The Russian was sitting on the left, Peter on the right, and Evangeline in the middle.
“You armed?” asked the Russian.
“No,” said Peter.
“I don’t like searching man. Don’t like touching crotch. You pull weapon, I pull off your nose and make girlfriend eat it.”
“We’re not armed,” said Evangeline. “And I don’t like nose.”
The Russian said to her, “My boss only want to talk. No need to kill anybody on Fourth Avenue. No need to run. No need to be smart-ass.”
Peter’s iPhone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and asked the Russian. “Can I read this?”
“Yeah. But no sending.”
It was a text from Joey Berra:
Can’t talk. Been running. Will meet you midnight. By bleachers in Times Square. If not then, same place, high noon tomorrow. But don’t call. Don’t text. Throw away phone and buy another. Phones are being tracked.
Evangeline read the message over Peter’s shoulder and said, “Now he tells us.”
Peter hit the Delete button.
The cab sped along Forty-second Street past the theaters and their spectacular marquees, past the massive McDonald’s and Madame Tussaud’s and the ice cream shops and B. B. King’s. Then it came to a red light on Eighth Avenue.
Peter wondered which corner had been the site of West Side Workingman’s.
Then the light changed, the cab accelerated through, and he wondered where they were going to end the night.
TWELVE
October 1907
It was the day after the Rileys buried their mother.
It was also the end of the month, and Tim Riley did not think that his family, or the country, or the country’s financial markets, would ever see a worse October.
The first tremors had reached New York eighteen months earlier, when an earthquake flattened San Francisco.
Soon, money began to flow out of the nation’s financial brain, out along the arteries, out to rebuild a ruined city that soaked up cash like stressed muscle soaking up oxygen. The cost of money rose. Credit tightened. The stock market slid. Most investors grew nervous, but a few saw opportunity. Some felt the first cold-sweat trickle of fear, while others experienced the warm tingle of greed.
Fear and greed, mother and father of financial markets. The first lesson that Tim Riley had learned as an office boy at J. P. Morgan was about fear and greed and the intercourse between them. He had learned to substitute the words prudence and opportunism, which sounded more gentlemanly, but when prudence worked on opportunism, or fear on greed, the result could be as rewarding as a happy marriage or as destructive as an ugly divorce.
That fall, an opportunist named Heinze had tried to take advantage of growing prudence to corner the copper market. He failed, with quick and disastrous results for his own balance sheet and for the stock of United Copper.
The problem was that Heinze also headed the Mercantile Bank.
And the directors of the Bank Clearinghouse, a consortium of fifty-three New York banks, suggested that Heinze step down. That news erased gentlemanly prudence and replaced it with abject fear. And fear’s messenger was rumor. And rumor was that the Mercantile would be forced to close. So, on the second Wednesday in October, Mercantile depositors staged a run on the bank.
The Panic of 1907 had begun.
Then depositors turned to the Knickerbocker Trust. When the stately doors opened on Fifth Avenue on October 22, a crowd was beginning to build. By noon, the line twisted three times through the lobby, and people were carrying out cash in sacks. By one o’clock, eight million dollars had gone through those stately doors, and they closed three hours early.
Two days later, the newspapers ran a photograph of Wall Street. Thousands of men (and a few women) were lining up to withdraw their cash from the Trust Company of America, or they were milling about, or standing on the steps of the subtreasury, or leaning against George Washington’s statue, watching, waiting, and wondering what was happening to the money they had entrusted to all the august institutions around them.
And while New York banks tried to satisfy depositors, regional banks were pulling money out of New York by the trainload, because people all over the country were catching the panic. And panic fed upon itself, fulfilling its own prophesies.
On Friday, the twenty-fifth, the financial pages listed the failed banks like casualties from a Civil War battlefront: the Twelfth Ward Bank, Empire City Savings Bank, the Hamilton Bank of New York, the International Trust of New York, and four Brooklyn banks, too.
Through it all, things had remained calm at West Side Workingman’s on Forty-second Street at Eighth Avenue. Depositors trusted the smart young president who was, after all, one of their own. That, Tim feared, would change when news spread of a default on the worst loan he had ever made.
And the one person who could always give him a bit of confidence or a dose of common sense, the one who could bake him a soda bread and brew him some tea and listen calmly while he talked, was gone.
Tim stood in his mother’s flat and listened to the familiar far-off sounds—the rumble of the El, the clop of hooves on cobblestones, the chatter of a young mother and her toddler on a stoop—sounds to make the immediate silence seem all the more permanent.
But when living voices faded, they quickly became part of the music of the past. And in the silence, Tim could hear a hundred conversations, a thousand expressions of joy and sorrow . . . his parents murmuring in the night after the telltale thumping had stopped . . . his father leading the family in grace . . . his brother snickering when Uncle Billy farted . . . his mother keening . . . his parents discussing their dreams, especially one about a box of old bonds. . . .
For the first time in years, Tim wondered where his father had hidden that box.
Then he heard footfalls . . . on the stairs, in the hallway, through the door.
Eddie Riley could not help but announce himself. That’s what Plunkitt always said. If you didn’t know him by the high-pitched voice and wide-ranging opinions, the sound of that wooden foot and cane always proclaimed that Eddie was coming.
“Bad times.” Tim kept his eyes on the windows. “Getting worse.”
“Ma always said bad times don’t last,” answered Eddie. “But they do get worse.”
“Worse?”
“Plunkitt can’t keep me on the payroll. No matter what he says in the papers, after losin’ two straight elections, he don’t see the chance of winnin’ again.”
“Then we need to find you some banking work.”
Eddie laughed. “I’m bankin’ every night.”
“Bankin’?”
“Out of business as a Plunkitt coat holder, now a place holder.”
“What’s that?”
“A place holder figures out where the next bank run’s comin’. He goes there the night before, when the line starts to build, and offers to hold any man’s place for ten bucks. Most men’ll pay for a good night’s sleep. And nothin’ guarantees one like knowin’ you’ll be at the head of the line when the bank opens in the mornin’.”
“We need to find you something more dignified.”
“A man with two babies and no job can’t be worried about dignity.”
“Pa kept his dignity, even when we had nothin’.”
“Could he keep it with the whole world fallin’ apart?” asked Eddie.
Always more serious, Tim had traveled farther along that path in fourteen years. Always angrier, Eddie had lost much of his anger. People liked Eddie. They trusted Tim. Eddie dressed like a dandy, walked into every room as if it were a party, and always left with a joke. Tim favored dark suits and winged collars, parted his hair and his mustache in the middle, and proceeded into a conversation like a man walking down a dark alley.
People said there was a simple explanation. Eddie had grown up in a political hall where the glad-hand was one of the tools of the trade. Tim had come of age in the presence of brokers and bankers who measured th
eir words as carefully as their inseams.
But there was more to understanding the Riley brothers than that.
It may have begun with their mentors, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall and Daly of J. P. Morgan. But it ended with the women who had shaped them, the mother they would never see again, the wives they had married, and the song-girl who had kept their secret since that bloody night at McGillicuddy’s. . . .
ii.
Tim was the older brother, but Eddie found a wife first.
He met her at Tammany’s Fifteenth District Cotillion of 1901.
Tim looked across the hall that night and saw Eddie talking to a pudgy girl with an infectious laugh named Polly Sadowski. After a visit to the punch bowl, Tim looked again, and Eddie was still talking to her. Half an hour later . . . still talking.
That was when Plunkitt sidled up to Tim. “Your brother and a Litvak. Not many Lithuanians in the district, so it won’t help if he runs for office. But that’s the most I ever seen him talk to a girl. If he starts playin’ the harmonica for her, get to work on your wedding toast.”
And sure enough, as people emptied out of Washington Hall that cold February night, Tim heard the harmonica. The song was “McNally’s Row of Flats,” followed by the happy laughter of Polly Sadowski.
Her family had come from Lithuania in search of a better life in 1897. The father, a boot maker, had opened a storefront on Tenth Avenue. Two of the sons were also bootmakers. The third, named Theodore, was an anarchist. They did not speak so much of him.
When Mary Riley learned that her son was in love, she worried that the girl wasn’t Irish. She was also suspicious of the Lithuanian brand of Catholicism: “Do these Lith-who-neenians bless themselves top to bottom and left to right, or do they go with that Orthodox business of top to bottom, then right to left?”
“Ask Father Higgins, why don’t you?” said Tim. “The whole Sadowski family sits down front at the ten o’clock every Sunday.”
That softened Mary Riley some. Then one day, Polly herself came by and offered to help the missus with her sewing. When Polly proved that she could do a running stitch and take a Singer sewing machine apart and put it back together again blindfolded, Mary Riley made the girl her own.
Eddie and Polly were married at Sacred Heart that summer.
Then everyone processed to Washington Hall for the reception.
Tim gave what everyone said was a grand toast. Later he gave what everyone said was a grand warning, when the anarchist brother drank too much and started grumbling about the oppressive institution of marriage. Tim told him, very quietly, to shut up or leave. “Or I will personally throw you out a window.”
TWO YEARS LATER, Tim met the dark-haired and slender Helen Murphy at a church social at Annunciation, on Broadway and 131st Street.
And he was captivated . . . by her wit, by her education (courtesy of the good sisters of the Sacred Heart), and by the blue eyes that watched him so seriously from beneath those dark brows.
Three nights a week, month after month, Tim took the El uptown to the neighborhood called Manhattanville, and he sat in the front room and listened while Helen’s Donegal mother played the piano. Tim had no musical talent, but he could have learned “Galway Bay,” “Greensleeves,” and “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” just from watching Mrs. Murphy’s fingers work the keyboard . . . again . . . and again . . . and again . . . because those were the only songs she knew.
Finally, the Murphys allowed Tim to take their daughter to the theater. It was the fall of 1904, and a new show was playing at the Broadway Liberty: Little Johnny Jones, by an up-and-comer named Cohan. Tim came out humming “Yankee Doodle Boy.” But Helen loved “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
Soon they were spending all their free time exploring New York, and for young people in love, it truly was the grand and imperial city that Plunkitt had promised.
They climbed the Statue of Liberty and looked out from the crown. They walked across the Brooklyn Bridge just to feel the majesty of it. They strolled the Ladies’ Mile. They stood on Twenty-third Street and felt the wind currents that the new Flatiron Building created, and they laughed when the coppers shouted “Twenty-three skidoo” at the gawking johnny-boys waiting for a gust to blow a lady’s skirt up around her waist. They went to the nickelodeon to watch pictures that actually moved. They counted the number of stories on the Times building rising at Broadway and Forty-second Street, then they traced the northward progress of the subway trench slicing through Longacre Square. And for her birthday, Tim took Helen to Delmonico’s, where they had steaks and an amazing dessert called Baked Alaska, which was both cold and hot at the same time.
Tim was completely in love with Helen, but he scanned the vaudeville notices every week for a company that included Doreen Walsh, or as she was known when her name made it onto the bill, Doreen the Chorine.
Doreen never played New York, but if she was in town to visit her widowed mother, she and Tim would have lunch. She had followed her dream out to what the vaudevillians called the “medium time,” out to cities like Providence and Cincinnati, out where she played theaters that were clean but seldom crowded, where a good week ended with fifty dollars in the pay envelope and clean towels in the hotel.
Doreen always told Tim that someday, she would make it back. She had an idea for a show with beautiful girls, fresh songs, dancing, and funny skits about high mucky-mucks like J. P. Morgan, with herself as the headliner.
Tim always assured her that it would happen.
And the meal would end with Doreen saying how nice it would have been if she could have had her dream and their dream, too. “We would’ve made a good team.”
Tim would politely agree, but until he saw her again, he would not trouble himself over might-have-beens, because his life was advancing with purpose and promise, and he married Helen at Annunciation in June of 1905.
After Niagara Falls, the couple moved to Forty-seventh Street, to a row of town houses built by William Astor. A full brownstone should have been beyond the reach of a twenty-five-year-old loan officer. But by then, Tim Riley had become the prodigy of New York banking. It had happened the winter before . . .
CHARLES SHAUGHNESSY, FIRST president of Workingman’s, had died during a Christmas celebration at Keen’s Steakhouse. No one was certain if it was a heart attack that killed him or an exploded stomach, because he had just eaten not one but two of their twenty-six-ounce mutton chops. He sat back, patted his enormous belly, turned to say something to Tim, and pitched forward . . . right into the creamed spinach.
So, on the day after New Year’s, the directors of the Twelfth Ward Bank tendered an offer to West Side Workingman’s stockholders. They were following the simplest rule of business and life: when your competitor is weak, take advantage.
Workingman’s had been founded in 1899. The directors—including Daniel Daly, Harold “Squints” O’Day, and saloon-keeper Jimmy Deegan—believed that a man with a Hell’s Kitchen address ought to be able to get a loan in his own neighborhood. “A Local Bank for the Local Interest” was their slogan. And once the bank was capitalized, the customers lined up with coins and bills, with dreams and debts, and the little bank thrived. Even Mary Riley traded in her piggy bank for an account paying 3 percent.
But Twelfth Ward offered five dollars a share above the stated price of the preferred stock. And the board split on the question: capitulate or fight?
Daniel Daly requested a week to mount a defense. Then he proclaimed loan officer Tim Riley the smartest, most mathematically skilled young man he knew and asked him to lead the fight.
A lifelong bachelor, Daly had taken a fatherly interest in Tim on the day that the frightened boy first appeared at the offices of J. P. Morgan. He had made it his business to teach Tim about accounting and bookkeeping. But he had not taught Tim how to handle himself in a room full of gentlemen or how to do complex calculations in his head or how to pick the borrowers who would always repay their loans. Some skills, he said, were simply i
nnate.
So Tim Riley set out to save Workingman’s.
For starters, he did what anyone in the Fifteenth District always did, if he knew what was good for him. He went to see Plunkitt.
As Tim came down the courthouse corridor, he heard Plunkitt delivering a disquisition to a young man with a notebook: “There’s only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature and act accordin’. And you can’t study it in books. Books is a hindrance and—why hello, Tim.”
Plunkitt introduced newspaperman Billy Riordan. “He’s been puttin’ everything I say in the papers. Now he’s makin’ a book of my wisdom.”
“All that free advice,” said Tim, “and folks’ll be payin’ for it?”
Plunkitt took out a cigar. “And ain’t that the grandest?”
Riordan begged a deadline and hurried off, so Tim climbed up next to Plunkitt, lit the sachem’s cigar, and presented the case for Workingman’s.
It did not take long.
“I’ve made myself a millionaire by not bein’ sentimental,” said Plunkitt, “unless sentiment had a purpose. When The McManus runs against me come fall, I’ll be able to tell voters that I helped saved the neighborhood bank. So you can have my proxy, and I’ll lend you fifteen thousand dollars, too.”
In the following week, Tim visited every major stockholder and every businessman who had ever benefited because of Workingman’s.
On the night before the proxy vote, he called a meeting of the board in the office of the late president. The kettle on top of the coal stove hissed steam that moistened the air but turned to frost on the windows. And he announced that they still needed twenty-five thousand dollars to hold off Twelfth Ward.
Daniel Daly, who had never expressed himself above a whisper in the back rooms of J. P. Morgan or the front rooms of Workingman’s, removed his pince-nez and said, “Then it’s finished. There’s no way we come up with twenty-five thousand to buy out the last stockholders by tomorrow afternoon.”
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