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stableman’s papers: Geiermeier. It had just as many letters as his, sounded equally foreign and was considerably more unpronounceable to an American tongue.
    Georg Geiermeier was the name the stableman had bought himself in a dark Hamburg alley, in the form of a Prussian passport. He’d booked his passage on the
Leibnitz
under that name. At Castle Garden, a scrivener had copied it from the ship’s register directly onto an immigration form, which a port official had stamped E NTERED AT THE P ORT OF N EW- Y ORK,
and Geiermeier it was (though a minor slip of the pen did contribute an
e
to the stableman’s
Georg
). Biedermann took pleasure in assisting a countryman, especially a down-and-out one, but the truth was it could just as well have been an Irishman who benefited from his little game. He quite simply hated industrialists, and especially their dissipated scions. Biedermann, God bless him (though naturally he didn’t believe), smirked through his mustache at the little subversion for most of a week—long after the stableman was back outside, staggering through the slush and snow, and the Astor had turned the episode into an anecdote. “Well, boys, here’s to Herr Guy-er-meyer, that’s
G-i-e-i-e-i
—” young Astor laughed, raising his glass of gin. His friends puffed their cigars and chuckled, slightly envious. “They’re saying he murdered a girl and burned down Barnum’s, and just think: He slept in my bed and ate my breakfast, while I had to hold my own with the convicts—and my father paid his bill, in advance. Now who says we don’t treat the little man well? Maybe too well!”
    It was nice of Biedermann and a big help to the stableman—I shudder to think of the oozing infections his burned hands might have suffered if not for those basins of warm, clean water, that soap, that salve—but as for this
Geiermeier
business, don’t bother learning the pronunciation; the stableman won’t be using that name long.
    “I hope you got some good eats over in Washington Square,” the second warden said, referring to the society block. Then he passed in a tin bowl of porridge and shut the gate behind him. The stableman realized he still had reason to be grateful. Even this cell was warmer than the stable. He ate the food and wondered what would happen to him next. Was there any chance they really thought he’d set the fire? Would he be able to defend himself, with no money and only his broken English? Several men shared that cell with him in the following days. At first he thought he might learn something from them—what the papers were saying about Barnum’s, maybe, or at least what he ought to expect in this place—but soon enough he realized there was no camaraderie among the prisoners here, just competition for resources. The stableman had never felt so alone. Sometimes, lying on his bunk, he thought about women, and one woman in particular, a girl he had befriended on the boat. Maria.
    The
Leibnitz
had been a typhoid ship. He’d not forgotten the pungent smell of her body, the sardonic twist of her smile, her fine waist or the suddenness of his own desire when he stood beside her. But on the boat, there was also death. That was what had really brought them together. It boarded the ship politely, with good manners, circulating first in a cold potato soup and then in a batch of fresh-baked pies—sweet, tart lakes of apple custard in tender crust, destined for the first-class dining room. The petri dish per se was yet to be invented, but what a petri dish custard made that day! A banker ate a piece, and a broker. Thus, on one frosty winter afternoon in the mid-Atlantic—and it wasn’t even fever season—did destiny transcend the boundaries of class and power. The germs gnawed like termites, inconspicuous but hungry, wracking the insides of a few fancy people who quietly took to their staterooms and clung to their chamber pots, shaking. Then the illness spread wider, and death came like a wrecking