Metropolis (45 page)

In fact, what Piker and Johnny had really done that night was amuse themselves with a drunk businessman they ran into down on South Street. They rolled him for his money, and that would have been that, but the guy tried to fight back. Piker had whacked him with a slungshot. Johnny did the kicking. Then they rolled him again, under a cart, but he wasn’t even dead. It was really Goddamned unfortunate, thought Johnny, that the one night his girl doped his whiskey out of spite, the only night in recent memory that he’d actually used the blades in his boot tips, was the night the cops had happened to come after him on a case of mistaken identity. It was maddening, and it was very bad luck. Johnny planned to teach Beatrice a lesson when he got the Hell out of the joint, but he never suspected that she was the rat. On the contrary, he trusted her completely, especially with managing the report and the gang in the meantime. She was a bit of a genius with the whyoing, that girl. She would figure something out. His mother had picked a winner.

And the more Johnny thought about how Beatrice was out there somehow saving his Dolan ass, the fonder he started to be of her. She was willful, and she was skinny, but she could be sexy, too, the way she hissed when she was mad. Piker asked him what he was going to do to her when they got out. Johnny thought about it.

“You know, maybe nothing, because in a way I like her more in the wake of this.”

Piker squinted at him.

“You think that’s stupid?” he said. “I should probably just kill her. Normally, anyone who even thought of doping my jug would be dead.”

Piker rolled a booger between his fingers, popped it in his mouth and crunched it like a louse. “Nah. She’s your girl. If you still like her, don’t get rid of her. Just show her some respect. First thing you do when we get back, Johnny, is break her other nose. Then see how she looks. If you still like her, then sure, let her live.”

The Whyo rules of stealth strictly precluded jail-cell visits, but after a week Johnny was surprised Beatrice hadn’t bent that just a little. She was good enough at whyoing to have pulled off something without much risk.

Another week later, he did get a visitor, Maggie the Dove.

“Hiya, Dandy boy,” she said through the heavy grille of his cell door. “How you holding up? Don’t let them pin nothing on you, all right? But how could they? No jury’d ever believe you hurt a fly, my sweet.”

“Nothing to pin and nowhere to pin it, Dove. I never met the poor man, apparently a manufacturer of brushes.” And he laughed because it was true, he was innocent. Not that it mattered. The Whyos were quite capable of fixing any jury in the world from a distance of one hundred yards. Then he laughed again because he was so glad to see her. He thought about Beatrice as he looked at Maggie. They were awfully different women. Maggie knew how to talk to a man. He’d never had to break Maggie’s nose. What was it about Beatrice, then? He couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Tell me, Dove, how’s life outside?”

She took the cue. “Jimmy’s doing great at his new job, you know. I never would of knew he had it in him. Otherwise, nothing much, we’re just all missing you.”

Johnny coughed. “Jimmy’s new job’s going well, eh?” He smiled like he thought it was quite a clever way of putting it, but the truth was that wasn’t at all what he’d expected to hear, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “The Jimster,” he said. “So he got the job, did he? That’s good news. Glad to hear it. You’ll let me know if he blows his lines, won’t you, Mag?” She winked and smiled and pressed herself up against the door grille, and they kissed until the warden came along, banging his nightstick on the doors and dislodging one woman after the next, like leeches, from their criminal lovers’ lips.

After she left, Johnny sat on his bunk for a while, trying to figure out what Beatrice was up to. Surely she’d sent Maggie as a messenger, and he decided he had to give her credit for her subtlety there as well as with the Jimster. He could only imagine that she was now doing the Jimster’s voice the way she’d done his, letting the Whyos think the Jimster had been his well-trained lieutenant all along.

It wasn’t a terrible plan—pretty clever, really—but it did surprise him, because Beatrice liked the Jimster, and she knew Johnny liked him, too. He was Fiona’s boy, after all, and Fiona was like a sister to her. Beanie was a smart girl. She must have seen the conflict, must have known he’d have to deal with the Jimster, maybe both of them, the moment he got out. Apparently, she’d decided that sacrifice was worth it to keep the gang rolling on while he was in the joint. It was quite a sacrifice, and it was going to be a bit of a pity, he thought, but he liked the way it showed both her loyalty and her ruthless side.

He was just lying there looking at the ceiling and thinking about Beanie and Maggie, wavering between the two of them in his mind’s eye—Beatrice or Maggie, feisty or bawdy, bony or soft—when he spotted the gray rat staring at him brazenly from the foot of Piker’s bunk. “Get the fuck out of here, varmint!” he said, and whipped one of his defanged boots at it, hitting it, quite to his surprise, and actually knocking it over. It lay on its side with its eyes open and its soft, light-colored belly heaving fast.
Odd,
he thought.
It must be sick to be so slow.
The rat twitched. He squinted at it and saw its complexity: soft belly and devious nature, sharp teeth and smooth tail. He had to admit, he kind of admired rats. Then he used his other boot to knock the carcass to the floor, and when the rat had fallen, he spat into his palm and reached down his pants.

38.

PROFIT SHARING

B
eatrice barely saw Harris those next two weeks, just twice on the street when she contrived to intercept him on his way to work. She feared the Whyos would perceive her disloyalty if she saw him more, but those few minutes were enough for her to find out what she had to—that he wasn’t in love with Sarah Blacksall—and to tell him what he needed to hear: She was working on her exit from the Whyos.

In the meantime, she was helping Fiona and Jimmy. She was also arranging for a lawyer for Johnny and Piker and doing innumerable small bits of damage control, massaging tempers, showing Fiona how to do the accounts. When she felt she had done enough to keep the gang on its feet, she intercepted Harris again on his way home from work.

He smiled widely just at seeing her and would have taken her hand, but she backed away from him. It was a dangerous step she was about to take. A casual indiscretion could put a grim end to it. “I’m ready to get out, Harris,” she said, “but I need to decide where to go. I can’t go back to my aunt’s.”

“Well, there’s Mr. Noe’s. It’s going to be my place now, and it’s huge.” Harris had just learned the terms of the bequest in a long letter from Mr. Noe’s lawyer—there were so many things he wanted to tell her—but Beatrice cut him off. It was imperative, she explained, to keep the Whyos from noticing a connection between Harris and the man Johnny Dolan was accused of killing. So far, no one had, but she couldn’t very well fall into his arms and move in with him and get away with it.

“You have to realize, I’m married to Johnny Dolan, Harris. Actually married to him. If I just went off with you now, the gang would find out what happened and hunt me down and kill me. You, too, maybe. I was thinking I could stay at that women’s hotel in Brooklyn Heights, the Margaret, but really I should go further.”

The line she’d given Fiona and Jimmy was that she wanted to lie low before the trial, for Johnny’s protection, to disassociate him and her from the rest of the gang as much as possible—just until he got off. They still believed that all of this was temporary. Johnny would be boss again, Beatrice would still be First Girl, and they would be their lieutenants. They had no idea she was praying he would hang.

“Sarah came by this week,” he said. “She was concerned about you, and she had an idea about where you might stay.”

“Sarah?” She nearly lost her composure at the mention of the lady doctor. She damn well wasn’t going to go live with Harris’s old girlfriend, that was for sure, no matter what sort of do-gooder she was.

“She’s a very good person. That’s all. She knows that. She mentioned that her partner’s family has a big house in Weeksville. They’ve offered to take you in.”

“Weeksville? Where is that?”

“It’s further out in Brooklyn, a black neighborhood.”

“Really, a black neighborhood? I don’t know.”

“Dr. Smith is black, a black woman doctor.”

“A black woman doctor?”

“Come on, why don’t you go meet her? It would be perfect. The gang would never find you . . . and maybe I could see you somehow.” He gave her the clinic address.

“All right, Harris, I’ll talk to her.” And then she melted into the crowd. She went to the clinic late that afternoon, rather hoping to have arrived too late, but both the doctors were there.

She felt terribly awkward with Sarah Blacksall. Dr. Smith she found surprisingly articulate and intimidating, at first, but Beatrice quickly warmed to her. She learned that the house in Weeksville belonged to Dr. Smith’s parents, but that Smith and Blacksall stayed there two or three nights a week, when they were holding office hours in their Weeksville clinic. Dr. Smith invited her out there for dinner and to spend the night, to see what it was like before she decided. She wasn’t very comfortable with the idea, but how could she say no?

And so, the following night, Beatrice returned to the clinic, took the ferry across to Brooklyn and rode out to Weeksville with the two doctors in their rig. She went mostly just because Harris had asked her to. She was thinking that hotel in Brooklyn would be more convenient while she waited for the trial and, hopefully, freedom. She didn’t need to be put into the midst of another family—and a black family at that—that would disapprove of her life. Plus, the two doctors were obviously such do-gooders. She was fed up with them before she’d even heard their lectures. But then they surprised her. Mr. and Mrs. Smith were warm and not the least bit nosy about why she needed their help. The doctors neither pestered her nor lectured her about the life she’d lived nor proselytized their hygienic theories nor otherwise dispensed advice. The dinner conversation was dominated by talk of the doctors’ more interesting cases and how they’d met at the Women’s Medical College. They made what they did sound almost as exciting as being a Whyo: solving a different problem every time, inventing new ways to do the same job better, knowing when it was worth it to risk a great deal on a grand and outrageous possibility, when to be conservative and cautious. They held power over life and death, she saw, and clearly it was exhilarating. Smith and Blacksall were perhaps the first women Beatrice had known whose lives weren’t either illegal or desperately boring. Even Sarah Blacksall wasn’t half as bad as she’d expected. For her part, Susan Smith was like no other Negro woman she’d ever known, Beatrice thought. Then she corrected herself: She’d never really known one at all before.

The Smiths showed her the room she could have, which had its own back door, and told her she’d be free to do whatever she wished with her days, welcome to dine with them or not. It was ideal, and she was grateful. She accepted the invitation that night. Long after old Mr. and Mrs. Smith had gone to bed, the three women stayed up talking over a bottle of sherry until the fire had died in the hearth. When the doctors asked Beatrice about the medical problems of girls in the Five Points, she said, “Oh, you don’t want to know,” but in fact they did. They already knew quite a lot, but they fervently wanted to know more, especially the worst of it, and what help the women there would want, what they thought they needed.

“Lemons,” Beatrice said, thinking she was being cryptic. “Free lemons all year round would be a help.”

To her astonishment, they knew what she meant, and they told her there existed a device made of rubber that could serve the same purpose but more effectively, if only it were legal to manufacture and market widely.

“But in the meantime, you’re right, we might as well give out lemons,” said Dr. Smith. “I don’t know why we never thought of that, except that I’m afraid it sounds a little old-fashioned. But I guess there’s no point believing we’re
not
in the dark ages when we surely still are.”

Beatrice had never imagined she could be friends with such people, but
very
quickly she was. And she felt something she hadn’t felt for years: admiration.

The next day, she returned to the penthouse apartment to pack up some of her things. She was going back to Weeksville that night. But first, she would be seeing Harris. He had invited her to dinner. She was fairly terrified as she rode the ferry back to Brooklyn and walked up to Fort Greene with her carpetbag of clothes. The prospect of seeing him alone had her far more nervous than she’d ever been.

The cook let her in through the kitchen door and shouted into the yard for Harris. The cook knew well enough that the house had been passed to him, but she didn’t quite see her way to treating Harris as master of the house, especially not as he was still living over the stable and acting like a stablehand, too. It was fine with Harris. He wasn’t eager to become anyone’s master and didn’t want to move into the big house, not in the least. He found it too sad, too strange without Mr. Noe.

He was struggling to lace his shoes when the cook shouted. He was nervous, too. He’d had a good day on the tower, but now he was a wreck. That was the way his life felt lately: uneven. At the moment, between the loss of Mr. Noe, the surprise of suddenly owning most of Mr. Noe’s worldly goods and the enormous anxiety of this meeting with Beatrice, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or throw up.

She was waiting in the parlor for him when he finally came over. It was an unbearably odd setting for the two of them. For a young man of means in Fort Greene to invite a young woman to his house alone was unthinkably scandalous. He should properly have had a whole party of people to diffuse the sexual tension. But this was Harris. This was Beatrice. They’d slept on adjacent mattresses in the same room for more than a year at the O’Gamhnas’, had heard each other fart and snore. Not to mention their night in the sewermen’s bath hall. There was no reason to be coy. But all that was a long time ago now. They stood at opposite ends of the room, facing each other.

“Hello.”

“I’m glad you came.”

“How are you?”

“Fine, you?”

The parlor itself seemed to demand this ceremony. Beatrice couldn’t stand it.

“Jesus Christ, I can’t make small talk with you, Harris.”

He agreed, but he was confused by her. He was afraid she would leave. “But what else can we do?” he said.

It made no sense, so she laughed. “How about you show me around?”

It was better when they were walking. Things occurred to them to say.

She told him how she’d left Fiona and the Jimster in charge. How she thought it would be okay as long as Johnny was in jail. He didn’t ask about after.

“Are you going to miss it all?” he asked.

“No, God, no, I’m glad to be out. But then again—yes. I guess I’m sorry in a certain way, about some of it. I was good at being that. What will I do?”

They went through the whole house, and then, in what was the most egregious breach of social protocol yet, he asked her if she’d like to see his apartment in the stable. They stood at the top of the rough stairway, looking in at his spare living quarters. There was nothing much there for him to show her but the picture of his mother, but suddenly he realized that the apartment was dominated by his bed and how inappropriate this must look. He blushed.

“Sorry,” he said, and they turned around. Going back down the stairs, he followed closely on her heels. His leg brushed the fabric of her dress. Then she stopped, and his leg bumped hers, beneath her skirts.

“Harris,” she said, and reached out for him, but he wasn’t prepared and was knocked off balance. He sat down hard on the stairs, pulling her with him, and then they slid down several more stairs, kicking and bumping and clutching each other. It was not a very proper seduction.

“Oh—” she cried. “Ow, my nose!” which started him laughing, and then her, too, though it did hurt. Then, rather slowly and carefully, he came at her face from the side, kissing her cheek, her cheekbone, the corner of her lips. The way they were tangled in her dress within the narrow, boxed-in stairwell, there seemed to be no getting up again, so they scootched to the bottom together and then ran back up the stairs to reconvene their embrace on the more stable ground of Harris’s bed. They didn’t talk. Their clothes began to loosen and come away.

I can’t think of a single thing that could have stopped them from consummating something then and there—except for the cook, calling that their supper was ready, which it wasn’t, but she had her eyebrows up at the manner in which they were carrying on.
Showing her his apartment,
indeed,
she thought.

They straightened themselves up and went inside, though, and after a half hour standing around the kitchen stove waiting for dinner, they ate not in the dining room, where the cook had laid the table, but in the kitchen, where Harris said he preferred it. Afterward, they tried out the parlor again, this time with fewer inhibitions and less monitoring from the cook, who was occupied with the dishes. Before long, they were sitting right beside each other on the horsehair sofa. He looked into her face. The black eyes were fading, but she still looked pretty beaten up. Her nose was red and swollen. It was going to be a lot more Roman than before.

“Harris,” she said, “I’m really sorry I punched you with the knuckles that time.” He touched the side of his own face, where she’d hit him. “But we didn’t know what to expect from you. It’s not so simple, two girls jacking a big man like you—you might have been tough. You might have fought back. But never mind that. I’m just sorry.”

“Don’t be. That turns out to have been a good day.”

They talked about the beginning: the fire at Barnum’s, the way the Whyos had heard of Harris on the street through the Jimster and Undertoe, and why they’d been so convinced he was Undertoe’s collaborator, starting with the German connection and the aliases. That conversation brought Harris to ask her something he’d been wondering a long while.

“I just couldn’t let him kill you, Harris. I knew you could keep your trap shut. But also, I don’t think Johnny was capable of being threatened by you. That made it easier.”

“I hated you then, but maybe I should have been grateful.” He told her how he first came to live with Mr. Noe. “It was right after the post-office job and that letter you sent me. I was out of my mind—I didn’t know what to think.”

“I’m so sorry, Harris—”

“I am, too.”

“He must have thought so highly of you, Harris, to leave you this house.”

He told her Mr. Noe had left most of his money to the missionary fund of the Pilgrim church, Lincoln University in Ohio and the S.P.C.A., but that the house and the business had gone to him. “I don’t know what to do with the brush company. I can’t run it. I don’t know anything about it.”

“Isn’t John-Henry working there?”

He looked at her. “Maybe I’ll just give it to John-Henry. He’s excited about it, and that way I can stay on the bridge. Mr. Noe should have thought of that. He was all for the uplifting of the Negroes.”

“Harris, you can’t just give an entire factory to John-Henry; he won’t take it, for one. It’s yours.”

“Well, Mr. Noe just gave it to me.”

“That’s different. He died. It’s a matter of pride, and of a lot of other things, too.”

“You know, the only thing I ever gave Mr. Noe was that cane. I picked it because he liked animals. It had such a smile on it. But I still haven’t been able to find it. What if it wasn’t Johnny’s cane he was beaten with, what if it was his?”