City Of Promise Part 17

"Mr. Hunt's flats," Josh said. "What about them?"

"Got a canopy over the front door. So as folks is protected from rain and snow and like that. When they come and go."

"That's a good idea," Josh said, "but Hunt's building is much grander than ours. Still, I'll consider it."

The tiler had gone back inside and they were again alone. Josh waited.

"The Italians," Washington had gone back to speaking in a tone barely above a whisper, "they got protection."

"From whom? And from what?"

"Ain't n.o.body going to ride 'em about not speaking English or nothing like that. Got other Italians what looks out for 'em. For a fee o' course. Way I hear it, they pay twenty, maybe thirty percent of everything they earn to an Italian gang. Protection."

Josh nodded. "Could be true," he said. "There are enough other gangs in this city. Why not one made up of Italians? But that's got nothing to do with you or me, has it?"

Silence.

"Maybe not directly," Washington said finally, and then, after a few more seconds of hesitation, "Back in Eddyville, when Sampson and me first knowed Tickle and Higgins and the rest, when we were all working for Mr. Kelly . . . You know about how Mr. Kelly sold his patent for almost no money?"

"Yes. Ebenezer Tickle told me about that."

"He tell you there weren't no way that made sense? How that Englishman what bought the patent, he didn't go to school to learn about steel like Mr. Kelly did?"

Josh nodded.

"Man named Trent Clifford," Washington said. "You know about him as well?"

"I do. What's more, I think you know that I do. You know a lot about what goes on, don't you, Washington?"

"Keep my eyes and ears open," the other man said. "Don't mean my mouth got to be open too."

Joshua again nodded agreement. It seemed to be enough to keep Washington talking.

"Captain Clifford," the black man said, "he spent a lot of time hanging around the Kelly brothers' foundry in Eddyville. He was there a lot the year before the Englishman showed up and said he'd take the Kelly patent, since Mr. Kelly, he was broke. Didn't pay a lot for it, mind. Didn't have to since he said he already knowed how to make steel in a converter."

So far he was confirming Tickle's entire story. "That's what I heard," Josh said. "You think Captain Clifford told the man from England how to make a converter? That he figured out the process just from hanging around the Kelly brothers' foundry?"

Washington shook his head. "That ain't sensible. I think . . ." One more glance up and down the street, and when he saw that they were entirely alone, "I think George Higgins told him."

"For money?" Josh said.

"Course for money. Ain't no other reason any dwarf had for getting mixed up with Captain Trent Clifford."

"What about Tickle? Couldn't he have been the one to tell Clifford how the converter worked?"

"Could have been, but he wasn't. Known him a lot of years and that ain't Tickle's way. Never takes a crooked path when there's a straight one available. George Higgins, he was a different sort. Not bad long as things was going how he wanted them to, but not one to pa.s.s an opportunity by neither. Long as it didn't mean he had to get whipped and maybe killed."

"You know about the races then, the dwarfs being used to-"

"I know. Ain't n.o.body was in Eddyville back then don't know."

"Fair enough," Josh said, "and say you're correct about it likely being George Higgins and not Ebenezer Tickle who sold out the Kellys, what's any of it to do with me or the St. Nicholas?"

"Captain Clifford started coming to the old ironworks down on Wall Street, hanging around. Couple of times I seen him talking to Higgins. Outside when they didn't think there was anyone around."

"But you were around," Josh said quietly. "Watching and listening."

"Tell you something about being a black man in a white man's world, Mr. Turner. Far as white folks are concerned, if you're a Negro, you be pretty much invisible."

Josh had no difficult believing that and he let it pa.s.s. "Are you saying you think Clifford was paying Higgins to spy on my business, and that somehow caused Clifford to murder him?"

Washington shrugged. "Maybe not exactly like that." He turned and looked back at the St. Nicholas. "And I'm not saying nothing 'bout these tilers. They ain't been here but a few days and a week from now they'll be gone. But the way I hear it, there be some kind of connection 'tween Captain Clifford and the Italians."

13.

THE ROOM WAS thick with cigar smoke and the rich aroma of malted whiskey. An elaborate Chinese screen decorated one corner; a mahogany bar occupied another. Wine-red velvet curtains were drawn across the far wall, shielding the constant tumult of the intersection where Fifth Avenue crossed Broadway to form Madison Square, keeping the focus on the power gathered within. A dozen men, all wearing evening dress since it was after six, took each other's measure. A tall black man stood behind the bar. He wore black trousers and a waist-length white jacket, and poured drinks according to the murmured instructions of another black man-older, white-haired, his face lined with years-who carried them round the room on a silver tray. Your Kentucky bourbon, sir. Your Tennessee sour mash. Your scotch, sir. Yes sir, a single malt. Immediately, sir. The tray, like each of the heavy lead crystal gla.s.ses and each gold b.u.t.ton on the uniforms of the servers, was etched with the initials "FAH," Fifth Avenue Hotel.

The guests cl.u.s.tered in small groups of two or three. Trenton Clifford stood alone. He had a cigar between his teeth and a drink in his hand, and he listened with no specific interest to the fragments of conversation floating in the air around him.

"A good thing Congress nullified the Indian treaties and made the savages wards of the nation."

"Wards, h.e.l.l. Criminals more like."

"d.a.m.ned Apaches are slaughtering whites in the Arizona and New Mexico Territories, and what is wrong with our Army that there are still live Indians to be dealt with?"

"Tweed is bound to be convicted."

"The man was reelected after being indicted, he'll never come to trial."

"Thirty million according to The Times. No great city can ignore such theft."

"Then how is it Gould's still a free man?"

"Grant is bound to be reelected, the public doesn't care about the scandals of his administration."

"Wrong, Grant is vulnerable. His policies are bringing the d.a.m.ned nigras north in numbers. The Democrats stand a chance if they nominate someone other than a rabble-rouser like Greeley."

"Word is the various elevated lines are to put their shares together in a holding company. Give them the necessary clout to get it done."

"Fools if they do. Gould will swallow their company whole."

Clifford heard that last comment and smiled. It was, as Barnum would say, time for the show. He took a few steps closer to the curtained wall. "Gentlemen." And once more, a bit louder, "Gentlemen, if you please."

The room quieted, the only sound the tinkle of ice in gla.s.ses as sips of smooth whiskey soothed throats made dry in antic.i.p.ation. Eleven pairs of eyes, all dark with avarice, looked toward the tall and broad Southerner with the walrus moustache and the fair hair that curled just above his collar.

"Thank you for coming gentlemen. I shall get straight to the point." Clifford turned and pulled a cord. The red velvet curtains rippled into motion and parted. "Take a look at that."

The men surged toward the windows. They framed a dizzying turmoil of streetcars and horsecars and private carriages and wagons and people on foot and on horseback, a scene so clogged it seemed as if everything and everyone was squirming in place. All struggling frantically to get ahead, but going nowhere. "What is it?" An elderly fellow in the rear was convinced he was missing something. "I don't see anything unusual. Is it an accident? Are there bodies? What's happened?"

"Nothing has happened, sir." Clifford's voice carried over the rising murmur. "Nothing can happen. That is exactly the point. What you see out this window, that stagnating intractable tangle of traffic, is not simply typical. In the matter of moving from place to place in this town, it is by no means the worst. Right now it takes upwards of an hour and a half to get from Twenty-Third to Wall Street. If a man wishes to traverse Fourteenth Street east to west he must take three different horsecars and pay four separate fares. Five if he goes west to east. Should he choose to hire a hansom his journey will be dearer and take longer, since a private cab does not have even the small advantage of the horsecar tracks. Your city, gentlemen, this great New York, is rotting in situ. Pretty soon your laborers will be unable to get to your factories, and your clerks won't arrive at your workrooms and offices. Your businesses will become as putrid as the metropolis around them. They will stink of manure and crumble into decay."

"What's this about, Clifford?" A single voice speaking the question on every mind.

"It's about saving yourselves from total ruin. It's about transportation at a speed swifter than that of the tortoise. It's about the thing New York desperately needs, and as you can readily see simply by looking out this window, does not have."

"Whole business is settled." The old man again, the one who'd thought he might be missing some b.l.o.o.d.y mayhem beyond the gla.s.s. "Tweed got his law through. Going to be trains forty feet in the air. Banging on above our heads."

"I'll get to Boss Tweed and his Viaduct Railway shortly, sir," Clifford a.s.sured him. "But first . . .," a pause while he looked at each man in turn, "I've asked you here this evening because I think you are men with the foresight to recognize the only way to genuinely solve this problem. If we're to secure swift transit for this enormous city, we must carry pa.s.sengers on trains through tunnels."

"Underground?" someone asked.

"Where the h.e.l.l else would you build a tunnel?"

"Pneumatic tubes. Asinine. As likely as flying pigs."

"The idea works. Beach proved it with that demonstration on Broadway."

"Cost him thousands an inch."

"Gentlemen," Clifford again, "if I may. Please forget pneumatic tubes, or belowground horsecars, or all the other nonsense. We must run proper trains powered by steam through our tunnels. Exactly as they've been doing in London for the past seven years, in a system they are busy expanding even as we remain paralyzed."

A man standing beside the bar made the point that London was not an island but a sprawling mainland metropolis. "Over here we'd have to dig below the most heavily used thoroughfares in America, right up against its tallest buildings."

The fellow couldn't have said it better if Clifford had written him a script. The Southerner smiled and with only a slight flourish-mustn't appear too c.o.c.ky, that would only put them off-produced an easel from behind a portion of the velvet curtains and exhibited a series of colored plates. Different views of the same thing: London's Euston Road with its many tall buildings and busy shops, all untroubled by the railroad running twenty feet below the street. Someone asked about ventilation and Clifford found yet another drawing, this one diagramming the thirty-foot grids that occurred in the pavement every three-quarters of a mile. "Steam rises and almost instantly dissipates, and fresh air descends. Problem solved."

The talk continued for maybe fifteen minutes, until one man-younger than most, dressed in impeccably tailored swallowtails, wearing a black eyepatch over his left eye-brought the discussion back to Tweed and his elevated railway. "Forgive me, sir. I mean no disrespect when I ask, what's the point of this discussion? As has been mentioned, Albany already pa.s.sed the Viaduct bill. We're to have Boss Tweed's elevated railways whether or not the scoundrel himself goes to trial. Indeed, it's my understanding the city is soon to pay his consortium five million to start the building of them."

Quiet after that. With everyone looking to Clifford for a reb.u.t.tal. "Exactly," he said. "That five million is what will get the Viaduct law repealed. It is greed beyond common sense, gentlemen. A cla.s.sic overreach."

"How so, Captain Clifford?" The young man again, rolling a cigar by his ear meanwhile, listening for the crackle of freshness. Then, obviously having heard the question murmured by a number of the others, he switched his single-eyed gaze from the man beside the easel to the a.s.sembly. "My name's Tony Wolfe for any as don't know me. And like yourselves I'm a businessman. I came because I was invited by Captain Clifford, and like you I know he's got a nose for profit, but," turning his attention once more to Clifford, "this time I fail to see how it's going to work. Once the city's paid over five million it will be committed. Nothing you say will change the mind of anyone who matters."

"The Gray Lady, Mr. Wolfe," Clifford said. "The Times. And Greeley's Tribune. The moment that check is drawn, both papers will be for once on the same side of an issue. They'll send up such a thunderous cry as to drown out the hounds of h.e.l.l."

"Too late then," someone said. "Tammany will do their dirty business in the dead of night and before anyone knows about it. The check will be cashed and the money unrecoverable. Same as always."

Clifford closed the cover of the book of drawings. "Not," he said, "if someone is to let the papers know before the money's paid over. A few days before, perhaps a week. Allow enough time for the reaction to build."

"Are you telling us, Captain Clifford," Wolfe paused with a match halfway to the tip of his cigar, "that you will know when the payment is to be made? Before it's to be made?"

"I am," Clifford said.

He let them chew on that for a while, gave them their heads, and let the talk go its own way. Then, "Let me tell you the one thing worse than having Tweed and his crowd get their five million before they lay an inch of track." Not raising his voice, just letting his breathy Southern vowels nip at the awkward angles of the strident Northern voices all around him. Waiting for his words to do their job and call the combined attention back to where he stood. Finally, when every eye was on him, "The thing, gentlemen, that would be worse, that would be a catastrophic mistake of the sort Lee, to my everlasting regret, made at Gettysburg, would be to drum up a huge opposition to the Viaduct plan. It could be a terrible blunder to encourage a great wave of public disgust at the thought of those noisy and dirty elevated trains running above the heads of every man, woman, and child on Manhattan Island."

"But you just said-"

"What's the point of having the papers get a stink going, if-"

Clifford raised his hand. The objections died away. He had an almost irresistible urge to call out Heel! No doubt he'd see every d.a.m.n one of them pull up short and open his salivating mouth, ready for whatever tidbit he chose to throw. "A blunder," he said, the silence so total he need not raise his voice, "if we alert the public to the stench of the Viaduct law, and then have nothing to put in its place. If the papers and the public are to demand the bill be repealed, we must give them something-someone-who has both the wherewithal and the reputation to stand behind a different method of transport. We cannot achieve our aims simply by destroying the overhead railroad. We must offer a superior alternative."

He could see them all sizing each other up after that. Thing is, none of them quite fit the bill and they knew it. Rich, yes. Influential even. Everyone in the room knew everyone else, knew exactly where they all fit in the pecking order. Except, of course, for Wolfe, the fellow in the eyepatch. He was a stranger to all of them. So by definition they did not credit him with the stature to pull it off, even if unbeknownst to them he had the power. As for any of the rest having both the money and the distinction to take on Tammany? Not a one of them. Trenton Clifford least of all.

"I think we've gone about as far as we can this evening, gentlemen. I'd like to believe you're all going to be thinking on this. Mulling it over in your minds. Bringing your individual intelligences to bear upon the problem, so we may eventually apply our collective wisdom to the solution. I shall be in touch and we will meet again soon. Meanwhile, I am sure you all recognize what a serious disadvantage it would be to have the wrong people made privy to our ideas before we've brought them to fruition. Such an error, gentlemen, could cost every man here an enormous profit. I'm sure I can rely on your discretion."

A general exodus after that, each man shaking Clifford's hand as he left, murmuring something about an interesting evening, and how he hoped to hear more if the plan looked to be going forward. Clifford waited until the sound of the last pair of polished patent-leather evening pumps had clattered down the marble staircase before turning back to the room.

The waiters were gathering up the bottles of whiskey on their way out. "Leave the Kentucky sour mash, boys," he told them, nodding to a half-full bottle of Old Fitzgerald's. Then, after they'd gone, he poured two gla.s.ses and turned to the opposite corner. "We're entirely alone, sir. May I invite you to a drink."

Zac Devrey emerged from behind the Chinese screen.

In some circ.u.mstances, Josh learned, success was like the pox. It spread by contagion. By the middle of April he'd leased thirty-seven of the St. Nicholas's forty-eight flats and he had a clutch of inquiries for the remaining units, some of them quite promising. He'd put a series of notices in the papers and requested they be run on the pages women were likely to read. Unquestionably, it did the trick.

Churlish of him not to actually thank Mollie for the idea, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Not after she'd lied to him about her visit to Bowling Green. It still rankled whenever he thought about it. If she'd simply confessed once she got over the immediate effects of her adventure, he'd have forgiven her for not consulting him beforehand. (Though he could not honestly say he'd have given his permission for her to talk to the women, and it had turned out a useful exercise in terms of the flats.) But he could not understand that after she went to Bowling Green, after the potentially dire consequences for her and their unborn child, she did not own up to what she'd done. It was that which planted seeds of doubt Josh ignored with difficulty, even allowing for her condition, which Simon had warned him could lead to all sorts of female irrationality.

Fortunately he had little time to dwell on the matter. The flats were looking to be finished by the middle of April. McKim had done some drawings for him of a similar project to go up on Sixty-Eighth Street, on three of the six lots he'd bought with the money raised by p.a.w.ning Eileen Brannigan's jewels. The new building would be closer to Third Avenue. And while it would be served by the same horsecars, residents would have five further blocks to walk once they were dropped off at the end of the line. Those things made Josh think he must rent the second lot of flats for slightly lower sums. "You can save a bit on finishes," McKim advised.

"Better still," Josh said, "we can go up a story. I can afford that this time, and additional flats will protect my margin."

"Nine floors," the architect said.

Josh detected some hesitation. "Can we go up that high with no safety issues?"

"Keep the steel coming and you can go up twice that high. The only difficulty would be finding men who wish to install their families among the clouds."

"People told me no one would want to live above and below each other. The St. Nicholas is two-thirds leased."

McKim smiled. "You're right and I was wrong. May I, nonetheless, offer a suggestion? One that might even qualify as an apology of sorts. For doubting you originally."

"No apology required. I'm interested in your suggestion because I trust your skills and admire your talent."

"Thank you. In that case . ." McKim's pencil flew over the paper in swift and certain strokes. "Square the new building off. Build it over the three lots on Sixty-Seventh as well as those that front on Sixty-Eighth and have back-to-back flats."

"It'd be like a tenement." Josh could not hide his astonishment. "No cross ventilation."

"Nothing like a tenement," the other man insisted. "Those abominations run an air shaft up the center that's so narrow you can reach across it. You," more pencil strokes, "will have this." He turned the sketch so Josh could see it more clearly. It was drawn as a bird's-eye view and he was in effect looking down at a clearly defined s.p.a.ce with trees and benches and what he took to be gra.s.s. "A central courtyard," McKim said. "It will provide an amenity for the residents, as well as proper ventilation in each unit. At the same time you will not simply double the number of flats by doubling the building s.p.a.ce. You will triple them. And you can make each nine hundred square feet rather than six fifty. So you can rent them for the same amount or perhaps more, despite their being further from the stable."

He went on to explain the structural realities, the gains made by creating additional bearing walls, and differing configurations of plumbing and heating requirements. Joshua listened intently for twenty minutes. "Do it," he said finally. "It's brilliant."

"I shall design and draw it," McKim said. "Doing it, my friend, is up to you."

Josh doubled the work at the foundry and Tickle hired two new men. He did so under the terms of the contract the two had negotiated that first day in the old slave quarters turned foundry. Base wage increased to fifty-three cents an hour for a forty-hour week. Time and a half for overtime. "I must pay you a wage now as well, Mr. Tickle. That was our agreement."