Dark Metropolis

by Jaclyn Dolamore

  But it wasn’t really the world she had known. The house felt quiet and insular; she didn’t hear the voices of passersby or the rumbling of motorcars. She imagined this gilt-and-brocade interior must belong to one of the wealthy houses in the city’s finest districts, set back from the street and surrounded by a gate. No one had to tell her that if she cried for help, she wouldn’t get any.

  She heard murmuring male voices in a different room, and after Valkenrath delivered his instructions, the guard led her there.

  “There she is!” A thin old man with a mustache sat at a table with a cup of coffee and a slice of pastry. The smell of the coffee was sharp and familiar and made Nan feel suddenly very homesick for a place she couldn’t quite remember. “Looking very well indeed.”

  The younger man must be Freddy. He looked at her rather gravely. She didn’t want to say any of the things Valkenrath had told her to say.

  “Nan?” Freddy said.

  “Yes,” she said, glancing around. Dark oil portraits gazed upon her from the walls. The wealth and well-kept age of everything felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “It will take time for her to recover from the suicide, but she’s happy at her new job, aren’t you, Miss Davies?” Valkenrath said.

  She held herself stiffly. “It’s all right.”

  “Where are you working?” Freddy asked, leaning forward in his chair, clutching his cup of coffee.

  “I pull levers all day,” she said. Valkenrath had told her to smile, but she was not smiling. She could feel his cold gaze on her.

  Freddy looked like a question was blazing on his lips. One he couldn’t ask.

  “Not much of a party girl, are you?” the mustached man said with a chuckle. She didn’t quite understand the situation, but it almost felt as if the mustached man was making fun of her. As though she would think the job fun if she were a different kind of girl. But no one would find that job fun, or anything about that sunless world.

  “There isn’t much opportunity to party when you have nothing of your own,” Nan snapped back. “Not even good food. What would we party with?”

  “Thea’s worried about you,” Freddy said. The mustached man frowned at him.

  Thea! Before she could ask him how he knew Thea—or for that matter, how she knew Thea—Valkenrath turned her shoulder to the door. “She’s ill-tempered, Freddy, but otherwise well,” he called as he forced her out. The guard was waiting just outside and grabbed her arms behind her back, holding them secure with one hand while roughly pulling the blindfold back around her face with the other. She stayed half limp, not trying to fight. There didn’t seem to be any point right now, when the guard could easily overwhelm her.

  “You didn’t say a single thing I told you to say,” Valkenrath whispered as they led her back into the depths.

  “Why would I?”

  “I could make your life much worse.”

  “So Freddy brings us back from the dead, but he doesn’t know anything about it afterward,” she said softly.

  “I’ll tell him the truth someday,” Valkenrath said. “When he’s old enough to understand why we do it.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “For the good of the city, Miss Davies. But I don’t expect a troubled, suicidal girl to understand.” They had stopped walking, and he pulled off the blindfold. They were back in the room where she’d changed out of her work suit. A nurse was waiting, with as much animation in her face as a coatrack, and he nodded at her.

  “I wasn’t suicidal.”

  “I wonder why you poisoned yourself, then.” He turned away from her, opening a cabinet. “Why you chose to die alone in some squalid alley.”

  The fire inside her was white-hot. He could lie all day, but she knew her own essence. She knew she had never been troubled and suicidal. She didn’t have to remember to know. “I would never do such a thing. If you take all my memories, you can tell me anything, but you can’t make me believe it.”

  “You’re sharper than most.” He watched the nurse prepare a syringe. “There’s something special about you. I do sense it. You were probably quite a charming girl in your life before. Used to getting your way. But trust me. You just haven’t been here long enough.”

  “This is ready, sir,” the nurse said.

  Valkenrath’s eyes indicated the guard should restrain Nan again, holding one pale arm out for the syringe. Her throat tightened, and she had to force herself not to struggle and fight, knowing it would only make things worse.

  “Over time,” Valkenrath said, “you will believe anything.”

  The needle entered her skin.

  On Thursday morning, Thea changed into a day dress to try to catch Father Gruneman at his breakfast table. After the other night, she was nervous to see him again, but if he knew anything more about what had happened to her father, she owed it to her mother to find out.

  When her father was alive, the whole family used to have dinner with Father Gruneman on occasion, but it had been so many years ago. In her childhood memories, his house was practically a mansion, but in reality it was a cottage, with a steeply pitched roof and two dormer windows. The walls were weathered, the roof patched. Like the church, it was a remnant of an earlier age when the city had not yet spread this far.

  She rapped on the door.

  Father Gruneman opened it promptly. “Thea,” he said. He was still…friendly, but not as easy with her as before. “I wondered when I’d see you. I just heard about your mother being taken away.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  He glanced at the street behind her before motioning her in. His windows were all curtained, even though the sun was up. The house was furnished with sturdy wooden furniture, the kind that would be passed down through generations, and there were piles of dusty books. It should have seemed comfortable and lived in, but the pent-up darkness was uninviting.

  “Would you like some eggs?” he offered. “A glass of milk?”

  “I’m not hungry, really,” she said. “But don’t let me stop you from eating breakfast.”

  He briefly shook his head and motioned for her to take a chair. “I had no idea you were working at the Telephone Club.”

  “It’s a good job,” she said, trying not to sound too defensive.

  “For a young woman, I suppose. But where do you go from there? I hate that you left school for your mother’s sake.”

  “Well, I had to do something. The veteran’s widow checks aren’t even enough for the rent, and the savings are long gone.” She looked at him carefully, almost expecting to see a stranger, but it was still her Father Gruneman, with gentle eyes. “Never mind me. I—I had to talk to you. The other night—”

  He interrupted. “I didn’t mean for you to see any of that meeting.”

  “But I can’t unsee it now.” She laced and twisted her fingers, wishing she could blurt out all her questions, tell him what she’d overheard him say. “Who was that woman?”

  “That was…” He hesitated as though he was deciding how much to tell her. “Arabella von Kaspar.”

  “How do you know her?”

  He stared at the ashes in his unlit hearth. “My dear Thea, I only want you to be safe. You must be patient. Your father was a good friend, and I want to help your mother, but if you ask too many questions and walk down a dangerous path, I would never forgive myself.”

  “But you do know something! How can I not ask? You’re the one who told me they took Mother away to erase her memories! Every day that goes by—” She swallowed. This was an idea she tried not to face.

  He sat back with a sigh, stroking his weathered cheeks. “Let me put it this way. You know me at church. When I’m there, my role is to speak the word of God, as much as I am capable, not to lead you into danger. But away from that—my own personal quest, if you can ca
ll it that—is to live the word of God as much as I am capable. To fight for peace and freedom and love. That is what led me to the revolutionary movement in this city. But it is not an easy business. I’ve put myself in danger, and I’ve sometimes succumbed to my own darker motives—revenge, or anger—because I’ve lost people in this. Your parents, of course, are among that number.”

  “But you won’t tell me anything about it?”

  “How could I tell your mother, if something happened to you? She’ll need you when she comes back.”

  “Shouldn’t I fight for peace and freedom and love, too? You don’t want me to actually learn anything from your sermons?”

  “I did walk into that one, didn’t I?” He met her eyes, and she was taken aback by the steeliness in his gaze. “Look, Thea, I understand and admire your impulse to help. But I will not put Henry’s daughter in danger. I know what I’m doing, but I also know—” He shook his head. “Just lie low. Wait. I will help your mother. I promise you that.”

  “Will you just answer one more question?” she asked. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “If I can.”

  “Was my father…part of what you’re doing?” Her whole body was rigid. She had to know if he was alive. If he was in prison.

  Father Gruneman caught her hand. “No. It was the war that led me to this work. And he was already gone.”

  She bit her lip. “But he could still be alive, couldn’t he?”

  “I don’t know for certain.”

  Of course he would say that. There was no body.

  But she had heard him say, at the club, She knew he was alive.

  He’d been talking about her mother. It must be. But if Thea confronted Father Gruneman, he would know she had spied on him. And it was obvious he had no intention of letting her in on the other half of his life.

  Still, she couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. All the things that had happened so quickly seemed to be leading her on this path, whether or not she wished it.

  “Are you sure I can’t offer you a bite to eat?” he asked, obviously trying to move off the subject.

  This time she accepted, just to be polite, but she was already thinking ahead. Maybe it was better to pursue the answers alone. He wouldn’t be putting her in danger, then. She would be choosing to get involved on her own. She knew the revolutionaries met at the Café Rouge, and if she happened to take an interest, could he really stop her?

  “I’d like a Starlight, and she’ll take a Milky Way Twist. Will you still have the Starlight when this show ends? It’s my favorite cocktail in the world now.”

  “They might give it a different name,” Thea said. “But I’ll mention it to the bartender.”

  “Thanks,” the girl said as the telephone on her table rang. Thea started to inch away, but the girl waved her back. “It’s for you. You have an admirer at table seven.”

  The waitresses, despite uniforms suggesting the career-girl clothes of a telephone operator, were not actually supposed to use the telephones. Thea’s eyes strained through the haze of smoke to table seven, finding a flash of silver hair.

  She walked over to Freddy. “Down here with the rabble tonight, are you?” she said with a smile, but she was burning to know if he’d found out anything about Nan. She still hadn’t shown up, and with every passing day Thea was surer that something awful had happened to her.

  “I insisted. Gerik likes the balcony better than I do.”

  “Noisy down here,” Gerik said with a glance at a nearby woman with a constant whooping laugh.

  “In all your stories of your crazy youth, no one was ever loud?” Freddy asked.

  “No one was loud in the imperial days,” Gerik said. “All the whispering was much more exciting. But don’t mind me.” He turned to watch the chorus line of dancing girls dressed—barely dressed—like stars.

  Freddy caught her eye and mouthed, Later. He mimicked picking up another cup of coffee.

  She nodded, but tonight was Monday, the meeting of the revolutionaries at the Café Rouge. She’d already asked Mr. Kortig about leaving work early. She couldn’t miss this one and have to wait another week to attend. She took Freddy’s and Gerik’s orders and rushed off. Supposing she could get Freddy alone, she wondered if she should bring him with her to the meeting.

  She didn’t know the least thing about revolutionaries, really. She’d always assumed a lot of artist types would talk about intellectual concepts she didn’t understand and say the bourgeoisie this and labor strikes that, and not actually do much. But she couldn’t imagine Father Gruneman talking that way.

  Freddy might tell Gerik and bring the whole thing down. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to see if she could get him to walk with her on some other pretense, and decide as they talked.

  She brought the drinks out, a slight smile playing on her lips, shooting an occasional glance at Gerik. “You’re becoming a regular, you know. I hope it isn’t just for the science lesson.”

  “Certainly not that,” Freddy said, grinning wryly.

  She leaned in closer and said, just loud enough for Gerik to hear, “Too bad you can’t seem to ditch the chaperone. I asked to get off early today to go to a party some girls I know are throwing. Ought to be a heck of a time. They have a phonograph and lots of music.”

  “I’ve never been much for parties,” Freddy said.

  Did he not understand what she was getting at?

  “Freddy!” Gerik barked, with some exasperation. “When a girl asks you to a party, you don’t need to act like such a stick.”

  Ah. Now she understood. He knew how to play Gerik, too. She tried to toss out more encouragement for Gerik to let him go. “It’ll be a nice time. Fifteen, twenty other kids, and some dancing. A bit tame for my taste, really, but she’s an old school friend who just moved into her own place with a couple other girls.”

  Gerik waved his hand. “I suppose you can’t get in too much trouble without me.”

  “Hmph,” Freddy said. “You wish I would.”

  “Can you meet me out front of Café Tops at ten thirty?” Thea said.

  “The sad-old-man place?”

  She laughed. “Exactly.”

  “Sure.”

  The night was brisk, a northern wind whipping down the street and keeping the crowds light, which was part of the reason Mr. Kortig had agreed to let her go early. Thea shivered as she hurried across the street. Freddy was waiting inside, alone among the sad old men. He had coffee and a pastry, in spite of having already polished off a plate of smoked-meat dumplings at the club. Even for a boy, he certainly ate a lot for someone so thin!

  “Well, Gerik’s gone, or at least spying from a comfortable distance,” he said.

  “Goodness, he’d better not be.”

  He smiled, but it did make her wonder. “I need to change,” she said.

  “How far away is this party?” he asked. “Because I need to talk to you.”

  “Well, me too. Just wait.”

  She hoped there would be a crowd at the revolutionary meeting and Father Gruneman wouldn’t notice her, but just in case, she didn’t want to look too Thea-ish. In the bathroom of Café Tops, she slathered her eyelids in kohl and wiped off her usual red lipstick. She had bought a new hat just for the occasion, bonnet-style with a curved brim that shaded her face, and pink flowers all over. She thought it was awful and would never wear it again, but that was just the idea. Then she wrapped her mother’s long black scarf around her neck. Father Gruneman might still recognize her coat, but among a lot of people no one would notice coats.

  “That is quite a hat,” Freddy commented.

  “It was the ugliest one I could find.”

  “You didn’t tell me it was an ugly-hat party.”

  “It’s a masquerade. But only for me. I’d rather not be recognized.”

  “Hmm. I hop
e the lighting is bad wherever we’re going, because I don’t think anyone would consider an ugly hat a disguise.”

  “It’s the best I can do on short notice!” She moved toward the door. “Let’s go.”

  The weather, unfortunately, was not welcoming to conversation. They walked fast, Freddy keeping a hand clamped over his own hat against the wind, and their teeth chattered. “Maybe we should h-hail a cab?” he said.

  “N-no. Just t-tell me what you wanted to tell me. All the cabs look occupied, anyway.”

  He squinted ahead. They were approaching the Lampenlight District’s traffic light, one of the few in the city’s busy intersections. Automobiles halted, turned, and proceeded in their usual dance.

  “I…I saw Nan,” he said.

  “What?” The vigor rushed out of Thea’s step. “How? Where?”

  He looked upset. Not at her. But at something. “Gerik…he has some involvement with the hospital. They have a sort of rehabilitation program for people who attempt suicide. And Nan…was there.”

  “But Nan wouldn’t—she couldn’t—I mean…!” She thought she’d known Nan well. “She had ambitions. She spoke of becoming a dressmaker, and she was so clever and brave. And she never seemed depressed or unsure. It wouldn’t be like her at all.”

  “Maybe she had trouble talking about it. Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Thea snapped. He didn’t know Nan, but she did, and she was certain. “Nan was solid as a mountain.”

  “I’ll admit that something doesn’t add up….”

  “And you said you saw her at the hospital?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Which hospital?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention on the way—didn’t realize where we were going.”

  “But you don’t know the name of it?”

  “No.”

  She was walking fast again, and she didn’t seem to feel the cold much anymore. “Speaking of something that doesn’t add up,” she said, “how could you not find out the name of the hospital once you knew Nan was there? Even after you’d seen her there, you didn’t think to look for a sign?”