by Chris Bauer
“Got more coming to you, you grubby nasty sack of—”
Suddenly my arm stopped in midair, gripped from behind. A smiling man in a black leather overcoat worked the belt out of my hand.
“So much anger,” said the man from the horseless carriage, “und from so young a man.”
“Mr. Volkheimer!” Sister said. “My goodness. Thank you for stopping him.” Sister gripped the back of my shirt collar and pulled me to her side. Her grip turned into a firm hold on my shoulder. “Johnny’s not, ah, so much a bad boy as he is spirited. And he was defending himself against…against…”
“Against Herr Zerhoffer, one of our tannery workers,” the man said, “who has apparently left in a hurry, not concerned about keeping his pants up.” He held out the belt and eyed the turned-tail SOB who was making his way back toward his bungalow. Mr. Volkheimer, tall and bulky as two stacked beer barrels, tossed the belt into the back seat of his carriage. “I witnessed the exchange, Sister. You needn’t explain the boy’s actions.”
Mr. Volkheimer’s gaze lingered a moment on me. I turned up my coat collar, closed it with one hand and hunched my shoulders over to cover my neck; I was cold from sweating. He crouched down eye level to me, thick wavy lines appearing on his forehead. “You must learn to control your temper, son,” he said. “You must fight those violent urges. The ones that sometime turn men into demons. This is very important. Do you understand?”
I nodded. His stare held onto me a moment longer, like he wanted what he’d said to sink in. He raised his hand; I flinched. His hand settled on my shoulder then patted my upper arm instead, his small grin disappearing with a slight nod of his head.
He stood and retied the waist of his leather coat around his huge belly, turned to Sister. “Und now we shall get the stricken Zerhoffer boy home.”
“No. He’s going back to the orphanage with me. I’ll have a doctor examine him. Please, Mr. Volkheimer…” Sister unwrapped the scarf from around the boy’s head and ears, then recovered them with the black waistband of her habit. She returned my scarf to me. “You must put a stop to the use of child labor in your tannery. It is deplorable.”
“You have heard my feelings on this matter before, Sister.” Rolf Volkheimer was a full German, but his accent wasn’t too bad. “I am trying to change things but my brothers do not agree. As they are my partners, I have, for the time being, been overruled. But I have petitioned the courts about it, und I assure you, I will fight this mistreatment. Here, let me carry the boy to my automobile. I can take all of you back to St. Jerome’s.”
Mr. Volkheimer lifted the stiff boy into his arms and placed him gently in the back seat of his carriage, then gave the sister his leather coat, which she wasn’t wanting to take, but then she did. Sister pulled herself onto the carriage’s running board, then settled into the front seat. Her hands, raw from the cold as mine were, went into Mr. Volkheimer’s coat pockets. One hand came out with a silver box in the shape of a treasure chest, but small enough to fit in her palm.
“That’s a snuff box,” I told her, looking over her shoulder. “Seen people at the hotel with them.”
“Yes, Johnny, I know. Using snuff tobacco is a nasty, nasty habit.”
Mr. Volkheimer gripped the carriage’s crank in both hands and gave it one rotation; the engine backfired. With the second and third turns the engine settled into a low, rat-a-tat-tatting purr. He climbed aboard behind the steering wheel. Sister handed him his snuffbox.
“Well, thank you, Sister, but it could have stayed in the pocket. Nevertheless…” He opened the tiny hinged box and pinched out a dark, sifted powder, brought it to his nose and sniffed until the snuff tobacco was gone. He returned the box to a pants pocket. Sister looked the other way.
“I will investigate more suitable use of these boys at the tannery, Sister,” Mr. Volkheimer said, “und for this boy in particular. My brothers have them crawling into the machinery where most men can’t fit, scrubbing down the parts with solvent. I give you my word that I will see what I can do to change this.”
I balanced myself on the running board outside where Sister sat. Mr. Volkheimer looked past Sister’s shoulder and spoke to me above the noise of the puttering engine. “Now be sure to hold on tight, boy.”
8
Coroner Kermit Frink was settled behind a small desk that didn’t give him much room between it and a window with Venetian blinds, the blinds pulled halfway up and open, sunlight striping his head and shoulders. Took him a few tries before he got the desk chair rotated to where he wanted it. Now it was tilted back and he was in a full slouch, his arm on the desk, a hand around a can of soda. Near the end of me telling him about Zerhoffer and the dead babies and the sewers, he got full upright in the chair, started tugging at his cigarette pack, then said with a few deliberate nods soon as I was done, “Finally. About time you spoke up.”
“Really, now,” I said, surprised. “How’s that?”
“When I saw you and those boys at the restaurant excavation,” he said, his hammy fingers working the cellophane off his soft pack of smokes, “I felt you knew something. At least more than the rest of us did. Then you showed up at the train wreck.” Kerm took a filtered cigarette out of the pack, put it in his mouth, and sucked on air. He pulled it away from his lips. “So I wasn’t all that surprised to run into you again at the convent. I went with my instincts when I let you and Father see the skeletons.”
The office we were in was no bigger than a prison cell and a half and was stuffed with a desk and desk chair, the two side chairs Father and me occupied, and a trash can. No name on the door, just the word office. Space was tight at the hospital; Kerm may have been a squatter. “So what you’re saying is the German immigrants were just throwing their babies away?”
“Tossing them into the river, or stuffing them down the storm sewers at night like they were table scraps. Who knows where else they were putting them; too many mouths, not enough wages.”
“You saw people doing this?”
“Yeah. Once.” I shuddered and took a tight-lipped swallow. “But other kids seen people do it, too. We spent a lot of time on the streets when I was at the orphanage. The sisters did what they could to control us kids, but we managed to sneak out enough.”
Kerm rubbed his temple like he had a headache. “I can see the headlines,” he said. “‘Turn-of-the-Century Mass Genocide in Three Bridges, Pennsylvania.’ Look, it’ll be in your town’s best interest for you to stay mum about this.”
The town had a lot to be ashamed of, but it still came down to the state of things back then, I told him, with poor immigrant husbands and wives doing what all husbands and wives did together, then ending up with more mouths to feed because of it.
And to think how Viola and me had tried for years to have kids. Knowing all them people were having babies and just throwing them away, I wondered how God was able to square that. And I wondered how come I hadn’t ended up on the floor with the rest of them skeletons, and how come I’d been left at the orphanage gate, and—
“Wump?” Father squeezed my shoulder. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Kerm spoke again. “Since I can’t determine forensically when the deaths occurred, my report will say they could have been spread out over the past sixty or seventy years, citing the age of these sewers.”
“But what about—”
“The two decomposing bodies? I checked with the sewage treatment plants in the area, and yes, I’m sorry to say they report finding baby bodies jamming up the pumping equipment every once in a while, mixed in with discarded pets, careless raccoons, and other small animals. They could have been tossed into the river or crammed into those openings in the sewer drains between curb and street. By the time a body gets to the treatment plant, if it makes it that far, it’s pretty much unidentifiable. Shameful, but that’s the way it is. So, there you have it, gentlemen. My take on the situation.”
Kerm called a cab to give Father and me a lift back to Our Lady’s, the city of Philad
elphia picking up the fare. Father didn’t say nothing the first four blocks. Me, I didn’t feel like talking either. Seeing death at work like this pushed me into thinking about my son, Harry. Most kids at age twenty think they’re invincible. Harry was forced to face reality early, got philosophical about it, a calm and rational voice above the pain. “Pop, I just get to find out what is or isn’t next, sooner than you,” he’d told me near the end, “with less of a chance of screwing things up before I get there.”
Amen to that, son.
About a block from the rectory, Father’s voice startled me. “That boy didn’t have a mark on him.”
“What boy, Father?”
“Adam. At baseball practice yesterday.”
Little Sonny had nailed Adam with some good hard punches to the face and head, and Adam hadn’t retaliated. Yet Sonny “looked like he’d been in the ring with Cassius Clay. I’m having trouble with that, and something else, too. I find it odd there weren’t two more bodies at the train wreck this morning.”
The hack leaned his Checker cab into a corner as we approached Our Lady’s rectory from the rear. It was the end of morning recess and the schoolyard was packed with kids, so he slowed down; the cab’s tires squealed around the corner anyway. We came out of the turn with Father still talking. “Why weren’t the other two dragged under the train with her? The train engineer said Sister Magdalena had a grip on their wrists right up till impact.”
“The engineer could have been wrong. Maybe she let go in time.”
“Right. So, the question is, what made her let go?” Father leaned forward and grabbed the top of the front seat. He spoke into the hack’s ear. “Turn the cab around.”
The stainless-steel door opened, and Kerm the coroner pulled out the slab. He unzipped Sister Magdalena’s body bag halfway, close to where it dipped down and leveled off. “What is it you want to see, Father?”
“Her hands.”
Kerm reached in, pulled on each arm by the wrist, and sat her hands outside the bag. Everything was attached: arms, hands, all ten fingers. Kerm turned her left hand up, said, “Well, I’ll be damned…”
“Open it up,” Father said.
Sister’s olive-colored hand was grimy from rubbing against the creosote-dipped railroad ties and the dusty cinders around them. Her fingernails were jagged and short, but this made sense because she’d been chewing them pretty regular for some time, ever since she’d gotten anxious. Kerm was having a devil of a time uncurling her fingers. “I had to do this once already. Can’t say I’ve ever seen a dead person’s hand reclose itself, especially after rigor mortis has set in.”
It was like whatever she’d been holding needed to still be in it, with her determined not to let go, even in death. Except she had let go, and her palms and curled fingers showed why.
“The skin’s mostly burned off. That’s bone in there,” Kerm said, pointing through the parted black flesh of her palm at things that looked like tan sticks inside melting Fudgsicles. “Something hot came in contact with her palm and fingers. My guess is it was the train engine’s wheels. They’ll retain heat with all that friction, iron wheel against iron rail, even after they stop turning. It’s already in my report, fellas. And in case I didn’t mention this before, I’m calling this an accident, not a suicide.”
Sister’s other hand was the same way, all curled up but revealing charred flesh in its palm and the underside of its fingers.
It didn’t matter how Kerm wrote it up. I might have bought that one hand got burned by the iron wheels, but not both. The train dragged the lower part of her body, but the upper half of it with both arms and hands had been left behind on the side of the tracks. Her hands and those big wheels might not have even come in contact with each other. What she’d been holding had gotten hot as hell after she’d started holding it.
Something happened here that wasn’t normal. Something no coroner’s language could do justice to.
The Checker cab dropped Father Duncan and me curbside out front of the convent. It was early afternoon, a little past one.
“Got a question for you, Father. Yesterday after baseball practice, you said being able to speak German was one of the reasons they assigned you to this parish, right?”
Both of us were on the sidewalk ready to part ways, Father to spend some time with the mourning sisterhood, me to head home to see if Viola was still there eating her lunch so’s I could fill her in on all the hubbub. The convent, the church, and the rectory loomed over Father’s shoulder in that order, like thunderheads gathering offshore, all three buildings a darker colored granite than I’d ever noticed before.
“That’s right. I speak German fairly well.” Father checked the front of his cassock with his hand, touched each of its buttons on his chest to make sure they were closed as far north as his collar. An absentminded gesture; one maybe to keep me from bothering him with more questions.
“‘One of the reasons’ is what you said, right?” I repeated for him. “So, give me another.”
This parish never had more than one priest for a few generations, and all of a sudden, the archdiocese decided to put another one out here. I’d found this real strange the first time I heard he was coming. For sure it weren’t no less strange now.
“Ah. I see.” Father looked up the street then down, a one-way three-laner that traveled northwest as it passed the parish buildings. Traffic moved too fast along this block most of the time, like it was doing today. But on Sundays, before each of the parish’s two Masses, it funneled into two lanes and slowed to a respectable crawl so as not to hit people crossing the street in the middle of the block. Drivers were at least smart enough to know that hitting a grandmother on her way to church on a Sunday would pretty much tip the Judgment Day scales in the wrong direction.
“I suppose,” Father said, “I could argue it’s because the parish has been growing, with a lot of ex-GIs from Philadelphia settling here and starting families.” Father’s tired black-brown eyes were focused real good now, staring at me. “But I think you know the real reason why.”
“Come again, Father?”
“I’ll spell it out. There have been some alleged…” he searched for the right word, “improprieties reported to the archdiocese. Anonymously, of course.” Father’s stare drilled me, but I didn’t flinch. “They involve the monsignor.”
Improprieties, hell. Monsignor Fassnacht was shaming the priesthood and the Catholic Church. He’d been bringing women back to the rectory at night and banging them, right there in his room for Christ sake. Been doing this for years, and nobody said nothing about it. Some of them been street women, some not. It was the ones that weren’t prostitutes that worried me. I saw the way he looked at all them young nuns, like they were meat. Saw and heard him around them, too. A man in his position of authority, with the sisterhood always taught to obey their Catholic elders…He was a disgrace, taking advantage like that. Someone had to do something.
“Really doesn’t matter who contacted the archdiocese,” Father said. “The Cardinal put me here to investigate the allegations and report back to him. Except—”
Father had a stumped look. His eyes settled on Our Lady’s front doors a moment. When he raised them to the round stained-glass window, I followed them. The window was wider than the church’s double-door entrance, and the glass showed two large angels on bent knees as they witnessed the Virgin Mary’s ascent into heaven.
“Except what, Father?”
“Except…” Father’s expression changed, and I got a glimpse of how he must have looked guarding home plate in a tight ball game. “Except there may be other forces at work here.”
His jaw muscles clenched, and his lips pressed together. “Why don’t you and I meet at the orphanage after school today? We’ll have a talk with Adam.”
I headed home on foot past the schoolyard, hoping to catch Viola for a few minutes.
Click-a-clack, click-a-clack. A sister stood in the doorway to the school’s back entrance, her tin crick
et between her thumb and forefinger. The signal pierced the din of a chattering schoolyard; lunch period was over. Girls in blue uniforms with white blouses and spring jackets assembled behind each other in rows according to grade. Boys in white shirts with clip-on blue ties pushed and elbowed each other within their own lines. I was halfway past the schoolyard on the sidewalk, outside the fence, as the late arrivals straggled through the gate and fell in behind their classmates. The laughing, giggling, jostling, and tugging at one another stopped, replaced by covered-mouth whispering, and a few nervous coughs. Click-a-clack, click-a-clack. The children began filing inside.
I got to the corner of the schoolyard. The sister closed the glass door behind the last kid entering the school, sealing the exit like it was a bulkhead on a submarine. Now the yard was empty. No, that wasn’t right. The cyclone fence was blurring my vision. In the far corner were two figures. I got closer to the fencing and looked through the crisscrossed links.
One of the figures was unmistakable: Raymond, strapped into his wheelchair, his head tilted left, his neck muscles not strong enough to carry it erect. A red Phillies baseball cap sat on top his long sandy hair. In his right hand was a toy sword with a short silver blade made of hard rubber above a plastic T-shaped gold handle. He was holding the sword weakly upright, its handle bottom balanced on his knee. The other figure was Leo, facing Raymond’s wheelchair with a sword just like his friend’s. Leo raised it skyward then slowly lowered it level with the blacktop. He pointed it at Raymond and spoke. “Ready?”
Raymond’s sword wiggled.
Leo thrust at Raymond’s midsection; Raymond tilted his play sword to meet the plunge, rubber blade to rubber blade, except what I heard was the sound of metal on metal. This made me look closely at their weapons. Toys, I told myself; I was sure.
Leo thrust again like a gladiator in one of them Roman movies, the thrust quicker this time. Raymond’s sword again matched him, and Leo again pulled back, the only other noise Leo’s heavy breathing. Leo got back to it, thrust a third time and retreated, a fourth, a fifth, each plunge a little quicker than the one before it, all of them met by flicks of Raymond’s wrist, no hint of metal striking metal. Leo then raised his sword with both hands on the handle and attacked from overhead, slicing down toward Raymond’s shoulders and neck and upper torso, but none of his blows connected, all of them greeted by his sparring partner’s weak-armed yet swift sword.