The Phantom of Manhattan (14 page)

I was halfway between the gate and the Hall of Mirrors when a figure appeared, racing towards me in what seemed like a panic. It was Darius. He was the Chief Executive Officer of the corporation whose real boss seemed to be the mysterious man in the mask. I thought he was running at me, but he raced straight past me as if I were not there. He was coming from the Hall of Mirrors. As he passed me he shouted something, not to me but as if to the sea wind. I could not understand it. It was not in English, but having a good ear for sounds if not always their meaning, I took my pencil and scribbled down what I thought I had heard.

Later, much later and too late, I returned to Coney Island and spoke again with the Funmaster who showed me a journal he kept in which he had noted down all that occurred inside the Hall of Mirrors while I was walking on the beach. If only I had seen that passage I could have understood what was happening around me and done something to prevent what came later. But I did not see inside the Funmaster’s journal, and I did not understand three words in Latin.

Now, it may seem strange to you young people but in those days dress was pretty formal. Young men were expected to wear dark suits at all times, often with weskit, plus stiff starched white collars and cuffs. The trouble was, that posed a laundry bill that young men on meagre salaries could not afford. So many of us wore detachable white celluloid collars and cuffs, which could be taken off at night and wiped clean with a damp cloth. This enabled a shirt to be worn for several days, but always exposing a clean collar and cuffs. With my notebook in my jacket pocket, I wrote down the words shouted by the man I knew as Darius on my left cuff.

He seemed half crazy as he ran past me, quite different from the ice-cold executive I had met in the boardroom. His black eyes were wide open and staring, his face still white as a skull, his jet-black hair flying in the wind as he ran. I turned to follow his progress and saw him reach the funfair’s gate. There he met the Irish priest, who had shut the boy Pierre in the coach and was coming back to look for his employer.

Darius stopped on seeing the priest and the two of them stared at each other for several seconds. Even across thirty yards of November wind I could sense the tension. They were like two pit bulls meeting the day before the fight. Then Darius broke away, ran for his own coach and drove off.

Father Kilfoyle came up the path looking grim and thoughtful. Mme de Chagny emerged from the Hall of Mirrors pale and shaken. I was in the midst of one hell of a drama and could not understand what I was witnessing. We drove back to the El-train station and then by railcar to Manhattan in silence, except the boy who chattered happily to me about the toyshop.

My last clue came three days later. The inaugural gala was a triumph, a new opera whose name escapes me but then I never did turn into an opera buff. Apparently, Mme de Chagny sang like an angel from heaven and left half the audience in tears. Later there was a hell of a party right on the stage. President Teddy Roosevelt was there with all the mega-rich of New York society; there were boxers, Irving Berlin, Buffalo Bill - yes, young lady, I really met him - and all paying court to the young opera star.

The opera had been set in the American Civil War and the principal set was the front of a magnificent Virginian plantation house with a front door raised up and steps leading down each side to the stage level. Halfway through the celebration party a man appeared in the doorway.

I recognized him at once, or thought I did. He was dressed in the uniform of his part, that of a wounded captain of the Union forces but one who had been so badly wounded in the head that most of his face was covered by a mask. It was he who had sung a passionate duet with Mme de Chagny in the final act, when he gave her back their betrothal ring. Strangely, considering the opera was over, he still wore his mask. Then I finally realized why. This
was
the Phantom, the elusive figure who seemed to own so much of New York, who had helped create the Manhattan Opera House with his money and had brought the French aristocrat over the Atlantic to sing. But why? This I did not learn until later, and too late.

I was talking with Vicomte de Chagny at the time, a charming man incredibly proud of his wife’s success and delighted that he had just met our President. Over his shoulder I saw the prima donna go up the staircase to the portico and talk with the figure I had then begun to think of as the Phantom. I knew it was him again. It could be no-one else, and he seemed to have some kind of a hold over her. I had not yet worked out that they had known each other, twelve years earlier, in Paris, and much more besides.

Before they parted, he palmed her a small note on folded paper, which she slipped inside her bodice. Then he was gone again, as always; there one second and disappeared the next.

There was a social-diary columnist from a rival paper, the
New York World
, a Pulitzer rag, and she wrote the next day that she had seen the incident but thought no-one else had. She was wrong. I did. But more. I kept an eye on the lady for the rest of the evening and sure enough, after a while she turned away from the gathering, opened the note and read it. When she had done she glanced around, screwed the paper into a ball and threw it into one of the trash cans placed to receive old bottles and dirty napkins. A few moments later I retrieved it. And, just in case you young people might be interested, I have it here today.

That night I simply stuffed it into my pocket. It lay for a week on the dressing-table in my small apartment and later I kept it as the only memento I will ever have of the events that took place before my eyes. It says: ‘Let me see the boy just once. Let me say one last farewell. Please. The day you sail away. Dawn. Battery Park. Erik.’

Then and only then did I put some of it together. The secret admirer before her marriage, twelve years earlier in Paris. The unrequited love who had emigrated to America and become rich and powerful enough to arrange for her to come and star in his own opera house. Touching stuff, but more for your romantic lady novelist than a hard-bitten reporter on the streets of New York, for such I thought myself to be. But why was he masked? Why not come and meet her like everyone else? To these questions I still had no answers. Nor did I seek any, and that was my mistake.

Anyway, the lady sang for six nights. Each time she brought the house down. December 8th was her last performance. Another prima donna, Nellie Melba, the world’s only rival to the French aristocrat, was due to sail in on the 12th. Mme de Chagny, her husband, son and accompanying party, would board the RMS
City of Paris
, bound for Southampton, England, to take over at Covent Garden. Their departure was scheduled for 10 December and for all the friendship she had shown me I determined to be there on the Hudson to see her off. By this time I was virtually accepted by all her entourage as one of the family. In the private send-off in her stateroom I would get my last exclusive for the
New York American
. Then I would go back to covering the doings of murderers, the bulls and the bosses of Tammany Hall.

The night of the 9th I slept badly. I do not know why, but you will all understand there are such nights, and after a certain time you know there is no point in trying to get to sleep again. Better to get up and have done with it. This I did at 5 a.m. I washed and shaved, then dressed in my best dark suit. I fixed my stiff collar with back stud and front stud and knotted my tie. Without thinking, I picked two stiff white plastic cuffs from the half-dozen on the dressing-table and slipped them on. As I was awake so early I thought I might as well go across to the Waldorf-Astoria and join the de Chagny party for breakfast. To save a cab fare I walked, arriving at ten before seven. It was still dark, but in the breakfast-room Father Kilfoyle was sitting alone with a coffee. He greeted me cheerily and beckoned me over.

‘Ah, Mr Bloom,’ he said, ‘so, we must be leaving your fine city. Come to see us off, have you? Well, good for you. But some hot porridge and toast will set you up for the day. Waiter …’ Soon the vicomte himself joined us and he and the priest exchanged a few words in French. I could not follow them, but asked if the vicomtesse and Pierre would be joining us. Father Kilfoyle indicated the vicomte and told me Madame had gone to Pierre’s room to get him ready, which was apparently what he had just learned, but in French. I thought I knew better, but said nothing. It was a private matter and nothing to do with me if the lady wished to slip away to say farewell to her strange sponsor. I expected that at about eight o’clock she would come rattling up to the doors in a hansom cab and greet us with her usual winning smile and charming manners.

So we sat, the three of us, and to make conversation I asked the priest if he had enjoyed New York. ‘Very much,’ he said, a fine city, and full of his compatriots. ‘And Coney Island?’ I asked. At this he became grim. ‘A strange place,’ he said at last, ‘with some strange people on it.’ ‘The Funmaster?’ I asked him. ‘Him … and others,’ he said.

‘Still the innocent abroad,’ I blundered on. ‘Oh, you mean Darius,’ I said. At once he spun round upon me, his blue eyes boring like gimlets. ‘How do you know him?’ he asked. ‘I met him once before,’ I replied. ‘Tell me where and when,’ he said, and it was more like an order than a request. But the affair of the letter seemed harmless enough so I explained what had happened between me and the Parisian lawyer Dufour, and of our visit to the penthouse suite at the top of the city’s highest tower. It simply never occurred to me that Father Kilfoyle, apart from being the boy’s tutor, was also the father confessor to both vicomte and vicomtesse.

Sometime during this the Vicomte de Chagny, evidently bored by his lack of understanding of English, had excused himself and gone back upstairs. I continued with my narrative, explaining that I had been surprised when Darius ran past me in the funfair, looking distraught, shouted three incomprehensible words, had his brief eyeball confrontation with Father Kilfoyle and had then driven off. The priest listened in frowning silence, then asked: ‘Do you remember what he said?’ I explained it was in a foreign language, but that I had jotted down what I thought I had heard on, of all places, my left plastic cuff.

At this point Monsieur de Chagny came back. He seemed worried, and spoke rapidly in French to Father Kilfoyle who translated for me. ‘They are not there. Mother and son are not to be found.’ Of course, I knew why, and tried to be reassuring by saying, ‘Don’t worry. They have gone out to a meeting.’

The priest stared at me hard, forgetting to ask how I knew, but simply repeated the word: meeting? ‘Just to say goodbye to an old friend, a Mr Erik,’ I added, still trying to be helpful. The Irishman kept staring at me and then seemed to recall what we had been talking about before the vicomte returned to us. He reached across, grabbed my left forearm, pulled it towards him and turned it over.

And there they were, the three words in pencil. For ten days that cuff had lain among others on my dressing-table and that morning I had by chance grabbed it again and slipped it over my wrist. Father Kilfoyle gave the cuff one glance and let out a single word that I never knew Catholic priests were aware of, let alone used. But
he
did. Then he was up, dragging me out of the chair by the throat, shouting into my face, ‘Where in God’s name did she go?’ ‘Battery Park,’ I croaked.

He was off, racing to the lobby, with me and the hapless vicomte running along behind him. Through the main doors he went, and found a brougham under the marquee with a top-hatted gentleman about to climb in. The poor man was seized by the jacket and hurled aside as the man in the cassock leapt inside, shouting to the coachman, ‘Battery Park. Drive like the devil himself.’ I was just in time to jump in after, and hauled the poor Frenchman after me as the carriage hit the road.

All through the drive Father Kilfoyle was hunched in his seat in the corner, hands clasping the cross on the chain round his neck. He was furiously murmuring, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, grant that we may be in time.’ At one point he paused and I leaned across, pointing to the pencil marks on my cuff. ‘What do they mean?’ I asked. He seemed to take some time to focus on my face.

‘
DELENDA EST FILIUS
,’ he replied, repeating the words I had written down. ‘They mean: THE SON MUST BE DESTROYED.’ I leaned back, feeling sick.

It was not the prima donna who was in danger from the crazed man who had run past me at Coney Island, but her son. But still there was a mystery. Why would Darius, obsessed though he might be at the thought of inheriting his master’s fortune, want to kill the harmless son of the French couple? The carriage raced on down an almost empty Broadway and over to the east, beyond Brooklyn, the dawn began to pink the sky. We arrived at the main gate on State Street and the priest was out and running into the park.

Now Battery Park then was not as it is now. Today vagrants and derelicts adorn the grass lawns. Then it was a quiet and placid place with a network of paths and walkways spreading out from Castle Clinton, and among them recesses and arbours with stone benches, in any one of which we might find the people we were looking for.

Outside the gate of the park I noticed three separate carriages. One was a closed brougham in the livery of the Waldorf-Astoria itself, clearly the one that had brought the vicomtesse and her son. The coachman sat on his box, huddled against the cold. The second was another of equal size, but unmarked; nevertheless, of a style and state of repair that would be owned by a wealthy man or corporation.