But as to who could have done something about it or why, neither Garvey nor Hayes could possibly guess. With no witnesses and no leads and the primary suspect being an entire company that, according to Hayes, seemed to know barely more than the police, they all figured it was going to be an ugly mess indeed.
“Something else odd,” Garvey said. “You know the door? The trolley door?”
“I suppose,” said Hayes.
“It was broken in. There were marks on the front. Impact marks. From what, we’re not sure. Looks like a battering ram, maybe.”
“Someone hung on the side of a moving trolley and rammed the door in?”
“Maybe.” He sighed. “You know what, we could send shit back and forth on this for hours.” He slapped his notebook shut. “You just can’t think about this normally. You just can’t.”
“You think this might be related to the man in the canal?” asked Hayes.
Garvey turned the question over in his head, handling how it fit. “I don’t want to say anything too fast,” he said. “But I’m tempted to.”
“Is the union situation really this bad?” asked Samantha. “For something like this to happen?”
Hayes shrugged. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? To be honest, I can’t say. I rarely deal with the working-class levels of Evesden. You want to answer?” he said to Garvey.
“There’s not enough work,” said Garvey. “And what work there is isn’t paying enough. Not by a mile. But that’s the way it is. The dockworkers want one pay, the smelters and foundry workers want another, the airship assembly teams want highest of all. Everyone says they want a little more, just enough to survive, they say, but they don’t. Not really. They just want. I know them all, I’ve listened to them all, I’ve hauled in people from each of their damn clans. And who’s going to tell McNaughton how to run their company? And how will they set their standards? One pay for all workers or certain levels only for a few? And how will they figure that out? I don’t know. I can’t think of a solution. I just clean up.”
“So what’s going on?” she asked. “Out there.”
“Out there? They’re starving. As is expected, I guess. Things got too big. There’s too many of us,” he said, and lit a cigarette. The bright orange flare seemed strange in that colorless place. “You can say all you want about greed and evils and economics, but that’s what it comes down to. They all came here looking for work and a lot of the trades they came here with got put out of business, and now there’s too many people. So they’ll turn to vice and violence and make a living as best they can. I guess you can’t blame them. But I have to. It’s what they pay me for.”
Hayes dozed off as night came on, the bottle of laudanum half-empty between his feet. Garvey and Samantha rose and left him there among his books and his dusty chairs with the coal fire smoldering before him.
“He’ll kill himself drinking that poison,” said Samantha.
“Maybe,” said Garvey.
“No. It’s really poison. It’s opium.”
“I know. He does, too. It’s been, well… manageable for a while now. Here, let me take you home.”
He led her to his car and they climbed in. He hit the lights and asked her where she lived. When she told him he whistled. “Newton is pretty fancy,” he said.
“It does all right,” she said, smiling.
After a while of riding they turned down Grange Avenue and the lights and white stone buildings of Newton swam into view. The thin, smooth tunnel of the train ran between the building tops like calligraphy, and here and there it dipped to the platforms, its car windows strobing in its descent. Up above the streets an arched glass walkway stretched from one building to another, and though it was empty the starlight refracted through it to make a ghostly prism suspended in the sky. Down on the corner a theater let out its patrons, all of them standing in the flickering lights of the marquee bulbs, arranging their coats and discussing the show. Cabs descended on them in a flurry, sensing the hefty fares of drunk rich folk who’d forgotten precisely how far they’d come. On nearby restaurant rooftops men and women in furs laughed and their merriness rebounded off the walls to rain upon the street. Champagne laughs, lily-petal laughs, pretty and sweet and perfect.
Samantha remembered what Hayes had said about the twentieth century and remembered the fairy world she lived in compared to the rest of the city. A tiny bubble of promise that would come true for only a select few.
Beside her Garvey explained that Newton was like a birthday cake, with many layers, all interconnected. Even below the street, where an entire marketplace filled the corners and cracks of the trolley tunnels and you could eat exotic food from all over the world, provided you didn’t mind a roof made of piping. And down there more mechanisms and devices kept the city running, more than you could ever imagine. Though, considering what had happened today, who would want to imagine it?
“There’s no going back, is there?” Samantha asked suddenly.
“Huh?” said Garvey.
“Oh. I’m sorry. It’s just… something I thought of.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“There’s no going back. It’s what I said. What I said when I first came here, on the airship. I’d never ridden one before. And as I got off another one came into the cradle. It was like seeing the sky open up. It shone like a shield with a little glass button on its belly, only the button was full of people. Then its engines turned all around and it lowered itself into the trusses. Workers came forward and looped the lines around its nose. And it floated in. Lowered itself down between the buildings. Like a tiger in the jungle.”
“I’ve seen it,” Garvey said. “Never been on one. But I’ve seen them dock in.”
“There’s no going back, I said. The world changed right underneath my feet. And I almost didn’t notice it happening. But now there’s no going back.”
“No,” said Garvey. “There isn’t.”
“And to think all this came from a fisherman,” Samantha said. “Thought up decades ago.”
“Kulahee? Yeah. He’s worshipped like a god in some places around here. People have spent lives trying to figure out how he did what he did. But whatever the secret is, McNaughton isn’t telling.”
Samantha watched as they passed by a pneumatic mail post, its dark glass chutes sprouting up from the cement. The brasswork around its nozzles was done in intricate leaves and vines, and each nozzle was unlocked and open, ready to devour whatever canister the next citizen was willing to feed it. “It’s almost like men could never make these things at all,” she said as it disappeared behind them.
“Yeah,” said Garvey. “Sometimes I feel that way, too.”
He dropped her off at her apartment. She stood below the awning and turned to look at him. “Thank you for the ride,” she said.
“Not a problem. Sometimes I need an excuse to see the nice parts of town, you know?”
Samantha laughed. “I suppose.”
“Sleep well,” he said.
“I will.”
He drove away. She stood and watched as the headlights faded and disappeared into the night.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The story of the murders spread quickly. The southeastern areas shouted it first and then it leaked to the outer districts. It was a steady build, like a storm piling clouds up on the mountains. When it had finally gathered enough momentum the rumble became a scream and the city filled up with wild questions.
The mystery and vagueness of the murders brought the police into question immediately. Either they were fools for not knowing enough or crooked for keeping information repressed. Badges were bought with money, everyone knew, and it didn’t matter where. Down in the Docks where brothels and dens paid to keep the patrols strolling, or up in Newton and Westbank where the police kept only the laws the locals approved of. And McNaughton men were gods to the police, that everyone agreed. The very name became an even dirtier word in Dockland and the Shanties in the wake of the Bridgedale trolley. The overseers at McNaughton were untried war criminals in a city where the war had not yet begun. Surely they had somehow engineered this, everyone said. After all, hadn’t they been the architects of the trolley lines? Could any trolley line be trusted, now that they could be turned into slaughterhouses the second anyone entered them?