Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The mafia man?”

  “So they say. We didn’t seal the arrangement with a black hand, so I can’t be sure.”

  The darning needle wagged. “I won’t have a wop telling me how to manufacture automobiles.”

  “It was a straight loan, not an investment on his part. When I told him what I wanted it for he wasn’t even interested. All he cares about is that he gets his money back.”

  “He was interested. When that butcher comes back for his cut, it comes from you, no one else. I’ve got enough partners as it is. If Bennett comes in I’ll have too many. No greasy dago is going to get his spaghetti hooks on an American automobile company.”

  “I promise you he won’t.”

  “I promise you.” Ford’s voice cracked. The forty-or-so-year-old mechanical genius sounded like a querulous old man. He scooped up his glass and emptied it. It was as if he’d poured water into the radiator of one of his automobiles; the patches of red that had appeared on his sallow cheeks faded, his eyes seemed less bright. Their gleam now was speculative. “You know your father’s a hidebound fool.”

  Harlan, unsettled already by the previous scene, felt the need to put up some kind of filial defense. “He has a blind spot when it comes to automobiles. Everyone has one about something.”

  “Think he’s senile?”

  “He’s only in his fifties.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. That jackass Bryan’s only in his forties, and he tried to ride a silver sled into the White House. The Abner Crownover who saved his father’s company wouldn’t have closed his ears to a new idea, even if he thought it was crackpot. He’d have heard it out.”

  “The family decision is I’m an idiot. He wouldn’t listen to me if I brought fire from heaven.”

  “He’s right about that one thing. You are an idiot.”

  Harlan was nettled but amused. “If this is how you treat someone after he’s given you five thousand dollars, I wonder how you’ve managed to attract any backers at all.”

  “You’re an idiot if you let him throw away the business he built up from a hole in the ground, your birthright. An idiot or a coward.”

  He was no longer amused. He had begun to realize that as far as bullies went, the Dodges were far less sophisticated, and therefore far less effective, than this son of an Irish-American farmer with gasoline in his veins and a fuel pump for a heart. “I’m gambling money I may have to pay back with my life on your third swing at the plate and your last strike. That may make me an idiot. It makes me anything but a coward.”

  “Cowards often do brave things to avoid doing something they’re more afraid of.”

  “Tell me what it is and I’ll tell you if I’m afraid.”

  “Taking Crownover Coaches away from Abner the Second.”

  Harlan had lifted his glass. He put it down without drinking and looked at Ford. “You’re the second person today who suggested that,” he said.

  part two

  The Plant

  chapter five

  Memorial Day

  MEMORIAL DAY WAS ALWAYS an important date in the life of James Aloysius Dolan.

  He was too young to have served in the War between the States, too old to have fought against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, and though he spoke often of his regret that his country had never found need to put him in uniform, he had an Irishman’s instinctive distrust of the military and shed few tears in private for those who had Given Their Lives. His patriotism ran more toward brass bands and bunting, and his chest swelled nearly as large as his belly when all four Dolans, in all their late-spring finery of red satin, starched white cotton, and blue gabardine, paraded with stepladder and trifold flag through the dewy grass shortly after dawn to affix the Stars and Stripes to the brass pole canting out over the front door of the house in Corktown. It was a matter of considerable pride on national holidays that theirs be the first staff in the neighborhood to display Old Glory; when on July 4, 1899, the McCorkingdales’ flag was discovered already aloft next door when the Dolans rose, Big Jim consulted The Old Farmers’ Almanac in order to determine the exact hour and moment of sunrise, then telephoned the party conduit to the Free Press and arranged to publish a column accusing Seamus McCorkingdale of violating the Flag Code by hoisting the sacred banner before the sun was decently above wicked Windsor. McCorkingdale, a conductor with the Michigan Central Railroad, a notoriously nonpartisan voter, and a Protestant into the bargain, responded with a withering letter to the editor in which he proclaimed his innocence, identified his neighbor as the instigator of the column, and suggested that Dolan had failed to raise his flag first because he was dissipated by drink and debauchery during a premature celebration the evening before of the birth of the Republic. Dolan wrote an open letter in answer, insinuating that McCorkingdale’s father had given McCorkingdale’s sister’s dowry to an official with U.S. Immigration to overlook a vile disease on the old man’s health chart that otherwise would have kept him out of the country.

  The war raged on into August and might have continued indefinitely had not the Michigan Central Railroad dismissed Seamus McCorkingdale for drinking on duty and the Detroit Savings Bank called in his mortgage, forcing him to move himself and his family into his brother’s home in Cleveland. There was a hearing to review the justification of his dismissal, at which it was established during testimony that a nearly full bottle of Old Eagle imported bourbon had been found in McCorkingdale’s locker in the depot on Third Street during a surprise inspection by Pinkerton detectives. This was clearly against regulations and prima facie evidence of dereliction of duty, and the insistence of the accused that he had never seen the bottle before the inspection, and that moreover he was a lifelong teetotaler and a charter member of the Anti-Saloon League, did not alter the decision. Six weeks after his neighbor of eighteen years moved out, Dolan’s second cousin, a recording secretary with the local Democratic Party and a high-ranking official in the Knights of Columbus, moved in with his wife and eight children. In three years, Big Jim’s cousin had never once hoisted his flag first.

  But the business of the flag, and the speech Dolan would make later at a rally on the Campus Martius, had little to do with the importance of today’s date for him. Memorial Day was the day he laid out the first of the outfits in his extensive summer wardrobe.

  Noche, reliable valet that he was, had no part in the ritual beyond picking up the clothes at the cleaner’s, where they were sent without fail on the first business day in May. Dolan’s dour and indestructible winter woolens were one thing, and in excellent hands with the manservant; but the master would no more brook interference with the first rite of summer than he would invite a companion into his confessional. Noche was given the holiday off to visit his sister, whose family he had moved from Santiago de Cuba to Detroit with the money he had managed to save from his salary.

  The first item to be laid out on the mattress of Dolan’s formidable bed was the blue gabardine with which he ushered in warm weather. Most of his colleagues preferred seersucker, but he did not care for the billowy nature of the fabric, and despite the gentle hint implicit in Charlotte Dolan’s suggestion that the stripes were “slimming,” he held to the belief that they made him look like the big top in the circus. The steep cotton twill was woven so tightly that the unlined gabardine felt slick and cool to the touch, like silk; a material he restricted to neckties and the socks he wore with evening clothes, lest he create an unfavorable impression of wealthy decadence. With the comfortable informality of a white oxford shirt, crisp linen collar and cuffs, sporty yellow spats on his black, high-laced brogans, and a daring explosion of yellow necktie, he felt that he had shucked off the chrysalis of winter at last; emotions such as this were too fine to share. He didn’t wish to be taken for a fop or, what was worse, a poet.

  The last item to come out of the deep walnut wardrobe in the corner of his bedroom was his straw boater, veteran of a hundred rallies and a thousand ball games, from which he lovingly removed the b
lue tissue and from whose red satin band he plucked the last bit of lint between thumb and forefinger, unwilling to risk snagging the threads with a brush. It was the only boater he had ever found that fit his big head; all the others rode up to his crown in minutes, where they were prey to the first breeze stiff enough to carry them south. As such it was not to be launched skyward with thousands of others when Jimmy Barrett tapped one past the shortstop with the bases loaded in the ninth. Dolan had found it at Mabley’s five Aprils ago, just when he had resigned himself to life in a Panama hat of foreign manufacture; C. R. Mabley himself had rescued it from a box in which an employee had repacked it for return to the factory as an oversize item, and had presented it to Big Jim with his compliments. Dolan treasured the gift as he would a blessing from the Pope in Rome. It was as stiff and as light as a new playing card, woven from pure white wheat straw, and when he tilted it over his right eyebrow at a thirty-degree angle and exchanged his heavy stick for a bamboo cane, he felt ten years younger and as light on his feet as a two-hundred-pounder, every inch the boulevardier—in so far as he ever cared to follow the example of a sinful Parisian. And so, after a light breakfast with his family downstairs consisting of six waffles with honey, twenty Blue Point oysters, a platter of fried potatoes, half a loaf of French toast, and a half-gallon of coffee, he piled wife and children into the hired carriage waiting in front of the house and started downtown. It was said in Corktown that the awnings were not unrolled nor the parlor rugs removed to have the winter dirt beaten from them until Diamond Jim was observed cruising down Michigan Avenue, tipping his summer hat to the ladies and signaling the driver with his summer stick. So vocal was he on the conventions of seasonal dress that if he were to appear in his gabardine and straw a week early, his neighbors would doubt the evidence of their calendars.

  As the Dolan carriage rolled down Woodward toward the Campus Martius public assembly center, the boatered and bonnetted throngs lining that broad thoroughfare cheered it as the lead vehicle in the Memorial Day parade, notwithstanding the fact that Mayor Maybury, the city fire brigade, and the members of the brass band sweating in their heavy woolen uniforms would not make their appearance for another twenty minutes. The parade could not take place until Detroit’s most prominent citizen and his family had taken theirs. When the driver drew rein, mounted patrolmen made a path through the crowd for the Dolans to walk to the steps of the speakers’ platform, where an officer on foot touched his helmet and uncoupled the velvet rope that they might mount to the folding chairs arranged inside the red-white-and-blue bunting. Male spectators in straw hats and derbies who had braved police chastisement by reaching out to shake the hand of the Irish Pope pumped circulation back into their fingers with cries of wonder at the strength of the man’s grip, while the women in their ribbons and lace admired or criticized Charlotte Dolan’s remarkable bonnet with its spray of real peonies and brim as large as a carriage wheel. It was a sunny day, and not a few of the younger men present—notably those in belted coats and striped vests—wore tinted cheaters in blissful disregard of the danger that they might thereby acquire reputations as “sports.” Seated in the reinforced armchair especially selected to accommodate his tonnage and girth, Big Jim lamented aloud to his wife the general relaxation of standards in masculine dress and deportment since the war with Spain. She in turn patted his hand and reminded him that it was a new century. “The president himself allows his daughter to be photographed wearing a shirtwaist.”

  “Roosevelt is a buffoon.” He had put on his horn-rimmed half-spectacles—studiedly unlike the despised chief executive’s gold-framed pince-nez—to look over the notes for his speech. Although he had written them in large letters on squares of white cardboard that had come back with his shirts from the cleaner’s so that he wouldn’t have to wear the glasses when he mounted the podium, he found that he still couldn’t read them without squinting. This put him in a dark humor. He did not fear aging, and indeed welcomed each new strand of silver in his temples that brought him that much closer to the enviable rank of Distinguished Elder Statesman. However, he had a railroad switchman’s distaste for the loss of youthful powers. Next to go would be his hearing. A demoralizing picture came to him of Old Jim Dolan, sitting bent over in the front row at a Knights of Columbus meeting with a white beard to his ankles and a tin horn screwed into one ear.

  “Why is the president a balloon?” asked young Sean.

  His mother began to correct him, but was interrupted by Dolan, whose eyes twinkled above the top edge of his spectacles. “What else would you call a large bag filled with hot air?” he replied.

  Little Margaret, horse-faced as ever in her fluffy white pinafore and red-and-white-striped hair bow, punched her brother’s shoulder. “He didn’t say balloon, stupid. He said baboon.”

  “Stop, now! I’ll have the driver take you home, and you will miss the parade.”

  “Let them be, Charlotte. They’re both right.”

  His wife sighed, said that he was spoiling his children and that they would grow up to be vaudevillians or worse. He paid her no attention. With offspring such as these, he reflected, he would never grow old. For that brief moment it didn’t matter to him that his son was a nincompoop and his daughter as plain as a washtub.

  The parade started on time, and Dolan, who was secretly bored by loud bands and the spectacle of the city’s many fraternal orders marching in all their gold braid and swinging sword tassels, consulted his pocket winder and resigned himself to the wait. He rose to his feet for “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and its fellow contender for the title of national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner”; nodded a greeting at the fire marshal, his wife’s cousin; applauded with the rest of the spectators when the mounted police appeared in their orderly ranks with gold-chased helmets sparkling and the coats of their well-curried mounts glistening like stretched satin; and sighed in relief when the musicians gathered on the bandstand and played their final four selections, finishing with a mournful “Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground,” to which many sang along in honor of the fallen in four formal wars and the Indian conflicts. He stood throughout the benediction, presented by Bishop Michael O’Shea of Most Holy Trinity and his own confessor, with his chins on his chest and his boater in his hands and made copious use of his great lawn handkerchief, during Mayor Maybury’s windy forty-minute speech on the subject of Sacrifice to keep from wilting his collar. Nothing had dehydrated him so much since his last twelve hours at the switch in the Michigan Central yard.

  At last it was his turn to speak. He jettisoned most of his prepared comments (“When the gentleman ahead of you holds forth for an hour,” he was fond of advising young elocutionists, “finish in five minutes”), retaining only the reminder that a short ninety years before, the British under General Sir Isaac Brock had staged their own parade up Jefferson Avenue on the occasion of the surrender of Fort Detroit to the enemy, and that, “as that great American and founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, once said, ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’” Using his great moustaches as counterweight to his mighty diaphragm, and rounding his vowels further with huge oracular motions of both hands, he transfixed his listeners with the same speech he had been using, with minor adjustments, on every public occasion since his first bid for office. He had learned early that large open-air groups were like children demanding their favorite story at bedtime, who resented even the slightest deviation from the way it had been told a hundred times before. This time he was proved right as always, as with bows and hands raised for merciful peace he resumed his seat to cheers and the requisite flurry of heaven-bound headgear. Charlotte touched his hand and leaned close to tell him how proud she was, as without transition she cuffed Sean on the back of the head and instructed him to remove his finger from his nostril at once.

  The assembly broke up. Dolan wrung the bishop’s hand and then the mayor’s, acknowledged with ducked head the congratulations of admirers, and saw his family to their carria
ge, where he kissed his wife on the cheek and assured her he would meet them at Belle Isle later for their picnic. He then walked to City Hall in company with the mayor, ironing out a disagreement over the relative virtues of cobblestones and macadam in resurfacing streets on the way. Cobblestones it would be, for the time being; Dolan’s brother owned the quarry with which the city had a contract. Inside they parted, and Big Jim entered the office he seldom visited, a small corner room in the clock tower but with fine views of the Civil War Memorial and the framework of the new Wayne County Building through the windows. The latter construction, with its dozen varieties of marble domestic and foreign, its miles of interior oak and curly maple, and heroic bronze charioteers flanking the portico, enabled the state Democratic Party to funnel a significant amount of public money into its war chest from the overrun, as well as the personal savings account of the party chairman.

  The room was painted dark green above the oak wainscoting, contained a bowl fixture suspended by chains from the ceiling and connected by an exposed cable to a button switch next to the door, two plain desks with captain’s swivels, four more or less dependable Windsor chairs for visitors, and a calendar with a color-tinted photograph of the Peoples State Bank Building at Fort and Shelby, in whose design Stanford White was said to have taken a hand. The office smelled of cigars and varnish and the disagreeable disinfectant that was partially the reason Dolan spent less time there than at any of the other stops on his official route.

  This was not true of the deputy street railway commissioner, who when Dolan came in was seated behind his desk, making entries in a calf-bound ledger the size of a dining-room table. Randolph Strick was a small, pudding-faced German with startling blue eyes and straw-colored hair that he parted above his left eyebrow and combed in perpendicular directions with simultaneous jerks of a set of silver-backed brushes that he said had belonged to his father, an adjutant to Otto von Bismarck. He wore, on this hot late May day with the windows shut tight, heavy brown tweeds that made his superior itch just looking at them, yet he had never been seen to sweat, nor had Dolan seen him anywhere but in that office, seated at that desk. The top was heaped with papers, books, and rolled street charts, and as he balanced the ledger between his lap and the edge of the desk a fresh fall of sheets joined the litter around his feet. Six feet away stood the desk reserved for the commissioner, its leather top naked but for a pristine blotter pad and an inkwell whose contents, if indeed it had any, must have set as hard as concrete since the last time a pen had been dipped into them. Dolan himself could not remember ever having done any paperwork there, but he was as certain as he was of anything that Strick would never consider extending his territory even temporarily to include his superior’s work space. He was a born soldier, obeying orders without question. He ran the street railway system with no interference from anyone, including the man who had been elected to run it.