City of Promise (43 page)

“Course I will,” she’d said. “And if you change your mind or just get lonely, I’ll be here on Bowling Green like always.”

And so she was.

16

I
NSUFFERABLE HEAT ON
the August day of 1873 when Eileen Brannigan summoned Joshua to tea at University Place. She let him in herself and ushered him upstairs to her sitting room, and sat him down to one of Hatty Ellis’s sumptuous midafternoon repasts. Beaten biscuits on this occasion, and peach preserves with candied ginger. “Please have another, Joshua. You’re looking quite peaky. I think you are working too hard.” According to Mollie, the pattern of the nine months since they had moved into their new home did not include many meals taken in the opulent dining room Eileen had furnished with such care. Business, her niece said. Restaurants for both lunch and dinner most days.
Joshua prefers it so, Auntie Eileen.

He nonetheless was falling with abandon on Hatty’s home-cooked delights. So as not to draw attention to the fact, Eileen made constant small talk while he ate. “Do you think, Joshua, Mr. Darwin’s latest theory is correct? He says human beings have also evolved, not just turtles and lizards and whatever else he reported on a while back.”

“Evolved from animals, not simply like them,” Josh said, heaping preserves on his fourth biscuit. “We, apparently, were once apes. Darwin is very convincing. Why does that make you smile?”

“I’m thinking that some men have not evolved all that far. Ah, I’m embarrassing you. Never mind, I see you’ve finished your tea so I must get to the point before you go rushing off.”

Josh sat back, content to wait until she spoke her piece. Eileen Brannigan never wasted his time.

“I have a . . .” Eileen hesitated, as if seeking for a word, “a colleague,” she said. “He is very clever and has certain connections.”

“As have you, yourself,” Josh said.

“Indeed. But these days I don’t see as much of the important gentlemen who once visited regularly. I have come to rely on this particular colleague for business advice.” She had dinner with Sol Ganz once a month. Always at Delmonico’s on Chambers Street where he arranged a private room. The food was unfailingly superb, but the talk still more interesting. Mr. Ganz, she had discovered, for all his folksy manner, was a man who knew just about everything about just about everyone. Their discussions always finished with him inquiring after her niece and nephew-in-law.
Mr. Turner’s business is still doing well? Very well, Mr. Ganz. Good, good. I am delighted to hear it.

Eileen was convinced Mr. Ganz already knew everything there was to know about Mollie and Josh, but since his fortunes were now in some measure tied to theirs, she no longer found his interest alarming. She believed instead that he was looking out for them. An opinion confirmed the night before when Mr. Ganz did more than simply ask after their well-being. “I have things to tell you. I can explain only a limited amount, but you must pay close heed to what I say and act on it swiftly.” Following that announcement he spoke earnestly for a number of minutes.

As soon as she got home Eileen wrote to ask Joshua to come to tea at his earliest convenience.

So here he was, awash in excellent tea and stuffed full of delicious biscuits and jam. And though there was no one in the house other than the two of them and Hatty Ellis, Eileen got up and closed the door, then returned to sit across from him. “I have something of great urgency to tell you.”

“I’m listening, Aunt Eileen.”

She nodded, but she did not speak. In another example of that caution Josh found remarkable, Eileen reached for a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote something, and passed it to him.

Josh was looking at two letters. A
J
and a
G.
Both capitalized. “Initials?” Josh asked.

“Precisely.”

He thought for a moment. “I’m sorry. I can’t think of anyone I know who—”

“Someone you know of,” Eileen interrupted. “In the world of business and finance. Very high finance.”

“Jay Gould.”

She snatched the paper back and began tearing it into tiny pieces. “Yes.” Spoken quickly, as if it might be a curse and she didn’t want the gods to overhear. “Him.”

“Aunt Eileen, Mr. Gou—That particular gentleman operates in circles far above mine. I have no connection whatever to—”

“Please, just listen to me. I believe it is the intention of Mr. J. G. to arrange things so that he can acquire whatever he wants anywhere in the country at the lowest possible price.”

“Nothing new in that,” Josh said. “He’s been doing it for years.”

“This is different. More . . . extreme. The market, Josh . . .”

“Yes.”

“At the moment it is not reliable.”

He thought for a few seconds. “You’re talking about a run, aren’t you? A panic. Like ’57, or even ’37.” Her silence was confirmation. “Aunt Eileen, I assure you, rest easy. There are new laws in place. The Treasury Department promises such an event can’t occur again.”

“My friend,” she said quietly, “is extremely reliable. I am myself sometimes astonished at the extent of his knowledge. And his . . . influence.”
Mr. Theodore Paisley . . . found dead in his home . . .
“Please take this information very seriously, Joshua.”

So, his choices were Eileen Brannigan and the high-level friends she had cultivated over better than three decades, or a Washington politician who might well be gone in the next election. “I shall take it very seriously indeed, Aunt Eileen. I promise.”

September 18th was a Thursday. Still warm for so late in the season. Sticky as well. It seemed the men on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street were doing business with something less than their usual exuberance. The weather, someone said. Another pointed to a character called Two-finger Tommy—the other eight digits had been lost at Second Bull Run—a trader known to act for a number of different principals. When the market was about to leap in one or the other direction Tommy inevitably got itchy. No explaining it, he insisted, but it was as if biting insects were crawling up and down his body. At just after ten that morning Tommy was scratching like mad and jerking up and down as if possessed by a devil.

There was never any evidence that Two-finger Tommy had advance knowledge of the meeting a short distance away at the New York office of Jay Cooke and Company, a Philadelphia investment bank believed to be among the strongest in the country. It was held in strict secrecy and only a handful of the most important bankers and brokers in the city, men who made the market, had been invited. Once assembled they listened to Cooke’s senior people plead for an investment of capital to keep their bank from going under. It did not take long for the leading lights of finance to make clear their refusal to bail out a firm that was the victim of its own bad judgment.

Vanderbilt voiced the explanation most everyone believed. Jay Cooke had overreached. He’d hired fellows—advertisers they called
them these days—to convince people that the stark badlands of the Dakota and Minnesota territories through which his Northern Pacific Railroad ran were ripe and luscious and accessible, a courtesan waiting to be enjoyed. The extravagant tale sold some stock in the short run, but the price collapsed once people saw the actuality. “If people will carry on business in this madcap manner,” Vanderbilt insisted, “they must run amuck.”

The moneymen left Cooke’s office at eleven, convinced they had done the right thing. The bad tidings were telegraphed to Jay Cooke in Philadelphia. He immediately closed his doors and suspended all business at every branch of his bank.

The news was announced on the floor of the Exchange at 11:22, and like a wounded beast the market roared in pain and plunged into frenzy. The vast majority of traders couldn’t sell fast enough. Jay Gould made an instant fortune on the decline. Vanderbilt opposed him and bought with abandon, desperate to start the bulls running. He succeeded in hanging on to the New York Central line, but Gould grabbed much of the rest of his rival’s holdings. Brokers large and small failed in a matter of hours and a dozen banks collapsed.

Friday, despite a driving rain, seething crowds churned the downtown streets into mud as they dashed from one bank to another trying to withdraw their funds. Lines formed around entire blocks and the police had all they could do to maintain order. The banks, meanwhile, had pretty much run out of cash. Their vaults were stuffed with railroad bonds, each of which was losing value as the seconds ticked by.

On Saturday at eleven a.m., forty-eight hours after the panic began, the governors of the Exchange shut down trading. Someone asked for how long. The answer was a shrug.

Zac found Josh at the foundry. Frankie Miller’s men, usually hidden, were in plain view around the perimeter. “You’re expecting trouble?” Zac asked. “Here?”

“Not really,” Josh said. “I’m just being cautious.”

“Well, you’ve been right so far. Prescient I might call it.” Zac’s voice betrayed a new respect for his younger brother. “How the hell did you know?”

“I can’t tell you a lot. Just that Mollie’s Aunt Eileen has some remarkable connections.”

“Jesus God Almighty. It certainly seems so.”

Zac had not at first credited Josh’s warning. Until in mid-August, a few days after their initial conversation, his brother brought four suitcases full of currency to Zac’s office in the Devrey Building. “Except for 1060 Fourth, my rooming houses, my flats, and the land each stands on, I’m now entirely in cash. And not a penny of it is in any bank. This is it, Zac. All I possess. In four leather satchels.”

Zac stood up, peering into the cases as Josh snapped them open. Each was full to the top with greenbacks.

“United States bills,” Josh said. “Every one, so our government assures me, backed by gold.”

“The gold,” Zac said, “is in Fort Knox. With an army to protect it. What are you proposing to do with all this?”

“I think Mama will look after it for me.”

“Now I know you’re mad. Surely you don’t mean to bury—” Zac had broken off and sank back in his seat, the light of revelation dawning in his eyes. “The Carolina clock,” he’d said softly.

“Exactly.”

Three hours later, eleven minutes before nine in the evening and the building all but empty, Zac went through the door beside his office and up a short ladder into the rooftop structure that housed the clockworks. Josh rested his left foot on the ladder’s second rung and his peg on the floor and hoisted one satchel at a time for Zac to stow away. At two minutes to nine the brothers were on Canal Street, gazing upward, intent on seeing that nothing they had done had interrupted the clock’s functioning. The seconds ticked by, with the hands moving in what appeared to be an entirely normal fashion. The hour struck.
Hell Witch
sailed majestically across the sky, followed by
West
Witch
and
East Witch
and the clock chimed nine times. “Mama,” Josh said, “approves.”

The next day Zac began raising as much cash as he could—less than Josh’s stash he was fairly certain—and hid his suitcases next to his brother’s.

Now, some four weeks later, the whole incredible drama was playing out exactly as Joshua had predicted. Pandemonium on Wall Street and a run on the banks.

The tension in the foundry that September Saturday morning was real, but more controlled than what was happening on the streets. Zac had arrived on an old swaybacked nag. He’d added seven hundred to his supply of cash when he sold a fine mare a month previous.

There were only four men standing near the Kelly converter—Tickle and the other dwarf, McCoy, and two normal-size men he didn’t know—because Josh had cut back on his payroll over the last few weeks. The four continued working, but Zac knew they were eyeing him with apprehension, anxious for any word from the world of finance.

“What’s the latest?” Josh asked.

“Well, it took me about an hour to get from Canal Street down here. Crowds everywhere, and I heard thirty-two different stories along the way. Only thing I’m sure of is that Grant and Richardson are in the city. At the Fifth Avenue Hotel, meeting with the governors of the Exchange. Apparently the federal government is being asked to put some forty million in cash into the banks.”

Josh turned to his men. “You hear that? The president and the secretary of the treasury have come to New York to help us. We’ll be fine.” Never mind how rapidly he’d dismissed the promises from Washington when Eileen issued her warning. Nor how right he’d been.

No different this time as it turned out. The administration announced it would not pony up hard cash in the form of deposits—not morally defensible, Richardson said, to reward the profligacy that had created the situation—but Washington would buy government
bonds on the open market and that would put some cash in the system.

The Exchange stayed closed for a week. The bears ran rampant nonetheless. Men traded on the street under the trees as they had in Colonial times. And always, it seemed, they were forced to sell for less than they’d bought. Stocks sank to new lows. Brokerage houses disappeared overnight, their clients finding them open for business one day and their premises empty and bolted shut the next. Banks defaulted one after the other—in a few cases the bankers disappeared with what little cash the bank still had. A week later a number of the insurance companies closed their doors. By then the crisis had spread from New York across the nation. Chicago, for one, was entirely without a banking system and the town resorted to barter.