The Phantom of Manhattan (4 page)

‘But, of course, before long rumours started and grew. Food, clothing, candles, tools went missing in the night. A credulous staff began to talk of a phantom in the cellars until finally every tiny accident - and backstage many tasks are dangerous - came to be blamed on the mysterious Phantom. Thus the legend began.’

‘
Mon Dieu
, but I have heard of this. Ten years … no, it must be more … I was summoned to give the last rites to some poor wretch who was found hanged. Someone told me then that the Phantom had done it.’

‘The man’s name was Buquet, Father. But it was not Erik. Joseph Buquet was given to periods of great depression and certainly took his own life. At first I welcomed the rumours for I thought they would keep my poor boy - for thus I thought of him - safe in his small kingdom in the darkness below the Opera and perhaps they would have done, until that dreadful autumn of ‘93. He did something very foolish, Father. He fell in love.

‘Then she was called Christine Daae. You probably know her today as Madame la Vicomtesse de Chagny.’

‘But this is impossible. Not …’

‘Yes, the same one, then a chorus girl in my charge. Not much of a dancer, but a clear, pure voice. But untrained. Erik had listened night after night to the greatest voices in the world; he had studied the texts, he knew how she should be coached. When he had finished, she took over the leading role one night and by morning had become a star.

‘My poor, ugly, outcast Erik thought she might love him in return but of course it was impossible. For she had her own young love. Driven by despair, Erik abducted her one night, from the very centre of the stage, in the middle of his own opera
Don Juan Triumphant
.’

‘But all Paris heard of this scandal, even a humble priest like me. A man was killed.’

‘Yes, Father. The tenor Piangi. Erik did not mean to kill him, just to keep him quiet. But the Italian choked and died. Of course it was the end. By chance the Commissioner of Police was in the audience that night. He summoned a hundred gendarmes; they took blazing torches and with a mob of vengeance-seekers descended into the cellars, right to the level of the lake itself.

‘They found the secret stairs, the passages, the house by the lake, and they found Christine shocked and swooning. She was with her suitor, the young Vicomte de Chagny, dear sweet Raoul. He took her away and comforted her as only a man can, with strong arms and gentle caresses.

‘Two months later she was found with child. So he married her, gave her his name, his title, his love and the necessary wedding band. The son was born in the summer of ‘94 and they have brought him up together. And she went on these past twelve years to become the greatest diva in all Europe.’

‘But they never found Erik, my child? No trace of the Phantom, I seem to recall.’

‘No, Father, they never found him. But I did. I returned desolate to my small office behind the chorus room. When I drew aside the curtain of my wardrobe niche, there he was, the mask he always wore, even alone, clutched in his hand, crouching in the dark as he used to beneath the stairs at my apartment eleven years before.’

‘And of course you told the police …’

‘No, Father, I did not. He was still my boy, one of my two boys. I could not hand him over to the mob again. So I took a woman’s hat and heavy veil, a long cloak … we walked side by side down the staff staircase and out into the street, just two women fleeing into the night. There were hundreds of others. No-one took any notice.

‘I kept him for three months at my apartment half a mile away, but the “wanted” notices were everywhere. And a price on his head. He had to leave Paris, leave France entirely.’

‘You helped him to escape, my child. That was a crime and a sin.’

‘Then I will pay for it, Father. Soon now. That winter was bitter, hard and cold. To take a train was out of the question. I hired a diligence, four horses and a closed carriage. To Le Havre. There I left him hidden in cheap lodgings while I scoured the docks and their seedy bars. Finally I found a sea captain, master of a small freighter bound for New York and one to take a bribe and ask no questions. So one night in mid-January 1894 I stood on the end of the longest quay and watched the stern lights of the tramp steamer disappear into the darkness, bound for the New World. Tell me, Father, is there someone else with us? I cannot see but I feel someone here.’

‘Indeed, there is a man who has just entered.’

‘I am Armand Dufour, madame. A novice came to my chambers and said that I was needed here.’

‘And you are a notary and commissioner for oaths?’

‘Indeed I am, madame.’

‘Monsieur Dufour, I wish you to reach beneath my pillow. I would do so myself but I am become too weak. Thank you. What do you find?’

‘Why, a letter of some sort, enclosed in a fine manila envelope. And a small bag of chamois leather.’

‘Precisely. I wish you to take pen and ink and sign across the sealed flap that this letter has been delivered into your charge this day, and has not been opened by you or anyone else.’

‘My child, I beg you hurry. We have not finished our business.’

‘Patience, Father. I know my time is short but after so many years of silence I must now struggle to complete the course. Are you done, M. le Notaire?’

‘It has been written just as you requested, madame.’

‘And on the front of the envelope?’

‘I see, written in what must surely be your own hand, the words: M. Erik Muhlheim, New York City.’

‘And the small leather bag?’

‘I have it in my hand.’

‘Open it if you please.’

‘
Nom d’un chien!
Gold Napoleons. I have not seen these since …’

‘But they are still valid tender?’

‘Certainly, and most valuable.’

‘Then I wish you to take them all, and the letter, and take it to New York City and deliver it. Personally.’

‘Personally? In New York? But, madame, I do not usually … I have never been …’

‘Please, M. le Notaire. There is enough gold? For five weeks away from the office?’

‘More than enough, but …’

‘My child, you cannot know this man is still alive.’

‘Oh, he will have survived, Father. He will always survive.’

‘But I have no address for him. Where to find him?’

‘Ask, M. Dufour. Search the immigration records. The name is rare enough. He will be there somewhere. A man who wears a mask to hide his face.’

‘Very well, madame. I will try. I will go there and I will try. But I cannot guarantee success.’

‘Thank you. Tell me, Father, has one of the sisters administered to me a spoonful of tincture of a white powder?’

‘Not in the hour that I have been here,
ma fille
. Why?’

‘It is strange but the pain has gone. Such beautiful, sweet relief. I cannot see to either side but I can see a sort of tunnel and an arch. My body was in such pain but now it hurts no more. It was so cold but now there is warmth everywhere.’

‘Do not delay, Monsieur l’Abbe. She is leaving us.’

‘Thank you, Sister. I hope I may know my duty.’

‘I am walking towards the arch, there is light at the end. Such sweet light. Oh, Lucien, are you there? I am coming, my love.’

‘
In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
…’

‘Hurry, Father.’

‘
Ego te absolvo ab omnibus peccatis tuis.
’

‘Thank you, Father.’

2

THE CHANT OF ERIK MUHLHEIM

PENTHOUSE SUITE, E.M. TOWER, PARK ROW, MANHATTAN, OCTOBER 1906

EVERY DAY, SUMMER OR WINTER, RAIN OR SHINE, I rise early. I dress and come up from my quarters to this small square rooftop terrace atop the pinnacle of the highest skyscraper in all New York. From here, depending upon which side of the square I stand, I can look west across the Hudson River towards the open green lands of New Jersey. Or north towards the Mid and Uptown sections of this amazing island so full of wealth and filth, extravagance and poverty, vice and crime. Or south towards the open sea which leads back to Europe and the bitter road I have travelled. Or east across the river to Brooklyn and, lost in the sea mist, the lunatic enclave called Coney Island, the original source of my wealth.

And I who spent seven years terrorized by a brutish father, nine an animal chained in a cage, eleven an outcast in the cellars below the Paris Opera and ten fighting my way up from the fish-gutting sheds of Gravesend Bay to this eminence, know that I now have wealth and power beyond the dreams of Croesus. So I look down on this sprawling city and I think: how I hate and despise you, Human Race.

It was a long hard voyage that brought me here in the first days of 1894. The Atlantic was wild with storms. I lay in my cot sick unto death, my passage prepaid by that one kind person I have ever met, tolerating the sneers and insults of the crew, knowing they could tip me overboard in a trice, and none the wiser, if I attempted to respond, borne up only by the rage and hatred for them all. Four weeks we rolled and thumped our way across the ocean until one bitter night at the end of January the sea calmed and we were dropping anchor in the Roads ten miles south of the tip of Manhattan Island.

Of this I knew nothing, save that we had arrived. Somewhere. But I heard the crew in their harsh Breton accent telling each other that in the dawn we would move up into the East River and dock for customs inspection. Then I knew I would be discovered again; exposed, humiliated, rejected as an immigrant and sent back in chains.

In the small hours, when everyone was asleep, including the drunken night-watch, I took a mouldy lifebelt from the deck and went over the edge into the icy sea. I had seen lights dimly flickering in the blackness, how far I did not know. But I began to drive my frozen body towards them and an hour later pulled myself up onto a shingly beach crusted with frost, I did not know it, but my first steps in the New World were on the beach at Gravesend Bay, Coney Island.

The lights I had seen came from guttering oil-lamps in the windows of some miserable shacks at the top of the beach, beyond the tide-line, and when I stumbled towards them and looked through the filthy panes I saw rows of huddled men skinning and gutting fresh-caught fish. Further down the line of huts there was an empty space in the middle of which burned a great bonfire and round it a dozen wretches were crouched, drawing the heat into their bodies. Half dead from cold, I knew I too must share that heat or freeze to death. I walked into the light of the great fire, felt the wave of heat and looked at them. My mask was stuffed inside my clothes, this terrible head and face was lit by the flames. They turned and stared at me.

I have hardly ever laughed in my life. There has been no cause to. But that night in the subzero pre-dawn cold I laughed inside myself for sheer relief. They looked at me … and took no notice. For one way or another every one of them was deformed. By a sheer chance I had come upon the nightly encampment of the Outcasts of Gravesend Bay, the rejects who could only make a miserable living by gutting and cleaning fish while the fishermen and the city slept.

So they let me dry and warm myself by their fire and asked me where I had come from, though it was obvious I had come from the sea. From reading the texts of all the English operas I had learned a few words of this language and told them I had fled from France. It made no difference, they had all fled from somewhere, pursued by society to this last desolate sand-spit. They called me Frenchie and let me join them, sleeping in the shacks on piles of stinking nets, working through the nights for a few dimes, living on scraps, often cold and hungry, but safe from the law and its chains and jails.

Spring came and I began to learn what lay beyond the tangle of gorse and furze that screened the fishing village from the rest of Coney Island. I learned the whole island was lawless, or rather a law unto itself. Not incorporated into the City of Brooklyn across the narrow strait and until recently ruled by a half-politician half-gangster called John McKane who had just been arrested. But McKane’s legacy lived on in this lunatic island dedicated to funfairs, brothels, crime, vice and pleasure. The last was the aim of the bourgeois New Yorkers who came each weekend and before they had left spent fortunes on foolish diversions laid on for them by the entrepreneurs who had the wit to provide those pleasures.

Unlike the rest of the Outcasts who would gut fish for all of their lives and never rise above it through their own doltish stupidity, I knew that with wit and ingenuity I could get out of these shacks and make a fortune from the pleasure parks even then being planned and built further along the island. But how? First, in darkness, I crept into the town and stole clothes, proper clothes, from washing-lines and empty beach-cottages. Then I took lumber from the building sites and built a better shack. But with my face I could still not move by daylight into that raucous unruled society where tourists were happily fleeced of fortunes each weekend.

A new arrival came to join us, hardly more than a boy of seventeen, ten years my junior but old beyond his years. Unlike most he was physically unscarred, undeformed, with a bone-pale face and black expressionless eyes. He came from Malta and had an education, learned from the Catholic fathers there. He spoke fluent English, knew Latin and Greek and had not a shred of scruple in him. He was here because, driven to rage by the endless penances inflicted on him by priests, he had taken a kitchen knife and plunged it into his tutor, killing him instantly. On the run, he had fled Malta to the Barbary Coast, served a while as a pleasure-boy in a house of sodomy, then stowed away on a ship which by chance was headed for New York. But he still had a price on his head, so he avoided the immigration filter at Ellis Island and drifted down to Gravesend Bay.

I needed someone who could do my bidding in daylight; he needed my ingenuity and skills to get us out of this place. He became my subordinate and representative in all things and together we have moved from those fish-gutting sheds to wealth and power over half New York and much beyond. To this day I know him only as Darius.

But if I taught him, he also taught me, converting me from old and foolish beliefs to worship of the one and only true god, the great master who has never let me down.

The problem of my being able to move in daylight was solved most simply. In the summer of ‘94, with savings scrimped from the fish-cleaning job, I had a craftsman make up a latex mask to fit over my whole head with just holes for eyes and mouth. The mask of a clown, with bulbous red nose and wide gap-toothed smile. With baggy jacket and pantaloons I could move through the funfairs unsuspected. People with children even waved and smiled. The clown outfit was my passport into the daylight world. For two years we just made money. There were so many scams and frauds that I forget how many I invented.

The simplest were often the best. I discovered that each weekend the tourists despatched 250,000 postcards from Coney Island. Most sought a place to buy stamps. So I bought postcards for one cent, stamped the words POSTAGE PAID on them and sold them for two. The tourists were happy. They did not know that postage was free anyway. But I wanted more, much more. I could sense a boom in mass entertainment coming that would prove a licence to print one’s own money.

In that first year and a half I suffered only one reverse, but it was a bad one. Returning home to the shacks one night with a bag full of dollars, I was set upon by a crowd of four footpads armed with cudgels and brass knuckles. Had they just robbed me of my money it would have been bad but not life-threatening. But they tore off my clown’s mask, saw my face and beat me until I almost died.

It took me a month in my cot till I could walk again. Since then I have carried a small Colt Derringer on my person at all times, for as I lay there I swore that no-one would ever hurt me again and get away with it.

By the winter I had heard of a man called Paul Boyton. He was seeking to open the island’s first enclosed all-weather amusement park. I instructed Darius to arrange to meet him and to present himself as a designing engineer of genius fresh-arrived from Europe. It worked. Boyton commissioned a series of six amusement rides for his new enterprise. I designed them of course, using deception, optical illusion and engineering skill to create sensations of fear and bewilderment among the tourists, all of which they loved. Boyton opened Sea Lion Park in 1895 and the crowds flocked in.

Boyton wanted to pay Darius for ‘his’ inventions, but I stopped him. Instead I demanded ten cents in the dollar for everything earned by those six rides, for a period of ten years. Boyton had sunk everything he had into his funfair and was deep in debt. Within a month those rides, monitored by Darius, were bringing in a hundred dollars a week to us alone. But there was much more to come.

The successor to political boss McKane was a red-haired firebrand called George Tilyou. He too wanted to open a funfair and cash in on the boom. Regardless of the rage of Boyton, who could do nothing about it, I designed even more ingenious diversions for Tilyou’s enterprise on the same basis, a percentage franchise. Steeplechase Park opened in 1897 and began to bring us a thousand dollars a day. By then I had bought and moved to a pleasant bungalow nearer to Manhattan Beach. Neighbours were few and mostly at weekends, times when I was, in my clown’s costume, circulating freely among the tourists between the two amusement parks.

There were frequent boxing tournaments on Coney Island with very heavy betting by the millionaire gentry arriving on the new elevated train from Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan Beach Hotel. I watched but did not gamble, convinced that most fights were fixed. Gambling was illegal throughout New York and Brooklyn, indeed all of New York State. But on Coney Island, last outpost of the Crime Frontier, huge sums changed hands as bookmakers took the gamblers’ money. In 1899 Jim Jeffries challenged Bob Fitzsimmons for the world heavyweight title - on Coney Island. Our joint fortune was by then $250,000 and I intended to place it all on the challenger, Jeffries, at long odds. Darius almost went mad with rage until I explained my idea.

I had noticed that between rounds the fighters almost always took a long swig of fresh water from a bottle, sometimes but not always spitting it out. At my instruction Darius, masquerading as a sports reporter, simply switched Fitzsimmons’s bottle for one laced with sedative. Jeffries knocked him out. I collected a million dollars. Later that year Jeffries defended his title against Sailor Tom Sharkey at the Coney Island Athletic Club. Same scam, same result. Poor Sharkey. We netted two million. It was time to move up-island and upmarket, for I had been studying the affairs of an even wilder and more lawless funfair for the making of money: the New York Stock Exchange. But there was still one last strike to be made on Coney Island.

Two hustlers called Frederic Thompson and Skip Dundy were desperate to open a third and even bigger amusement park. The first was an alcoholic engineer and the second a stuttering financier, and so urgent was their need for cash that they were already into the banks for more than they were worth. I had Darius create a ‘shell’ company, a loan corporation which stunned them by offering an unsecured loan at zero interest. Instead, the E.M. Corporation wanted 10 per cent of the gross take of Luna Park for a decade. They agreed. They had no choice; it was that or bankruptcy with a half-finished funfair. Luna Park opened on 2 May 1903. At 9 a.m. Thompson and Dundy were bankrupt. At sundown they had paid off all their debts - bar mine. Within the first four months Luna Park had grossed five million dollars. It levelled at a million a month and still does. By then we had moved to Manhattan.

I started in a modest brownstone house, staying inside most of the time, for here the clown’s disguise was useless. Darius joined the Stock Exchange on my behalf, following my instructions as I pored over corporate reports and the details of new share issues. It soon became plain that in this amazing country everything was booming. New ideas and projects, if skilfully promoted, were immediately subscribed. The economy was expanding at a lunatic rate, pushing westwards and ever westwards. With every new industry there was a demand for raw materials, along with ships and railroads to deliver them and haul away the product to the waiting markets.

Through the years I had been on Coney Island the immigrants had been pouring in by the million from every land to east and west. The Lower East Side, almost beneath my terrace as I now look down, was and remains a vast teeming cauldron of every race and creed living cheek by jowl in poverty, violence, vice and crime. Only a mile away the super-rich have their mansions, their coaches and their beloved opera.

By 1903, after a few mishaps, I had mastered the intricacies of the stock market and worked out how the giants like Pierpont Morgan had made their fortunes. Like them I moved into coal in West Virginia, steel in Pittsburgh, railroads out to Texas, shipping from Savannah via Baltimore to Boston, silver in New Mexico and property throughout Manhattan Island. But I became better and harder than them, through single-minded worship of the only true god, to whom Darius had led me. For this is Mammon the god of gold who permits no mercy, no charity, no compassion and no scruple. There is no widow, no child, no pauper wretch who cannot be crushed a little more for a few extra granules of the precious metal that so pleases the master. With the gold comes the power and with the power even more gold in one glorious world-conquering cycle.