The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

  I couldn’t understand all of what he was saying, but the words I did understand made my blood boil. There was never a way to escape it. If you were a poor Jew, then you were a parasite, living in a hut with a dirt floor or the filth and squalor of a tenement you could hardly afford. If you were a wealthy Jew, you were a vampire, a conniving evil sucking the blood of the common people. The proof was right there—no matter how high we climbed, there would always be someone a step higher, to stomp down on our faces.

  “Still, for all Grigori’s virtues, he is impulsive. He would rather target street kids than think higher. He lacks restraint and true vision.” Whitby gave a tedious sigh. “I hoped to nurture that in him, but even now, he refuses to listen to reason. I told him as much earlier. As you can see by the state of my foyer, he didn’t take it very kindly.”

  “You mean you’re the one who told him to kill?” I demanded.

  “No.” He chuckled. “He was already doing that when I found him. In London at the American Exhibition, and in Paris at the Exposition Universelle. Rome, Bologna, Berlin. Wherever the show goes, he goes, too, to root out the infestation in your hovels and your ghettos. Culling, he calls it.”

  I thought back to what I had said at the Whitechapel Club, the words that had flown from my mouth in such a flurry, I had hardly even comprehended what I was saying:

  A boy was found in the Pletzl, in an abandoned home, his neck slit. 1889. His name was Daniel. Three others went missing in Paris that summer. There were two boys found in London in 1887, young Jews, just children. They had fallen into the Thames and drowned.

  Yakov must have tracked Grigori down somehow, followed the path of destruction he had carved through Europe, until it brought him to the shores of this goldene medina. He could have sent letters to the heads of the Jewish communities in those cities. Perhaps all those stories about traveling Europe with his uncle had been built on lies, and he’d actually gone to those cities alone, burning through his inheritance until he washed up in Chicago with hardly more than the clothes on his back.

  “Was it Grigori who killed Aaron?” I asked, then clenched my jaw as Mr. Whitby stared at me in confusion. Of course he wouldn’t know Aaron’s name. I doubted it had occurred to him that Aaron even had a name. “Aaron Holtz. The boy who showed up at the Whitechapel Club before us, the one asking questions. Was it Grigori who killed him?”

  Mr. Whitby sneered. “What do you think?”

  My hands curled into fists. I wouldn’t have minded if Frankie decided to kick his teeth in. I wished that I had the will to do it myself.

  Before I could do something that I’d regret, Frankie stepped forward. “Tell us where we can find Grigori.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because we are godly people,” Frankie said quietly, leaning down to stare him in the face. Whitby laughed, but there was nothing funny about the look in Frankie’s eyes. “We believe in justice. Biblical justice. The kind that comes at the end of a sword. Now, you tried to hurt my friend. You would have killed him, if you could have. Therefore, according to our laws, I have full jurisdiction to jam this gun—you see this, yes?—up your ass.”

  Whitby’s laughter died in his throat. He licked his lips, his eyes flicking to the gun in Frankie’s hand. I couldn’t even tell what Frankie was planning, and that unsettled me. I rested my palm on his arm, but he shook my hand away and cocked the revolver’s hammer.

  “I can shoot you in the gut,” Frankie said when Whitby didn’t answer. “It will be slow. Painful. If you don’t bleed out on the floor, your insides will rot from whatever you catch in the hospital, if they’re not rotten through already.”

  “You wouldn’t.” But the bravado had evaporated from Whitby’s voice.

  “I’ve killed a man before,” Frankie said.

  Whitby gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, before beginning tentatively, “If I tell you, you’ll let me go?”

  “Yes,” Frankie said.

  “He’ll kill you both, so it doesn’t matter whether I tell you or not.”

  “He can try.”

  Whitby moistened his lips once more. “Go to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. You’ll find him there.”

  44

  Several blocks away from Mr. Whitby’s place, we hailed a hansom cab. It was nearly twenty till eight, but the coachman assured us that he could get us to the Wild West Show only a few minutes late of the eight o’clock showing.

  As the coach barreled down the street, Frankie held his pocket watch to the radiance of the lantern on his side of the coach. He watched the seconds tick by.

  “Thank you, for what you did back there,” I said. “I don’t know what would have happened...”

  “I wish I shot him.” He shook his head. “Ever since you told me about Harry, I feel like I’ve been burning up inside, Alter. I wanted to kill Mr. Whitby. I wanted to kill him so much. I wanted to shoot him in the face for what happened to Harry. I wanted—I wanted—I didn’t. I didn’t because you were there.”

  He drew in a deep breath. Exhaled. Closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose. Moisture gleamed in his thick lashes.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered, placing my hand on his knee. “You can cry.”

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, his jaw trembling. “I just can’t believe Harry’s actually gone. I mean, he was there last night. He was right there.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll show you where his grave is so you can put a stone on it.” I wanted to cry, too, but the tears wouldn’t come. Just in the last year, I had tended to so many of the dead and comforted so many mourning families. Some of those people I had known. In many ways, this felt no different. It was simply what it meant to be human.

  “Do you still have that gun?” Frankie asked a few minutes later, without looking at me.

  I reached down and found its heavy weight at my side. Through my coat, it could have been anything. “Yes.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  “No,” I admitted, grimacing as the coach careened around a corner so sharply, I expected us to crash.

  “Give it to me.”

  I did as Frankie asked. From the perch above, the coachman wouldn’t be able to see us through the cab’s solid ceiling. Still, I felt nervous and exposed just holding the revolver, my stomach churning with anxiety. I couldn’t imagine actually pulling the trigger.

  In the glow of the coach’s lantern, Frankie opened the cylinder. All six chambers were loaded. He took the bullets out, bits of brass and lead that winked in his palm, then had me put them back in.

  After he had finished instructing me on how to shoot the weapon, I took it from him. It wasn’t a sword to slay a dragon, but it would serve its purpose. He curled his hand over mine, stopping me.

  “Before you pull that trigger, you need to remember what you have at stake,” he said. “What you have to lose. Killing Grigori won’t bring the dead back to life.”

  “I know.”

  “And for anyone who sees it, you will be the aggressor.”

  “I need to do this.” I slid his fingers off my hand. “For Yakov and Victor and Harry. For all those who died alone.”

  * * *

  The Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was housed in a massive open arena across the street from the World’s Fair, a dirt lot lit on all sides by electrical arc lamps that emitted a radiant purplish-white glow. Now that I knew what I was looking at, I recognized it as the vast expanse I had witnessed in my vision at the fairground. What I had originally thought were walls of gallows were actually elevated wooden benches.

  Popcorn and wads of paper crackled beneath our feet as we proceeded through the rows of seats. We had arrived almost twenty minutes late, and the benches were packed to capacity. It took nearly five minutes before we found seats. We sat side by side on a rickety
bench that quivered under our weight, under the bright, buzzing glare of the spotlights. The air was hot and humid, pungent with the odors of sweaty wool, sawdust, and animal dung.

  We had arrived in the middle of a sharpshooting act. The woman held a long-arm nearly as tall as she was, shooting hollow glass orbs and targets effortlessly. Each time her partner threw a glass ball in the air and it exploded into a corona of glistening dust without fail, the ringmaster crowed, “Another one for the Peerless Lady Wing-Shot, folks!” or “My god, Oakley’s done it again!”

  Any other day, I would have been enthralled by the experience. Now, anxiety stirred in my gut each time a gunshot echoed through the stadium. When she shot a cigar from her partner’s lips, I had to grit my teeth to hold back the low cry that threatened to break free, thinking of how the man would look if she missed, how Harry had looked on the washing table, how I might look if we failed.

  After she cleared from the arena, the ringmaster stepped forward and lifted his hands, quelling the audience’s deafening applause. He waited for silence to descend over the stands before speaking up again.

  “And now, from the steppes of Russia, get ready for the brave Cossacks of the Caucasus!”

  “I can’t believe it...” Frankie muttered under his breath.

  Six horsemen in white coats flooded the arena. They called out to each other in a flowing, sibilant tongue. I shifted in my seat, the wooden board hard and cold against my rear.

  “Tugarin Zmeyevich,” Frankie said distantly. “In the stories, he looks enough like a human that he can ride horses and wield weapons. He has paper wings.”

  “That sounds like our dragon in Romania, the zmeu, except for the paper wings.”

  “In Russian, it is zmey. So, Zmeyevich means ‘son of dragon.’” He crossed his arms, watching the horsemen with his jaw held tightly. “It’s a metaphor, of course, like everything else. Replace Tugarin with a Tatar or a Jew, and it becomes a tale of how the hero Alyosha Popovich—literally, ‘son of priest’—drives back the heathens from pure, unsullied Eastern Orthodox Kiev.”

  “A child wouldn’t have known that,” I said quietly. At that age, fairy tales were dark, simple things, their hidden metaphors worn down so that they fit comfortably in a child’s grasping hands. Violence for violence’s sake, cruelty for cruelty’s sake. There needn’t be a meaning to it.

  At seven years old, Yakov wouldn’t have understood the reason for the pogroms or the full magnitude of the destruction. So, when he had escaped those flames, perhaps in those final moments of consciousness, he had seen a man on a horse. A man much like these men, with his white coattails billowing behind him like a pair of paper wings. And Yakov would have known then that Tugarin was real.

  As we watched the men ride around the arena, Frankie explained that Cossacks formed the military might of the Russian Empire, where they were required to serve for twenty years. I already knew about the Cossack Uprisings back in the 1600s and 1700s, as well as the brutal pogroms that they had committed during those times. While nothing had happened on a similar scale since the Koliyivshchyna rebellion in the 1760s, beatings and extortion weren’t uncommon. Hatred of Jews was entrenched in all levels of the tsarist government, and though Jews also served in the military, promotion was dependent upon conversion.

  The Cossacks lined up in the center of the arena, dismounted, and hitched up their horses. Forming a circle, the men began clapping their hands. The steady beat of palms vaguely reminded me of dancing the hora at my cousin’s wedding, where, after accidentally stepping on the foot of a neighborhood boy I admired, I had retreated to the sidelines and clapped in rhythm with the other guests. I felt a little like I did back then, my face hot and itchy, my palms moist with sweat, and my heart knocking against my ribs in a nervous, jolting tempo.

  “Do you see him?” Frankie asked tightly. “Do you see the bastard?”

  Two of the Cossacks broke free of the circle and ran to the center, drawing their swords. I flinched as steel came in contact with steel, the sharp metallic twang accompanied by a flash of sparks. The two leaped and twirled around each other in fervent circles, every so often drawing close to exchange blows, like two hawks locked in a fatal spiral of courtship.

  The younger of the pair, a teen whose lambskin hat shielded eyes as dark and riveting as jet, was clearly the more talented swordsman. But his smooth, graceful parries were met with fierce tenacity from his partner—the other man, at least six centimeters taller, put all his strength behind his blows, as though this weren’t a performance at all. As though he wanted to make the boy bleed.

  As I caught sight of the man’s face, my throat tightened. A tall hat of fetal lamb balanced like a wasp’s nest on Grigori’s head, shadowing eyes as hard and gray as mica, with the same shallow gleam.

  “That’s him,” I whispered. “He’s right there.”

  A low groaning overhead. I lifted my head, holding my breath. The oilcloth awning over the seats shuddered as a hard wind slammed into it. Was it my imagination or was the structure swaying? Any minute now, it might come crashing down on our heads, smothering us in the endless red, the air moist and burning with terror sweat and frantic gasps, screams in my ears, colliding bodies.

  Gagging, I lurched to my feet and pushed past Frankie. I couldn’t stay here. Couldn’t keep watching this.

  Once I had made it some distance from the arena, I paused to catch my breath. Sweat drenched my back, and my limbs trembled uncontrollably. After a few minutes, I heard Frankie come up behind me. His hand rested gently on my back.

  “Are you all right?” he murmured, stepping around to face me.

  “I’m fine. I just... I need to breathe.”

  Frankie’s gaze focused on something over my shoulder. I turned, my gaze landing on three Cossack riders trotting past, relieved of their duties.

  Hatred seared Frankie’s features. He snarled something at them in Russian. I didn’t understand what he said, but I recognized the insult in his voice.

  The roar of horse hooves. One of the Cossacks rode up to us.

  At the sight of his face, my blood went cold.

  “Ubiytsa Khrista.” Grigori’s eyes burned with hatred and recognition. To make his message clear, he spat at me and repeated his insult in English. “Christ-killer. You never should have come here.”

  Before I could respond, Grigori’s whip leaped forward like a meadow adder. A searing pain curled over my shoulder and my heart seized with an icy shock. It took me a moment to understand what had happened. I thought sweat was dripping down my chest until I looked to see pinpricks of red leaking through my shirt.

  The air crackled with tension, charged with the crowd’s confusion and excitement. Dozens of eyes on me. What were they hoping for? A fight? A pogrom?

  “Bastard,” Frankie snarled, and lunged for Grigori. As the whip came down again, my right hand flashed forward out of reflex and seized the whip midswing. It must have stung smartly, but I didn’t feel a thing. I dug my fingers into the braided leather and yanked Grigori from his mount.

  As he landed on the ground, a surge of intense rage rushed over me, murderous wrath that felt like a fire had been stoked beneath my skin. I switched the whip to my left hand without meaning to, without even realizing it at first, took hold of its worn handle, lifted it.

  “Eto dlya moyey mamy.”

  And I brought it down on his shoulders.

  “Eto dlya moyevo otts.”

  And I struck his face, splitting open his cheek from lip to earlobe like a rotten orange.

  “Eto dlya vsekh lyudey, kotorykh vy ubili!”

  The words must have meant something to me—to Yakov—because suddenly hot tears coursed down my cheeks. I drew back the whip to bring it down once more, but several pairs of hands seized me midswing, took the whip, wrenched me back.

  I bucked against the crowd’s grasping fingers, growling and ki
cking like an animal. I tried to reach for the revolver in my pocket, but their hands restrained me. I didn’t know what I would do. I would rip his eyes out. I would bite his nose off. Crush his skull, his face in.

  “Tugarin!” The name tore from my lips in a savage howl, as sharp and biting as a curse. Yakov’s dybbuk writhed within me, clawing my insides into a hot, burning frenzy. His enraged shrieks echoed through my blood and bones like earthquake tremors, threatening to tear me in two: Dolzhni ubit! Dolzhni ubit! Kill, kill, kill him.

  “Alter, get ahold of yourself,” Frankie shouted, grabbing my shoulder. I tried to elbow him, but someone else had my wrist. “Calm down!”

  “Damn you, Frankie, let go of me!” Rage flared through me. I needed to get to that man. I’d kill anyone who got in my way. “It’s him. It’s him. It’s him.”

  Frankie released me, but other hands took his place. Slowly, Grigori rose to one knee, panting for breath. Blood and dust mingled on his chin and beaded in his mustache. As we locked eyes, he reached for the curved shashka on his belt.

  Suddenly, the clomp of hoofbeats filled the air. The crowd parted to make way for the young swordsman who had partnered against Grigori in the performance. He jumped down from his horse and stepped between us, his back to me.

  “Prekrati!” the boy shouted at Grigori, lifting his hands to pacify him. “Chto s toboy?”

  His interference did little to quell the rage burning in my veins. I struggled to free myself from the strangers’ grips, snarling words I didn’t know, in a language I had never learned. Grigori stared at me, his eyes the gray of ashes.