Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I knew that before you did. It was all there, in The Coach King. That’s not what I want you to talk to him about. I want you to tell him to call off his dogs.”

  “Dogs?”

  “His people. His lawyers. His money. The only use he makes of any of them anymore is to turn them loose on people. After you’ve got everything else out of them, that’s what’s left.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no reason you should. But you will, if you ever get off the loading dock.”

  The group was migrating in their direction. Ford’s bony fingers suddenly gripped Harlan’s upper arm like a bundle of wires and turned him. Now both their backs were to the world.

  “Selden is a wooden owl, a decoy,” he said. “The A.L.A.M. paid him ten thousand for the right to exercise his patent. Any money they manage to extort from the other automobile companies is in the way of a bonus. They don’t need it; they’re all millionaires. They’re only working together to destroy me. Why do you think they wouldn’t let me join?”

  “But why you?”

  “Your family isn’t wrong about you. You’re slow. Who in this town hates me enough to close down my plant and put hundreds of people out of work?”

  Harlan shook his head. “My father would never throw in with automobile men.”

  “They aren’t automobile men. Have you ever seen Selden’s car? Of course you haven’t; there isn’t one. His patent doesn’t cover any practicable machine. None can be made from it or ever was. Or ever will. You’ll hear nothing more of the A.L.A.M. once the Ford shop closes. Your father will dismantle it like a coach that’s done its work.”

  “He’s a businessman, not a buccaneer. Anyway, he’s convinced automobiles won’t catch on. As he sees it, you’re no threat.”

  “Not to his business. His family is another matter. There’s no telling what a man will do if he thinks his son is being stolen from him.”

  The others were near, reliving at the tops of their voices the details of the adventure they had all witnessed. Harlan started to say something. Ford squeezed his biceps painfully and it turned into a short cry. The automobile man leaned in uncomfortably close. Harlan felt his hot breath in his ear.

  “Tell him to call off his dogs. If he won’t do it, tell him to go ahead and set them loose. I’m at fighting weight and he’s rusty. He can’t wear me down.”

  Then they were enveloped. Huff piloted the Arrow up the bank to where the flatbed wagon that had brought it waited to take it away, Ford let go of Harlan’s arm, and the crowd drifted toward Jefferson, Ford in the center. Harlan was left alone on the edge of the lake.

  Crazy Henry, he thought.

  chapter eleven

  The Summit

  “CARA MIA, YOU’RE LOSING your appetite. Are you feeling ill?”

  The question, delivered in Maribel’s musical northern Italian accent, dripped with sincerity. There was concern in her great dark eyes, little inverted commas of worry at the corners of her wide mouth. The long fine fingers touching the back of his hand where it rested on the table held the power to love and heal. James Aloysius Dolan considered that in twenty years of politics he had never been lied to so successfully.

  He smiled, feeling his face break into weary lines. “I’m right as rain, sweet child,” he said. “Just a bit tired. You’ll get used to seeing me this way during an election year.”

  She smiled then, her teeth blue-white against red lips and olive skin, patted his hand, and withdrew hers just as Fritz, the headwaiter at the Shamrock Club, came in to take away the corned-beef platter, clucking when he observed that it was still half full; the Countess, whose system would not support most Irish fare, had contented herself with a small dish of noodles and a glass of burgundy. When they were alone again she took Dolan’s hand in her cool grip. They were not trying to delude anyone about their relationship; merely observing the proprieties. At the Shamrock, mistresses were regarded as a fact of life so long as the carnal nature of the arrangement was not paraded about like a shillelagh on St. Paddy’s Day. Nevertheless Dolan, whose sensitivity to the opinions of others no matter how well concealed formed the crux of his success in public life, felt diminished in Fritz’s esteem. True, he was just a waiter. But Dolan’s standing in the community rested upon a foundation built of waiters, porters, bricklayers, coal shovelers, switchmen, domestics, and teamsters; pry loose but one and the entire structure was weakened.

  What was worse, he felt shrunken in his own regard. Often when he was with Maribel, and always when he was not, he thought that the intoxication induced by the heavy spirit was not worth the feeling of misery when it wore off. In truth, she was not all she appeared on the surface, but rather inferior tobacco in a good wrapper, cheap ale poured from a decanter designed for aged claret. Her private habits were coarse. She neither shaved her armpits nor pushed the door to when she used the water closet, serenading him with the sounds of her base biology. At those times he would help himself to a slug of the good Irish whisky he bought for the sideboard in the bedroom of the flat he rented for her on Howard Street and frame his farewell speech. Then she would emerge from the bedroom wearing a floor-length sweep of diaphanous black lace, the bill for which had been sent to his office by Hudson’s, drenched in the musklike imported perfume he’d paid for at Partridge & Blackwell’s, and he would lose track of his golden words in the smothering moist scent of her skin, the sweet stinging agony of her nails on his back, the furnace heat of the steaming grotto between her thighs. Later, spent and self-loathing, he would slip out of the bed where she lay snoring, dress quickly, and creep downstairs and out into the light of a late afternoon sun scowling down at him, reminding him sternly what nighttime and shadows were for.

  He would not, could not, go straight home to Charlotte from Maribel; thus he had formed the new habit of dropping into Diedrich Frank’s saloon and washing away his sin with liquor, unaccompanied by a platter of food. He was eating less, but he was not losing weight. His full face was bloating and his complexion had gone from robust red to a liverish purple and his eyes appeared to be swimming in blood. No one he met remarked upon the change, yet he could see it reflected in their own faces, in the split second’s hesitation before they responded to something he had said, as if they were preoccupied with his appearance and what it meant to his performance and their own fortunes. He wanted to shout at them, to shock them into saying what they were thinking. He did not. He was afraid they would take him up on the challenge. In the old days he had been fond of saying that he would rather have people say negative things behind his back than to his face, because that would mean they had lost their fear of him and his influence. He did not care to test his theory, because he might prove it to be correct. And so he went through the motions of his days in a clammy-cold jacket of dread.

  He had been with Maribel seven months. He had first met her knowing gaze, the bottomless black shafts of the eyes into which he thought all his secrets had been poured, on board the ferry to Belle Isle on Memorial Day. Two more weeks had passed before he felt the dry cool touch of her hand, when Vito Grapellini introduced her to him at a twenty-five-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner at the Cadillac Hotel. The butcher, his fat face gleaming above the high white collar of his dress shirt, wearing a tailored evening jacket paid for by the prime rib he had sold to the Democratic Party for the affair, explained that the Countess diViareggio was in the midst of a tour of the United States to reduce the pain of the recent loss of her husband, and that she had asked to meet this man Dolan of whom so much was said in every quarter of the city. He had responded with equal parts self-deprecation and Old Country blarney. Charlotte was at home, looking after their daughter Margaret, who had a case of the sniffles. When later in the evening Grapellini came over to Dolan’s table, pleading a problem with the refrigeration system that required his attention at the shop, Dolan agreed to escort the countess to her hotel. (The story she had told Abner Crownover at the theater, about visiting relatives, was a
fabrication suggested by Dolan. He did not want it bandied about that he was keeping company with an adventuress.) He bade her good night at the door of her room and went home, but to all intents and purposes the affair had begun that night.

  Charlotte, he was satisfied, did not suspect. What was commonly understood among the fifteen or twenty men with whom he associated on a regular basis was barred to her by a covenant as old as Man. She did, however, note the change in him, and the steep decline in his appetite, and had asked him if he didn’t think he was working too hard. Of late she had become more insistent about his seeing a doctor. He had agreed to make an appointment with Charley Hennessey for a complete physical examination, entirely to throw her off the trail which from the time of Eve had always drawn the senses of Woman to the correct conclusion unless they were distracted. He knew what was wrong with him, and he knew the cure. Taking it was the problem.

  “DeWolf Hopper is performing at the Temple Saturday night,” said Maribel, scooping a forkful of apple cobbler out of a dish dusted with powdered sugar. “Will you take me? I met him in New York last winter. He told such funny stories.”

  “I don’t know if I can get away Saturday night.”

  “Of course you can. It’s an election year. Tell her you’re meeting someone important. You will not even be telling a lie.” Her eyes glinted above the fork.

  “Make sure you want to see this fellow. We mustn’t make this a habit. A lot of my constituents go to the Temple Theater.”

  “You are ashamed of me, yes?” The glint turned steely.

  “You know that’s not true. It’s all very well for my associates to know about you and me. Voters are a horse of a different color. Their wives will never stand for it.”

  “Their wives cannot vote.”

  “They don’t mark the ballots, but they might as well. No married man who values peace will vote against his wife’s principles.”

  “You think they don’t know?”

  “Rumors are one thing. It’s quite another to shove the proof in their faces.”

  “Well, I want to see Wolfie.”

  “Wolfie, is it, now? How did you meet him?”

  “We were introduced by friends. It was a big party at the Hippodrome.”

  “Last winter, you said? January or February?”

  “No, it was earlier. December.”

  Dolan set down his glass. His face felt numb, as if he had exposed it to the frigid air outside. “You were in New York December before last? How soon was that after your husband the count died?”

  “Oh, weeks.” She took another forkful.

  “You told me he died in Tuscany at Christmas. The fastest boat in the world could not have gotten you to America between Christmas and the end of December. Just when did he die? Was he ever born to begin with?”

  She looked up, startled. A swift pallor crossed her face. And then, as if by an act of will, her color returned, bringing with it a hardness he had not seen before. She let her fork slide into her plate and folded her hands under her chin, studying him as from a great distance. And in the silence before she spoke, Dolan felt it was he who had been caught in a monstrous lie.

  He had an appointment with Strick back at the office, to discuss the amount in the campaign chest and how best to spend that portion not already earmarked for himself and others in the party organization, but he did not keep it nor send word that it was canceled. He asked Fritz to see that the Countess got back to her flat and headed home, hailing a four-wheeler instead of riding the streetcar or walking the short distance. The latter two choices presented the risk of his being recognized and addressed, and forced to wonder how many of those with whom he spoke were aware of his shame, the extent to which he had willingly assisted in his own destruction. For the first time in his life he feared human contact.

  In the past, when a close and important election race had been lost or a trusted associate had shifted his loyalties to another camp, Jim Dolan had taken comfort from a carriage ride through the streets he loved. Baked in the heat of summer that brought out all the pastels and straw hats and parasols like so many blossoms, drenched in the cleansing showers of spring, or cloaked, as today, in a fresh fall of winter snow that obliterated the venial sins of broken pavement and litter, the city had always assured him that it would go on regardless of the transgressions of the moment, waiting patiently and with bottomless love to welcome its returning flock. Today it showed him the hard, frozen face of a spouse betrayed one time past forgiveness. Its ears were deaf to poetic speeches; no amount of bouquets or baskets would penetrate the horned growth that covered its heart. Its sterile whites and bleak grays told him he had profaned the gift he had been given ahead of all his peers, all for the sake of a common thing, a weakness he deplored in his friends and attacked in his enemies. He felt low and mean and—unheard of thing, since he had outgrown his first pair of knickerbockers—small. And he felt on his own.

  The driver drew rein suddenly, jerking him forward and tumbling his trilby off his head to the floorboards between his feet. Retrieving it, he saw the reason for the abrupt maneuver: A preposterous arrangement on spoked wheels with a black canvas top and a scrolled metal front had lurched out from a side street, startling the horses and turning into traffic with a clatter of pistons and an angrily bleating horn, as if the road were its personal property and all activity that did not stop and pay it tribute had violated some natural law. The motorcar drew all his rage and self-loathing like a lightning rod; here was the thing that was to blame for his purgatory, that had warped his judgment and caused him to lose sight of the great tapestry for a single snag in the thread.

  No. It wasn’t automobiles.

  The carriage started moving again. They were nearing his door. He raised his stick, touching the driver’s arm and drawing his attention, and gave him another address.

  “Are you sure, sir?” The driver, an obvious Irishman mottled with freckles from the brim of his old-fashioned topper to the heavy woolen scarf wrapped around his throat, had recognized his passenger. As was the way in such situations, he appeared to have assumed the responsibility of Dolan’s entire future. “It’s clear—”

  “I know where it is,” snapped the other. A lie; he had been doing business with the establishment at that address for years and had never laid eyes on it.

  He had, it was true, visited the neighborhood, although not stopping any longer than it took to bellow the same phrases he’d been using for a decade above bumping brass, two-finger whistles, and the occasional raspberry from an opposition plant. He scarcely recognized the place in January. The vegetable carts and sidewalk stands were missing, and so were the teeming crowds that in gentle weather blanketed the streets and impeded the progress of brewers’ drays and engine-company pump-wagons. The stoops and fire escapes, normally used for stadium seating, looked empty and naked, as in photographs in books of European ghettos evacuated by pogroms. Such pedestrians as presented themselves hastened across the carriage’s path with hats pulled down, collars turned up, and fists thrust deep into their coat pockets, barely glancing right and left as they dashed toward shelter across razor winds blowing bits of snow like iron filings between the buildings. Dolan, who had not noticed when the names stenciled on the shop signs changed from German to Italian, was surprised when they drew up in front of a vacant-looking brickfront with a fogged display window and thought the driver had made a mistake. When he challenged him, the fellow merely pointed with his whip at the black-enameled numerals fixed above the front door. Only the first four letters of the legend GRAPELLINI’S MEATS could be read on the frosted glass.

  The shopfront was shallow, ending ten feet in at a plate-glass display counter that ran the width of the room, with chops and racks of ribs and mounds of ground beef inside, advertising their prices on little signs sticking up out of the meat. The floor was paved with black and white linoleum tiles in a checkerboard pattern, kept clean with the help of a rubber runner inside the door, which collected tracked-in mud
and slush from the sidewalk. Homemade signs tacked to the green-painted walls above the wainscoting announced sale prices on sides of beef, whole hams, and stewing leghorns. The room was brightly lighted by a row of white porcelain bowl fixtures suspended by poles from the ceiling. Every surface shone and the smell of disinfectant was strong.

  No one was standing behind the counter when Dolan stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind him, jangling a bell mounted on a spring clip atop the frame. A moment later, a door opened at the back, accompanied by a whoosh of working compressors, and Vito Grapellini emerged from a thick cloud of vapor. He made an incongruous sight in a heavy corduroy coat, brown jersey gloves, and the summery straw boater that was part of the uniform of his profession, worn at a jaunty angle. As the thick cooler door drifted shut against the pressure of its pneumatic closer, he recognized his visitor and stripped off his gloves to reach across the counter and shake Dolan’s hand. Dolan accepted his grasp out of long habit.

  “Signor Dolan! What an honor and a surprise.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He?” The butcher’s fat smile remained in place, but the brightness went out of his eyes as if a veil had slid between them and his brain.

  “Your partner. I want to see Borneo.”

  Now the smile was gone. “He is upstairs. I will tell him you are here.” He squeezed his bulk through the narrow space between the end of the counter and the right wall.

  “I’ll go up with you.”

  The butcher paused, then jerked his chin in a brief nod. He went out through the front door and held it for Dolan. When they were both outside he drew the door shut.

  “Aren’t you going to lock it?”

  Grapellini snorted rudely. “When Signor Borneo becomes my partner I throw away the key.”

  Dolan followed him into the narrow alley alongside the building, through a side door, and up a flight of rubber-runnered stairs between walls of mustard-colored plaster. At the top they turned down a wainscoted hallway with a hardwood floor, lit only by the weak fixture over the staircase and a morsel of winter sunlight coming through a window at the other end, which looked out on the brick wall of the blacksmith’s shop next door. Ten feet short of the window they stopped before a blank door and Grapellini rapped on one of the panels. A muted voice from the other side asked who it was.