City of Dreams (44 page)

The house was empty and smelled of bleach. In the pit, a few musicians were warming up. In the outer dressing room, the chorus girls were chattering, swapping makeup tips and stories.

Doreen was sitting before the mirror in the headliner’s dressing room. Her costume—a Dutch-style dress with a ruffled collar—hung on a rack. A dry vase of opening-night roses moldered in a corner. She was doing her eyes, which she flicked at Tim. “You hear that?”

“Not even a hello?” Tim pulled over a stool and sat.

“The orchestra. You hear that? They’re warmin’ up on somebody else’s music.”

Tim recognized “School Days.” Everyone was singing it. “Dear old Golden Rule days.” He listened a moment. “I still say you were great.”

“You and the thirty-five people who paid.” She shifted her eyes to his reflection. “You could still keep us afloat, you know.”

He said nothing. They had been through this.

She dabbed the brush into the black makeup. “Goddamn Ziegfeld.”

“Ziegfeld?”

“A month before we open a show about Peter Stuyvesant and his wife, spoofin’ New York history and all the bigwigs, Ziegfeld opens a show about John Smith and Pochohantas, spoofin’ New York history and all the bigwigs. He stole our idea.”

Tim was not so sure about that, but they were past arguing.

“The goddamn
Ziegfeld Follies of 1907
.” She threw her mascara brush down.

“He even stole your year,” said Tim.

She glared at his reflection to let him know that she was in no mood for sarcasm. “He killed us. With the same kind of material.”

“His was better.” Tim offered more honesty than usual. “He also opened on Broadway, in a rooftop theater with a low nut and lots of foot traffic.”

“The Jardin-de-Paris? At Hammerstein’s Olympia?” She picked up the rouge. “That’s not even a real theater.”

“It’s right in Times Square.”

“
Longacre
Square. That’s what we called it when we were kids. And it’ll never amount to nothin’. Neither will this Ziegfeld.” She painted some rouge onto her cheek. “Did you count the house?”

He shook his head. He knew she was heartbroken. He wanted to reach out to her, but whatever had existed between them had begun to fade when rehearsals began. Doreen Walsh had become Doreen the Chorine, then Doreen the Top-Billed Chorine, and finally, when the notices appeared, Doreen the Furious Flop.

She turned to him. “If we keep the doors open another month, we might—”

“Charley Gibbs is in default,” said Tim. “And the collateral he put up, that land at Coogan’s Bluff . . . it has more encumbrances than a horse pullin’ a trolley down Broadway. Even the New York Giants claim it.”

“Come on, Timmy. You’ve got plenty of money in that bank.”

“It’s not my money. The people of Hell’s Kitchen entrusted it to me. I’m supposed to invest it wisely. My books now show a twenty-five-thousand-dollar hole. And you haven’t paid me back a nickel.”

“And we never will if we’re out of business,” said Doreen. “Just one more advance, Timmy.” And her eyes brimmed with tears. “Otherwise, I’m finished.”

“I may be finished, too.”

She said, “You would be if I told the true story of the McGillicuddy massacre.”

“No more money.” He kissed her on the cheek. This time, he tasted her tears.

She slapped powder onto the place he had kissed.

T
IM STOPPED THAT
afternoon in the New York Society Library. He had never lost the reading habit or felt more at home anywhere else in New York. He took out a new book by Upton Sinclair—
The Jungle
.

Then he went home. He had read all the muckrakers, as Teddy Roosevelt called them. Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens. But none of their books had affected him like
The Jungle
, the story of a Lithuanian family that moved to Chicago to become meat cutters and met nothing but exploitation and tragedy.

Around five thirty, he poured himself a glass of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. He had been drinking more of late. It helped him to relax. It helped him to think.

And he thought it was a wonder that there had not been a revolution in America, that the anarchists or the socialists or some other bunch of -ists hadn’t ignited half the population, because so many Americans lived like the Lithuanians in that book. They labored six days a week, dawn to dusk, in the cold, wet, blood-soaked slaughterhouse of capitalism. They earned five hundred dollars a year, while J. P. Morgan spent millions on rare books, fine arts, and his own spectacular museum.

But some men flourished and some men merely survived.

It was not just the American story. It was the human story, except that men had a better chance to flourish in America than anywhere else. Tim believed that as certainly as he believed that Jameson’s tasted of Irish peat. It was the reason that his grandfather had crossed the ocean. It was what his father had told him that day in the cupola of Woodward Manor. And it was why he had left Morgan for West Side Workingman’s. A bank might be capitalism’s clubhouse, but it existed for the communal good, too.

Tim had seen most of the ways that men made “bad” money in Hell’s Kitchen. And he believed in the old saying, “Good money drives out bad.” Bringing down the Morgans of the world could do nothing to raise the lot of the meat cutters, the demolition men, the barkeeps. But by carefully lending money that had been carefully banked—good money—Tim could. That made
him
the revolutionary.

He had another drink and perused his brother’s anarchist rag.

The anarchists planted bombs. They shot businessmen. And six years earlier, an anarchist had assassinated President McKinley. And what had it accomplished?

The anarchists might say that Theodore Roosevelt replaced McKinley and began breaking up the business trusts that were the governing structures of capitalism. He had also called Morgan and his ilk “malefactors of great wealth.” The anarchists would call that a good start. But . . . a pounding on the door interrupted his thoughts.

Daniel Daly, in black suit, winged collar, and flat-topped derby, was peering through the sidelight. He had a sheaf of papers under his arm. “Let me in. Now.”

Daly had never come to the door unannounced or impolite, but he stalked into the parlor and threw the papers onto the sofa. “This is how you repay me?”

Tim swallowed his shock and said, “I’m working to rectify the mistake.”

“You loaned twenty-five thousand to a vaudevillian to buy a theater? He’s in default after six months, his collateral is in litigation, and you covered up the loan. Once we institute foreclosure proceedings—”

“I’m working to rectify the mistake.”

Daly walked over to the sideboard and picked up the Jameson’s. “May I?”

Tim gave a nod—of course. It was the least he could do, considering that he had just driven the man to drink.

Daly fumbled with the bottle, filled a glass, turned. “When wealthy men are mobbing banks on Fifth Avenue, what hope can we have if something like this gets out?”

“I am working to rectify the mistake.” Tim didn’t like saying it any more than Daly liked hearing it.

“It was not a mistake,” said Daly. “It was malfeasance.”

“Misfeasance,” corrected Tim.

“And how do you propose to erase it? By redeeming those old bonds?”

“If I knew where they were, I might try,” said Tim.

“They’re as worthless as your faith in
The Big Cavalcade of 1907
.” Daly stepped close to Tim and looked into his eyes. “I trained you, Timmy. I taught you. And you betrayed me so that you could wet your prick in a chorus girl.”

That stung. “I’m sorry, Daniel.”

“You have one week to . . .
rectify the situation
. Then I want you out.” With that, Daniel Daly threw down the shot of Jameson’s and left.

Tim sat for a long time, alone, sipping his Jameson’s, thinking.

Somehow, he would make this right. Or he would sacrifice himself for his sins.

He went upstairs to his rolltop desk, a wedding gift from his dead wife. He unlocked a drawer. Inside were three more 1780 bonds, the last of the five that his father had saved from the mahogany box.

Tim had heard that J. P. Morgan was traveling to Wall Street each day with his son-in-law, so there would be no chance for another raid on his cab.

But Saturday brought his chance.

At five that afternoon, Tim received a phone call from the Bank Clearinghouse, ordering him to appear at the Morgan Library at eight P.M. His stomach dropped, because at first, he thought they had found him out. But the voice on the other end of the line explained that it was an emergency meeting and that he should bring a secretary.

Tim was summoned not because he was a prodigy or his bank was powerful, but because Workingman’s was one of ten small banks that formed a consortium that month by month rotated a different representative to the Clearinghouse meetings.

A
T SEVEN FORTY-FIVE
, Tim and his secretary for the night, his brother, Eddie, pushed through the crowd of reporters on Madison and Thirty-sixth. The paperboys, as Eddie called them, had been watching Morgan’s every move for days, and as the financial leaders of the city gathered at the Morgan Library on a Saturday night, when most of them would have had dinner plans or theater tickets or wives to appease or mistresses to entertain, even the greenest stringer could see that something was up.

A few of the reporters asked Tim questions, starting with, “Hey, kid, how come they’re lettin’ you in there?”

But Eddie waved his cane and said, “No answers, fellers. So no questions. So save your breath.”

Then the brothers presented their credentials and stepped into a universe of marble. Tim looked up in awe. Eddie whistled softy.

The design was magnificently simple. A rotunda and three rooms surrounding it: Morgan’s study to the left, the actual library to the right, and directly ahead, the librarian’s office.

Men with winged collars and well-trimmed beards were hurrying across the rotunda from one room to another or collecting into knots of conversation that sent a nervous murmur vibrating off the marble walls and the frescoes on the vaulted ceiling.

Tim nodded to a few of them. Fewer nodded back.

“Glad I wore my new suit,” whispered Eddie.

Tim noticed several gentlemen pacing in the librarian’s office: Morgan’s partner, G. W. Perkins, and Judge Elbert Gary and Henry Clay Frick, both of United States Steel.

Eddie elbowed Tim. “You see Frick? If you get close, look for the missing earlobe and the scar on his neck. An anarchist shot him twice and still couldn’t kill him.”

“The anarchists should take that as a sign.”

Then Tim took a few steps closer to the office and saw the burly figure of Morgan himself, leaning over a desk, focused on something that must have been very serious, because he was paying no attention to anyone around him.

“Talk about your malefactors of great wealth,” whispered Eddie. “If Teddy Sadowski knew about this, he’d be here in ten minutes with a wagonload of dynamite.”

Then, a young man approached them. “Trusts or Clearinghouse?”

“Clearinghouse,” said Tim.

The young man directed the Rileys into the library.

Two stories of illuminated cases greeted them, along with the curious or disinterested faces of many of the most important men in New York.

Tim nodded to a few who nodded back. But their expressions said, “That’s Tim Riley. He’s nobody.” Tim did not disagree. In comparison to most of them, he was Nobody from Nothing Bank.

The most powerful of them were sitting around the library table. The rest were standing or sitting in chairs in front of bookcases that contained a Gutenburg Bible, a Shakespeare folio, Dante’s
Inferno
, and much of the rest of humanity’s highest hopes and deepest dreams in their earliest forms.

It seemed that two trust companies and a major brokerage were in danger of collapse because of withdrawals, bad investments, and a panic-driven drop in the value of their securities. If they went down, they would bring the whole economy with them. So Morgan had called these men together to fund a communal pool that would improve liquidity, lower short-term interest rates, and end the panic once and for all.

Tim took little part in the talk. No matter how much he knew, he was a neophyte to these men. He listened and observed from near the library door, and from time to time peered across the rotunda and into the librarian’s office.

And the men talked and talked . . . and talked. Midnight, one A.M. two . . . Tim felt his eyes droop more than once and had to elbow his brother for snoring.

Around two thirty, Eddie went outside for some air, but he came right back. “We’re locked in,” he whispered. “Morgan has the only key and isn’t lettin’ anyone out.”

Tim laughed. “That sounds like something old Plunkitt would do.”

Around quarter to three, Tim noticed Henry Clay Frick walking out of the librarian’s office, carrying papers into the study. And Morgan was alone.

Tim had been bold before. He would be bold now. He strode across the rotunda, tugged at his cuffs, knocked on the open office door, and stepped in.

Morgan looked up, and Tim saw the cards. All night, with the economic life of a nation in the balance, J. P. Morgan had been playing solitaire.

“Riley? Tim Riley? What are you doing here?”

Tim explained his role on the rotating seat.

“Well, keep your eyes and ears open.” Morgan put a black eight on a red nine.

“Men will be writing about this night a hundred years from now, sir.”

“Let’s hope they’ve learned something by then.”

Tim put a 1780 bond on Morgan’s desk.

Morgan shifted his eyes. “Save it. If we fail here tonight, a Continental bond with historical significance may be worth more than a gold bond from the Morgan Bank.”

Tim knew that was an exaggeration. But this wasn’t: “If I fail here tonight, the passbooks of a lot of hardworking people will be worthless, too.”

Morgan put a red ten on a black jack. “What’s your shortfall?”

“We’ve had a default on a $25,000 loan.”