Metropolis (43 page)

She packed a small satchel of belongings, a carpetbag of cash and the keys and papers to their safe-deposit boxes. On the street, she used her quietest whyo to direct the stares of people on the street away from her face, though that was just vanity. The sight of a woman’s bashed face was common enough not to draw much attention. She was going to Brooklyn, uncertain of what she would find, but her immediate destination was the public bathing pier on the river. She couldn’t face Harris, if he was still alive, without bathing. She was desperate to wash herself clean of Dandy Johnny, to feel the cold, saline harbor water soothe her bruised body.

She passed Undertoe on the street without even seeing him, and he failed to see her either, thanks to the virtual invisibility she’d thrown around herself. She entered the women’s side just to the south of where he had exited the men’s, changed and lowered herself slowly, carefully into the water, where she clung to a handhold and let the current sweep her. After twenty minutes of hardly moving, she left and walked to Fulton Ferry, trying not to dwell on just how badly Dandy Johnny Dolan and Piker Ryan had ruined the rest of her life.

The crowd in the yard of the Noe house confirmed to her that something awful had happened. There were two police wagons—one from the local Brooklyn station, another from the Manhattan district where the factory was located. Mr. Noe’s physician’s cabriolet stood parked alongside the buggy of his minister, the good if notorious Mr. Beecher from the Pilgrim church. The horse that was just then being fed a bucket of Mr. Noe’s oats belonged to a hack driver getting an all-day rate to take a reporter and a sketch artist from the
Eagle
wherever they had to go to get their stories. At the moment, the two
Eagle
men were canvassing the neighbors. The cook had learned a thing or two about stonewalling the press during Harris’s recent crisis.

Beatrice went up to the door and was about to knock when the cook threw it open. “Thank God—oh. Who are you? What do you want?” She was expecting Harris to return any minute.

“It’s Miss O’Gamhna. Please, what’s happened? Is he all right?”

The cook’s body blocked the doorway. She jerked her chin at the crowded yard. “Miss O’Who? Do you think all that would be there if he was
all righ
t
?”

“I called a few weeks ago, after Mr. Harris fell.”

“Oh, so you’re the one. You look even worse now.” She scowled but remembered Harris’s desire to see this girl. “Yeah, all right, come on.” She stepped back and led Beatrice to the dining room. “Stay out of the way. I’ll call for you.”

After ten minutes of sitting slumped and blank at the table, Beatrice rose. She had to see him. She thought she heard Harris’s footsteps. But it couldn’t be. She went to the doorway in time to see him run past.

“Harris?”
He stopped upon hearing her voice, his name, turned back to look at her and hung there for a moment, squinting, as if she were an apparition.

“Beatrice?” Then he gestured for her to follow, and they both ran toward the sickroom, where Beatrice now realized someone else must be dying. Harris was fine. He had just arrived home. At the closed door, he paused and took her by the shoulders. Perhaps he would have kissed her if her whole face hadn’t been so damaged, but he just touched her lips.

“Will you wait for me out here?”

She nodded.

Mr. Noe was awake when Harris got there. John-Henry was already there, standing at the back of the room scowling while the police strove to interview Mr. Noe through his delirium. They weren’t making much headway. When Harris entered, they stepped aside and let him go to the bed.

When Harris took his hand, Mr. Noe looked up and said quietly, “Harris, my boy. Where did you go? What took you so long?” But his awareness of his surroundings was transient. After a while, his talk merged back into babble and he slid into unconsciousness. Harris looked around the room for someone to give him some explanation, some information. All he knew was what he’d been told by the messenger who fetched him from work: Mr. Noe was near death.

“We don’t know much,” said John-Henry. “A woman found him early this morning at the new factory. He must have been lying there all night. Her name’s Francie Harris, if you can believe that, so he’s got the idea that you were the one who found him.”

“Just for the record,” asked the policeman, “you’re the Frank Harris of bridge-tower fame, I gather?” Harris nodded. “Well, I’m very pleased to meet you. But I do have to ask where you were last night, Mr. Harris.”

“I was here. I went to bed early. Ask the cook. It was my last night of recuperation before going back to work. Tell me what happened. Is he going to make it?” Harris felt a queer detachment rather like the one he’d had after falling through the tower—as if every bone in his body had been crushed, but he himself was someone else, somewhere else, just watching it. The policeman said nothing.

“They don’t know,” said John-Henry. “No idea who did it either. Only clear thing he’s said until just now was something about a monkey.” John-Henry cast a careful but clearly hostile look at the police lieutenant, who had pursued him with numerous questions after hearing that detail and then instructed him not to leave the premises—as if John-Henry would even have considered leaving, as if he were a monkey and had been implicated, as if Mr. Noe, who’d been a vocal abolitionist, would ever have used such a loathsome piece of slang.

“A monkey?”

Harris was too overwhelmed by the events to recall the gift he had given his friend, which was still lying at the bottom of one of the dumbwaiter shafts where his assailant had thrown it, which was so thickly encrusted with Mr. Noe’s dried blood that the leering silver monkey head didn’t even give back a twinkle when, later that day, one of the investigating officers lowered a lantern most of the way down the shaft on a length of cord and peered into the darkness. Meanwhile, the police at the Noe house filled Harris in on what they knew and questioned him, but they didn’t learn anything that seemed relevant. And no one could think of an explanation for Mr. Noe’s statement.

Harris stepped into the hall sometime later, when Mr. Noe lapsed back into his stupor, and saw Beatrice sitting on a bench, head in her hands. Was it really her? She had looked quite horrible, he thought. Why was she there?

“Beatrice?” he said, and she looked up. Her eyes were grotesquely purple. “God—someone tried to kill you, too.” He hardly knew what he felt as he sat down on the bench beside her and took her in his arms. “What’s happened to you? What are you doing here?”

“Harris, I came because . . . I don’t know, really. Who is it in there, your landlord? Is he very bad off?”

“Yes. Mr. Noe. He was beaten very badly, maybe by robbers. He may die. What happened to you?”

“Forget about me. Harris, was it here? Were you here, too? Because they must have mistaken him for you. The reason I came is that . . .” she looked over her shoulder. “I thought something happened to
you.
Johnny told me he sent Piker after you. He figured, what with you being in the papers, you were a risk. And then I tried to stop it, which made him madder.”

Harris shook his head. None of that had anything to do with Mr. Noe.

“No, listen—Johnny actually told me they
took care of you,
Harris. That means you should be dead. I don’t know why they went after your Mr. Noe instead, but maybe it was a message. Or maybe they were drunk and it was a mistake, in which case they may come back.”

“No, this happened to him in the city. I wasn’t even there. I’ve never been to his new factory. Someone followed him in and robbed him and beat him half dead with a stick. Or so the police think. That’s not the kind of thing the Whyos do, is it?”

“No, but Johnny was in a vicious mood last night. He still might have done it. What else do they know?

“He hasn’t been able to tell them anything, just keeps muttering something about a monkey.”

“Really, a monkey head?” Only now did Harris think of the monkey cane and wonder where it was.

“He can’t talk much. The doctor said it was probably just a hallucination.”

“But a
silver
monkey? Because, Harris, it
was
Johnny then. Johnny had a monkey cane with him last night when he went out on a rampage, and he brought it back home this morning. I watched him cleaning and polishing the head.”

Harris looked at her. It didn’t make sense. “Johnny has a monkey cane?”

“He bought it at the Hippodrome. He collects canes.”

“I bought one there, too. I gave it to Mr. Noe. It has a silver head and big smile.”

“So they had the same cane. But Johnny had his with him last night.”

“Beatrice, what are you doing here? Do you really think Johnny did it? Does this mean you’ve broken with him? Can you even do that?”

“Look at me. Clearly, I can’t, but here I am.”

He looked at her purple nose and terrible eyes, then he looked over his shoulder and, when he saw that no one else was in sight, he leaned forward and gently kissed her.

“Can you tell the police? Can you talk to them? What will happen to you if you do?”

“I’ll be all right if they really arrest him, and if they do it fast, and if no one finds out I ratted.”

“That’s a lot of
if
s.”

“I’m going to do it, Harris. It’s the only way to make sure he doesn’t come after you next, my only chance to get free of Johnny.”

“Let’s find Mr. Noe’s cane. If it’s really the same, we’ll show them what it looked like.” They stood up and Harris walked to the front door. He picked up the lone umbrella in the stand and looked at it, as if it might sprout a monkey’s head. The cane wasn’t there.

“It’s gone,” he said, looking at Beatrice.

“It doesn’t matter. Even if it wasn’t Johnny’s cane, I saw him washing blood off it this morning. We have enough to make it stick.”

There she was, really there, and she had left Johnny, had offered to denounce him to the cops. It would have been a dream if only it weren’t mixed up with the nightmare of Mr. Noe’s crushed skull. Now Mr. Noe was probably going to die and Beatrice was standing there with him, offering to do something so crazy it was likely to get her killed. She had come back to him, in this disaster, but at least she had come. He had no idea what to do, except to take her in his arms. She crumpled against him when he touched her.

It was late in the game, maybe too late to matter, but Frank Harris declared himself to her. In a sense, it went better this time than it had at the Old Bowery. They stayed there together for a long moment. The air around them was fraught: It was made up of roughly 78 percent despair, 21 percent pent-up love and contained trace elements of relief, terror, lust, grief and regret. They weren’t happy, not at all, but they found themselves in a desperate kiss. When it ended, they both stepped back, and Harris tripped over a chair leg. She flinched, part on his behalf, part on hers, and touched her nose very gently. Even the kiss had hurt.

He said, “What happened at the bath house, that day before the meeting, that night at the Old Bowery, that time on the pier, before the ferry blew up. . . .” But he couldn’t articulate a sentence, much less a question.

She nodded. “I’ve been in love with you for longer than that, Harris. I really didn’t know what was coming at that meeting. But once it happened, I knew I wasn’t allowed to say no, and so I decided to try to make the best of it. I can’t tell you I was forced. I chose the power, the money, that whole world. It was all I knew how to do, and I was hoping it would be better for you, too, maybe. You were never going to be a good crook, Harris. You’re too nice. Then, by the time I saw you on the pier, everything was crap. I just wish the explosion had been bigger.”

She didn’t say she was sorry. Both of them had far more things they were sorry for than could be stated in that hallway. They walked side by side back to the sickroom, his arm around her shoulder. The cook was mopping Mr. Noe’s forehead, and the cops were once again harassing John-Henry.

Harris said, “She knows something important,” and Beatrice talked.

Undertoe stayed in Manhattan that day. At noon, he went over to the Old Bowery to take in a matinee, then headed west across town. He was free and easy till later that night, when he was supposed to meet a newsboy he’d just signed up at Lizzie Fagan’s Siren Song, a new place with burlesque dancing and back rooms for hire. Undertoe had made an arrangement with Lizzie to help her dispose of clients who turned uncooperative, something that would benefit both of them equally. As he walked, he fiddled with something in his pocket, a folded piece of paper. He took it out and unthinkingly used the corner to rout the grime that had already begun to collect under his nails since his bath that morning. The paper was nice and stiff. It was Harris’s letter, of course. It had been in that pocket for some time now.

That evening, he paid a newsboy he didn’t know four cents for the late city final
Sun
and scanned the pages for the item about the Noe Brush factory attack.
Would have been a headline if he’d died,
he thought when he found it. According to the report, the victim was still hanging on but remembered nothing of the crime itself except for seeing a silver monkey-headed cane, which was believed to have been his attacker’s weapon. Undertoe laughed at that. Where on Earth would a person go to find a cane like that, now that the Hippodrome had been razed?

He tossed his blond forelock from his eyes with a twitch, drawing a glance of interest from a hot-corn girl who was crooning
—Your lily-white corn!—
though her basket was empty. He paid her, and five minutes later she was grunting on her knees in a doorway, skirts up over her backside. He enjoyed both her options, despite her objection that anything other than standard was extra, then turned her around and told her to open wide.

“That’s two dollars more,” she said, straightening her petticoat. “And I’m done with you, mister.”

“No, it’s included,” he said, grabbing her by the hair and forcing her back to her knees. He sang her song back to her, just one mocking half tone off-key, as she gagged: “Get your hot corn, your lily-white corn, get your hot corn here, hot corn, hot corn.”