Metropolis (7 page)

Every time he got ahead, something happened to undo his progress, so that his whole life till now was an up-and-down jig that kept moving backward no matter how many forward steps he made. When he had passed through Hamburg on his way to America, he’d been frightened to leave everything behind, fearful the police would catch him before he got away, and yet above all he’d been hopeful. He went back to the Dicke Wirtin, the bar he’d often gone to, and asked after the girl he’d spent so many nights with when he had worked on the cathedral. She’d been gone a good year, the proprietress told him.

“But where?”

“Not moved away, pet. Dead. Now what about someone else?” she asked. “I have plenty of blondes. I’ll make sure you get your money’s worth.” He left without another word. The only other person he’d have liked to see was Meister Teichold, but given his precarious situation he didn’t try to find him. Instead, the morning after he’d bought the Geiermeier papers and his ticket on the
Leibnitz,
he waited with the tourists and the schoolboys in the long line to climb the newly completed cathedral tower. At the top, he’d looked out over the city and felt dizzy. But it wasn’t so much veritgo as nausea. He was simply full of grief and remorse and fear of what would become of him in New York. He’d had no idea, then, that the Hamburg skyline, with its five great church towers braced like God’s daggers against the infidel sea, was so much grander and more beautiful than New York’s dingy, wide, low one.

When the bells rang at five, the only thing he was sure of was what he wanted for breakfast: eggs, pancakes, bacon, toast, oatmeal with milk and sugar. And coffee. Two cups of coffee. He was ravenous and bone weary. The snow had begun to glow with the indirect light of predawn as he hopped into the cart of the crew he was with and led the men back to Coffee House Slip. When they got close, the smell from the coffee warehouse made his mouth begin to water, but then he made out the lean figure of Luther Undertoe kicked back against a lamppost near the office door. The rest of the men were waiting in the equipment shed, warming themselves by the potbelly stove. Will stepped past Undertoe into the office, where it was warm and dry.

“Good morning,
Mr. Williams.
”

At first he wasn’t sure—had Undertoe betrayed him? It took him a moment to register the man’s goodwill, another to return the civility. The lag would have been obvious to anyone who even suspected that Williams wasn’t his name, but the night manager wasn’t suspicious. He was pleased. He was smiling.

“Mr. Williams, you’ve done great work. Why, ordinarily it would take this department half the week to undo what nature did in a day. I’ve got good news for you. If you and your boys want it, there’s going to be work again tonight, when the regular sweepers go home. While I make out vouchers, you can sign up the ones that are worth their salt for tomorrow.”

“Vouchers,” said Will. Of course. The night manager would hardly be capable of doling out so many payments in dollars and cents. But you couldn’t buy breakfast or a bed on a voucher. He needed cash. His body thrummed with hunger and panic.

Meanwhile, the men of the regular sanitation corps wandered into the large equipment shed for the morning shift, joining the night crew where they waited to be paid. By the time Will and the night manager got there, the garbagemen’s jackets had begun to give off a stench. It was dead hog, stale beer, rotten perch, rancid milk, moldy slops, sewer slime, night soil, you name it—a miasma theorist’s nightmare and an unhappy smell even to those who didn’t believe vapors spread disease.

There was less grousing about the vouchers than Will had expected. No one who was working under him that night was quite as flat broke as he; they could wait till Monday to cash their vouchers. And as for Undertoe, he had seventy beans in his blueboy. His was an easy-come-and-go economy of faro, molls, booze, poppy and hydrate of chloral—an expensive substance that was sold by the drop in glass phials but an excellent investment, since a dram could render a dozen men insensate and vulnerable. Undertoe had any number of ways of earning his daily bread, but shoveling certainly wasn’t normally among them.

Undertoe went out and bought himself the breakfast our man was dreaming of. After he’d eaten, he found he was plagued by a shard of bacon lodged in his teeth. He sucked and probed, but it was firmly stuck between the upper left first molar and second bicuspid. Then he found a slip of folded paper in his pocket, used it as a toothpick and peered at the offending object. It was smaller than he expected, the particle, and so was the figure he saw written to the right of the dollar sign. Not that he needed the money, but the fact that he’d stayed up all night shoveling, just to keep his eye on Geiermeier, and that the pay was this paltry—well, it fairly made the hairs at the small of his back bristle. Add to that that the fellow was turning out to be a bit odd, a bit unpredictable, and to have an attitude to boot. First, he’d interrupted Undertoe’s amusement with that girl. Then it had almost seemed like he was picking a fight, like he knew more than he ought to. Undertoe felt a bubble of discomfort in his solar plexus, the kind of pain that’s indigestion, if it isn’t angina. He picked the smidgen of bacon from the edge of the voucher and popped it in his mouth, then let forth a bilious ribbet.
Will Williams
was it now? Not very savvy. But if he did know more than he let on, why had he made such a point of revealing his new alias? There was something off about the man. An image flashed through Undertoe’s mind: George Geiermeier, alias Will Williams, slit straight open, liver to anus. He smiled.

At which point Will was still chatting about the depth of the snow with the night manager. “Oh, at least two feet,” he speculated, stomach rumbling, never guessing how Pyrrhic his small rebuke of Luther Undertoe could turn out to be, nor that his more immediate adversary, Beanie, was out on the pier, shivering and impatient, waiting.

8.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

A
t 7:00
A.M.,
though it was barely light out, a small cluster of people had already gathered at a side door of Bellevue Hospital on Twenty-fifth Street on the far east side. One of the men stepped forward and lifted the heavy bronze knocker, and when the door was opened the lamplight from within glimmered against the gilded letters carved into the lintel overhead:
MORGUE.

A body had been discovered deep in the wreckage of Barnum’s museum the day before, and it was in surprisingly good shape when it was found—no burns or visible injuries. The story in the
Sun
was based mostly on a brief statement made by the chief of police, so the reporter wasn’t able to mention that the girl had come in frozen solid, in a slumped-over, seated position. But now she was thawed and ready to meet the press.

The morgue attendant, whose name was Louie, invited the party inside and took down their names in a large black book. Then he asked them to wait in the lobby while he went back to his office, put his feet up, and flipped through the paper. It was the usual procedure, except that this was Sunday morning, and the morgue didn’t open to the public till eight. This was a special showing. Even so, Louie had learned it was advisable to make all visitors, whoever they were, sit for a while and get used to the place—its smells, its prospects—before introducing them to the bodies. It reduced the amount of swooning. Louie didn’t have to read the coverage in the early edition of the
Sun
to get the story of the murder and its victim—he knew her a bit more intimately than that by now. But he was eager to know the progress of the case, and he was pleased with what he read. There it stood, in plain type, for the edification of the populace: They had a suspect. Someone would hang for this.

The group in the waiting room included an officer of the metropolitan police, half a dozen members of the press—sketch artists and reporters from the major daily and weekly papers—representatives of several institutions for social reform, a lady physician, and an employee of P. T. Barnum. The one that Louie was worried about was the lady physician, Sarah Blacksall, and the problem was that she wasn’t just a woman but a real
lady—
the kind he knew tended to be squeamish. Louie needn’t have worried himself. Dr. Blacksall had seen more cadavers in her courses at the Women’s Medical College than the rest of that rather hard-boiled group ever would, combined—all excepting him, of course, and one other. The other was Luther Undertoe.

In his capacity as deputy security guard and general odd-job man for P. T. Barnum, Undertoe had been sent to verify whether the girl was an employee, the girlfriend of an employee, or anyone otherwise known to have frequented the museum or its stables. As they entered the dead room, he reached inside his collar and scratched the rash on his neck.

Louie pointed to the leftmost table. He pulled the sheet back—it was wet and clung to the body—exposing the girl’s head and shoulders. She was young and dark haired. But the most salient fact about the cadaver had been revealed even through the sheet, by the bulge in the middle: She was pregnant.

“She ain’t one of ours,” said Undertoe quickly. “I don’t know her.”

“Nor I,” tsked the matron of women from the Five Points House of Industry.

“So young,” said the sketch artist from
Harper’s,
as he began to draw. And then to Louie: “Can you tell me the way her hair was arranged when she came in?” Hair was crucial for a likeness.

“Are those her clothes?” asked a reporter, gesturing at the ruined gown that dangled from a hook on the wall at the head of the table.

“May I?” asked Dr. Blacksall with a glance at the sergeant. At his shrug, she approached the table and removed the sheet entirely.

She wasn’t just great at the belly. She had swollen breasts and ankles like overstuffed, underdone pork pies. Pregnancy can be beautiful, if the woman’s alive; in death, it is hideous. And yet there was a strange aura about the girl, something shimmering and almost invisible. She and the slightly tilted granite table she lay on were shiny wet, running with a cool, thin sheet of Croton water that spritzed onto her forehead from a nozzle above and spread out across her flesh, keeping it cool. It was a modern design that greatly postponed decomposition. Dr. Blacksall approved of it. She leaned down to the young woman’s ear as if to whisper something and inspected the skin around her neck and jaw. Then she shooed the others from where they gaped at the foot of the table and asked them to wait outside. Louie cocked his head, but Sergeant Jones nodded. Permission had been arranged.

When Dr. Blacksall was alone with Louie, the sergeant and the girl, she bent the girl’s right leg at the knee and peered between her thighs, almost as she would have with a living patient. She removed several articles from her bag, laid them on the table and asked for a candle. Louie assisted reluctantly. A few minutes later, when she’d completed her examination, Sarah Blacksall laid her hand on the girl’s cold, wet knee. It was just 7:30, but she had already seen more than she cared to that day. She left the morgue in a state of melancholy and determination.

Luther Undertoe was in another mood entirely. He had taken courteous leave of the sergeant, an old acquaintance, and he was whistling “Willy the Weeper” as he sauntered down the street and away from the morgue, his mind idly rehearsing the words as he puckered and trilled, just a half tone out of key. He had several errands planned for that day, most of them to do with his work for Barnum, but there was also a meeting at the Central Park menagerie with a gentleman who owed him a considerable sum in cash. He was tired after the night of shoveling but looking forward to the ride uptown.

Meanwhile, Will was sitting in a coffeehouse across from the first man he’d met in years who seemed to like him and to appreciate the work he’d done.

“Eggs?” the night manager had asked. “Rasher? It’s on me.”

How could he say no, when his stomach was a yawning cavern that threatened to digest itself? The night manager had sensed his hunger and his poverty in the way he’d blinked at his pay voucher, and so he had invited him out for breakfast. So there he sat, eating bacon, trying to ignore the shame: shame that he had nowhere to go, shame that he needed his breakfast bought for him, shame that he had no money, shame that he’d lived on to get himself in so much trouble, when others far worthier had gone to their rewards. Shame ran in his blood, a cocktail of Protestant self-loathing with a splash of Jewish guilt, but he was not living according to his bloodline anymore, and he had determined not to let it mire him. It helped when the night manager said to him, after second cups of coffee were brought, “You’re a hard worker, Williams. I like the way you supervised those men. What I’m thinking is, there could be a place for you in this department. Things are changing in New York, you know. It doesn’t even matter that you’re German. Do you know about the Sanitary Commission? We’re trying to clean the city up—for real this time. We’re expanding. Men like you are needed.”

He thought of the street sweepers in that shed down at Coffee House Slip. It was the last thing he wanted, to join that wretched battalion, even as a foreman. He still had the whiff of their coats in his nose. “I’d like that,” he lied. Images of stone flickered past his eyes: granite, marble, limestone, and the great teetering scaffolds it took to turn them into steeples. Could he build up to that from being a garbageman?

“Why don’t you stick around tomorrow morning, after quitting. I’ll get the paperwork going on my end, and I can help you fill out the forms. Now, mind you, I’m not promising anything . . . but I can offer my personal recommendation.”

“Thank you,” Will Williams mumbled, “thank you very much.” He envisioned his future collecting horse dung and maggoty butcher’s tailings and all manner of filth from the streets. But then he took a sip of coffee and got ahold of himself. For now, he needed paying work, and he could make street cleaning do, if that was what had come his way. He would not
become
a garbageman; he would simply make the best of this opportunity and move on as soon as he could, possibly very soon. He smiled at the night manager, lifted his cup, and let the last dribble of sweet black coffee fall onto his tongue. Now he just had to find a warm place to pass the day—perhaps even sleep—and he’d be able to manage the second night’s work just fine. Soon, from there to something better.

They said good-bye on the street in front of the restaurant, and Will walked up Broadway, trying to look as if he had a purpose and a place to go.

He was wondering what his first step should be, in attempting to investigate the fire, and he wasn’t the least bit sure. The going was hard on the sidewalk, where much of the snow from the street had been piled in great banks but not yet carted to the river, and after a block or two he decided to walk in the street. Then an omnibus approached, a team of six horses pulling two passenger cars on the streetcar tracks. He was pleased—his work had enabled the buses to run—but then he had to scramble up onto a bank of snow considerably taller than he was to get out of its way. When the mountain of snow ended, he found himself sliding down the other side on his behind, and he laughed aloud. Last night he’d been by turns too worried, too hungry, and too busy to enjoy the snow, but now he remembered that however much work and inconvenience it made, a heavy snow was also a delight. It covered the ugliness of the world, made hard things soft, and anyplace at all a playground. And then, thinking how soon such a pristine snowbank would turn gray and dirty on Broadway, he dug in his heels, got a running start and hurled himself back over the bank. He rolled all the way down the other side to where the sidewalk was still more than knee-deep in fluffy snow. He lay there smiling to himself for a moment before gathering his wits and dusting himself off. Then he did it again. The morning was still so young and the street was quiet; he was sure no one saw his display, but even if they did, what did he care?

He was wrong, of course. Undertoe may have moved on to other matters, being confident he knew where to find his man again that evening, but Beanie and Fiona were still on the job, quite frankly exasperated with how difficult it was turning out to be to corner him somewhere private and deliver Johnny’s message. It’s not all that easy to tail a man in a world that’s blinding white. They were slightly ahead of him when he opted to jump, and they’d hurled themselves over the snowbank in the other direction to avoid coming face-to-face with him when he landed. But when he went back over, what could they do? They ran off in a mirage of snowballs and giggles. By all rights he ought to have gotten suspicious—they’d been tailing him for a little too long for him not to have noticed—but he didn’t seem to find anything odd about seeing them again; he just smiled and trudged off through the powder.

Still, the girls were more careful after that. They split up, Beanie at times as much as a block ahead, Fiona lagging. From time to time they exchanged a couple of low Why Not whistles that were lost among the snow-muffled noises of the city long before they reached his ears. They stayed a little further away from him from then on but continued to follow him.

As they were heading uptown, Undertoe moved south. He was looking for a newsboy he employed on the side, a kid he knew to have deft fingers and cleverly constructed pockets in the lining of his coat. And Jimmy was always game: He’d carry out even the most unusual of errands, exactly as asked to, and afterward keep quiet about it. Undertoe was coaching him to do more. At Astor Place, he spotted him.

“
Extra! Extra!
” the boy crowed, performing a little when he saw Undertoe approach. He was hoping for a job. You could learn a lot from crooks like the Undertaker, he’d found—not so much by asking them anything (which would only shut them up) or listening to what they said (which was usually the opposite of what they meant) but by watching how they worked.

“Morning to you, Jimster,” Undertoe smirked.

“Likewise, Mister U. Seen the special edition?” Undertoe had seen only the
Sun,
so he shook his head and the Jimster tossed a copy of the
Tribune
his way, catching in midair the dime Undertoe flipped back. It was a bit of a disappointment, coming from the Undertaker, even if the paper cost only two cents.

But then Undertoe pointed to the cover story and said, “I want you to look out for this Geiermeier guy. The one we saw get dragged off the other night, the stableman. And let me know if you see or hear anything.” Almost as an afterthought, he reached into his pocket and brought out the voucher. He stuffed it into the Jimster’s breast pocket.

“Cash that thing in at the bank in the morning, why don’t you, Jimster. I don’t have the time. You want to hear something funny? I earned it myself—ten hours of hard labor last night.”

He left the Jimster puzzled but pleased and turned to the paper’s headlines.

There were several stories he was curious about, especially the murder of the girl found in the Barnum’s fire, but not just that—Undertoe had any number of balls in the air. More than a normal man needed, you might say. Why wasn’t he content with his day job for Barnum? Why on Earth had he spent the night shoveling snow, pushing our protagonist’s buttons? Pretty much for the same reasons he’d gouged out Sheeny Mike’s eye the month before in what ought to have been just an ordinary brawl, the same reasons he usually slit the throats of the whores he visited, the same reasons he’d stolen even the underclothes and shoes off that Poughkeepsie gentleman he’d rolled for his wallet a couple of weeks back and then left naked, bloody and unconscious in a dustbin. It was meanness; it was to keep the world on its toes; it was because he wanted people to fear him and to suffer, as he had, as his mother had; it was rage; it was revenge. His tactics were peculiar, even for the metropolis, and unpredictable, which made him hard to catch. He didn’t run with a gang—he couldn’t get along with people—unless you wanted to count his newsboy pawns. There were always one or two of them doing his bidding, but even they tended not to last very long. As soon as they started to get independent or a little too familiar or to know too much, he did away with them.