Free Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney

hailed the group of shovelers with a shout, and dammit, there was Undertoe again, stepping forward. She wasn’t sure what they were up to, yet, but the situation seemed worthy of reporting to Johnny in person. She needed Fiona.
    She stepped into a doorway and began to whistle—a strange cooing-pigeon song that at once stood out from and blended in with the sounds of the night. A minute later, she heard the owl screech that told her Fiona was in earshot and would take the watch. Then she headed over to a Whyo bar called the Morgue, wondering whether Johnny would be pleased with what she’d learned or annoyed that she hadn’t yet made contact with her mark. Certainly the situation had just grown more complicated. It was illogical, improbable, this shoveling gambit—as was the entire way the man worked. But she was also starting to admire him: He’d thwarted her ability to direct people’s attention where she wanted it and make them do exactly as she bid.
    He was thinking of a different girl as he watched over his men, Maria of the
Leibnitz.
He thought of her more often than she warranted, that girl. But there was something about her that drew him. Possibly it was physical—her strong arms, narrow waist, flared nostrils, pale skin—but in another sense it wasn’t about her. She was a woman who’d survived the disease his mother had succumbed to, as he had survived it. Dreaming of her blurred easily into a dream in which his mother still lived.
    But whyever the stableman thought of Maria, it wasn’t mutual. She didn’t think of him, ever, especially not then, when she happened to be busy lavishing saliva on the nethers of a Pennsylvania anthracite merchant. She’d found a way to survive in the metropolis, but at considerable cost. She’d do pretty much anything, Maria—not because she liked it, mind you, but for a small extra fee. She strove to please her customers and expected ample payment in return. Maria thought of various things, to keep her mind off the chafing and the ludicrous obscenities of her clients: a pudding in the pie safe, a pair of boots she wanted, the warm loft above the kitchen of the squalid little house she’d grown up in, where she used to lie among the drying roots and herbs and daydream for hours. She was not nostalgic, Maria, not in general—it was only that she needed something to distract her while she worked. Certainly she didn’t spend her time reliving the voyage of the
Leibnitz.
    But he did.
    It was January when the
Leibnitz
arrived in New York harbor and moored at the quarantine station north of Sandy Hook, the decks dusted with carbolic acid. The third- and steerage-class passengers were hanging their heads, awaiting transfer to the various hospital ships and quarantine islands in the lower harbor. Some of them would be buried on Hart’s Island.
    “I’ll take care of you,” he’d said, speaking far beyond his ability to follow through. But her mother had died, she was alone, and he was smitten.
    She’d looked at him with a squinted eye and half a smile on her upper lip, clearly thinking he was daft. It was her independence, her fearlessness—the very qualities that precluded her from needing him—that he liked about her. Afterward, he realized he should have put it differently: He should have asked her to marry him.
    “You’ll take care of me,” she’d repeated, and rolled her eyes. She wanted to start over in America, not be saddled with some German boob who’d seen her at her worst, on the boat. The truth was, Maria found him annoying.
    Maria and her mother had signed aboard the ship as kitchen help and scullion, and their labor reduced the price of their passage to a pittance, but for that the duties were rather broader than advertised. Maria’s mother was still quite attractive—she had all her front teeth yet—and her daughter, well, her daughter was blond and shining. At the interview, in the galley, the cook had hacked chickens apart with his cleaver on