City of Dreams (54 page)

Evangeline had been a member since she moved to New York. For a hundred and seventy-five dollars, you had access to gracious reading rooms, research materials, writing rooms, and an enormous range of fiction and nonfiction. It was the best deal in town.

Henry looked up at the five stories of limestone, at the pear trees blooming out front, and gave a low whistle. “You say anyone can join? ‘Society’ don’t mean ‘High Society’?”

“No. Just decent society. You want to join?”

“I’ll stay outside. I’m your eyes on the street.”

“I may need a secretary,” she said. “They don’t let you Xerox the rare material.”

“Okay. Do we know what we’re looking for?”

She hitched her purse on her shoulder and started up the stairs. “We’ll know it when we see it.”

“That ain’t where you want to be with twenty hours to go,” said Henry.

“When Timothy Riley says, ‘My father hid the box of bonds in the chandelier of the famous old City Hall subway station,’ you sing out.”

“Gotcha.”

She opened the door and said, “Now, be cool.”

“I always cool, baby.”

At the desk, Evangeline showed her pass while Henry scoped out the stone walls, the beamed ceiling, the magnificent grandfather clock at the entrance to the catalogue room. They took the staircase to the second story. She showed him the Members’ Room and the rare British Army field map of Manhattan hanging by the elevator.

Henry studied the map. “It don’t look like there’s nothing but a few houses north of Chambers Street back then.”

“New York wasn’t the city of dreams . . . yet.”

“City of dreams?” Henry chuckled. “You do my line of work for a while, you be callin’ it the city of
schemes
.”

“It’s that, too.” Evangeline pointed him up the stairs. “Come on.”

Miss Casey Nolan, the pleasant young librarian of rare books and special collections, took their order and told them to have a seat at the research table in the Marshall Room.

Henry looked around at the Governor Winthrop desk, the big table, the historical prints on the wall, and he said, “Mama would be proud.”

Miss Nolan returned quickly with the Timothy Riley notebooks. “This is quite an interesting box. It came to us from an Irish Christian Brother. When he took his vow of poverty, he donated us a portion of his family’s estate and these notebooks. You’ll see that the edges of the last of them were scorched in the famous 1920 anarchist bombing. But it survived and was returned to the family with Mr. Riley’s effects.”

“Has anyone else looked at them?” asked Henry.

“Not in the last month. That’s as far back as we keep borrower’s records. May I ask what you’re researching?”

“Well, now”—Henry sat back and stroked his chin—“we’re exploring the interrelationship between the intellectualization of the historiographical experience of twentieth-century New York with the primary source recollections to be found in the materials left by the practictioners of Monafisterian analysis and deconstructive theory. You know what that is, don’t you, Miss Nolan?”

“Oh, yes,” she said as she scurried away. “Good luck.”

Henry winked at Evangeline, “See . . . I told you I could talk about anything.”

P
ETER
F
ALLON AND
Kathy Flynn were now in the back of a cab heading downtown.

She said, “You tell what you know, and I tell what I know. Okay?”

If Evangeline had been in the cab, she would have told Peter to keep his mouth shut. But she wasn’t, so he talked Kathy through the events of the last twenty-four hours.

Kathy pulled out a notebook.

Peter said, “Come on, Kathy. This is all off the record.”

“I’m publishing an article about Avid Austin and his antideficit crusade tomorrow. I’m doing whatever I can to smoke people out.”

“Why?”

“It’s my job, Peter.” She leaned closer to him. “And I’m ambitious. Otherwise, I might have married you. We could be living in Boston, enjoying life.”

“Why do I always have the feeling that you’re coming onto me?”

“Because you’d like me to. You’re a dreamer. Like me. Evangeline is all nuts and bolts. And people may try to tell you that opposites attract. But a pair of dreamers, imagining themselves discovering artifacts lost for centuries or exposing financial frauds in New York, they can be attracted to each other, too.”

He was listening, remembering, but remaining motionless.

She was good, and she was seductive, especially when she whispered, “It’s what makes power couples, Peter. This town is full of them. Big dreamers on both sides of the bed.”

It would have been easy to lean over and kiss those lips or whisper something back to her. He was glad that he was on the run, in the midst of way too much trouble as it was. It made it easier to keep his arms folded and his lips to himself.

“So”—she clicked her pen—“how about letting me take just a few little notes?”

“About what?”

“About Antonov going to Harvard,” she said.

“Why?”

“Why do you think we’re going to see Will Wedge from Boston?”

The cab had arrived.

“Because he’s Harvard, too?”

“It’s called affinity fraud,” she said. “Madoff did it with rich Jews. I think Arsenault is doing it with rich Harvard guys who think they’re too smart to get Madoffed. Pay the fare.”

By the time Peter got his change and gave a look around, Kathy was already parading into the restaurant. That was how she walked, long legs loping, ass swaying, always like she owned the place.

Peter liked 11 Madison Park for its high ceilings, its twenty-foot windows looking out onto the square, and its two-course prix-fixe lunch for twenty-eight bucks. A bargain by New York standards. Just so long as no one was tailing you, spying on you, shooting at you, or otherwise trying to keep you from enjoying your meal.

But as he went in, he asked himself again, why the hell was he here when he should have been uptown, poring over those Riley notebooks? Most of the time, when he went after something, the clues accumulated logically: a line of quotes from
Paradise Lost
led to a lost Paul Revere tea set. A single line, repeated through history, echoed across New England until it drew him to the hiding place of a lost U.S. Constitution. But where was the logic in this? He hoped that Evangeline was doing better.

Kathy was telling the hostess that they were meeting the Arsenault party.

The hostess glanced at her book, “So there’ll be five of you rather than three?”

Peter noticed the eyes turning, but they were turning toward Kathy. Some were recognizing her, brightening, following.

It was a good lesson. If you were trying not to be noticed in a half-full restaurant, walk in with a well-known woman who also looked fabulous.

Will Wedge had arrived first. He was sitting on the banquette in the corner, so that he could see the whole room. He must have been spooked from the night before in the Harvard Club. He was sipping something amber, neat.

A little early, thought Peter, but under the circumstances . . .

Wedge looked shocked to see them, then he put on his old hail-fellow face, stood, and offered a big handshake. “Well, the MarketSpin lady and the treasure hunter. What a surprise. I didn’t know that you were joining us.”

Kathy put a finger to her lips and gave him a little wink. She could play anything, from hard-nosed to coquettish, from moment to moment. “It’s a surprise.”

Wedge turned to Peter. “Did the police ever interview you?”

“Not yet.” Peter sat with his back to the room. He was brazening through at the moment. A man wanted for questioning by the police would never be strolling into a fancy restaurant as the lunch crowd arrived, so he couldn’t be the guy whose picture had been in the papers.

And no one paid particular attention, except for the waitstaff. They slid another table into place. They brought Perrier, breadsticks, menus.

Wedge recovered nicely. He even glanced at the wine list and told the waiter, “Bring us the Jacques-Frédéric Mugnier, Clos de la Maréchale, Premier Cru 2006.”

“Nice bottle,” said Peter,

“Nice pronunciation,” said Kathy.

“Nice price,” said Wedge. “But what the hell? Arsenault is paying.”

“Is he?” asked Kathy.

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t Wedge, Fleming, and Royce a feeder for Avid?” asked Kathy.

Wedge sat back. “A long and positive relationship. You could call it stellar.”

“In the good years and in ’08, too?”

“Well, yes. And if they were good in ’08, you know that they are rock solid.”

“Have you ever had a problem withdrawing funds for your clients?” asked Kathy.

Wedge leaned forward. “What are you getting at?”

Peter asked, “Who else from Harvard has come for the meeting of the Paul Revere Foundation. Anybody I’d know?”

Wedge said, “A dozen or more, all committed to fighting the deficit.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Kathy.

The wine arrived. Wedge told Peter to taste it. Peter approved.

Wedge took the time to recover. “As Arsenault has told this country for years, unless we get control of our deficit, we will turn our economy into a big Ponzi scheme.”

“Interesting term,” said Kathy.

Wedge kept talking: “But the people at the top of the pyramid won’t be stealing from the ones at the bottom. They’ll be stealing from their grandchildren.”

“And all the other Harvard men on the board agree with you?” asked Peter.

“They’re not all Harvard men,” said Wedge.

“We can look at the 501(c)(3) filing,” said Peter. “I’ll bet that most of them are.”

Kathy gave Peter a playful punch on the shoulder, “Very good. I wish I’d thought of that. Looking at the 501(c)(3). You should be a reporter.”

Wedge looked from one face to the other. “What is this all about?”

“A lot of Harvard brokers pouring money into the operation of a bigger Harvard broker. Getting nice annualized profits, never looking at the books, never questioning,” said Kathy.

“Sounds familiar,” said Peter.

“Now wait a minute,” said Will Wedge. “There has never been a moment when we haven’t been able to withdraw as much money as we’ve needed from Avid. I don’t think that—” Will Wedge shut up, because Austin Arsenault and Owen T. Magee were striding across the room.

And neither of them looked happy to see two extra guests.

“Please tell me that you have good news for us,” said Owen T. Magee to Peter Fallon. “Otherwise, this is a private lunch.”

But as if he understood that it was never cool to make a scene, Austin Arsenault sat and said, “On the other hand, we can make it a friendly lunch, if the both of you promise not to talk about business.”

E
VANGELINE AND
H
ENRY
were still working away in the Marshall Room on the fourth floor of the New York Society Library.

The four notebooks were a hundred leaves long, lined paper, bound in marble boards, like ledgers. Since they were written over about a year, there were no drastic changes in handwriting. Sometimes Tim Riley wrote in pencil, sometimes in ink with smudges and splotches.

And the notebooks told the story of a man and his city, from the day he first rode uptown in the Riley Wrecking wagon, to the meetings with G. W. Plunkitt, to the encounters with J. P. Morgan, including the night when Morgan locked the bankers in his library. Then there was the run on West Side Workingman’s Bank, stopped by bags of Morgan money.

Henry loved this line from Tim’s father, who looked out from the cupola of an old house, at the smoky, steaming air of the city, and called it, “the great cloud of commerce that rains money like water on the city of New York.”

Evangeline was touched by this: “In the turmoil of the ’07 panic, your mother and I both suffered great disappointments. All people do in life. But out of it grew an understanding of what is most important. And out of our understanding came a fine son.”

She gave that sentence a lot of thought and wrote it down and read on.

The final passage was dated September 15, 1920:

“I must write of my father’s death. But I cannot write much. I only heard it happen. His bravery saved my life. He stood up to thugs. I found him on the steps of the old house that, if we could go back, would sit at the corner of Broadway and Eightieth. He had drawn a white X on the steps. This meant we should take up the board and save to sell to Squints O’Day, the cooper who made water tanks. My father sometimes worked for Squints, who called him ‘the best tank-bottom man in New York.’ I have always puzzled about my father’s last word, ‘eyes.’ When he said it, he seemed to be peering into the future. We all peer ahead and hope for our children. We all have big dreams. But what matters is what my father gave to Uncle Eddie and me: ‘A roof over your head and food on your table and a family that loves you in a parish that cares.’”

Evangeline showed that to Henry.

“Man was a philosopher,” said Henry.

Then she read ahead: “Tonight, after you were in bed, I took my evening walk to the roof. I counted several new water tanks. When I was a boy, there were few, and now there are many. The sons of Squints O’Day still make the tanks. And as my father once said, they hold the water that washes like life into the city.”

Evangeline puzzled over that, then turned the page and saw a final entry, in pencil, in a handwriting that was scrawling, almost impossible to read, “
Rainwater O’Day. X marks the . . . spiffle
.”

Henry read that and said, “What the hell is a
spiffle
?”

I
T WAS NOT
a pleasant lunch.

Will Wedge was silent for most of the first course.

Peter guessed that Austin and Owen were planning to pump him, maybe to urge him to raise his stake in Avid Investment Strategies. That was how Ponzi schemes worked. They had to get more in because others were taking out, or would be soon.

Once the main course was placed in front of everyone, Will looked at Arsenault and said, “These two are suggesting that you’re another Madoff.”

“Print that,” Owen T. Magee said to Kathy Flynn, “and I will sue you, your Web site, your network, and the people who make the computer you write on.”