New York

  “At this time,” he told Sean, “I now have thirty-six percent of the company. MacDuff has forty percent. Another ten percent is owned by other railroads and investors who I know for a fact won’t sell. A scattering of investors have four percent and the last ten percent is in the hands of your friend Frank Master.”

  “I didn’t know he was so big.”

  “It’s his largest holding. He’s built it over time, and in doing so he has shown his good sense—it’s an excellent investment.” He smiled. “But if he sold it to me, I’d have control of the company. And since he’s a friend of yours, I’d like you to introduce us.”

  “You want him to sell his ten percent to you?”

  Gabriel Love smiled. “No. But I want MacDuff to believe that he might.”

  So Sean had set up the dinner at Delmonico’s. By the end of it, his admiration for old Gabriel Love knew no bounds. The neatness, the symmetry of the thing was a work of art. And what did Frank Master have to do? Nothing—except go away for a few days.

  They were to meet once more, at Delmonico’s, next Friday, to ensure that everything was in place.

  Sean was contemplating this business on Saturday afternoon, when his sister Mary arrived to see him.

  They spent a pleasant hour, chatting about this and that, and after a while, their conversation turned to the Master family.

  “You know you told me that Frank Master was making a fool of himself, and that he’d better be careful?” Mary remarked. “Well, am I right in thinking he’s got a young lady?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know. He looks pleased with himself, but also a bit tired. I just wondered.”

  “Well,” Sean smiled, “you’re right. Her name’s Donna Clipp. Clipper—that’s his pet name for her. And he ought to give it up.” He glanced at her. “Why, do you think his wife guesses?”

  “She’s never given any sign she’s known about Lily de Chantal, all these years,” answered Mary. “If she’s never known about her, then why would she know about this one?”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Sean. “She’s a good woman, in her way, and I’d be sorry if she was hurt.” He paused a moment. “Did you know Master’s going upriver on business next Sunday? He’ll be gone a few days, and he’s taking the girl with him.” He shrugged. “I just hope it’s over soon.”

  “No fool like an old fool,” said Mary.

  “Keep that to yourself, though.”

  “Did you ever know me to talk?”

  “No,” said Sean, approvingly, “I can’t say I did.”

  An hour later, Mary informed Hetty Master: “He’s taking her with him upriver on Sunday. And he calls her Clipper.”

  “Good,” said Hetty. “That’ll do nicely.”

  Frank Master had hesitated, but finally, on the following Wednesday, he made up his mind. Leaving his house late in the morning, he went eastward along Fourteenth until he came to the station, climbed up the open staircase of the El, and came out onto the platform.

  As he climbed the stairs, he felt a faint twinge of discomfort, but it seemed to pass, so he took a deep breath, puffed out his chest, congratulated himself that he was still pretty damn fit, and lit a cigar.

  It being quite late in the morning, there weren’t many people about on the platform. He walked along it and gazed down at the clusters of telegraph lines strung between their poles, and the slate roofs of the small houses across the street. The rooftops were grimy with the soot from the El trains that passed above them, and they usually looked sad and depressed at this time of the spring. But the weather this March was so warm that they seemed dirty but cheerful in the morning sun.

  Frank didn’t have to wait long before a series of puffs and rattles announced that the El train was nosing its way along the high rails toward him. All the same, as the train carried him downtown, Frank wished he wasn’t on it. For two reasons. First, he was going to see his son. Second, that meant a trip into Wall Street.

  It was a couple of weeks since he’d last seen Tom. He loved his son, of course, yet there was always a faint tension in the air when they met. Not that Tom ever said anything—that wasn’t his way—but ever since that day at the start of the Draft Riots, he’d had the feeling that Tom didn’t approve of him. Something in his look seemed to say: You deserted my mother, and we both know it. Well, maybe. But that had been a long while ago—long enough to forgive and forget. True, he’d been seeing Lily de Chantal for most of the intervening time, but he was pretty sure Tom didn’t know that. So there was no excuse.

  However, Tom had his uses. And it seemed to Frank, as the train carried him downtown, that he needed Tom just now.

  He got out at Fulton and walked into Wall Street.

  Why did he feel uncomfortable in Wall Street? He used to like it well enough. Trinity Church was still there, presiding over the street’s western end, in all its solemn splendor—a comforting sight. Wasn’t Trinity the very soul of Wall Street’s tradition? Hadn’t the Master family belonged to Trinity, members of the vestry more often than not, for generations? Wall Street should have felt like home. But it didn’t.

  The place was busy as usual. Fellows in dark coats, rushing in and out of the Exchange with orders stuck into the bands of their high hats. Clerks hastening to their high stools and their desks. Messenger boys, street vendors, cabs delivering merchant gentlemen like himself. It was the old New York, wasn’t it?

  No. Not really. Not any more.

  He passed a stern and bulky building. Number 23. The House of Drexel, Morgan. And as he passed, it was all he could do not to bow the head. Yes he, one of the Masters, friends to Stuyvesants and Roosevelts, Astors and Vanderbilts, must experience a trembling of awe as he passed the offices of Morgan. That was the trouble. That was why he didn’t belong here any more.

  But his son Tom did. And a few moments later, he came to his door.

  “Father. An unexpected pleasure.” Tom pushed his big chair back from his roll-top desk. His tailcoat was hanging on a stand. But his gray waistcoat was as spotless as his white shirt, his silk cravat and the pearl pin that held it in place. Everything about him told you: this man does not handle goods, he only handles money. Tom was not a mere merchant like his ancestors; he was a banker.

  “Got a moment?” said his father.

  “For you, of course.” Tom didn’t need to say he was busy. The gold watch chain across his waistcoat told you his time was valuable.

  “I need some advice,” said Frank.

  “Glad to help,” said Tom. But in his eye, like a clergyman whose parishioner asks to see him alone, was a faint suggestion of caution, and impending judgment.

  That was the trouble with bankers, thought Master. A merchant wants to know about the deal. A banker wants the money just as much, but he has appointed himself the enforcing conscience of the tradesman, and therefore affects an air of superiority. His son Tom was in his forties now, silky smooth and stinking rich and pompous.

  Oh well, he needed his advice, and at least he wouldn’t be charged for it.

  “I own ten percent of a railroad,” said Frank.

  Then he stared at his son in surprise. He hadn’t said it to impress—he’d just stated a simple fact. Yet the transformation in Tom was remarkable.

  “Ten percent of a railroad?” Tom was all attention. “How big a railroad?”

  “Middling sized.”

  “I see. Might I ask which one?” There was a politeness in Tom’s voice that his father had never heard before.

  “That’s confidential for the moment.”

  “As you wish.”

  There was no question—he could see it in Tom’s eyes: he was being treated with a new respect. Even his moral status seemed to have improved. It was as if the clergyman had been faced not with a vulgar tradesman, but a serious donor. Seeing his new situation, Frank did not fail to improve upon it.

  “My ten percent,” he said quietly, “gives me the balance of control.”

&n
bsp; Tom leaned back in his chair and gazed at his father with love. It was as if, Frank thought, all his sins had suddenly been remitted, and he was entering Heaven through the Pearly Gates.

  “Why, Father,” said his son, “this is exactly what we do here.” His face broke into a smile. “Welcome to Wall Street.”

  It was the Civil War that had really changed Wall Street. The Civil War and the American West. Massive flows of capital were needed to finance the one, and to develop the other. And where was capital to be found? In one place only, the money center of the whole world: London.

  It was London that had bankrolled America. Just as the century before, the economy of America had grown on the great triangle of London, New York and the West Indies sugar trade—and later on the Southern cotton trade—now a new, less visible, but equally powerful engine was making the running: the flow of credit and of stocks between London and New York.

  That’s where the House of Morgan had arisen. Junius Morgan, a respectable Connecticut gentleman whose Welsh ancestors had taken ship from Bristol to America two centuries before, had returned across the ocean and set up as a banker in London. He was liked, he was trusted, he was in the right place at the right time, and he had the intelligence to see it. He arranged loans from London to America, and those loans grew huge. In the course of this steady, respectable business, he’d become a very rich man.

  But it was his son, John Pierpont Morgan, who was at the helm now. Over six feet tall, big-chested, with a great nose that would flare up like a swelling volcano when he was agitated, and commanding eyes like the headlights of an oncoming train, Mr. J. P. Morgan was becoming a legend in his own time. It was J. P. Morgan and a few men like him who were the kings of Wall Street now, and because of them, even a substantial merchant like Frank Master no longer felt comfortable there. For the bankers’ deals and industrial combinations were growing so large, the sums of money involved so vast, that fellows like Master weren’t of much account any more. The bankers didn’t buy and sell goods; they bought and sold businesses. They didn’t finance voyages; they financed wars, industries, even small countries.

  Oh, Morgan might serve on the same vestry; Frank might meet him socially in the same New York houses. But Morgan’s game was too big for him, and they both knew it. Frank found the fact humbling. And no man cares to be humbled.

  But bankers were interested in railroads. Railroads were big enough.

  Mr. Morgan himself was active in railroads—he’d placed huge quantities of the best railroad stock with London investors.

  But now, Mr. Morgan had decided that it was time to sort out the chaos. Like a monarch faced with a land of barbarian warlords, he had called the railroad men to his house to try to end the warfare and bring order to the competing lines. And he was beginning to make progress. There was still time, however, for the unruly railroad barons to make some spectacular raids.

  “I’ve reason to believe that there’s going to be a fight for control of the railroad,” Master explained. “If there is, one of the parties is going to try to buy more shares. But unless I sell, there won’t be enough out there in the market for him to buy. And that shortage will drive the price of my shares up.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said his son.

  “I’m intending to do nothing. Let the price rise. But if it gets high enough, I may sell—at least some of them.”

  “You don’t care who controls the railroad?”

  “I don’t give a damn. Question is, am I breaking any laws?”

  Tom Master considered. “From what you’ve told me, I’d say it’s fine. Is there anything else I need to know?”

  “One of the parties wants me to hold off selling, to drive the market up. He wants the other fellow to buy him out, but for a high price.”

  “Hmm. Is he paying you?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’d say it depends what else he does, and what else you know. There are rules in the game these days.” Tom smiled. “We bankers are trying to bring some order to the market.”

  We bankers: Tom was so proud of being a banker. He worshipped Morgan—even had a roll-top desk like his hero. But you couldn’t blame him. And if the bankers were taking the moral high ground and telling everyone how to behave, you couldn’t deny that they had a point.

  The fact was, Frank thought, when you looked back over the last few decades, for most of his own lifetime really, the New York Stock Exchange had hardly been a respectable place. If the railroad show had been a big attraction, the stock market had been the fairground. You could get away with almost anything.

  The easiest ploy was to control a company. Men like Jay Gould would cheerfully issue new stock without even telling existing shareholders, taking new money from new shareholders while diluting the stock values of the old ones. Watering the stock, they called it. You could set up new companies to buy the old ones until nobody knew what the hell they had. You could buy politicians to vote for concessions that would favor your business, and give them shares for doing it. Above all, you could manipulate the price of the stock of your own company, and then speculate in its shares.

  But solid men like Morgan were insisting on new rules, now. The market was being cleaned up—slowly.

  “The thing that’s most frowned upon at the moment,” said Tom, “is companies manipulating their own stock. For instance, a company offers to sell you a parcel of its stock at a discounted price. Then, by whatever manipulations, the company deliberately makes its own stock seem worthless. So it can satisfy your order by buying its own stock at a rock-bottom price. A week later, the artificial panic’s over, and the company’s made an extra profit. Some companies have done that sort of thing again and again. And of course, when brokers start placing bets on stock-price movements, they can get badly burned by these games. Gabriel Love is one of the great offenders. Do you know him?”

  “Know the name,” said Frank Master, cautiously.

  “He belongs in jail,” said Tom firmly. “But your railroad operation doesn’t sound like that. Effectively, you’d have cornered the market in the shares, and you may profit accordingly. So long as there’s nothing else going on.”

  “So you think it’s all right?”

  “I’d be happy to handle the business for you, if you like.”

  “That’s kind of you, Tom, but I think I can take care of it.”

  “As you wish. If you get wind of anything that might be improper, you’ve a very simple option, you know. Just hold on to your shares. Don’t sell them, or at least wait a while, till the whole thing’s blown over. The stock may stay at the higher price, and you could lighten your holding then, and take some profit. That’d be all right.”

  “Thank you, Tom.”

  “My pleasure. You don’t want to tell me what this railroad is?”

  “Not just now.”

  “Well, good luck. Just remember one thing. Stay away from Gabriel Love.”

  “Thanks,” said Frank. “I’ll remember that.”

  The second dinner at Delmonico’s took place that Friday. It was just the three of them again: Frank, Sean O’Donnell and Gabriel Love. As before, Gabriel Love lowered his great frame slowly into his chair, and gazed benignly over his white beard at them both. And Sean smiled at Frank reassuringly, as if to say: “Ain’t he a character?”

  Master had prepared himself carefully for this meeting. So, as soon as they’d ordered drinks, he came straight to the point.

  “Mr. Love,” he said, “I’d like you to go over the precise details of this transaction one more time.” He smiled. “Just so that I know what I’m getting myself into.”

  As they had before, the pale blue eyes gazed out of their watery domain. But did Frank detect, in their benevolence, a hint of impatience?

  “The business, my friends,” said Mr. Love, in a voice of great gentleness, “is simplicity itself. And your role in it requires only that you should absent yourself from the city for a day or two—that you should take a small rest, away from
the cares of business, in a place where you cannot be reached by the telegraph. Nothing more.” He smiled in a kindly way. “In short, a vacation, free from all care.” He turned to Sean. “Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s it,” said Sean. “Upriver.”

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” Gabriel Love continued. “The markets are open in the morning, before closing for the rest of the weekend. And tomorrow morning, just before the market closes, I am going to purchase, in the name of several third parties, some blocks of shares totaling one half of one percent of the Hudson Ohio Railroad. I know that I can secure them, because they are already in the hands of my agents, who will obligingly sell them to me. Those transactions won’t cause any stir, but the activity will be noted by the market.

  “Mr. Cyrus MacDuff is in Boston. He is attending his granddaughter’s wedding tomorrow. In the unlikely event that his agent informs him of the share activity by telegraph, it is possible that he might try to send a cable to you. If he does, you will not respond. More likely, however, he will know nothing of this activity.

  “On Sunday evening, a certain judge of my acquaintance is dining with Mr. MacDuff. He will inform MacDuff that he has heard I have secretly purchased over thirty-six percent of his railroad, and that my agents are rumored to have purchased some more on Saturday morning. Meanwhile, I shall see to it that the rumor is circulated widely in New York.” He nodded sagely. “And that, my friends, is where the evil nature of Cyrus MacDuff will get the better of him. The devil will have that man in his grip.

  “He will attempt to make contact with you, so that you can assure him you are not selling your ten percent. Or that you will sell it to him, and not to me. He will first try to cable you. He may even try to take a train to New York, if he can find one so late. But he will be unable to reach you, because you will have departed. All attempts to reach you will fail. He will not know if you are holding or selling. He will be in a state of great anxiety. And why? All because he hates me, and does not want me to have any part in his railroad. There will be wailing, gentlemen, and gnashing of teeth.