Metropolis (39 page)

He looked at Mr. Noe.

“You don’t need to lie to him.”

That night, he began to write the letter. After a week of crumpling up false starts on thick stationery, he bought a box of cheap foolscap and allowed himself to ramble, writing anything he dreamed of saying, telling himself that this was just a draft, just a trial run. He found that the Gothic handwriting he’d struggled to preserve had indeed deteriorated, and he was somewhat ashamed of the thought of mailing this rough penmanship to his father. He went through dozens of pages, rewording already cautious statements. There were long, hostile rants against his childhood, too, and praise songs to his mother, accusations, insults. The only things he wrote that he considered sending were about the bridge. Even on the coldest days, he loved going up there, day after day. Block by block it rose, and soon it would be the tallest man-made structure in the word. This was the way life should be: gradual accrual amounting to accomplishment over time. He rhapsodized on the techniques of installing bolts, or indeed just the size and beauty of the hardware, the stone blocks, the bridge itself. If only his life showed similar progress and virtue.

He never read over what he wrote, and when he grew tired he burned his pages in the grate. Eventually the idea of an actual letter to his father receded, and he realized he was writing to clarify his own mind. The problem was, his mind kept wandering to the subject of happiness, which meant he thought of Beatrice. He wondered if she’d approve of his handwriting now. But she was even less approachable now than his father.

On Christmas Eve, he took out the box of good letter paper for the first time in weeks, and in a single draft he wrote a very simple letter explaining his present situation to his father. It filled just two pages. He neither lied nor divulged gratuitous, unsavory details of his career in the underworld. He didn’t apologize for leaving, just filled in a few details of how his departure came about. It was not all he had to say, not nearly, but it was not shallow either. It was neither dangerously honest nor entirely safe. It was a beginning. He sealed it in an envelope, and the following day it was in his pocket when he paid a New Year’s Day visit to the Henleys, bringing a sack of imported oranges he’d bought at Washington Market.

Afterward, he met Sarah Blacksall, and they went out and took water samples for her study, as they did twice a week now, quite routinely entering the manholes with the aid of a sewer gaff Sarah had had made according to Harris’s specifications. Technically, this activity was illegal, but they worked with such authority and were so obviously interested in the common good that on two occasions beat policemen had offered to help them by directing traffic away. It made Harris slightly nervous, but Dr. Blacksall was the one who chatted with the policemen, while he did the heavy lifting and collected the samples. They had ten locations they were monitoring, and it took them a couple of hours to get all the samples. Afterward, back at the clinic, Sarah inspected the phials of liquid under the microscope, and they once again found the bacterial counts downstream of the dirt-catchers lower than elsewhere. Harris smiled to think that the work he’d done for the Whyos had been useful after all.

The letter was still in his pocket. It was almost Christmas, but he was in no mood to go home and celebrate the holiday with Mr. Noe. He wandered aimlessly north. He happened to be a few blocks south of the Hippodrome when he found himself stopping, sniffing the air. He smelled creosote, heard alarm bells, several of them. Fires were common enough, but they turned his stomach, and even more so the crowds that came to watch them. He decided to avoid this one. Then he glanced up into the sky and saw the wide arc of the glow. It was more than just some fire; it was an entire block. He turned back and walked toward the blaze.

When the Jimster hadn’t shown up, Undertoe had realized his mistake. He’d told the Jimster they’d be torching the place the next night, but they’d planned to meet there that evening, just to go over things. Actually, Undertoe’s idea was to do the job early and to catch the Jimster off guard. He didn’t know just how the little bastard planned to do it, but Undertoe wasn’t so stupid as to miss the double cross. His problem was, he’d gotten a little ahead of himself and had already dumped the fuel.

By the time Jimmy got there, the walls were already doused with kerosene, which he had smelled as he neared the building. It wasn’t good, Jimmy thought. Things weren’t set up on his side yet. He was planning to tip off a cop in the morning based on what he learned tonight, but none of it was in place yet, and so nothing good could come of his being there tonight. He had turned and gone straight to the Morgue to fill Johnny in on the development.

But dupe or no dupe, Undertoe could hardly put the job off now. He had strolled through the Emporium one last time, smelling the fumes. Then he lit a cigarillo and tossed the match one way, the burning butt the other a few paces on. When the smoke began to rise, he ran from the building and toward the nearest alarm box. It was something he always enjoyed, sending the alarm on his own fires.

Much of what Harris saw was very different from his last Barnum fire: The Hippodrome was vast compared to the American Museum’s workmanlike structure. He was outside, not inside. And the weather wasn’t freezing, so the building didn’t drip paradoxically with ice the way the American Museum had. But much of what he saw was the same: the firefighters pulling up in their engines, the spectators, the mayhem and, once again, the animals trapped inside. The place was going fast. Just as the central doorway seemed on the verge of collapse, a group of men ran through it with heavy ropes. They were doing their best to haul the enormous forms of two elephants through the smoke and fire to safety. The larger one nudged the smaller one ahead of it with her trunk, and both made it out just before the front wall collapsed. Someone was in there, risking his life to save a one-hump camel, but the animal fought and broke the lead. When a vitrine of stuffed pink flamingos caught, they ignited like tinder and the sudden flare flushed the camel, thanks only to luck, into the street.
The elephants are free,
thought Harris,
the camel, that’s good.
But the sea lion? The tiger? The bear? He hung his head at the thought of how disasters repeat themselves and, sorry he’d taken part in the gawking, he pressed on toward Fulton Ferry.

But something made him look back one last time when he got to the corner, and as he did he collided with a man who had to have been following him. Or had the man collided with him on purpose? He reached inside his greatcoat to secure his money purse, not that it was very full. Harris backed up to get a look at him, but the man’s face was in shadow, the blazing Hippodrome a halo around his head. He braced himself and wished he had a sewer gaff on him, but he was entirely unarmed. Harris took a couple of quick steps to the side, and as he turned, his assailant turned with him, allowing the light from the fire to catch his features: Luther Undertoe.

Undertoe was staring at him, smiling at this good fortune. Seeing Harris—or Geiermeier, as he thought of him—was a strange kind of gift, the sort he hadn’t gotten for a while. It seemed like the perfect compensation for the Jimster’s bailing out on him: his old dupe, back at just the right time. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bottle, which he uncorked and tossed at Harris. Harris dodged it, but it smashed at his feet and the splatter stained his trousers. The bottle, of course, contained kerosene, which Undertoe had planned to use to incriminate the Jimster. This was even better.

“Nice to see you again, George. You know, you really shouldn’t play with fire.”

George.
Harris smelled the solvent and looked at the glass shards. Was Undertoe going to try to light
him
on fire? He decided not to find out, and he ran. Undertoe shouted something Harris couldn’t make out—a name, perhaps, because a moment later Harris heard another set of footsteps pursuing him—from the weight and sound of them, a kid’s. The kid was pretty fast, but Harris had the added advantage of fear. He made it to the Greenpoint ferry terminal at the foot of Twenty-third Street, the nearest one, just as a boat was casting off, and leapt aboard, barely making it.

“What the Hell?” said the deckhand. “You coulda got yourself killed.”

Harris turned and looked back at the dock, but it was too dark to make out the faces of any of the people on the pier. “I know,” he said. “Sorry.”

He stayed outside on deck, despite the cold, hoping no one would notice the whiff of the fuel. It was a long way on foot from Greenpoint to Fort Greene, but Brooklyn wasn’t a place where you could find a cab at that hour. Not that he wanted one, smelling like kerosene as he did. He walked. He got back to his room about two but lay awake till dawn, listening for footsteps.

33.

BEZOAR

A
week later, Undertoe oozed his way into his old friend Jones’s new office at the precinct house. It was bigger than the old one. He had a window now.

“What rock did you crawl out from under?” Jones said.

“Happy New Year, Jones. I have some news for you,” began Undertoe, before telling him he had found Will Williams. He didn’t get any further.

“
Who
have you found? And
why
do I care?”

Undertoe didn’t mind the tone; it was part of the police culture. He knew Jones would come around when he heard the offer. They always did.

The fact that Harris had jumped a Greenpoint boat had led Undertoe to look for him there first. He had one of his boys redraw the old newspaper image of Geiermeier, add a beard to make him Harris and make copies for the rest. They staked out the East Twenty-third Street dock in twelve-hour shifts for forty-eight hours straight, but Harris never showed. Undertoe’s rash had begun acting up then, and he spent the following days watching the ferries—all the ferries, now—and scratching, relentlessly scratching. He’d seen Geiermeier twice now, Goddamnit, after all that time, and he’d be damned if he didn’t track him down and send him to the gallows at last.

Finally, he saw him. He’d been scanning a group of passengers at the Manhattan Fulton Street pier when his eyes locked onto Harris’s face. He underwent a spasm of excitement and raked his nails so hard across one welt that they came away bloody, but it was well worth it. He’d boarded the boat and shadowed Harris back to Mr. Noe’s. He recalled the house from following Fiona the previous summer, and it infuriated him that he’d failed to recognize his man back then, despite watching him come and go for several days. At any rate, now it was indisputable that Harris was working with the Dolan gang. It was tempting just to dispatch him in broad daylight, but Undertoe got a hold on his urges and held out for the greater satisfaction of reeling his man in slowly and delivering him live to the police. He watched the house all night and in the morning saw Geiermeier chatting with a nigger doughnut girl before he went to work. She seemed to know him, so he went over and ordered a coffee just after Geiermeier had left and asked her what his man’s name was. She told him.

“Oh, I guess I don’t know him. The fellow I was thinking of is German.”

Lorraine shrugged and went back to wiping her counter. It surprised Undertoe to find out he was using such an Irish-sounding name, but Geiermeier-Williams-Whateverhisnamewas had thrown a few curves before. That was what made him such a pain in the ass. And it fit in beautifully with the Dolan angle.

Now, as he sat in Lieutenant Jones’s office, Undertoe was salivating over the prospect of his lost bounty from the museum fire. He also imagined there might be an excellent incentive related to the Hippodrome conflagration, assuming he could pin that one on him.

Jones didn’t react to anything he said, just listened quietly, then sat there silently.

“Surely you do remember Williams, Officer Jones, don’t you? Koch was another one of his aliases, and Geiermeier was his real name, George Geiermeier. The American Museum. The girl who burned alive. Back in sixty-eight.”

“It’s
Lieutenant
Jones.”

“Oh. Quite right,
Lieutenant,
but you do remember the suspect, don’t you? How he broke out of the Tombs, vanished on us?”

The lieutenant sighed, wondering both why he’d ever taken tips from this lowlife and how the man had managed to weasel his way into his office. He would have to talk to the boys at the front desk. “What I remember is, you pinned the thing on some mysterious Hebrew countryman of yours who you didn’t much like for reasons unknown to me, and we were eager to indict him even though it was a setup, because it looked pretty plausible and we were dying for an arrest, what with the papers on our asses because of the dead girl. I also remember the victim turned out to be no one. Someone came in and identified her, but the name probably wasn’t right, because no one with that name was missing a daughter, and no one ever came to claim the body. And then you lost your dupe somehow. Barnum collected his insurance money—and from a Connecticut firm, if I recall, meaning it was easy on city coffers. That’s about all I remember. I don’t remember any evidence. No, I’m afraid no one cares about that case anymore, Mr. Undertoe. It’s closed. Excuse me.” And he rose from his chair.

“But, officer, I can add something. You see, it’s not just an old case—it’s a new one, too. I bumped into the guy—Williams, Geiermeier—leaving the scene of the Hippodrome fire, smelling like kerosene and running. I had one of my boys tail him to the ferry. Don’t you see, he was the firebug this time, too. He’s got something against Barnum, I’ll wager. He worked for him back then, you might recall—that’s how I knew him. He’s working on the Brooklyn Bridge now. What if he tried to burn that down next? Huh, what about that?”

Jones sighed and cast his eyes out the window. It was just a glorified air shaft, no view.

“You think he’s going to burn down a couple of stone towers standing in the middle of the river? Why am I not too worried, Lou?”

But Undertoe kept on: “The insurance company’s a New York firm this time.” Undertoe knew that because he’d shown the inspectors around. “And there’s more—he’s not working alone anymore. He’s with a gang now—or maybe he always was. You know Johnny Dolan and Piker O’Riley, the one that chewed his friend’s ear off last year?”

“Let me get this: Your mastermind German pyromaniac’s going by the name of Harris now, passing himself off as an Irishman and in league with that bunch of no-count bruisers? I sort of feel sorry for the guy, really.”

“They’re doing more jobs than you know. And he’s working with them. He just works on the bridge as his cover.”

Jones looked at Undertoe. The man’s information had never been any good. He’d turned in a lot of stooges, just to settle scores, but a lot of the arrests had led to convictions. He had a kind of doggedness that amounted to follow-through—except in that one last case, where he’d blown it. That was why he’d tolerated him. Convictions were good for an officer’s career. If the case could really be made, it would be stunning publicity. There wasn’t a single lead on the Hippodrome fire, though insurance fraud seemed obvious. But a German arsonist under cover as an Irish laborer? The Whyo gang, that bunch of barbershop musicians?
No,
thought Jones,
I don’t think so.
It would make him look like a fool.

“Tell me what you stand to get out of this one, Undertoe.”

“I admit I don’t like the guy. He screwed me over before. So I’ll enjoy it. Otherwise, just the reward money. Although now that you mention it, I wouldn’t mind at all if your boys relax the tithe a little. Sir. And a little more latitude from time to time would be nice. Look the other way, things like that.”

It was an honest answer, Jones thought. A reasonable set of requests if anything he said panned out, which seemed highly unlikely. But it might be worth a look, just a look. “All right, we’ll check into it,” he said. “Now get out of my office.”

Harris, meanwhile, was in quite a state. Every morning, he woke up wondering if he should go to one of the Whyos and tell them what had happened. It was all the clearer to him now that they really had been protecting him from Luther Undertoe, that Undertoe really had been a threat. But would they still help him now? Could they? Would they just decide to get rid of him themselves, the way he’d feared at the start? There was no statute of limitations on murder, as Beatrice had told him. He ate poorly, went to work and came home. He begged off sick rather than eat with the Henleys or do his sample collections with Sarah Blacksall, thinking it was wiser not to go to Manhattan at all.

Then one morning, a week after Undertoe had gone to see Jones, Harris began to feel a pain in his gut. His stomach lurched at any sudden noise. It felt like something hard and indigestible had lodged in his intestines and was biting into them. It stayed with him until he was up on the tower, but there, in a place so high most people’s stomachs would have folded, his anxieties fell away. It was heaven up there, and in addition the top of the tower was an utterly defensible fortress aerie, a place where every approach could be seen far in advance. Where he might have fled to if he ever were pursued to the top of the tower was another matter—there was only one way down—but the stomach is not a rational being. It and he felt safe there, and he came to dread quitting time the way most people dread the beginning of a shift.

For a month, his mind raced constantly with worried questions about how Undertoe had found and recognized him. Which of his blunders had compromised his cover? Had he been tailing him a long time, the same way Fiona had? Was he still? Was Harris endangering Mr. Noe by staying there? He thought of telling Mr. Noe but couldn’t bring himself to. And then, well, nothing happened. No one came after him. Undertoe did not show up at his door, nor did the cops. As winter bled uneventfully into early spring, he began to think that he really had dreamed it up—all except for the fact that his coat had stunk of kerosene the next day.

Harris and the crew were mixing mortar on top of the tower one day in March when one of the loads that came up on the crane had a note attached to it. The men on the ground generally communicated with the tower using a semaphore of bells and flags and hand signals, but for anything outside the usual set of messages they resorted to notes. This one said Harris was wanted down at the office. There were a few jokes to the effect that he was either going to be promoted or fired, but no one made much of it. But Harris’s stomach was in an uproar. He couldn’t go immediately, though, as they were right in the middle of setting a block.

They had already spread the prepared surface with cement, and the bottom edges of the new stone had been trimmed. The stone was fitted into the sling, and Harris was on the guyline. It took several men to hoist each stone in the air, while the men on the guylines kept the stones from swinging wild. Carefully, they brought the arm of the boom derrick around and positioned the stone over the mortar bed. The wind was strong, and the linemen had to use every ounce of their weight to keep the load steady as it was lowered. Finally, the pins set into the top level of the tower were aligned with the sockets cut in the new stone and everything slid into place, just like the latch of a well-hung door clicking shut. They cleaned up the seams and locked the derrick in place, and then Harris headed down.

The footbridge that connected the tower to the ground undulated under the footsteps of anyone upon it. A sign posted at the bottom read
SAFE FOR ONLY 25 MEN AT ONE TIME. DO NOT WALK CLOSE TOGETHER NOR RUN, JUMP OR TROT. BREAK STEP
!
It was far from the most dangerous place on the site, but compared to the rock-solid tower it was rickety going. Harris slid his palms along the cable handrails as he went and tried to convince himself there was something good waiting for him below—that promotion to cutter he’d dreamed of. But when he was halfway down, he saw a group of uniformed men in the yard near the office, looking in the direction of the footbridge, the tower and him. Four of them. His stomach began to thrash. There were black blotches in his vision, and he stopped short on the gangway and gripped the wire rails. A ripple traveled up the boards behind him and back, like a wave on the sea. He tasted sweet and bitter, saliva and bile, and a moment later a yellow bolus of Harris’s vomit was sailing through the air—a hundred eighty, a hundred, twenty feet to go—and then it landed in the river with a tiny splat and was gone. On the pier, the master mechanic was standing with the police, noticing it all.

“What was that?” asked Lieutenant Jones. “Looked like he dropped something.”

“I’d say that was his breakfast.”

Harris stood up. A long string of mucus and saliva trailed from his chin, and then the wind carried it off. He was light-headed, his knees were wobbly and everything was blurry. He was fully aware of just how easy it would be to follow his doughnut and coffee to a watery grave. A part of him would have preferred that to facing judgment, but the greater part of Harris, the part that had been growing in the time since he’d left the gang, believed that the truth would prevail. He squatted down, held on and breathed deeply. Ten seconds later, he was seeing clearly again and slowly picking his way down the planks to terra firma.

“Feeling ill?” asked the master mechanic. He frowned as if it were a moral failing.

“Just some stomach trouble, sir.”

“Dizzy?”

“No, sir.”

“Well then, there are some men who’d like to speak to you, Harris.”

The police’s strategy was to interrogate Harris in a manner that would not raise alarm in an innocent man. They took him to a room in the bridge office and in the company of one of the master mechanic’s assistants told him they were looking into a crime that might have been committed by a man of his name. It was merely routine, Lieutenant Jones insisted, but they were interviewing as many Frank Harrises as they could find, including, he might be amused to hear, a young boy working in the Manhattan caisson. Harris hadn’t heard there was another Frank Harris on the bridge, but he knew a kid named O’Hara, he said, feeling a queer surge of gratitude to Dandy Johnny. Hiding in plain sight. They asked him some questions about his career, which he sketched as far back as the paving crew. “That was my first job here,” he said. It was the first one he’d put down when he filled out his papers at the bridge office, anyway. He gave the name of the English boat on which the other Frank Harris had arrived, around the same time Georg Geiermeier did, all just as Beatrice had prepared him to do in just this eventuality. He did it all pretty calmly, too, considering the shifty way his stomach had just behaved. But it was easy—it had been drilled into him by Beatrice two hundred times, and he’d used it ever since. They asked his whereabouts on Christmas Eve, and he told them he’d been working with Sarah Blacksall. It all checked out. Jones walked away studying the small, yellowed square of newspaper with the portrait of George “the Torch” Geiermeier. The man looked vaguely similar to it. What with the intervening years and the rigid expression of photographs, it was possible Harris was Geiermeier, except that Harris’s English was perfect, his accent undeniably Irish, and he was a skilled stoneworker with a convincing story, reasonable-sounding alibis and no history of criminal involvement. Jones wanted Undertoe to be right, but this was looking pretty far-fetched.