City of Promise (33 page)

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

T
HE 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 glasses and each gold button on the uniforms of the servers, was etched with the initials “FAH,” Fifth Avenue Hotel.

The guests clustered 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, hell. Criminals more like.”

“Damned 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 damned 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 glasses as sips of smooth whiskey soothed throats made dry in anticipation. 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 bloody mayhem beyond the glass. “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
assured 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 passengers on trains through tunnels.”

“Underground?” someone asked.

“
Where the hell 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 cocky, 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 passed 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 rebuttal. “Exactly,” he said. “That five million is what will get the Viaduct law repealed. It is greed beyond common sense, gentlemen. A classic 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 assembly. “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 hell.”

“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 damn 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 glasses 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.