The Empire of Shadows (41 page)

Tom was silent and appeared to be listening with interest and an almost clinical curiosity, an attitude that unsettled Van Duzer. He was used to a very different reaction to his words and august presence.

“I am not a man to trifle with, nor am I easily intimidated,” he said, but the words had a hollow ring.

Braddock smiled. “You will not be trifled with, I can assure you,” he said. “Nope. No trifling here.”

“You know who I am, and where I stand in this city?” Van Duzer said. “I have many powerful friends, sir. Your badge will not protect you.”

“No, ordinarily I'd have to agree with you, Rupert.”

Van Duzer stiffened at the use of his first name.

“But these are not ordinary times. You're confused, I can see. Let me explain,” Tom said. “You will not set foot again in any court in New York State. If you do, you will be arrested. Do you understand me so far?”

Van Duzer's brows lowered even further and a sneer crept across his lips.

“You will leave this office within the hour. You will not return, not under any circumstances. If you do, you will be arrested.”

“On what charge?” Van Duzer erupted. “On whose authority? This is absurd! This interview is at an end, Braddock. Get out of my office. Now!”

“Morgan is no longer a client of yours,” Tom continued unchecked, “not since we told him what you'd done. I wouldn't bother trying to contact him. He won't be available to you. In fact, you have no clients. Not even your friends at the Wigwam,” Tom said, referring to Tammany Hall. “They won't come near you now.”

“But I've done nothing! Where's your indictment? Where's your evidence? What is it you imagine I've done?” Van Duzer said, doing his best not to raise his voice or lose command. “I have heard quite enough from you. By the time you get back to your dingy little police office and your small-time cop concerns, you will find out who holds the real power in this city.” Van Duzer rose and strode to the door as he said this. Tom didn't rise, didn't take his feet off the desk.

“Good day to you, sir!” the lawyer said as he opened the door. But he stopped and went silent when he saw a uniformed officer stationed outside in the hall. Tom sighed.

“The only reason you will not be leaving this room in handcuffs is because of the influence of your friends,” Tom said. “We've had talks with them all, all the important ones. Inspector Byrnes and I have been busy these last few days. Once they saw what we had to show them, they all fell in line, the judges, the Fifth Avenue clients, the lawyers, your political friends at City Hall and the Wigwam.

“They were all quite astonished. They were equally anxious to protect one of their own, though, and I regret to say they prevailed upon Byrnes and the mayor to let you go quietly. Been too many messy scandals lately, too many inconveniences,” Tom said with a tone of regret.

“Personally, I would just as soon break every bone in your body and toss you in the river to drown.” Tom sighed again. “But that's just me.”

Van Duzer closed the door. Tom reached into his inside jacket pocket, pulling out a stuffed envelope. He threw it on the desk. “You'll want to look at those,” Tom said. “Copies of telegrams from Owens to you, a copy of a deathbed confession implicating a certain New York lawyer, with Morgan for a client, copies of bank deposits to an account under Owens's name, copies of letters to Ella Durant. Do I need to go on?”

Van Duzer looked about the office as if seeking a means of escape. He picked up the envelope though, frowning at its contents as they unfolded before his eyes. “You were working both sides, Rupert, playing on Durant's troubles, his sister's suit, and Morgan's deal. For what? That I don't know and can't understand. I don't imagine you're about to tell me either, are you?”

Tom sat in silence as Van Duzer read. Minutes passed as a tall clock in the corner ticked away the seconds. “Was it a percentage, a few hundred acres, your own estate in the wilderness?” Tom asked at last. “Something like that, right?”

Van Duzer sat back down in his high-backed chair, seeming much smaller than he had before.

“Whatever,” Tom said. “Let me make something clear to you.” Something in the way he said this made Van Duzer look up. “My blood is on those papers, my blood, the blood of my wife, the blood of my children, the blood of my friend.” Tom rose to his feet and leaned on the desk, planting his hands and hunching his massive shoulders. “Do you understand me? Listen closely, you fat bastard. This is the last time we will see each other. If I see you again, I will kill you, whether it's at the opera, the Broadway stage, the Bowery dance halls, anywhere. I will kill you. On sight! In the worst fucking way imaginable! Your friends have bought you this one opportunity. Only one. Take advantage of it. Disappear. Never come back and never cross my path again!”

Tom left Van Duzer's office feeling better than he had in a very long time. He smiled as he walked past Gramercy Park, watching the governesses pushing prams about in the bracing November air. The last of the brittle, brown leaves huddled in the gutters and bunched against the corners of the high fence.

Tom pulled his collar up. Within the hour, the roundsman he'd left with Van Duzer would escort him out. Braddock would have preferred to simply make Van Duzer disappear. It was a thing easily accomplished, if he'd been allowed.

He'd argued for it with Byrnes, who'd lent a sympathetic ear.

The chief had chewed the end of his cigar to a slimy stub, puffing thunderheads of smoke, but in the end said, “Can't do it, Tommy. Don't get me wrong. I'd like nothing more than to see him floating in the river, for Chowder's sake at the very least.”

Byrnes held up a hand when he saw Tom about to argue again. “No, Tom, don't bother. We've gone over it up and down. He's got too many important friends. Can't kill the sonofabitch, and can't convict either. All things considered, I think we've pursued the right course.”

Tom knew it was true. If they tried to bring Van Duzer to trial on the strength of a few one-sided telegrams and a dubious confession, they'd never have gotten anywhere. So they'd decided to use his own prominence against Van Duzer, to blacken his character and reputation to such an extent that none of his cronies or clients would come near him.

Byrnes had predicted they'd rather cut him loose than suffer the embarrassment of his continued acquaintance. Men like Morgan needed to cling to appearances as much as the next man, and perhaps more. In fact, convincing them that Van Duzer was a man to be scorned was easier than Tom had imagined. It became quickly apparent, in fact, that he was not loved, but feared. Tom had enjoyed the shows of high moral indignation as his “friends” got in line to cast him out.

“At least you'll have the satisfaction of doing it in person,” Byrnes had said. Tom grinned at that.

“Yes, I will, but I'd trade that in a second for a cold ale and a warm stove, with Chowder tellin' one of his stories.” Tom took a long pull at the cigar Byrnes had given him. “I'll kill him if I see him again. You know that.”

Byrnes frowned and shook his head. “For the love o'Mike, don't tell me shit like that. I'm not supposed to know. If you've got to do it, make it look like a goddamn accident.”

Tom figured Van Duzer never knew just how close to death he'd been.

But perhaps he did, for over the next few weeks Van Duzer became more and more frantic. Tom heard reports of his telegrams and visits to the powerbrokers of the city, of doors slammed in his face and wires left unanswered. He was even turned away at the Union League Club, his club of twenty years, asked to leave by the doorman.

Gradually, news of him shriveled and died, and he was rarely seen in the daylight. Van Duzer was no fool. He realized that if it was possible to ruin him, then it was equally possible to kill him, a thing he hadn't credited much in the safety of his office. In time, he became hermitlike, a condition Tom encouraged by occasionally spending long hours idling near the park within sight of his townhouse.

One evening, not quite six months later, while crossing Twenty-first Street at the corner of Park Avenue, Van Duzer was run over by a beer wagon. It was on its way to the Players Club. The huge horses bowled him over, the broad, steel-shod wheels did the rest. Eyewitness reports were that he wasn't looking where he was going when he stepped off the curb. “He kept looking over his shoulder,” the cop at the scene was told.

 

“It's pretty here,” Rebecca said. She and Mary, Tom and Mike were walking the dappled paths of Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island. Chowder always said that he'd like to be buried there, even though it was terribly far from the city.

“If it's good enough for Commodore Vanderbilt, its good enough for the likes of me,” Chowder used to say. Vanderbilt's tomb there looked something like a Grecian temple set into the side of a hill, a long, curved drive and a huge cast-iron gate guarded it from curious eyes. They could see the gate as they walked to Chowder's grave.

The trees spread overhead in a cool, green canopy, shading the granite stones and spires, mausoleums and simple, faded markers. Squirrels skittered from tree to tree and a rabbit watched them pass from the base of a large rhododendron.

It was early September. A year had passed. It was the anniversary of the day Chowder died. His stone was set on the side of a gently sloping hill. The grass, Tom noticed as they approached, had grown in well. It didn't look new any more. No evidence remained of the ragged hole, the large pile of earth. Even the bright green of the fresh grass had darkened, so that Tom could not tell exactly where the grave had been.

He stopped before it and Mary's hand slipped into his. Mike stood to one side, looking at the writing on the stone. He read it all, the name, the date the inscription, but it said nothing to him. It said nothing of who Chowder Kelly really was, at least not to him. “Uncle Chowder,” as Rebecca called him, had been an almost mythical figure. Legends followed like him like smoke followed fire.

He was a man of great wamth and humor, of flexible morality, yet unbending will, and if even half the stories Mike had heard of him were true, he'd been a breed apart from the cops he knew, except for Tom.

He watched Tom put a hand on the stone, and for just a second bow his head. He knew how much his father missed Chowder, knew how Tom had dreaded this day.

“Chowder would have liked it here,” Mike said. It didn't sound right to him, but he felt the need to say something comforting. Tom and Mike exchanged a look. It was nothing more than a split second glance, a crinkle at the corner of the eye, a turn of the mouth, but they understood each other completely.

Tom nodded, and the ghost of a grin crept across his face. He shrugged and said, “I suppose. Chowder never was one for peaceful places, though he wanted to be here, sure enough. He liked the bars, the beer gardens, the dance halls. He should have been cremated and put up behind the bar at McSorley's in a big, silver urn. Now that would have suited him fine!” Tom said and grinned. Mike and Mary smiled, too.

Tom reached into his pocket and took out a rubber-rimmed porcelain stopper from a beer bottle. He laid it on the top of the stone. “Had one for you, old friend,” Tom said. “Nice and cold, just like you liked it. Everybody at the bureau says hello.”

Tom took a deep breath and looked around, seeming suddenly self-conscious. Rebecca, who'd been looking for rabbits, walked up and stood by Tom.

“He died on God's doorstep,” she said, reading the inscription on the stone. “That must be very good. What does it mean, Daddy?”

Tom looked down at her and petted her curls. “Just something Mitchell said,” Tom told her as he looked up at the trees.

William West Durant did more to develop and popularize the Adirondacks than virtually any other man of the nineteenth century. More importantly, he set the standard for what development might be. The rustic architectural style of his four great camps, Pine Knot, Uncas, Sagamore, and Kill Kare established a vision of construction rooted in nature, an esthetic sharply at variance with the prevailing Victorian style. Describing Pine Knot in 1881, Seneca Ray Stoddard said, “Men took a circuitous route in order to gain a glimpse of it, and to have been a guest within its timbered walls and among its woodland fancies was to wear the hallmark of the envied.”

But, for all his vision, Durant was no great businessman. He built on faith, on the self-assured conviction that others would share his vision, if only they could be exposed to it. Rarely, if ever, did he actually see a profit from any of his ventures. He invested heavily and entertained lavishly. He built a huge, 191-foot, steam-powered sailing yacht, in order to be better accepted by the class of society he wished to woo.

Princes of Europe and captains of industry took to the waves with William. In the end, it yielded him nothing and only hastened the end.

William's biggest mistake was to deny his sister her share of their father's estate. Taking over from Thomas Durant after his death, William considered it his duty and prerogative to carry on and shepherd the family's business ventures as he saw fit. Unlike his views on architecture, these values were deeply rooted in his Victorian upbringing. He resented her demands and her questioning of his judgment.

Perhaps he intended to give her more when his investments paid off. But his investments never did pay, and Ella became increasingly demanding. She finally brought suit, but it was delayed until 1899. By then his properties were heavily mortgaged, his great camp Uncas sold to J. P. Morgan for far less than it cost to build. Ella Durant finally won her suit in 1901, when the court ordered William to pay her $753,931. Ella never saw a dime of it.

William West Durant died in 1934 at the age of eighty-three. After losing his empire in the Adirondacks, he tried his hand at a number of business ventures, including hotel manager, mushroom farming, and surveyor, and he often worked on lands he'd once owned. He never lost his aristocratic bearing or his taste for a well-cut suit.

On August 12, 1936, his widow unveiled a stone and bronze marker dedicated to him, opposite a newly formed lake created by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was christened Lake Durant. The bronze plaque credits William with “developing the Adirondacks and making known their beauty.” That marker stands just two miles from the hamlet of Blue Mountain Lake. William was interred in the family's mausoleum in Green Wood Cemetery. Ella was not to have a place there.

Mitchell Sabattis continued to guide sporadically for special clients over the following years. Tom and Mike would come sometimes in summer, sometimes in fall, spending days with the old man hunting and fishing. They were always sad to leave.

On April 17, 1906, Tom got a telegram from one of Mitchell's eight sons saying that Mitchell had died the day before.

A pure-blooded Abanaki Indian, Mitchell Sabattis was the son of Captain Peter Sabattis, who served in both the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. Mitchell was a founder of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Long Lake, a builder of fine boats, and one of the greatest guides ever to walk the north woods. A recreational park in Long Lake bears his name.

The Prospect House went into a long, slow decline. Recurring deficits forced Frederick Durant to mortgage the property, and in 1898 his brother Howard foreclosed and took over the hotel. The short Adirondack tourist season made it nearly impossible to turn a profit on such a grand establishment, especially in light of less-expensive competitors across the lake and elsewhere.

In 1903 two guests came down with typhoid. In the fall of that year it closed its doors forever. It stood empty until 1915, a grand, ghostly presence, an echoing reflection of the gilded age of Adirondack development. It was finally dismantled, the lumber and furnishings sold.

The white buck, which was kept penned beside the lake since it was a fawn, survived for only four years. One winter, while corralled inside the barn, it got into a bin of oats and ate itself to death.