Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “Eliminate the wagon.”

  Dolan shook his head like an old bull. “You said killing was out.”

  “It was. It is. Dead men have a disconcerting habit of rising again as symbols, and there is no fighting a symbol. Killing Henry Ford would only cloak the automobile business in a heroic mantle. Truly destroying a man involves hollowing him out and leaving him standing, an empty wreck not even worth pitying.”

  “I’m beginning to get you.” The Irishman’s face felt hot.

  “I was certain you would. You’re a higher animal, able to learn from the past. George.”

  He spoke the name without raising his voice above the level of the conversation they’d been having, which was not engineered to carry to the other tables. Nevertheless, a man rose from his seat in a corner booth near the swinging door to the kitchen and offered a hand to someone who had been seated opposite him. The man was the shockingly ugly creature whom Dolan had first seen in Borneo’s office above the butcher shop away back in January. George Zelos, the name was. A Greek, but decidedly not the kind of which statues were made. The woman he helped to her feet could not have helped but appear beautiful by comparison, although indeed she was not. She had a long, homely face, and her drab brown hair was skinned back into a tight bun behind her head under a cheap hat. She wore a dress that upon a more handsome woman might have appeared endearingly simple. On her it was a nondescript print in a shade of gray unbecoming to her indoor pallor. Her downcast gaze and hesitant step as Zelos escorted her to his master’s table convinced Dolan that she belonged to the serving class.

  “James Aloysius Dolan, this is Agnes. She has asked that her surname not be used.” Borneo kept his seat.

  Dolan, not wishing to draw any more attention to himself than he already had, chose to remain seated also. Ordinarily he made it a point to greet every woman he met as if she were a lady. They did not vote, but many of them influenced their men, and in any case even a drunken bricklayer who beat his wife and abused his children preferred to support politicians who kept the proprieties. He nodded to the woman, who stood staring at the floor and twisting her hands in front of her.

  “Agnes was once employed in the Ford household in Dearborn as a maid. She lost her place after six weeks. There is no reason I should know that, except that Mrs. Ford hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to find her and bring her back for an interview. I’m indebted to a young Neapolitan for this information,” Borneo added. “I helped him find a position with the Toledo office as a records clerk.”

  Dolan pushed aside the untouched bowl of meatballs. He did not want to be distracted.

  “Tell Mr. Dolan what you told me, Agnes,” Borneo said.

  When the woman hesitated, Zelos tightened his grip on her arm. Pain flashed across her plain features.

  “George.” The Sicilian’s tone was the same as when he had summoned the man. George released the woman’s arm. She rubbed it.

  Borneo said, “Go ahead, child.”

  “Marty saw Mr. Ford touching me.” She had a strong Irish country brogue.

  “Marty was the scullery maid?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Mr. Ford sent us both away.”

  “He fired you and Marty?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dolan gripped his knees. “Where did he touch you?”

  “On my hand.” She stroked her right hand in a soft caress.

  The Irishman sat back, disgusted. “Is this what you asked me here to witness?”

  “Mrs. Ford heard enough to have her found and brought back,” Borneo said. “She would not have done that if she hadn’t reason to believe the rumors. Where there is smoke there is fire.”

  “The newspapers will laugh you out of town if this is all you have to bring them.”

  “That is more than likely. I am only a butcher. But you are the Irish Pope.”

  “No one calls me that to my face.”

  Borneo raised a conciliatory hand. “You have confederates on every newspaper staff in the city. If there are other Agneses, they will find them. Moral indignation sells papers. Prurient fascination sells even more.”

  “Even if there are other Agneses, the man’s private habits have nothing to do with his business.”

  “That will be Ford’s defense. As I’m sure it would have been yours in the case of our dear Maribel.”

  Dolan’s fingers cramped, cutting off circulation to his knees. He had been in mudslinging politics all of his adult life and had never hated anyone as thoroughly as he hated the man who sat facing him.

  Borneo’s eyes, dark and nonreflective, gave the impression of absorbing everything they saw and returning nothing. The depth of Dolan’s hatred for him was measured and recorded. “Agnes is staying at the Railroad Hotel as my guest. George is in the room next door. They’ll be at your service whenever you want them. My advice is not to wait too long. Have you seen this morning’s Free Press?”

  “I didn’t have time. I had to move up a morning meeting to make room for this one.”

  Borneo glanced up at Zelos, who took a tightly folded newspaper from the side pocket of his rough canvas coat and slapped it into his master’s hand. Borneo refolded it and passed it across to Dolan. The headline at the top of the first column read:

  CROWNOVER TO MAKE AUTO BODIES FOR FORD

  The iron ferrules that were used to reinforce the wheels used in Crownover vehicles were made at the company foundry in Cleveland, where pellets from the Kent Mining Company were smelted and poured and then hammered out by blacksmiths in long strips, to be cut to the desired lengths upon delivery in Detroit and fitted by the finest wheelwrights that could be had for wages. The strips arrived in sixteen-foot-long bundles bound with iron clamps and had to be unloaded by two-man teams. Harlan, who was short a man the day the new shipment arrived, lent his back, boarding the wagon and lifting the end of each bundle and guiding it over the tailgate, where a man seized the opposite end and helped him walk it onto the dock. The bundles were heavy and awkward and the unfinished edges of the strips sliced through a pair of stout leather work gloves like razors. Very soon Harlan’s palms were stung and bleeding.

  “Harlan!”

  He had not heard his name called in that tone in many years. When he turned, his father was standing on the dock before the entrance to the plant, with his younger brother Edward hulking behind. Abner II’s simian face was as white as his stiff collar except for patches of congestion like dark bruises on his cheeks and forehead. The old man was shaking visibly; Harlan thought of one of John and Horace Dodge’s engines being tested on the Ford block. He had a rolled-up newspaper clenched in one bony fist.

  Harlan stepped off the wagon and approached his father and brother at a normal pace. To himself it seemed he was walking very slowly, as if wading through water over his knees. His face felt numb, the nerves dead. He would remember each of these details for many years, but would describe them to no one.

  “Father. Ed. What a surprise.” It was the same greeting he had used when Abner had confronted him on the dock over his meeting with Big Jim Dolan more than a year before. That it should be unchanged under the present circumstances was the real surprise.

  “I wanted to talk to you about this before I demand a retraction.” Abner unrolled the newspaper and held it in front of him, stretching it between his hands. The paper rattled as in a high wind. It shook so badly Harlan couldn’t read the headline at the top of the lead column. He didn’t need to.

  “No retraction is necessary,” Harlan said. “The story’s true. I gave it to them right after I signed the contract with Ford.”

  “Then you’ll call them yourself. Your final act as an employee of this firm.”

  “Your final act,” Edward repeated.

  Abner said, “You’re a fool. That damned confidence man Ford has made you his instrument. I blame your mother for pestering me into giving you any part
in Crownover Coaches. She’s soft on weakness.”

  “You’re a fool,” said Edward.

  “I signed a contract.”

  Abner balled the newspaper between his fists as if it were the contract. “Your signature means nothing. The signature of a loading-dock foreman.”

  Inspired, Edward added, “A former loading-dock foreman.”

  Harlan was aware that all work in the plant had ceased. The laborers inside the building had come out to join the dock workers watching. Harlan felt a sudden loyalty toward his father. This was no event for spectators. “Let us discuss this in your office.”

  “The discussion is over. Get out. You’re trespassing on private property.” Abner pointed to one of the dock workers, a young bald-headed Irishman with an intelligent face. “You. What’s your name?”

  “Jimmy Doyle.”

  “Doyle, you’re temporary foreman. Do the job right for a week and I’ll make it permanent.”

  “Father.”

  Abner turned his back on Harlan. “Edward, call the police. If he’s not gone by the time they get here, swear out a complaint against him for trespassing.”

  Harlan slid a folded sheet of paper from the bib pocket of his overalls. “Father,” he said again.

  “Tell this man I’m not his father.”

  Before Edward could open his mouth to obey, his brother snapped open the sheet and held it out to him. “Show him this.”

  Edward didn’t take it. “What is it?”

  “It’s a letter from Byron Jakes, the company attorney. It confirms that I control forty-seven percent of Crownover stock, the largest single block. Larger than Father’s. Mother and Ab signed over their proxies to me last week. That puts me in charge of Crownover Coaches.”

  The ball of newspaper fell to the dock and bounced away. Abner snatched the letter out of Harlan’s hands just as Edward was reaching for it. Before he could read it, he bent double. His knees buckled and both his sons closed in to catch him under his armpits. Parchment that he was, stretched over brittle bone, he was as heavy as a bundle of iron strips. He made a gurgling sound and retched suddenly. Spots of bright scarlet the size of pennies appeared on the white sheet crushed in his right fist.

  part four

  The Harvest

  chapter fourteen

  Targets

  “GO AHEAD, TAKE A SHOT,” said Henry Ford.

  Harlan accepted the rifle hesitantly. It was a simple mechanism: The greasy little brass .22 cartridges were loaded flanged-end first down a narrow tube and introduced into the firing chamber one by one with a pumping action of the wooden slide, which cocked the hammer. Harlan, who had never before handled a firearm, lifted the walnut stock to his right shoulder, lined up the sights with his cheek resting against the stock the way Ford had instructed, and pressed the trigger. There was a sharp crack, and dust popped out of the rectangular bale of hay at the end of the room a good six inches to the left of the paper bull’s-eye target.

  “I guess I’m no Annie Oakley.” He returned the rifle.

  “It’s your first time. You did better than Wills. He missed the hay bale.”

  The room was long and narrow, with a partition erected along the left side to segregate it from the rest of the plant building on Piquette. To Harlan’s right was the brick exterior wall, the windows of which had been painted over recently; he could not tell if the turpentine smell was coming from that direction or belonged to the fresh pine of the partition. A shoulder-high bench had been added, with a scrap of green carpet tacked on top for the shooters to rest their elbows on when they were firing.

  “The Dodges are the best marksmen,” Ford said, taking his position and closing one bright eye. “They’re used to shooting at bartenders’ feet. I like to come in weekends and monkey with the sights. Last time I did that John got so worked up he shot out a window.” Chuckling, he squeezed off a round. The bullet scalloped the edge of the black bull’s-eye.

  Harlan said, “I’m not clear yet on just what shooting off a gun has to do with making automobiles.”

  “Not a thing, that’s the point. It ain’t healthy to just think about automobiles all the time. Dulls your edge. God knew that and it’s why He invented Sunday.”

  They went out and across the floor of the plant, where a number of modified Model Ns—now referred to, as Ford skipped his way through the alphabet, as the S—were in various stages of assembly. The workers banged and ratcheted and welded away without paying any attention to the visitors. Harlan had heard that Ford’s reaction, upon being asked by one of his foremen to bar outsiders from the plant because they made the workers self-conscious and prone to accidents, was to schedule almost daily tours by dignitaries, reporters, and curious members of the public until his employees no longer took notice.

  Ford stopped before a door in another partition and inserted a key attached to a large ring in a brass lock. On the other side he used the key again to lock the door. This room was less than one-quarter the size of the firing range—just big enough, Harlan noted, to contain an automobile (although none was present), with a little room to move around it—with a number of power tools slung from a wall rack and a blackboard mounted on a trestle. The board was blank.

  The room would not have been part of a Ford operation without a discordant feature. Harlan smiled at the old-fashioned spindle-back rocking chair in the corner but did not ask about it. “Design room?”

  Ford jerked his head in what passed for an affirmative nod. “You’ve met Joe Galamb, my best draftsman?”

  Harlan said he had not. The circle around his partner was always shifting, new faces taking the place of old ones; Malcolmson, for instance, almost never came around anymore, and it was whispered that he had broken with Ford over the coal merchant’s preference for ever-pricier models. Couzens had stepped forward to fill the gap. The feisty general manager’s enthusiastic support of Ford’s continuing opposition to legal maneuvers by the A.L.A.M. to shut him down had drawn them into a tight conspiracy, the bulldog and the wirehaired terrier always in a corner somewhere with their heads together.

  “Galamb’s a world-beater,” Ford said. “I never have to explain a thing to him twice. Look at what he ran up from my first rough sketch.” He paused dramatically with his hand on the blackboard, then spun it on its pivot to expose the other side.

  It bore a detailed sketch in white chalk of what appeared to be a bathtub on wheels. Up front was a radiator shaped like a tombstone with a curved and vented cowling behind it, folded up to expose a four-cylinder engine, as straight and simple as a shotgun barrel. The spindly undercarriage rode high upon four spoked wheels with sloping fenders and a bowl-shaped headlamp mounted on either side of the radiator. It was a homely throwback design, predating even the curved-dash Oldsmobile, and appeared too fragile to exist anywhere but on that blackboard.

  “… motorcar for the multitude,” Ford was saying; and Harlan realized he’d been talking for several moments. “Large enough to transport a family but small enough for the average man to operate and maintain without recourse to a garage. Constructed of the best materials, built by the best men on the simplest design. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to afford one. It will carpet the country.”

  Harlan found himself groping behind him for the arms of the rocking chair. He sank down onto the pressed-leather seat. Thus spared the difficulty of maintaining his balance, he set himself to thinking how best to tell Ford he had made a mistake.

  “The center of gravity is too high,” he said. “What’s to prevent it from tipping over when it turns a corner?”

  “It won’t. The wheelbase is longer than it looks.”

  “But will it stand up on the road? It looks as if it will break in half the first time it hits a bump.”

  “Wills is working on a new alloy he got from Sweden. Vanadium, it’s called. More durable than regular steel and a lot more flexible. It bends, but it springs back. You’ll get used to it. It will go into
the bodies you build.”

  “Crownover has never worked with steel. We’d have to gut the plant and retool from the ground up.”

  “You’ll get used to that too. I expect to outgrow this plant in a couple of years. I see a totally self-sufficient operation: lumber mill, foundry, glass plant, final assembly. Everything made right on the premises. No more dependency on the outside.”

  “Where will the money come from?”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “I need a drink.”

  Ford’s scowl pulled his spare features into a mask. He spun the blackboard again, making the disturbing image in chalk disappear. “That’s why I set up the firing range, to discourage all you fellows from becoming sots. How is your father?”

  Harlan, still unaccustomed to his partner’s galvanic changes of subject, thought at first that he had accused Abner II of being a sot.

  “Not well. He has a perforated ulcer. One doctor wants to operate, the next thinks it’s too dangerous. He’s at St. Mary’s Hospital. They suggested sending him home, but he refuses. He won’t accept any visitors except my brother Edward. He’s the only member of the family Father thinks hasn’t betrayed him.”

  “What did you expect? You stole his company.”

  “You’re the one who’s been encouraging me to take it over. It’s all I’ve heard from you for more than a year. You wanted Crownover bodies.”

  “I didn’t say you did anything wrong.” Ford’s tone was quieter. “Sons betray their fathers. It’s a natural law. If a man is strong and his son is his son, there’s no other outcome. You weren’t intended to sell carriages to fat old rich women any more than I was intended to work the dirt my whole life. If we was to go against that—that would be the real betrayal. It don’t mean I don’t wish my father had lived a couple more years, just to see his boy didn’t turn out a tramp.”