Metropolis Read Online Free PDF Page B

ball, taking everything and everyone it wanted, indiscriminate of cabin size or class. The stableman’s sweat ran clammy when he saw the sick passengers, their familiar fever. He and Maria, who was working in the galley (and doing overtime in the first mate’s berth) to defray the cost of transport, were among the few who weren’t taken ill. They tried to help the others by distributing medicinal teas of chamomile and willow bark, but the infusions just seemed to make the people worse.
    The
Leibnitz
’s passengers were no sturdier than his mother had been, his aunt, his little sister. They gasped and clawed and died like flies in their stinking bloody sheets. Maria and the stableman had helped the remaining crew to heave the mortal remains of dozens of passengers into the sea, shrouded only in their bedclothes, and watched them sink unblessed, unabsolved. He knew they would rise again, bloated, in a few days’ time to be pecked at by the gulls. Through it all, Maria had worked by his side. She was perhaps fifteen, but the way she handled the plague made her seem more than that, and he, who was somewhat older, felt ancient. In other circumstances, he would have wooed her. As it was, he had bemoaned the money he’d stolen and the trouble he’d gone to to get on that boat. At first he’d thought,
Oh God, I’m next,
but then it turned to
Why don’t I die?
The very death he’d been plagued by back home in Germany had tagged along, a stowaway, but somehow, in the midst of all that horror, he’d been smitten.
    There in his cell in the Tombs, he lay on his bunk and pictured her face and imagined various ways he might try to track her down, assuming he ever got out of jail. It didn’t seem very easy. Finally, exhausted, he pulled his bedclothes over his head and slept. His body had work to do, repairing its various breaches.
    Several days later, when he descended the broad front stairs of the Tombs just past noon, he kept his eyes to his boots. He felt ashamed to be coming out of that place. Leaving implied having been there, after all, and being an inmate of the Tombs implied a good deal. He still felt congested from the smoke, too. First thing on breathing the fresh, cold outside air, he had a painful coughing fit and spat up a pink and gray object. After that his breath came easier but more raw. He was sore, exhausted and demoralized, but the thing that troubled him most was the arrest itself. Or had he ever been arrested? He wasn’t sure.
Goddamn Irish arsonist,
the policeman had said. Clearly they thought he’d burned the museum down, but he was never brought before a judge or formally charged. It was all very odd. There were crimes he
had
committed, to be sure, but not this one. He had no earthly reason to do such a thing. The place was his job, his home; everyone he knew worked there, and, if you included the animals, so did his only friends.
    “You have now the true incendiary, you have found him?” he had asked of the desk clerk who signed him out.
    The man looked at him. “Yeah, I have him—right before mine eyes.”
    “But it is agreed I did not do this. I am free.”
    “Agreed? No, I wouldn’t go that far. They ain’t no charges ’cause they ain’t got nothing on you. Can’t keep ya without a lawyer, ain’t nobody going to get you one—so you’re outa here. But don’t get too relaxed. We’ll nab you back when we’re ready. We got your address.”
    He had protested. He had said he preferred to stay in jail for as long as it took to clear his name, argued that it shouldn’t take long at all, considering how simple it all was. He attempted to ask for the captain of police, but with his English as it was, and his anxiety about not being cleared and Tom Thumb somehow in mind, he muddled it and asked not for the captain but “the general.”
    “Oh sure,” said the officer. “The general. Which one would you prefer, maybe Grant? Let me call him for you.”
    He shook his head. “No, I mean . .