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.