City of Dreams (46 page)

“Thanks,” said Tim, and he walked home through the rain.

Doreen was waiting for him when he got there.

He smelled beef stew.

“I cooked it myself,” she said.

And he was glad to be home

iv.

So dreams ended. But life went on. And years passed . . . thirteen to be exact.

On a cool September night in 1920, Tim Riley sat in the parlor of the Forty-seventh Street brownstone that he had converted to a two-family. A fire crackled on the grate. His son Richie sat at the big rolltop desk in the corner and did his homework.

Above the desk was a photograph of Doreen in a military-style cape with a doughboy’s overseas cap perched jauntily on her head. It was not a costume. She had lasted as a wife and mother for ten years. Then came the war, and the cry for soldiers, and the cry to entertain them. When old Charley Gibbs tracked her down and told her he was forming a vaudeville troupe that was heading to Europe, Tim told her to go. He said it would be good for her and good for the soldiers, too.

Now she lay in a small cemetery near a place called Chateau Thierry, the victim of a slick road and a Model T speeding to the next show.

It had only been in the last few months that the boy had begun to talk about his mother and ask about his parents’ youth.

So one morning, as he rode the subway to Wall Street, Tim had decided to leave a written record of his days for the auburn-haired boy who had inherited his father’s mathematical skills and his mother’s singing voice. Besides, anyone who had lived forty-one years in New York had seen changes worth writing about. Skyscrapers, subways, Broadway. No place seemed to change more quickly, and yet somehow it always stayed the same.

So Tim had filled four notebooks for his son. He wrote about his mother and her sewing. He wrote of his father, who could have been “the best tank-bottom man in New York,” but preferred to start his own demolition business. He described his meetings with J. P. Morgan, including the famous night at the library. He tiptoed around the McGillicuddy massacre. He told the story of
The Big Cavalcade of 1907
so that the outcome—a happy marriage and a son named Richard Daniel Riley—made the disappointments of his parents worthwhile.

Tim still had much to write about, like the day he went back to work as an accountant for Morgan and Company, or the 1918 afternoon when he looked out the windows of 23 Wall Street at thousands of people packed from Broadway to Water Street, all to hear movie star Douglas Fairbanks shouting through a megaphone, urging them to buy bonds. That was democracy in action, thought Tim, the money of a democratic nation put to work to win the Great War.

He also had to write about the anarchists, the enemies of democracy in action.

They had been conducting a war of terror in America for thirty years, a war with governments, capitalists, and the social order itself. They had plotted to set off a bomb under a magistrate’s bench in the Tombs prison. They had tried to blow up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because church hierarchy was as abhorrent as any other. They had sent thirty bombs through the mail to kill politicians and industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller. They would have included J. P. Morgan, too, except that nature had already done the job. The bombs were discovered, but for one that blew off the hands of a Negro housemaid. So much for social justice.

Eddie’s brother-in-law, the anarchist Theodore Sadowski, had been in and out of the country, in and out jail, and had lately shown up again in Hell’s Kitchen, railing against the treatment of two Italians immigrants from Massachusetts named Sacco and Vanzetti. But the family did not speak so much of him. The Sadowskis could not understand his hatred of a country that had given them such opportunity.

So, on that September night, Tim was writing and his son was doing his geometry proofs. Tim heard the snap of a pencil and glanced up as the boy rummaged for another.

“Check the middle drawer.” Tim flipped him the key.

The boy opened it, pulled out a few pencils, and said, “Hey, Pa, what are these?”

The last two bonds
. Another story for a father to tell his son. So Tim told it. “Somewhere your grandfather hid a mahogany box containing another nineteen thousand five hundred dollars worth of them.”

“And he didn’t tell you where?”

“He gave me clues.” Tim described his father’s talk about clouds, rain, water, and money. But he could not talk about the death of his father, even then. So that night, he wrote about it. He wrote about his father lying on the steps, the white X drawn on the tread, and his father’s last word, “eyes,” and about that last moment, when his father seemed to be squinting into the future.

Before bed, Tim took a bit of air up on the roof. He liked it up there, looking across Hell’s Kitchen at the jumble of chimneys and fire escapes and the water tanks on the newer, taller buildings in the distance. It wasn’t a world of perfection. But it worked. And he had helped, in his small way, to make it work.

Knowing that was almost as profound as a prayer before bed.

Like a lot of people who wrote, Tim slept with his notebook beside him. An hour or so after he had fallen asleep, he woke, fumbled for a pencil, and scrawled something he thought was eloquent:
Rainwater O’Day. X marks the . . . spiffle
.

T
HE DAY DAWNED
clear and bright, crisp and blue. In a city where clouds of industry and commerce always seemed to darken the sky, this was what Tim called September perfection.

He cooked bacon and eggs for himself and the boy. Then they walked out together. He gave Richard a pat on the back and told him to study hard. He never sent his boy off without a pat on the back. Then Richard turned toward Sacred Heart School, taught by an order called the Irish Christian Brothers, mostly tough New Yorkers who had answered a call.

Tim headed for the subway. He read the paper on the way downtown. There was more about Sacco and Vanzetti, but he didn’t really care about them. When he thought about Massachusetts, he thought about a gift from the Boston Red Sox named Babe Ruth. Fifty-one homers and still counting. What a hitter.

At eight thirty, Tim arrived at the canopied entrance to J. P. Morgan & Co. It was a new building, but it still sat at the most prominent financial intersection in the world, the corner of Wall and Broad, across from the subtreasury and Washington’s statue. It was September 16. The quarterly reports were due in two weeks, and Tim was the assistant chief accountant. So he worked hard all morning and had lunch at his desk. But while he ate his cheese sandwich, he opened his notebook.

And he saw the cryptic notes he had written in the night.
Rainwater O’Day. X marks the
. . . he couldn’t read the last word. It looked like
spiffle
.

He was puzzling over that when the telephone rang.

“Accounting.”

“Timmy, is that you?” It was Eddie, who worked now for the McManus machine.

“What’s wrong?”

“Something funny goin’ on. Polly just called me, said that her brother Teddy borrowed some money from her today.”

“So what else is new?”

“He told her he wanted all that she had in the cookie jar and under the rug, and if she gave it up, she’d never see him again.”

“If that’s a promise,” said Tim, “I’ll give him a few bucks myself.”

Eddie didn’t laugh. “Then, a little while ago, she was cleaning up his room and she found a tourist map of New York.”

“He’s no tourist.”

“He’d drawn a route from Hell’s Kitchen to Little Italy, where he made an X, then down to Wall Street, where he made another X, right across the street from you.”

Tim could hear the noon bell chiming at Trinity Church. He glanced at his watch, as he always did when he heard the bells. Right on time.

Eddie said, “Polly saw him ride off in a wagon pulled by a dark bay horse. I think that stupid Litvak is in business with the dago anarchists. I think—”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Just look out the window. If you see the son of a bitch, tell him to go home. His father’s scared to death that he’ll do something stupid and get them all deported.”

Tim said, “Hold the line.”

As he stood in that sea of desks in the middle of that enormous open banking floor, Tim glanced down at his notebook. And he saw his father’s eyes, squinting. And in the strange way that a distraction can lead roundabout to an insight, he knew. In an instant, he knew where his father had hidden the bonds. But from the corner of his own eye, he saw motion outside the window.

A wagon was pulling up, directly across Wall Street. Now the driver was jumping down and walking quickly east.

Tim hurried over to the big window and tried to see if it was Sadowski.

And his mind froze everything that he saw:

The dark bay horse nodding its head . . . a messenger boy hurrying along the sidewalk . . . two women angling across the street and one of them glancing up at him . . . a man opening a newspaper in a shaft of sunlight . . . a chocolate peddler looking east . . . a dozen people taking the sun on the steps of the subtreasury . . . a Model T clattering along . . . a horse-drawn carriage coming right behind it. . . .

The chiming at Trinity Church stopped.

A horn honked.

William Joyce, the head trader, called to Tim.

As he turned, Tim felt a sudden, inexplicable pressure. He felt it outside him and inside his head and deep in his chest, too.

An instant later, everything was consumed in a flash of orange flame.

The window in front of Tim exploded inward. His eardrums burst. He was struck with the force of air that slammed him against a desk and shook the whole building. Then six-inch lead missiles—sash weights—were flying like bullets in every direction.

And it seemed to go on and on and on, a sound feeding off its own fury.

His ears were screaming in a cloud of smoke and flying debris.

Then he saw William Joyce through the smoke . . . standing . . . lurching . . . reaching to the hole in his forehead . . . collapsing.

And Tim realized that his trouser leg was soaking wet. He saw his own blood pouring onto the floor. A long shard of glass had dug deep into his groin.

He pulled it out, and a dark arterial blood spurted.

One . . . two . . . three . . . spurts, each lower, each under less pressure. He rolled over on the blood-soaked, glass-covered, marble floor of the J. P. Morgan Bank.

His ears kept screaming, but he tried to stand, tried to find his phone to call his brother, to tell him that he knew where the bonds were. But his mind was fading. He was leaving great puddles of blood on the floor. And he simply could . . . not . . . stand . . .

His face pressed against the shards of shattered glass. He made an X on the marble with his own blood. He hoped that his son would understand.

He prayed for the boy. He began to say the Act of Contrition. He made it to “for having offended Thee . . .”

THIRTEEN

Still Wednesday Night

T
HE BOSS ONLY WANTS TO TALK
. . . only wants to talk . . . only wants to talk
.

Evangeline kept reminding herself as the cab reached the West Side Highway.

Peter was reading an article on his iPhone. The headline:
WALL STREET BOMBING
!

The Russian—he said his name was Vitaly—leaned across Evangeline to look at the small screen in Peter’s hand.

She could feel his muscle through his boxy suit, and she could have smelled his cologne through a hazmat suit. Aramis: big in the seventies but not unpleasant.

“Fancy phone,” he said to Peter. “What you reading?”

“An article from
The New York Times
.” Peter held it up.

The Russian’s eyes widened. “Bomb? On Wall Street? Arab son of bitches.” He looked at Evangeline. “I waste so much time chasing you, I don’t hear news all day.”

“This is an old newspaper,” said Peter. “It was an anarchist bombing.”

“Anarchists? Like terrorists?

Peter nodded. “Striking at the heart of capitalism. The bomb went off in front of the Morgan Bank. A hundred pounds of dynamite, five hundred pounds of sash weights.”

“Sash weights?” Vitaly nodded. He approved of sash weights.

“It wrecked cars and wagons, killed forty people, injured four hundred, shattered windows for six blocks, including the wall of glass at the stock exchange.”

“Why did Antoine want you to see this?” asked Evangeline.

“Because the bomb destroyed the interior of the Morgan Bank and killed three people inside, including assistant chief accountant Timothy Riley.”

“Oh, no,” said Evangeline.

“He friend of yours?” asked Vitaly.

“This was ninety years ago,” said Evangeline.

“But he was kind of a friend,” said Peter. “They all become friends in a way.”

The cab was heading south on the West Side Highway. Evangeline kept waiting at every light for the left turn that would take them back to . . . wherever they were going.