Authors: Elizabeth Gaffney
He had it in mind to run for the fire station next, as if he were the only man in Manhattan and there were no watchtowers, no alarm boxes, no neighbors, no hack drivers to notice the blaze that now burst through the roof in multiple places. But somehow that thought enabled him to make it, crawling, coughing and finally stumbling over the fallen lintel to the stable door. He was on his knees as he made his way into the night. The air was clear and cold, and the wind seemed to whip the smoke away from the Earth, straight to the stars. The stableman saw Orion’s Belt—three lights straight as ninepins, bright and fine and reassuring—and then he heard a fire wagon pull up at the curb, saw its steam pump gushing clouds of ice that mingled with the smoke. The clanging of bells suggested that other carriages approached as well. In the fire’s quavery light, a posse of men leapt forward to attack a small figure at the curb. General Tom Thumb? He wondered deliriously why they would do such a thing—unless they thought he had set the blaze? But of course it was only the fire hydrant on which the stableman had sat more than once, taking in the street scene, before the weather turned so cold. Soon a supple length of hose jerked and jumped. Water surged to its nozzle. Two men stood on either side to restrain it, like boys playing tug-of-war. They raised it toward the flaming doorway where he lay.
Salvation!
he thought, but it was a bit late for that.
The spray of water hit him like the whole North Sea, icy and powerful. He was on his knees already, and it smashed him to his belly, crashed against him like a wave on the rocks, shooting out in a horizontal geyser. He could neither advance nor retreat. Behind, the fire roared; ahead, hoses spewed. Above, the sky was high and black and dry and windy, filling fast now with low gray billows. Cinders wafted bright among the stars and a light snow fell from the spray of the hose. But he saw nothing anymore, save a white death as perilous as the red-hot one he’d escaped. Nor did the firemen see him, or the torrent relent. His eyes clamped tight, his mind shut down. How many choices did he have? How many do I? To save him from an early death here may be only to deliver him to a slow one later, a lifetime of struggle and humiliation. It might be kinder just to end it here, but now that I’ve taken him on, how could I?
It was Beatrice who spotted him. She wore an enormous winter shawl on top of her overcoat and for a better view of the excitement was riding on the shoulders of her friend Fiona, her feet tucked into her partner’s armpits, her skirts bunched unladylike around her thighs, letting the cold air in. Beatrice was describing the scene to Fiona, who could see only snatches here and there through gaps in the milling crowd. Being pickpockets, they were always on the job, of course, but among many other things they were also girls, curious of a spectacle, and they’d long since ceased trying to work the crowd.
Beatrice thought she saw a man emerge from the doorway and struggle briefly to stand, then ball up against the rushing water and disappear from view. Everyone else was watching the horses with their tails aflame, the windows shattering, the orange roil, but she stretched herself higher to confirm her sighting. Yes, there was a man in there, and she gesticulated to no one in particular. “Stop,” she shouted, “Stop!” But nobody heard. She was trying to flag down a fireman when she swayed too far sideways, and Fiona staggered and dropped her. She was too large a girl to be carried like that in the first place, even without all that flapping. She didn’t hit her head or break her arm, nothing grave, just landed on her back and lay gasping for breath, her arm still jabbing the air, pointing toward the stable door. She had become a small spectacle unto herself, and finally, when she got her breath back, her cries—“There’s someone alive in there, I saw someone trying to get out the door!”—at long last drew people’s attention to the man whom no one else had seen.
If he’d heard her voice, he wouldn’t have recognized it, regardless of how he’d dreamed of her, or how many times she’d sung her wares in his neighborhood before. A song is not a shout. Even if he’d seen her, he might not have recognized her—she didn’t look exactly like the woman of his dream. The bridge of her nose had a larger bump, her eyes were deeper set, her chin was sharper. But no matter—he’d meet her again soon enough, and not find himself all that happy about it, if you must know. She couldn’t see his face—it was night, there was smoke, he was black with soot—and no, she wouldn’t have known him, but she’d find out who he was before long. But all that was later; this was now.
Quite a crowd had gathered, and the collective eye of all those people followed the girl’s finger to the muddy figure writhing in limbo between fire and ice. Her announcement was repeated, mouth to ear, mouth to ear, until someone finally told a fireman, who told another, who briefly diverted the stream to a window above. Most in the crowd were silent with horror when they saw him; some cheered the survivor; others were more cynical, doubting aloud that he would live. Fires were common in New York—death, too.
One of the onlookers was a dirty-blond man in the front row. He knew the stableman from Barnum’s, where he held some nebulous job that brought him through the stables now and then. He was talking to the boy at his side, loudly, so that anyone nearby could hear him—one of those people who seem to think everyone cares to know their opinions.
“Look at that, Jimster—isn’t that the new stableboy, the German one? Jesus Christus—you think maybe he’s the firebug?” He scratched his neck as they watched a fireman run up and drag the stableman to the sidelines.
“Come on, Mister U.,” said the boy. “Him?” But he wasn’t really paying attention; he was marveling at the water that came through the hydrant under fabulous pressure but started to freeze almost before it met the flames. It seemed the hoses were shooting snow.
“Well, somebody did it, didn't they, Jimmy? Fire doesn’t light itself. Just look at it: Barnum’s burning down
again.
Just look at that blaze.”
“Yeah,” said the boy, breathing out white puffs. “But you know what gets me? Where the Hell all that water comes from.” He was thinking of the corner well where he filled a pail in the mornings. He was thinking he was thirsty.
“What, Jimmy, really? Don’t you know? Croton. Travels forty miles over bridges, through tunnels, all downhill, just to get to that reservoir uptown.”
But how would the boy have known that? He lived in the Fourth Ward, where the water had never been connected to the tenement flats.
Sanitation for the population!
was the cry of the social reformers, but it was just a slogan. Neither the city nor the tenement lords would pay to bring the water indoors. Meanwhile, every seven seconds one of New York’s more pampered households flushed a newfangled toilet bowl full of piss-yellow Croton water, sending another tiny wave of sewage out with the ebb, into the harbor—but never far enough. For the flood tide brought it back again, and naturally it settled in the boggy lowlands abutting the slums, and the tenement wells drew a questionable brew that was much the worse for having been in high places.
The water the firemen were spewing at the blaze was the first Croton water the stableman had ever tasted, but he had no idea how clean and pure it was. There was the clanging of bells, the roar of flames, the rush of pressurized jets, and then he felt the arms of strangers lift him up and carry him away. His sodden clothes swiftly started to freeze into a stiff box around his body, and he felt the ice crack and rain down against his skin as he was packed off, shivering uncontrollably, into an official vehicle, whether ambulance or police wagon he didn’t think to wonder at the time. Someone asked his name, but he couldn’t respond. What did his name matter? What did his face? What did anything, when he’d lost yet again what little he had to lose? Most of Barnum’s animals were certainly dead—if not burned up then suffocated, their lungs scorched beyond resuscitation. His own breath was perilously shallow.
Through the open rear doors of the coach, the stableman spotted a ghostly figure in a fourth-story window, and he thought a fireman must have ventured into the building to try to save the menagerie. Perhaps they had found the keys to the animals’ shackles. The face he saw was orange and strange, which he put down to the glow of the fire—until it opened its jaws and roared. Raj the tiger was free. The big cat tapped his paws against the hot glass, crouched out of sight, then reappeared in fluid motion. He pounced straight through the windowpane and sailed through the night in an aura of flames, shards and sparks, his leg iron trailing a charred lump of timber.
His flight was magnificent. The people on the street watched silently as he landed with a thud, then they let out a collective scream. The tiger staggered, one of his legs in grave disorder, at a strange angle from his body. He looked around him, and for an instant his yellow eyes met those of the stableman in the back of the wagon. The fur along Raj’s back smoldered. He grumbled from deep within, dropped to his haunches and roared. Then he ran north, at a fairly fast pace for a tiger who was dragging one leg and a four-by-four by the shackle. The onlookers scattered and the stableman had a view of the tiger’s path. As Raj picked up speed, his singed fur was fanned by the wind and flames broke out across his back and down his long, pumping tail. Then the stableman heard a blast and saw the tiger recoil. Another two shots, and the animal crumpled to the icy pavement with a growl. He had been a splendid but miserable creature whose huge paws had worn a perimeter groove in the wooden floor of his small cage as he furiously paced, mouth half open in contempt, teeth bared, long white belly scruff dangling between his knees. He often sprayed urine at spectators who approached his cage too closely but had never marked the stableman, who sometimes brought him a greenish hunk of beef when the lion tamer was otherwise engaged. Had they shot him to put him out of his agony or because they considered him a threat? Had there even been a reason? Had it just been an officer’s lust for heroism, satisfied at last against the wildest beast ever let loose on a New York street? A fear seized the stableman then that he and Raj were two of a kind—foreigners in this land, misfits who’d managed to escape the blaze but only after sustaining injuries that rendered them useless and possibly dangerous.
The authorities had dispatched the tiger. A man in a uniform laid a blanket over the stableman and pulled it across his face, as if he were a corpse, and he read the word
POLICE
woven into its border. He groaned and struggled to paw it from his eyes. Was the officer there to help him, to arrest him or just to cart him off to die? He looked for an answer in the eyes of the man standing above him, but the man’s eyes looked away.
And so began his career as a suspect, a man on the edge of the law, for a second time—despite all his intentions. It was why he’d fled Germany. Now here he was in a city he’d thought was big enough to get lost in, big enough to need innumerable builders to help make it bigger yet, and he found himself in a different boat of the exact same class. How had it happened, and so fast? Was there something about him? A curse? Did his face look felonious, threatening? That’s certainly not what Beatrice thought when she peered into the back of the wagon while he watched the tiger being shot.
She’d already heard the rumor flying through the crowd that the man she’d seen and saved was a disgruntled worker from the museum, that he was the one who had set the fire. Maybe, she thought, but who had ever heard of an arsonist sticking around long enough nearly to die in the fire? Barnum had enemies enough that it hardly seemed likely this stableman was responsible, at least not by himself. He looked a little too honest, too stunned. What she was thinking was that this fellow had gotten himself in over his head. Someone had set him up to take a fall.
She scanned the crowd to see if she could guess whom he was working for. When she had her answer, she began to formulate her plan. She needed a story to take back to Johnny, her boss. He would certainly want to know all about it.
3.
THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
H
e woke up in the Tombs, but he had no sense of being in jail. No, at first it rather seemed as if he’d died and gone to Versailles. He was lying in a soft bed, and the first thing he saw was a wheeled metal bathtub full of steaming water. His head was heavy. His eyes burned, and so did his lungs. He took account of his limbs and digits and found them all there, but they hurt. His hands and feet were scabbed and blistery and had stuck in several places to the fine Egyptian sheeting. He wondered if this was a hospital. Then a strange, grinning little man materialized from a corner and helped him soak the blisters free in a basin of water from the tub.
“What is this place?” he asked when they were done.
“Why, the Hall of Justice, sir.”
He’d heard the name, but it didn’t make sense. “Sir?” he said. “You mean the Tombs?”
“The very same.” And then the fellow—less jailer than manservant—helped him stand and undress. He laid out a black woolen robe and directed the stableman’s attention to a decanter of port, a tumbler and a tub of anesthetic salve on a small side table. Then he disappeared. Sore and coughing and still half delirious, the stableman helped himself to several glasses of port while he soaked. It was spicy and delicious. He tried not to think, because when he did, he kept seeing burning horses, the flight of the tiger, the stagger and jerk, the blood steaming red against the ice. Eventually, when the water had cooled, he rose from the tub, smeared himself with the soothing cream, crawled back under the covers and fell deeply asleep.
He dreamed. He was in the dripping marble chambers of the Roman Baths at Baden-Baden, where his father had introduced him to the rituals and rigors of manly purgation while his mother underwent one of her therapeutic regimens and the governess took his sister, Lottie, strolling through the cure park.
“This will fix anything that ails you,” his father had said as they entered the front atrium of an imposing building with the air of a courthouse or museum. The doctor purchased tickets and they proceeded down a hallway and into a changing room with many cubbies and tall stacks of white towels.
“But what do I change into?” he asked when his shoes were lined up neatly under the bench and his trousers folded. On the next bench, an old man let out a cackle that set the flesh of his hairy belly a-wobble. Then his father stripped off his shorts to reveal something awful in the midst of his firm abdomen and pale, powerful thighs: a thick, red, leathery proboscis. It was quite unimaginable to the boy that he would remove his own thin drawers before these two naked men, his father—a firm, strong God—and the mocking old satyr.
“There are no ladies allowed here, son—you don’t need a bathing costume.” His father had slapped him on the shoulder then and made him feel a man, though in truth he was not at all sure he wanted to be one. And then they’d gone together through the alternating pools and chambers—hot and dry, cold and bracing, steamy humid, body-warm—to arrive at last in a luminous circular chamber where beds ringed the walls like spokes on a wheel and a silent attendant trussed him in a blissful cocoon of smooth sheets and soft fleece blankets.
It was, perhaps, his fondest memory of his father, the great doctor who was beloved by generations of patients and medical students, his father who had disowned him long before he reached his majority. But even it was tainted, as every thought of his father was, by what had happened after. The following day, he had awakened in a sweat, with a fever, and everything else was a sea of confused images, half hallucination, half real. It seemed that weeks passed without his seeing his parents or sister or anyone but the nurse and the visiting physician. Or then again, like just one long day. At the end, when he’d finally been given permission to get out of bed, he found a new suit of clothes laid out for him by the governess. He imagined a party of some sort and smoothed down his hair with spit until it shone, just as his mother liked, but the nurse took him to a room where his father sat alone. His father’s arm didn’t move when he tugged it; the man was entirely rigid, a statue. Finally, he’d blinked and looked at his son and told him where they were going and why. His mother was dead.
The nightmare ending of that dream was still playing out in his head in the Tombs when, at noon, a meal of poached eggs, white sauce, toast points and tea was brought in on a tray. There were sugar cubes. He found a jug of fresh, cool water for drinking on the table and a pitcher of hot for washing on the stand; a chamber pot as clean as a dinner plate awaited his need beneath the bed. He was further from the tack room where he’d gone to sleep the night before than he was from his lost, pampered boyhood just then, and it was only slowly that he recalled the series of events that had happened to him in between. The whole thing seemed so improbable. Perhaps there were quite a few other firstborn sons of prominent men who had been disinherited before their majority and sent to live on farms with distant relatives; surely many first wives’ children were hated by their stepmothers; and probably it was the majority of new immigrants to the great city who found themselves living unexpected lives. But how many of them were mucking
elephant stalls
? How many had been falsely accused of arson? How many of those who had ended up in jail were in
this
sort of a jail? When he looked around, it seemed more of a hotel suite or guest room. Was he lucky or unlucky, he wondered. Apparently it wasn’t the right question. He was both, by turns. So far, New York had not exactly offered him the fresh start he sought, but then again, it kept helping him back up every time it battered him down. Maybe that’s the way it would go: He had to go under before he could rise. If that was the case, if each setback would be followed by some odd bit of good fortune, he felt sure he could make it. Maybe, with a little perseverance, he could thrive.
And so he resolved to make the best of whatever came his way for as long as it lasted. He knew from his childhood what the high life could be like and how quickly it could disappear; he also knew destitution. He’d grown up in a monarchy and come to a democracy. He’d seen firsthand that both of them required an aristocracy as well as an underclass. He had been a member of both and hadn’t much liked either. Above all, perhaps, he’d learned that class distinctions were more fluid than they seemed and tragedy befell the privileged just as often as the poor. On the ship over, for instance, the rich had died the same as the likes of him in steerage. But he had survived.
“Well, buddy,” said his jailer-cum-manservant later, as he carried in a pile of clean laundry, “either you’re somebody—but I don’t think so—or you got lucky last night.” Apparently, the man had taken a closer look at the condition of his clothes.
The stableman shrugged and scooped up the last of the yolk with his toast. He was grateful for the fluke that had gotten him this bath and bed and breakfast, and he doubted it would last; still, he saw no reason to accelerate its end by saying anything at all. When the man left, he slept again, this time without dreaming—a relief.
Several hours later, an angry officer woke him abruptly by yanking the sheet from his grasp. His fingers stung and he braced himself, he knew not what for.
“Wake up, you Goddamned Irish arsonist! What do you think you’re doing here?”
“What, sir? I’m not Irish. I’m German. I work at Barnum’s. I was trapped in the fire. You were maybe thinking from someone else? Is the arsonist here as well, maybe not this room?”
“All right, you kraut scum bucket, how the Hell did you manage to get yourself into this particular cell?”
“I didn’t manage anything, I was brought here.”
But by this time he was scrambling into his clothes—he noticed buttons where there had been none, long-split seams that were joined, places where holes had been patched with a similar fabric.
“There was a bloody Astor in the drunk tank all last night and most of today,” the officer spat, “all because you somehow snuck your dirty German hide in here. Who’s going to pay for those toast points now, boy, tell me that? Goddamnit, you don’t look the least bit like an Astor!”
“An aster?” But instead of explaining, the warden responded with a right hook to the jaw, just one solid, dizzying punch, then turned on his heel. It turned out to have been a cell reserved for criminals of the upper echelon, where all the amenities were billed home; so he was told by the comparatively benevolent warden of the squalid cell in the great hive of barred cells to which he was transferred a quarter hour later. The society wing was occupied mostly by bachelors who’d shot their rivals at supper clubs and businessmen caught consorting with the wrong kind of women at the wrong houses on the wrong nights and unlucky enough to have been rounded up in raids. The second warden smiled a little as he spoke, perhaps imagining the scenario that led to this mix-up: a comatose, vomit-encrusted millionaire wastrel scooped up half naked in an opium bust and issued prison stripes; a working stiff brought in unconscious in an overcoat that, though wet and burned, looked well enough cut to suit a gentleman. In fact, the situation was the handiwork of a skinny little anarchist desk clerk, name of Biedermann. As much as he hated all Astors, Biedermann liked the name he saw on the stableman’s papers: Geiermeier. It had just as many letters as his, sounded equally foreign and was considerably more unpronounceable to an American tongue.
Georg Geiermeier was the name the stableman had bought himself in a dark Hamburg alley, in the form of a Prussian passport. He’d booked his passage on the
Leibnitz
under that name. At Castle Garden, a scrivener had copied it from the ship’s register directly onto an immigration form, which a port official had stamped E
NTERED AT THE
P
ORT OF
N
EW-
Y
ORK,
and Geiermeier it was (though a minor slip of the pen did contribute an
e
to the stableman’s
Georg
). Biedermann took pleasure in assisting a countryman, especially a down-and-out one, but the truth was it could just as well have been an Irishman who benefited from his little game. He quite simply hated industrialists, and especially their dissipated scions. Biedermann, God bless him (though naturally he didn’t believe), smirked through his mustache at the little subversion for most of a week—long after the stableman was back outside, staggering through the slush and snow, and the Astor had turned the episode into an anecdote. “Well, boys, here’s to Herr Guy-er-meyer, that’s
G-i-e-i-e-i
—” young Astor laughed, raising his glass of gin. His friends puffed their cigars and chuckled, slightly envious. “They’re saying he murdered a girl and burned down Barnum’s, and just think: He slept in my bed and ate my breakfast, while I had to hold my own with the convicts—and my father paid his bill, in advance. Now who says we don’t treat the little man well? Maybe too well!”
It was nice of Biedermann and a big help to the stableman—I shudder to think of the oozing infections his burned hands might have suffered if not for those basins of warm, clean water, that soap, that salve—but as for this
Geiermeier
business, don’t bother learning the pronunciation; the stableman won’t be using that name long.
“I hope you got some good eats over in Washington Square,” the second warden said, referring to the society block. Then he passed in a tin bowl of porridge and shut the gate behind him. The stableman realized he still had reason to be grateful. Even this cell was warmer than the stable. He ate the food and wondered what would happen to him next. Was there any chance they really thought he’d set the fire? Would he be able to defend himself, with no money and only his broken English? Several men shared that cell with him in the following days. At first he thought he might learn something from them—what the papers were saying about Barnum’s, maybe, or at least what he ought to expect in this place—but soon enough he realized there was no camaraderie among the prisoners here, just competition for resources. The stableman had never felt so alone. Sometimes, lying on his bunk, he thought about women, and one woman in particular, a girl he had befriended on the boat. Maria.
The
Leibnitz
had been a typhoid ship. He’d not forgotten the pungent smell of her body, the sardonic twist of her smile, her fine waist or the suddenness of his own desire when he stood beside her. But on the boat, there was also death. That was what had really brought them together. It boarded the ship politely, with good manners, circulating first in a cold potato soup and then in a batch of fresh-baked pies—sweet, tart lakes of apple custard in tender crust, destined for the first-class dining room. The petri dish per se was yet to be invented, but what a petri dish custard made that day! A banker ate a piece, and a broker. Thus, on one frosty winter afternoon in the mid-Atlantic—and it wasn’t even fever season—did destiny transcend the boundaries of class and power. The germs gnawed like termites, inconspicuous but hungry, wracking the insides of a few fancy people who quietly took to their staterooms and clung to their chamber pots, shaking. Then the illness spread wider, and death came like a wrecking ball, taking everything and everyone it wanted, indiscriminate of cabin size or class. The stableman’s sweat ran clammy when he saw the sick passengers, their familiar fever. He and Maria, who was working in the galley (and doing overtime in the first mate’s berth) to defray the cost of transport, were among the few who weren’t taken ill. They tried to help the others by distributing medicinal teas of chamomile and willow bark, but the infusions just seemed to make the people worse.
The
Leibnitz
’s passengers were no sturdier than his mother had been, his aunt, his little sister. They gasped and clawed and died like flies in their stinking bloody sheets. Maria and the stableman had helped the remaining crew to heave the mortal remains of dozens of passengers into the sea, shrouded only in their bedclothes, and watched them sink unblessed, unabsolved. He knew they would rise again, bloated, in a few days’ time to be pecked at by the gulls. Through it all, Maria had worked by his side. She was perhaps fifteen, but the way she handled the plague made her seem more than that, and he, who was somewhat older, felt ancient. In other circumstances, he would have wooed her. As it was, he had bemoaned the money he’d stolen and the trouble he’d gone to to get on that boat. At first he’d thought,
Oh God, I’m next,
but then it turned to
Why don’t I die?
The very death he’d been plagued by back home in Germany had tagged along, a stowaway, but somehow, in the midst of all that horror, he’d been smitten.