others struggled to drag him from the street. There was something familiar about that girl. He looked around, trying to remember who these people were, where he was, what had happened. And then he grasped it. That girl leaning over him in the gaudy dress was
Maria.
She was holding his hand in hers, looking right at him.

“Maria—?” She blinked in surprise to hear her name—a name she’d stopped using some time ago. He smiled. And then she smiled back, in recognition. If he’d said any more, it would have been in German, all risks and bans forgotten, but he was speechless.

“
Bist doch der vom Schiff,
” she said.
You’re the one from the ship.
Had he heard right? Was it real? He touched his fingers to his ear and they came away wet. When he examined them he expected to see red, but it was just water, released from his ear canal by the impact of landing. Then he looked back up at Maria.

She looked worried, and it was wonderful.

He had never been so happy to see the pout of German words on a pair of lips. It amazed him that he had ever given up hope of finding her. She was blond and lovely, and there was a strange look of jubilation in her eye. It made him recall that life was worth living, just for the surprises. It made him think,
My God.
All the time he’d squandered on an infatuation with a gangster’s moll and, lately, being melancholic. Maria furrowed her brow, and he felt a little swoonish. It was the same kind of dizzy he had been in the morgue that day, when he thought she was dead. But this time it brought him to his feet rather than knocking them from under him.

“You were on the
Leibnitz,
weren’t you?” she asked.

Yes,
he nodded, raising himself up to stand, if shakily, not really thinking through the implications of the swiftness and ease with which she’d recognized him.
Ja,
he said, he was the one from the boat.

27.

DREAMS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

T
here was a Whyo in the crowd—or, to be precise, a Why Not. How could there not be, in that part of town? Harris had gotten himself nearly run over in a place where Whyos ran rampant. He was lucky, though, because it was Fiona, who’d gone over to Brooklyn as soon as she’d got wind of disaster at the bridge, knowing Beanie would want to hear about it if anything grave had happened to Harris.

The Jimster was there, too. He’d just run into Fiona on his way out of Billy’s, where he’d had a meeting with Undertoe and told him he wasn’t working for him any longer. He’d decided the Undertaker was a loser, still looking for his old dupe Williams. At least Jimmy wasn’t looking at Harris as he thought that—he was too busy looking at Fiona. Fiona was the one with her eyes glued to Harris.

She’d been worried he was dead until he sat up and started talking to a girl. She had been relieved by that—until she realized they were speaking German.

“What’s your name again?” Maria asked him, not that Fiona understood it.

“I’ve changed it so many times since I knew you, it hardly matters.”

Maria laughed at that, musically, in a way Harris didn’t remember from before. It seemed she knew exactly what he meant, as if they were old friends, which in some sense they were: She may have forgotten his name, but she knew things that trumped names entirely. He was going backward as fast as he could, thinking he’d at long last discovered his point of divergence from the path that led to happiness. Yes, clearly, his mistake had occurred when he got off the boat and lost sight of her.

But then he realized the mistake he was making right then by talking to her in German. Their conversation shrieked with consonants and umlauts. Harris was drunk and dazed and weirdly euphoric, but he wasn’t a total fool. For better or worse, he remembered that his very existence hung upon maintaining the identity bestowed on him by the Whyos. He shouldn’t be speaking German, not with a street full of people’s attention centered on him. Hoping to God her English was good enough to slide from one language to the other without fuss, he focused his eyes intently on hers and broke away from the language she’d just returned to him. He said, in English, that he thought he was all right, just bruised. He held his breath, willing her to respond in kind, but she looked at him in puzzlement for a moment, as if she hadn’t understood him. Then she smiled.

She spoke a broken and accented but swift-flowing English. Her pitch and fall were steeper than the rolling brogue that Harris had grown proficient in. In short, she spoke just the way any recent German immigrant could be expected to speak if they hadn’t been heavily coached. And rather like a meal of spätzle and bratwurst and beer at one of the many German restaurants around Five Points and the Lower East Side, her English still reminded Harris of home.

Fiona had observed it all. Harris had corrected himself quickly, she thought, but was it quickly enough? It remained to be seen how much the Jimster had noticed.

“Let’s get out of here, eh?” she said.

As Jimmy and Fiona headed across the street, Jimmy turned to whisper some bit of freshness in her ear, and as he turned the Jimster caught a profile view of Frank Harris standing up. There was something familiar about that man, he thought, the tone of voice, the boxer’s nose and potato face, the black eyes.

“You know,” he said, “isn’t that the guy we were tailing the other day? I recognize him from somewhere.”

So Harris had blown his cover. It was just what she’d wanted to avoid. “Who cares about him?” she said, kissing Jimmy hard and slipping her hand inside his coat.

“Yeah, you’re right. . . . Never mind.”

Fiona asked the Jimster if he would take her out to lunch, and he said sure, anywhere but Billy’s, as he didn’t want to run into Undertoe.
That’s good,
thought Fiona,
that’s just the right answer.
She was thinking it was time to push Beatrice to introduce the Jimster personally to Johnny, try to get him brought in. It would certainly make her life easier.

Maria was much as Harris had remembered, a bit better fed and better dressed, which he was happy to see. But then he thought about how she had recognized him, and he grew more worried. He looked around, knowing it was not a good idea for him to be with her. He walked a few paces down the block with her, then stopped and put his hand out to shake hers in parting. She looked at him, clearly disappointed. Had she been thinking of him, too, all that time? he wondered. Had his crush been mutual? He looked around him, saw an oyster house, and smiled noncommittally. Perhaps it was just his yearning to forget what had happened earlier that day that made him do something so risky, so foolish.

“Why don’t you take me there, to dinner?” she asked.

“Dinner. Yes, all right, if you care to.” Immediately, she moved closer to him. Too close, he thought. He looked at her again, taking an inventory of her face: her lips, the same shape he remembered but now artificially pink; her skin, dusted with powder where it had once been fresh and translucent, so that she resembled a china doll his sister had had, the head and hands and feet of which were cold molded porcelain with painted details, the rest of the body being stuffed tubes of mattress ticking. Maria’s hair was as yellow as ever, but it was done up in a complicated fashion now. Her eyes were just as blue, but less angry and more calculating, perhaps. The thing that cinched it was her dress—too shiny, too opulent. Harris was a man; he had lived in the world; he understood. Maria’s changes were far more understandable, really, than his own.

“Oh, um, well.” He felt an urgent desire to go home and reassure Mr. Noe that he had made it out of the caisson safely. To take this woman he barely knew and who he now realized was a prostitute out to dinner—that was not what he wanted to do. A man he worked with had just died. It was no time for sleazy self-indulgence. “Maybe I’ll call on you another time? If I may.” He didn’t plan to. He just wanted to get away. On top of the rest, it was such a disappointment that this was who she was.

“Don’t go. I promise to make it a pleasant reunion.” She smiled in a way that made him go red, not quite with shame but a corollary of shame, the thing that precedes it. She quoted her price by the hour and for all night. It wasn’t much either way. “Come on,
schatzie.
Let me cheer you up.”

Harris did need cheering. Drinking hadn’t worked. He had definitely been thinking too much about women lately, yearning for their company, their touch. His romantic prospects were terrible. Maybe this was what he needed. Maybe this was all he was going to get. He put the idea of going home aside, took a deep breath and slipped his arm around her waist.

Harris led her across the street, where he swallowed a plate of oysters almost without noticing them. He would have liked to talk to her, to find out how she’d fared since they both landed, to tell her his own stories. But now that he knew what she was, he could think of nothing to say. Finally, he asked, “Do you have a room?” She did, and they went there.

Across the air shaft, in the opposite window, an old woman sat with a candle at her side, sewing, and when Maria lit her kerosene lamp, she looked up. Maria pulled the curtain, but Harris heard the woman’s muffled voice call out, “Mend your ways, Magdalene. I can get you piecework. God has hope.”

He sat on the bed and took in the room: the gray of the sheets, the gray of the curtains, the gray of the old porcelain basin on its wooden stand—all slightly different tones, all gray. He thought of Waugh. But then he looked up at Maria as she shed her clothing in the yellow light, and she wasn’t gray at all. She was pink and yellow like some candy, and she was stepping out of a dress that was bright, bright blue. When she spoke it was in German. Nothing smutty—she could always tell what a customer wanted—just sweet nothings, and he rose to the lovely rasp of her voice as much as to her nakedness or the way she knelt between his legs and unbuttoned his pants.

“Keep talking,” he said, but talk was not the commodity she sold. So he lay back, listening to the creaks of the house and the bed and the squelching of her cheeks. His nose was full of the oily smell of her sheets. After a while, she stuck a finger up his ass, and he came abruptly, almost unpleasantly.

“Really,” she said after spitting into the spittoon by the bedpost. “It’s like you’re dead.”

No, he wasn’t. Waugh was.

“Just hold me,” he said.

She put her arms around him. As they lay there, he thought back to his last Christmas in Göttingen, when he’d fallen unexpectedly and inappropriately in love with his stepsister, Tatianna. She was two years younger but had suddenly grown up. It had been mutual. From the moment he and Lottie arrived that year, the previously uninterested and prissy-seeming Tatianna was friendly to him—more than friendly, flirtatious. In the past, the main good thing about those awkward winter visits had been hanging around the lab or going off with Robert Koch. But that year, Koch had a girl he was courting—the one he later married—and so the doctor’s son devoted himself to Tati. She wasn’t
really
his sister, after all. They stayed up late talking, laughing. She was funnier and prettier and cleverer than any girl he knew. She wore all the latest fashions, knew the daughters and sons of the local barons and viscounts, with whom she went to balls and the opera, and she had traveled as far as England. Certainly she bore no comparison to any of the girls in Fürth.

On New Year’s Eve, the last day of his visit, after all the others had retired, Tati had begun to mope. “Why must you leave?” she wanted to know. Of course, he couldn’t answer that. She had said she wanted to go outside and look at the stars, and he was glad for the change. Once they were out in the bitter cold, the greenhouse across the garden beckoned to them. How beautiful it had looked, lit faintly from within, the glass all spangled with frost and glowing green to the slender wooden rafters. Inside, there were many common ornamental plants in pots, but near the stove, in a large glassed-in case, were the most exquisite specimens, the orchids and other tropicals, with their frightening blossoms and smooth, leathery leaves.

They finished a bottle of champagne they’d taken from the sideboard, passing it between them and drinking directly from its mouth. When the wine dribbled down his cheek, she brought her fingers to his lips, and he licked the spilled drops from her skin. He had kissed girls before, and there was no uncertainty about her invitation. His fingers probed her shirtwaist, but finding it impenetrable he reached lower, for her skirt hem. In between them were yards of fabric, but after a flurry of rustling silk, he found the strap of her stocking. Her legs nearly undid him, they were so smooth and unexpectedly strong. He kissed her inner thigh and nosed tentatively higher. But he had gone too far. She pushed his head down and reeled back. When he’d gotten free of her dress, he tried to formulate an apology, an appeal. She listened to him stammer for just a moment, slapped him and never talked to him again.

Eventually, Maria sat up beside Harris, and he opened his eyes and looked at her. He saw something he hadn’t before: The filthy, irregular pattern of stains on her sheets continued as bruises and welt marks across her torso.

“My God, are you all right?”

She swiftly pulled the sheet up to cover herself.

“Are you all right, Maria?” he asked. “This is no life.”

“What’s it to you? You got what you paid for.”

She didn’t want help or friendship. She had recognized in him a business opportunity; he hadn’t exactly hoped for love—he had known it was a temporary escape—but this was the very opposite of love; it was commerce. He dressed and left quickly, in a flurry of dollar bills and shame.

That night, back in his room at Mr. Noe’s, Harris dreamed he heard whyoing and woke with a start, as if from a nightmare. He saw that it was near dawn. It could have been the howling of a dog that triggered it, but quite possibly he really had heard whyoing that evening. Maria’s sordid little room was in the Five Points, not so far from the Bend or the O’Gamhnas. It occurred to him then with a retrospective amazement—how could he not have noticed it before?—that he’d heard such sounds many times, many nights, while he lived with the O’Gamhnas: eerie noises in the distance at certain times of the evening. And he’d never heard them in Brooklyn. Brooklyn was blissfully quiet. He rolled over and went back to sleep, since he didn’t have to go to work. He woke again much later and once again decided to stay in bed. Around noon, Mr. Noe knocked on his door.

“May I come in, Frank?” he asked. “I was worried yesterday. How are you?”

Harris was wishing his housing arrangements were less encumbered and that Mr. Noe would just leave him alone, but then, when he looked up, he saw a concern that was genuine, and it touched him. This was what he needed, wasn’t it, someone who cared what happened to him? Harris sat up, swung his feet to the floor and put the kettle on the stove, to which he added a small log. Then he apologized for vanishing and letting his friend worry about him.

Mr. Noe didn’t know what his troubles were, but he knew there was something amiss, something more than just the blowout. And yet he didn’t press Harris, just set a plate from the cook—biscuits and some sliced meat and gravy—on the table and waited quietly while Harris fussed ineptly with the tea. Perhaps it was that patience that led Harris to start talking. He opened his lips, once the tea was made, and gave Mr. Noe a more honest accounting of his life than he’d done with anyone but John-Henry to date. He started with the story of the blowout and how responsible he felt he was, and from there he went backward. It wasn’t quite the full truth—he didn’t use names—but he told Mr. Noe about his involvement with the gang, about his loss of Beatrice, even about his encounter with Maria. Mr. Noe showed no sign of being scandalized or angry, he just nodded and said he was glad to hear about all this at last. He’d suspected some trouble. He understood grief, Mr. Noe, he understood guilt, and he understood how a man could go astray. Then he asked Harris if he wanted to eat his lunch. And when Harris had done so, Mr. Noe delivered a surprise of his own.