City for Ransom

CHAPTER 8

Philo Keane had packed up what he could carry, leaving his young assistant, Waldo Denton, to arrange transportation for the bulk of the photographic equipment from the crime scene. Philo had one single desire for now—hide away in his darkroom. To bid the annoying world and his assistant goodbye. To be alone with his creations and his music.

He dearly loved sleeping to the sound of a symphony playing on his newly purchased phonograph—his only expensive indulgence, this awe-inspiring invention that placed the decision of a musical score into his hands. He loved live theater, opera, almost as much as a good beer garden. And now he could afford the next best thing! He’d placed on a favorite, Wagner’s “Rides of the Valkyries.” The sound of the orchestra wafted throughout the cramped apartment, and the beauty of it mesmerized and relaxed Keane. Accompaniment to his art and passion that he now wished to immerse himself in. The sooner he was done with the crime-scene cuts for Ransom, the sooner he could sit down to contemplate the photographic art he’d created from his most recent model, Miss Mandor. God, she was gorgeous, and as she was a mute, so perfectly manageable.

For now, he must concern himself with commerce. Aside CITY FOR RANSOM

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from what Ransom needed, which he did purely for the money, he did shoots for area merchants. Another passion, his camera, was the specially designed 1893 Hetherington magazine camera. Sealed in leather with no projecting points, it had a continuous rotary shutter requiring no attention and could be set on slow, medium, or rapid speed. The lens was a beautiful Darlot #1 hemispherical with a lovely revolving diaphragm working between the lenses. Aside from a focusing dial, the camera was outfitted with a tally that kept a record of the number of exposures made. Finally, it had a rack-and-pinion focusing movement, and a back-and-forth double swing back, as well as a side-to-side swivel. Everything in one camera! And it had set him back sixty dollars—a fortune. Purchased through Montgomery Ward & Company, along with his oversized tripod that’d cost another $9.98, his outlay for equipment had put him in the hole. However, he’d talked Ward & Company into barter for partial payment through a commission to create a photo array accompanying a line of veterinary instruments.

Philo was in the process of fulfilling this agreement on the side, but the angst involved, the frustration, the sheer hatred of the project had grown like a cancer inside. A ruddy little account executive named Trelaine kept turning down his concepts for selling, with some attempt at flourish, such items as stricture cutters for cow teats, French poultry killing knives, Whisson’s improved pig forceps, de-horning saws, Farmer Miles’s castrating ecraseur, and, worst of all, the disgusting Gape Worm Extractor for worm disease in fowl.

This terrible looking instrument, essentially a brass probe with barbed fishing hooks, Trelaine billed as the only sure way to pluck out the offending worm and dead matter from the windpipe to save a chick from a gasping death.

Men like Trelaine infuriated Philo. So did all the prudes at Ward & Co., as they’d turned away his best, most imaginative solution to selling such god-awful products—a lovely bonneted model playing the part of farm maiden, holding a precious chick in one hand, the chicken-torturing device in another, while smiling at the camera. Their alter-66

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native? A boring full-page add made up of words. Words that spilled over the edge of the page; words without let-up, no visual counterpoint, like looking at a page in the Ency-clopaedia Britannica.

Still he had to pay the piper, to defer to his patron, to swallow his artistic integrity. To abolish his perfectly rendered ad for the milksop they proposed—a simple picture of each probe, each extractor, each bailing iron and plier.

But first to CPD business, make some money by developing 8-by-10 cuts of dead people. Another side business, an underground market catering to the bizarre and gruesome, would pay handsomely for a shot of Ransom shoving that severed head into Tewes’s hands—not to mention headless, crispy-fried torso shots.

He slipped a small silver-coated flask from his coat pocket and swallowed its contents. With Denton still not back, he’d had to mix the chemicals and float the cuts himself. By now, he hoped the death shots from the train station—submerged in a brackish solution that told him he needed to clean his tray—ought to be taking form.

In his darkroom, he found it so. The results made his rent, and a sumptuous meal and bottle besides. “Where in hell is Denton?” he wondered aloud. His new apprentice was a glutton for punishment. In fact, Waldo brought it on himself.

“But like God, I never put more on the boy than he can bear.” Helplessly, Philo always took the tone of a British lord engaging his lowliest subject with Denton—lord to peasant; he did so only because Denton invited it, seemed actually to expect it. “It’s as if comforting to the boy,” he’d once told Alastair when Ransom had pointed it out.

Philo stared into the watery solution as the prints below the surface began a hazy, formless chemical dance. The term solution seemed apropos. Unfortunate that his friend Ransom had no easy solution to this bizarre series of garroting murders.

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residence, his clatter at odds with the stirring sound of Wagner’s valkyries down in the deep interior of the lower level apartment. Over the musical rendering of the twelve hand-maidens of Odin riding their horses over the field of battle to escort the souls of the slain heroes to Valhalla came Denton’s complaints as he placed the monster tripod in its corner. Too large to stand straight up, the tripod—used only in photographing murder and suspected murder victims—reached out to trip even the cat, Kronos, a tom that came and went of his own accord.

Philo slipped from the darkroom, his hands waving, mimicking a maestro. Waldo stared at his mentor’s antics. Philo’s orchestrating left hand continued, while his right swooped rhythmically down, dipping into his pocket, and returning with a bank note dangling before Waldo.

“The equivalent of U.S. currency, my boy!” he assured his apprentice, handing him the note instead of the promised dollar bill. Denton stared at the bank note from the Prussian Bank of Chicago as if it were a hundred dollar bill, his eyes wide with wonder. “I’ve never seen a bank note with this kind of pale pink color, and my . . . the Roman Caesar’s got such a strange scepter, and usually his nose is a whole lot bigger, isn’t it, Mr. Keane? I mean don’t get me wrong. It’s quite lovely in its detail.” “It’s a new bank just opened off Lake Park Avenue . . .

you know, Adams Street. So you know it’s legitimate.”

Philo himself made little in the way of payment from the CPD, but he’d wisely catered to not one but all seven district station houses, and the work was beginning to pick up.

Philo’s darkroom amounted to a section of the apartment he’d covered in black material purchased from a mortuary.

In what little space remained of his apartment, one corner was filled by a bed shoved against the wall, while another wall held up his bookshelf and desk, cluttered with all manner of photographic paraphernalia and books. Philo had studied the new and amazing science of photography since 68

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its inception and even before: the various stages of man’s desire to reproduce reality in his own hands—through his own eyes—from cave art to present . . . the Matthew Brady deluxe camera and tripod now available in any Sears Roebuck store and catalog across the country. Photography had taken off like a brushfire in a tornado, and sadly he knew the only ones getting rich from it were the manufacturer and the merchant. At times, he’d cursed himself for having turned down that job to sell cameras at Fields Department Store, turning his back on a normal life, a regular paycheck, and perhaps some friends he’d have encountered among those who loved the new science. But sales was sales and he was no salesman, and he had always shunned what others called normal.

Perhaps for the same reason the science of photography had captivated Philo as a child. The history of reproducing and depicting the world around mankind, all of it fascinated him. Even as a child, he watched in awe as a Civil War photographer named Clemmens displayed battlefield shots and spoke of his adventures in the war. This man inspired him, giving Philo a wartime print that he’d signed.

Philo now ushered Denton out of his front door, chastising him for being late getting back. “Come round when I send a messenger for you, Waldo, and not before.”

“Right, sir, but are you sure, sir?”

“Out Waldo, now!”

The sound of Waldos closing the door came as a gift just as Wagner ended. “Sometimes silence and aloneness is all that will do,” he said and raised his empty gin flask. “But this will not do.”

Inspector Alastair Ransom had left the Illinois Central train station and waved down a city hansom cab, one of a fleet of horse-drawn carriages that collectively beat a rhythm against the brick and cobblestone streets. Once seated inside, Ransom called out to the cabbie through a small portal CITY FOR RANSOM

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that slid open and closed as needed, shouting, “One forty-one Clark Street.”

Clark Street was the center of a great deal of activity, shops and taverns lined its way along with bawdy houses and gambling dens. In order to remain open and operating, Ransom knew that every pub, inn, tavern, bar, brothel and flophouse paid a tribute to the beat cops patrolling the area.

Rent in the area had remained low.

The quiet interior of the cab and its plush cushions had an instant effect on Ransom, whose recurring headaches, stiff right leg, and frayed nerves did battle with him. He hated having to deal with people he thought belligerent—like Tewes and Kohler. This placed him in a foul mood that only Merielle might render neutral.

Not even Merielle’s lithe body and experienced hands could end his suffering altogether. In her arms, beneath her warmth and her strong massaging hands, with her lips on him, with her giving herself entirely over to his needs without judgment, without harangue, allowing him to indulge his most secret desires, Ransom at least had the illusion that someone loved him unconditionally and without reservation.

Merielle did not recoil at his burned flesh where the bomb had mauled him; she didn’t recoil at the size of him, as did many a woman. She did not recoil at his often lurid, often horrific stories of things he’d seen on the street as a cop, tales more terrifying than anything penned by her favorite author from Harper’s Illustrated, Edgar Allan Poe. Once, during an all-night session after they’d made love, he’d shared tales he thought would send her running from him.

He’d confided the truth behind his reputation. Instead of leaving him, she leapt into his arms. He learned her real name that night. Before this he’d known her only as Polly Pete. Ever after, he’d called her Mere. Still, she’d withheld the details of what had led her into prostitution.

Alastair believed himself in love with Merielle, and he nowadays paid her a salary to be on call exclusively, setting her up in an apartment. She no longer needed to sell herself 70

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to men, he’d told her, and she’d tearfully accepted the arrangement. With his generosity and what she made modeling for Philo Keane, she needn’t make a whore of herself ever again.

She had come to love him, and to love him unreservedly, despite the disparity in their ages. He was old enough to be her father. In fact, of late, she’d begun to treat him like a father, and this made him uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that he did not go to her for comfort.

She was a balm to his mind— body and soul. His working day was spent amid a dismal, depressing landscape; amid the poor and homeless, the wretched and out of work, the abandoned and orphaned—all ignored and given not the least human tolerance by city fathers whose god was money.

The city he loved, the city he had always called his, had disappointed Ransom in cascading fashion.

An English reporter who’d recently pleaded persuasively to gain entry into the Harrison and Des Plaines streets’ lockups was a close friend of Alastair Ransom’s. The man wanted to publish a sensational exposé of conditions in Chicago, along its South Levee district and in its corrupt political scene, and in its treatment of the poor and indigent; to get at this, he wanted to see firsthand how people in the jails were treated, and he wanted Ransom’s input. While it had yet to be published, author William T. Stead had confided in Ransom, over ale one night, the title: If Christ Came to Chicago. Ransom had laughed, finding it both fitting and hilarious at once.

“You can’t be serious,” he’d cautioned Stead.

“I am deadly serious, my friend.”

“But you will scandalize the gentry, the wigs on Michigan Avenue, the merchants on State Street.”

“As it should be!” Stead raised his glass and loudly exclaimed, “If Christ himself came in on a box car, he’d be pummeled and dragged off to a cell the likes of which I’ve not seen the world over, gentlemen. I tell you, I have seen more Christian charity in China, nay even Russia. Ransom CITY FOR RANSOM

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here has shown me that Chicago’s got the deepest holes other than Calcutta.”

He’d gone on that night, adding that Chicago had no equal for squalor on the planet, thanks to the cruelty of the guards and the city fathers who’d created the dungeons here. “Your city, Ransom, allows it,” he’d said.

Ransom felt the stinging truth in Stead’s words. Any visit to the Harrison Street jail, which Stead characterized as worse than the prisons of St. Petersburg, proved this truth.

Gaslight and shoulder-to-shoulder prisoners and makeshift areas for the homeless, so many sleeping in one place. All conspired to create a thick warmth and an atmosphere that strangled the man who dared inhale. The floor a carpet of humanity, the fetid atmosphere choking, the bars sweating with condensation, the lockup proved the picture of Hades—straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Paradise and Hell. While actual prisoners slept behind the barred gates, homeless tramps slept in the corridors between barred cage and wall, there on the stone floor. “Pigged together like herrings in a barrel,” Stead had written. “A pavement of human bodies.” As the reporter finished each chapter of his proposed book, he’d asked Ransom to read it for authenticity and detail. All this on the promise he’d help Ransom research Haymarket for his next exposé. The man missed nothing.

But unlike Stead, Ransom had to work under these conditions and to live with them. Stead could write his book and feel good about himself, feel he’d served man and reportage gods, and could be on his way . . . onto the next social problem or issue in another city in another part of the world.

Stead had left his manuscript with Laird and Lee, a small Chicago publishing concern likely to go bankrupt, while he’d returned to England. Ransom held out little hope his friend would ever work on Haymarket, and he imagined that Stead’s book on political corruption would likely never see light of day. But even were it published, Alastair predicted the sum total would be a mere ripple effect; certainly not 72

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enough to embarrass Chicago’s elitists. Nothing substantive came of Reform with a capital R, of new laws, new resolutions, of cleaning house, and all the clichés of politicians caught hands down. That only happened when someone died, as in the Haymarket reforms.

Chicago’s wheels turned on the greased axle of corruption, and with graft came all manner of crime. Nothing against Stead or his naiveté, but the chances of his brave and devastating tirade against Chicago’s politicians, money changers, officials, city councilmen, aldermen, her under-world and upper-world bosses would likely get fifteen minutes of anyone’s attention. Chicago’s corrupt nature somehow endeared it to those who lived here, even as it alienated and disenfranchised its own.

Amid this growing mad dragon of a city, with booming skyscraper construction reaching these days to twenty and thirty stories, people tried to make a living in an economy that favored those with resources, but circumstances only favored a widening gap between takers and the taken. And those who were without came flooding into the city from every conceivable direction on a daily basis. Every business in the city was exploding. Every school growing. Every trade erupting. Including the black markets along Maxwell Street, but hardly at the clip of the increasing population. As a result, every human vice had its own district, and professions like gambling and prostitution were as rampant as the opium trade.

The cab Ransom rode in bumped about the brick streets.

The rhythmic clop-clop-clop put him near asleep, but then another pothole would wake him. The work at the train station had been grueling on a body he warred with daily.

Ransom had lived with pain since ’86—seven years now.

He experienced no relief save the dance with the occasional opium pipe, or the bedroom dance with Merielle, and sometimes he combined the two, and she joined him fully in the ballet.

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The cabbie snatched open the latch and called out, “Clark Street, sir. You’ll be departin’ soon, sir.”

Ransom contemplated a good stiff drink as he fished out payment for the cabbie. He dropped two bits into a paybox with a jingly bell attached. He needed to lie down with Merielle . . . get everything off his mind.

The carriage passed through the noise and bustle of new construction. While there was a great deal to recommend Chicago to newcomers with ready capital to invest in real estate or some new undertaking, the explosion of construction, land speculation, and development only made Ransom uneasy in his own home and in his own skin. He’d always imagined that Chicago would never become another New York, that it would always maintain a kind of small Mid-western flavor and friendliness, but such romantic notions had burst just after the Great Fire and multiplied after the Civil War.

Neither the Civil War nor the Great Chicago Fire could be set straight, but Ransom had been secretly investigating the cause of the murders at Haymarket since the day he’d walked out of Cook County Hospital on wooden crutches. Five friends who’d also been taken to County that day never walked out, victims of the bomb supposedly set off by agitators—union rabble, heads full with communistic ideals and radical notions of fair work practices. Two other cops dead on the street. No one ever learned the truth of it. No one ever claimed responsibility, and no one ever pinned that responsibility on anyone either, despite their hanging one man for each killed police officer. All Ransom knew was the single fact that seven good cops died that day. A devil’s bargain that left him wounded and wondering who to lay it on. Official reports left as many questions as physical injuries. He gave little thought to emotional injury. But he gave a great deal of thought to what’d become a crusade to get the CPD to pay restitution to the families of the slain officers, but in his zeal to do so, he’d raised the ire of the mayor, his lieutenants, city fathers, and Chief Kohler.

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Oddly, the more he poked and prodded, the greater the protests against him, which only led Ransom to dig in his heels to uncover the truth surrounding Haymarket.

As he dug deeper into a past that wouldn’t let go, Alastair began to suspect the unimaginable . . . that the highest authorities in Chicago may have wantonly conspired against the labor movement in an effort to make them all out to be anarchists, and thus hatched the idea for the anarchist bomb in Haymarket Square. Could it have been conceived and implemented by labor bosses and by men in his own department?

A horrid notion when Alastair first came to it; it’d hit him like a stone wall. He refused to believe it, and for a long time it’d sat—while he pursued other leads, talked to other sources, went down other paths . . .

Each only led back to a single persistent and ugly conclusion. As actual eyewitnesses disappeared, moved on, died, became mentally unfit, or had graduated from incarceration to death itself, memories and details and so-called facts had become scarce, drying up.

But he remembered the doctor who’d patched him up and tended his burns, Dr. Christian Fenger. What Fenger knew, however, he had no intention of telling Alastair Ransom. He felt the matter rightly belonged in the grave of time, better left with those dead on both sides of the labor wars. On this score, Dr. Fenger had all these years remained adamant.

The cab stopped abruptly. The end of movement and the sudden silence against the cobblestones raised Ransom from his reverie. He climbed from the cab, tipped the faceless, silent cabbie and walked from the tavern address fronting the street to the back alleyway. Here he climbed stairs to the second floor atop the tavern, and knocked on Polly Pete’s door in the sure belief that Polly no longer lived here, replaced by his beloved Merielle instead.

No answer came at the door.

This surprised him.

He checked his watch.

He’d given her everything she needed to pursue her fasci

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nation and interest in painting oils, and she was an amazing artist, after all. He’d seen the result of his patronage; his benevolence such as it was on a detective’s pay. She simply needed to be discovered by Crocea or Barhid or any of the major galleries now legion here. Along with commerce and industrialization, the interest in opera, theater, ballet, and the arts had blossomed. In fact, Chicago’s new art institute was this year completed in Lake Park, standing alone and set apart on the lakeside of Michigan Avenue facing the buildings of commerce and banking. The arts building at Congress and Michigan Avenue also stood out in his thoughts now as he again knocked at Merielle’s door.

Where might she be?

Then he heard someone on the inside.

He banged louder.

Louder still.

Finally, the door crept open, wide enough he could see her eye in shadow. It was swollen red and cut so badly as to be closed. Opening her injured eye sent a shock of pain through Merielle that she could not mask, contorting her soft features. Someone had beaten her, and he knew exactly the man—if the term could be applied to Elias Jervis.

“Don’t say anything, Alastair,” she said. “Just listen. I’m no good for you. I let you down.”

“Jervis did this to you! The bastard. I’ll kill the sonofa—”

“No, it wasn’t Elias!”

“Who then?” Jervis had been the last man who’d tried to keep her, but he only knew her as Polly Pete. It was rumored he’d once put her up as partial payment on a bad debt. Ransom goaded Elias to toss her in as a prize during a heated poker game when both men were drunk. Ransom had had his eye on her since seeing a photograph that Philo had sold him. But at that poker game, he saw something pained and solitary and quivering and in need when he gazed into her eyes. He cajoled Elias into the bet, upping the ante, saying it must be a permanent arrangement, and Polly’s eyes lit up with the possibility. And so he’d won her fairly, and once 76

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they were alone, he offered her enough money to leave Chicago, to go home. But she continually claimed there was no home—that it no longer existed.

That had been the night they’d first made love, but also the night they’d watched dawn arrive together. The night Alastair learned her real name.

“I slipped back, Alastair,” she now tearfully said. “I don’t know why . . . don’t know what’s wrong with me, but he got ugly, the bastard, but I swear it never came to nothing but a beating. It’s all my own fault. I shouldn’t’ve let him through the door, but . . . but he was going to go forty bloody dollars.

Damn me! Damn my—”

He pulled open the door and took her in his arms. When he’d first met her, his friend Stead had warned him off, characterizing her as a woman “shut up in sin,” one destined to tread the “cinder path of sin,” as he’d called it. But Ransom refused to give her up.

She stood shivering, surprised, expecting him to hit her.

“It was Elias, wasn’t it? I want a piece of the bastard.”

“Forget him, Ransom. My own stupidity and foolishness got me this way.”

“No, Merielle! No man has a right to do this to you!” He shoved the door closed. “No one!”

“You don’t know my final secret, Alastair . . . sweet, dear Alastair.”

“Christ . . . I thought we’d gotten through all your secrets.”

“We got through all of Merielle’s secrets, yes. But not . . .”

“—not Polly’s?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“Whatever will make you happy?”

“Something’s wrong in my blood . . . in my head even, Alastair. I need someone to tell me why . . .”

“Why?”

“W-why I like to be hurt . . . why I like pain. Why I want to be treated like dirt. Ground beneath your boots, Alastair.”

“Baby, it’s—”

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“Shut up and listen! I’m telling you the truth, finally, so listen!”

“All right . . . go ahead, sweetheart.”

“Can you, old man, tell me why I want to be Polly and not . . . not this princess you want me to be, Alastair, the one I’ve been trying to be! Like your bloody dream of some child I once was?”

“We can talk to Dr. Fenger.”

“No! Not him!”

“Then another doctor. Chicago’s full of doctors.”

“A doctor for the soul? How many treat your soul, Alastair?”

“What’re you talking about, baby?”

She went to her bureau drawer and snatched out a piece of soiled, torn paper. She held up the advertisement to his stunned eyes. A frayed flier for the services of Dr. J. Phineas Tewes.

“Tewes . . . why’d it have to be Tewes?”

“I’ve been seeing him.”

“How long? For how bloody long?”

“Two weeks, a little more. He’s helped tremendously!”

“I can see that,” he replied sarcastically. He snatched the flier, ripped it up, and paced the floor boards above the London Royale Arms Tavern like a bull caged in a stall.

Given what he’d gone through today with the quack at the train station, it felt like a blow, this desire of Merielle’s to visit Dr. Tewes for a phrenological exam to determine why she felt mentally scattered. It was as if two people occupied her cranium: Merielle a cultured, educated, and sweet young woman Ransom might take to any cotillion in the city, and Polly, the brash, dirty-talking, crude, uncultured, unread, uneducated poisonous wench who enjoyed dirty money for dirty sex.

“He says you’re just using me, Alastair.”

“Tewes said that?”

“He says a lot of things about you, yes.”

“Bastard. What else?”

“Says you beat people to within an inch of their lives when you interrogate them.”

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“It’s only what everyone on the street says. He knows no more ’bout me than what I want people to think. If they think that way, I get ’em talking, believe me, without laying a hand on ’em.”

“Dr. Tewes says you’re only after one thing from me, Alastair.”

“Really? And what might that be?”

“What lies between my—”

“Why the squirmy little runt quack! What business is it of his to get involved in our affairs? Last time you held me, you called me a comfort, said you loved me, Mere! And I believed you, and I’ve never lied to you, ever, and—” “Dr. Tewes says your attention and help is only trading one kind of bondage for another—”

“Just tell me, who in hell beat your eye to a pulp!”

“Dr. Tewes thought it was you.”

“Who?”

“I ain’t tellin’. I don’t want you going raging off like my—my father to slay the dragon. Merielle might, but I don’t!”

“I’ll just find out another way, Mere.” He refused any longer to call her Polly. “It’s what I do, after all.”

“You won’t get it from me.”

“Stubborn little . . .”

“Bitch? Now that’s the kind of talk I like, Ransom. Call me dirty names and be as rough as you can be, and you’ll please Polly, and with Polly in your bed, you’ll have the buckin’est best time of your—” He grabbed her up in a bear hug and stole her breath away with a passionate kiss. He hurled her onto her back and ripped away the robe she wore, revealing her red lace lin-gerie. He tore away at his own clothes even as he kissed and touched and held her down all at once. “As rough as you want it,” he hoarsely whispered in her ear. “Maybe after this, Dr. Tewes can go to hell, Polly!” “Oh, god, Ransom! Yes, yes! Being Polly for you”—she caught her breath—“that could work . . .”

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And to hell with that creepy little bastard Tewes, he thought, his hatred of the man rising with his passion. He said aloud as she came in multiple orgasms, “Promise you’ll never see that quack again, Polly baby. And give me the name of the blackheart who hurt you! Now or else I will never stop this!” He taunted her with each thrust. “Tell me . . . tell me now . . . now . . . now . . . now!” “Damn fine . . . in-ter-ro-ga-t ion tech-technique! Ran . . .

som . . . style, damn! Said you’d . . . get it outta . . . out of me . . . one way . . . or another . . .”