Now and then, unannounced, Drave showed up to review Lew’s progress.
“First of all,” he advised, “I can’t speak for God, but your wife is not going to forgive you. She’s never coming back. If that’s what you thought the payoff here was going to be, you need to re-evaluate.”
The soles of Lew’s feet began to ache, as if wanting to be taken all the way to the center of the Earth.
“What if I didn’t care what it took to bring her back?”
“Penance? You’ll do that anyway. You’re not Catholic, Mr. Basnight?”
“Presbyterian.”
“Many people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no connection. All the variables are independent. You do penance not because you have sinned but because it is your destiny. You are redeemed not through doing penance but because it happens. Or doesn’t happen.
“It’s nothing supernatural. Most people have a wheel riding up on a wire, or some rails in the street, some kind of guide or groove, to keep them moving in the direction of their destiny. But you keep bouncing free. Avoiding penance and thereby definition.”
“Going off my trolley. And you’re trying to help me get back to the way most people live, ‘s that it?”
“‘Most people,”’ not raising his voice, though something in Lew jumped as if he had, “are dutiful and dumb as oxen. Delirium literally means going out of a furrow you’ve been plowing. Think of this as a productive sort of delirium.”
“What do I do with that?”
“It’s something you don’t want?”
“Would you?”
“Not sure. Maybe.”
SPRING ARRIVED, wheelfolk appeared in the streets and parks, in gaudy striped socks and long-billed “Scorcher” caps. Winds off the lake moderated. Parasols and sidelong glances reappeared. Troth was long gone, remarried it seemed the minute the decree came down, and rumored now to be living on Lake Shore Drive someplace up north of Oak Street. Some vice-president or something.
One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace. Despite the sorry history of rapid transit in this city, the corporate neglect and high likelihood of collision, injury, and death, the weekday-morning overture blared along as usual. Men went on grooming mustaches with gray-gloved fingers. A rolled umbrella dented a bowler hat, words were exchanged. Girl amanuenses in little Leghorn straw hats and striped shirtwaists with huge shoulders that took up more room in the car than angels’ wings dreamed with contrary feelings of what awaited them on upper floors of brand-new steel-frame “skyscrapers.” The horses stepped along in their own time and space. Passengers snorted, scratched, and read the newspaper, sometimes all at once, while others imagined that they could get back to some kind of vertical sleep. Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams, nor easily attributable to the smoke-inflected sun beginning to light Chicago.
He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear.
He must have descended to the sidewalk and entered a cigar store. It was that early hour in cigar stores all over town when boys are fetching in bricks that have been soaking all night in buckets of water, to be put into the display cases to keep the inventory humidified. A plump and dapper individual was in buying domestic cheroots. He watched Lew for a while, just short of staring, before asking, with a nod at the display, “That box on the bottom shelf—how many colorado-claros left in it? Without looking, I mean.”
“Seventeen,” said Lew without any hesitation the other man could detect.
“You know not everybody can do that.”
“What?”
“Notice things. What was that just went by the window?”
“Shiny black little trap, three springs, brass fittings, bay gelding about four years old, portly gent in a slouch hat and a yellow duster, why?”
“Amazing.”
“Not really. Just, nobody ever asks.”
“You had breakfast?”
In the cafeteria next door, the early crowd had been and gone. Everybody here knew Lew, usually, knew his face, but this morning, being transfigured and all, it was like he passed unidentified.
His companion introduced himself as Nate Privett, personnel director at White City Investigations, a detective agency.
In the near and far distance, explosions, not always to be identified in the next day’s newspapers, now and then sent leisurely rips through the fabric of the day, to which Nate Privett pretended to be listening. “Ironworkers’ Union,” he nodded. “After enough of ‘em, a man begins to develop an ear.” He poured syrup on a towering stack of pancakes out of which butter melted and ran. “See, it’s not safecrackers, embezzlers, murderers, spouses on the run, none of the dime-novel stuff, put all that out of your head. Here in Chi, this year of our Lord, it’s all about the labor unions, or as we like to call them, anarchistic scum,” said Nate Privett.
“No experience with any of that.”
“You appear qualified, I should say.” Nate’s mouth went sly for a second. “Can’t believe you haven’t been approached about Pinkerton work, pay over there’s almost too good for a man not to sign up.”
“Don’t know. Too much of the modern economics for me, for there’s surely more to life than just wages.”
“Oh? What?”
“Well, give me a few minutes with that one.”
“You think working for the Eye’s a life of moral squalor, you ought to have a look at our shop.”
Lew nodded and took him up on it. Next thing he knew, he was on the payroll, noticing how every time he entered a room somebody was sure to remark, ostensibly to somebody else, “Gravy, a man could get killed out there!” By the time he got that pleasantry all decoded, Lew found he was more than able to shrug it off. His office and field skills weren’t the worst in the shop, but he knew that what distinguished him was a keen sympathy for the invisible.
At White City Investigations, invisibility was a sacred condition, whole darn floors of office buildings being given over to its art and science—resources for disguise that outdid any theatrical dressing room west of the Hudson, rows of commodes and mirrors extending into the distant shadows, acres of costumes, forests of hatracks bearing an entire Museum of Hat History, countless cabinets stuffed full of wigs, false beards, putty, powder, kohl and rouge, dyes for skin and hair, adjustable gaslight at each mirror that could be taken from a lawn party at a millionaire’s cottage in Newport to a badlands saloon at midnight with just a tweak to a valve or two. Lew enjoyed wandering around, trying on different rigs, like every day was Hallowe’en, but he understood after a while that he didn’t have to. He had learned to step to the side of the day. Wherever it was he stepped to had its own vast, incomprehensible history, its perils and ecstasies, its potential for unannounced romance and early funerals, but when he was there, it was apparently not as easy for anyone in “Chicago” to be that certain of his whereabouts. Not exactly invisibility. Excursion.
Nate showed up at Lew’s desk one day with a thick folder that had some kind of royal crest on it, featuring a two-headed eagle.
“Not me,” Lew edging away.
“Austrian Archduke is in town, we need somebody to keep an eye on him.”
“Fellows like that don’t have bodyguards of their own?”
“Sure do, they call em ‘Trabants’ over there, but have a lawyer explain civil liability to you, Lew, I’m just an old gumshoe guy, all’s I know is there’s a couple a thousand hunkies down to the Yards come over here with hate in their hearts for this bird and his family, maybe with good reason, too. If it was just the wholesome educational exhibits on the Fairgrounds and all why I wouldn’t be too concerned, but
the book on young Francis Ferdinand is, is he prefers our own New Levee and high-life neighborhoods like that. So every alleyway down here, every shadow big enough to hide a shive artist with a grudge, is a warm invitation to rewrite history.”
“I get any backup on this, Nate?”
“I can spare Quirkel.”
“Somebody get Rewrite!” Lew pretended to cry, affably enough.
F.F., as he was termed in his dossier, was out on a world tour whose officially stated purpose was to “learn about foreign peoples.” How Chicago fit the bill was about to become clearer. The Archduke had put in an appearance at the Austrian Pavilion, sat through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with a certain amount of impatience, and lingered at the Colorado Silver Camp exhibit, where, imagining that camps must necessarily include camp-followers, he proceeded to lead his entourage on a lively search after ladies of flagrant repute that would have taxed the abilities of even a seasoned spotter, let alone a greenhorn like Lew—running up and down and eventually out into the Midway, accosting amateur actors who had never been west of Joliet with untranslatable ravings in Viennese dialect and gesticulations which could easily be—well, were—taken the wrong way. Uniformed handlers, fooling elaborately with their whiskers, gazed anywhere but at the demented princeling. Lew slid like a snake from one architectural falsehood to the next, his working suits by the end of each day smudged white from rubbing against so much “staff,” a mixture of plaster and hemp fibers, ubiquitous at the White City that season, meant to counterfeit some deathless white stone.
“What I am really looking for in Chicago,” the Archduke finally got around to confessing, “is something new and interesting to kill. At home we kill boars, bears, stags, the usual—while here in America, so I am told, are enormous herds of bison, ja?”
“Not around Chicago anymore, Your Highness, I’m sorry to say,” Lew replied.
“Ah. But, at present, working here in your famous slaughterhouse district . . . are many . . . Hungarians, not true?”
“Y— maybe. I’d have to go look up the figures,” Lew trying not to get into eye contact with this customer.
“In Austria,” the Archduke was explaining, “we have forests full of game, and hundreds of beaters who drive the animals toward the hunters such as myself who are waiting to shoot them.” He beamed at Lew, as if mischievouly withholding the final line of a joke. Lew’s ears began to itch. “Hungarians occupy the lowest level of brute existence,” Francis Ferdinand declared—“the wild swine by comparison exhibits refinement and nobility—do you think the Chicago Stockyards might possibly be rented out to me and my friends, for a weekend’s amusement? We would of course compensate the owners for any loss of revenue.”
“Your Royal Highness, I’ll sure ask about that, and somebody’ll get back to you.”
Nate Privett thought this was just a knee-slapper. “Gonna be Emperor one of these days, can you beat that!”
“Like there ain’t enough Hungarians back home to keep him busy?” Lew was wondering.
“Well, not that he wouldn’t be doing us a favor.”
“How’s that, boss?”
“With more them damned anarchistic foreign-born south of Forty-seventh than you could point a Mannlicher at,” chuckled Nate, “sure’d be a few less of em to worry about, wouldn’t it?”
Curious himself about who might be his opposite number on the Austrian side of this exercise, Lew nosed around and picked up an item or two. Young Max Khäutsch, newly commissioned a captain in the Trabants, was here on his first overseas assignment, as field chief of “K&K Special Security,” having already proven himself useful at home as an assassin, an especially deadly one, it seemed. Standard Habsburg procedure would have been to put him out of the way at some agreed-upon point of diminishing usefulness, but nobody was willing to try. Despite his youth he was said to give an impression of access to resources beyond his own, of being comfortable in the shadows and absolutely unprincipled, with an abiding contempt for any distinction between life and death. Sending him to America seemed appropriate.
Lew found him sympathetic . . . the oblique planes of his face revealing an origin somewhere in the Slavic vastnesses of Europe as yet but lightly traveled by the recreational visitor. . . . They got into the habit of early-morning coffee at the Austrian Pavilion, accompanied by a variety of baked goods. “And this might be of particular interest to you, Mr. Basnight, considering the widely known Kuchenteigs-Verderbtheit or pastry-depravity of the American detective. . . .”
“Well we . . . we try not to talk about that.”
“So? in Austria it is widely remarked upon.”
Despite young Khäutsch’s police skills, somehow the Archduke kept giving him the slip. “Perhaps I am too clever to deal efficiently with Habsburg stupidity,” mused Khäutsch. One night when it seemed Franz Ferdinand had dropped off the map of greater Chicago, Khäutsch got on the telephone and began calling around town, eventually reaching White City Investigations.
“I’ll go have a look,” said Lew.
After a lengthy search including obvious favorites like the Silver Dollar and Everleigh House, Lew found the Archduke at last in the Boll Weevil Lounge, a Negro bar down on South State in the Thirties, the heart of the vaudeville and black entertainment district in those days, hollering his way into an evening which promised at least a troublesome moment or two. Barrelhouse piano, green beer, a couple of pool tables, girls in rooms upstairs, smoke from two-for-a-penny cigars. “Squalid!” screamed the Archduke. “I love it!”
Lew kind of enjoyed it himself in this part of town, unlike some of the ops at White City, who seemed skittish around Negroes, who’d been arriving lately in ever-increasing numbers from down South. Something about the neighborhood drew him, maybe the food—surely the only place in Chicago a man could find a decent orange phosphate—although right at the moment you could not call the atmosphere welcoming.
“What here are you looking at, you wish to steal eine . . . Wassermelone, perhaps?”
“Ooooo,” went several folks in earshot. The insultee, a large and dangerous-looking individual, could not believe he was hearing this. His mouth began to open slowly as the Austrian prince continued—
“Something about . . . your . . . wait . . . deine Mutti, as you would say, your . . . your mama, she plays third base for the Chicago White Stockings, nicht wahr?” as customers begin tentatively to move toward the egresses, “a quite unappealing woman, indeed she is so fat, that to get from her tits to her ass, one has to take the ‘El’! Tried once to get into the Exposition, they say, no, no, lady, this is the World’s Fair, not the World’s Ugly!”
“Whatchyou doin, you fool, you can get y’ass killed talking like that, what are you, from England or some shit?”
“Um, Your Royal Highness?” Lew murmured, “if we could just have a word—”
“It is all right! I know how to talk to these people! I have studied their culture! Listen—’st los, Hund? Boogie-boogie, ja?”
Lew, supposed to be disciplined in the ways of the East, would not allow himself the luxury of panic, but at times, like now, could’ve used maybe a homeopathic dose, just to keep his immunity up. “Hopelessly insane,” he announced, waving a thumb F.F.’s way, “escaped in his time from some of the fanciest bughouses of Europe, very little remaining of the brains he was born with, except possibly,” lowering his voice, “how much money you bring with you, there, Highness?”
“Ah, I understand,” murmured the imperial scapegrace. Turning to the room, “When Franz Ferdinand drinks,” he cried, “everybody drinks!”
Which helped to restore a level of civility in the room, and soon even of cheer, as smart neckties were soaked in suds, the piano player came back out from under the bar, and people in the room resumed dancing syncopated two-steps. After a while somebody started singing “All Pimps Look Alike to Me,” and half the room joined in. Lew, however, noticing the way the Archduke seemed to keep inching stealthily but unmistakably toward the street door
, thought it wise to do the same. Sure enough, just before sliding out the door, Der F.F. with a demonic grin screamed, “And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!” whereupon he disappeared, and it was a near thing that Lew got out with his keester intact.
Outside they found Trabant Khäutsch ready with a two-horse hack poised for instant departure, and the Archduke’s own double-barreled Mannlicher resting nonchalantly but visibly on one shoulder. As they were speeding along dodging grip cars, private carriages, police patrol wagons with their gongs banging, and so forth, Khäutsch casually offered, “If you’re ever in Vienna, and for any reason need a favor, please do not hesitate.”
“Soon’s I learn to waltz, I’m on my way.”
The Archduke, pouting like a child whose mischief has been interrupted, did not offer comment.
LEW WAS JUST HEADED out to Kinsley’s for a late steak when Nate called him into the office, reaching to fetch down a new folder. “Old F.F.’ll be out of town in just a couple more days, Lew, but meantime here’s somethin for you tonight.”
“Thought I might grab some sleep.”
“Anarchy never sleeps, son. They’re meeting right down the El line a couple-three stops, and you might want to take a look in. Even get educated, maybe.”
At first Lew took it for a church—something about the echoes, the smell—though in fact, on weekends anyway, it was a small variety theater. Up on the stage now was a lectern flanked by a pair of gas lamps with Welsbach mantles, at which stood a tall individual in workmen’s overalls, identified presently as the traveling Anarchist preacher the Reverend Moss Gatlin. The crowd—Lew had been expecting only a handful of malcontents—was numerous, after a while in fact spilling into the street. Unemployed men from out of town, exhausted, unbathed, flatulent, sullen . . . collegians having a look in at possibilities for hell-raising . . . Women in surprising numbers, bearing the marks of their trades, scars from the blades of the meatpacking floors, squints from needlework carried past the borderlands of sleep in clockless bad light, women in head-scarves, crocheted fascinators, extravagantly flowered hats, no hats at all, women just looking to put their feet up after too many hours of lifting, fetching, walking the jobless avenues, bearing the insults of the day . . .
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