Effie was silent for almost a minute. Then she said to Robert, ‘You and I should have been born on different planets.’
‘I think we should,’ agreed Robert. ‘Are you pulling my leg about the San José de Mayo?’
Effie shook her head. ‘I called Lieutenant-Commander Horace Dawes, and Sir Godfrey Lelew.’
‘God damn you,’ said Robert, showing his bitterness at last. ‘That could break us, the loss of that gold.’
‘I would rather be broke than branded a traitor to my country.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ snapped Robert. ‘Don’t you have any sophistication at all? We’re not the only bank which is doing it. And who the hell told you about the San José de Mayo? It wasn’t that idiot Cockburn, was it?’
‘No.’
Robert was rapidly reaching boiling-point. He kept furiously rubbing at his neck, and stalking backwards and forwards, until in the end he strode up to a small side-table, arranged with Dresden ornaments and a small jewelled carriage-clock by Carl Fabergé, and he swept everything off it with his arm, so that plates and statuettes and clock all smashed on the parquet floor.
Effie said quietly, ‘Before you go completely berserk, Robert, and decide to murder me, as well as smash everything of value in the house, you should know that I have already asked Rosie to pack my trunks; and that I have sent McVitie to book me a ticket on the Milwaukee, which leaves Liverpool on Wednesday night for New York.’
Robert stared at her. ‘You’re sailing to New York? I thought all passenger services were suspended.’
‘The Milwaukee is an American cargo-ship. She’ll be sailing under escort.’
‘You could be torpedoed.’
‘By your friends from Frankfurt and Dresden? On what level? Financial, territorial, or religious? Or perhaps it’s my race they object to?’
‘Effie,’ warned Robert.
‘I’m leaving Britain, Robert,’ said Effie, ‘and I’m leaving you. I’m taking £100,000 of my own money, in cash, and I’ve already called Mr Kerr at the bank this morning and asked him to transfer three-quarters of a million pounds of my personal assets into a suspense account where you won’t be able to lay your hands on them. You will continue to need my approval for major alterations in bank policy, and I will send you my address as soon as I am settled in New York. If there is anything else you require, you’ll have to wait for it.’
Robert said nothing, but went to the telephone and picked it up. ‘Get me Uruguay Shipping at Southampton,’ he snapped. Then, ‘I don’t know! Find the number yourself.’
He watched Effie with eyes as unsympathetic as a child’s marbles as he waited to be put through. Then he said, ‘Uruguay Shipping? Is that Seíor Carrasco? He’s out? Well, tell him Mr Robert Watson called him. Tell him the ship is not to sail under any circumstances. That’s all. The San José de Mayo is not to sail. I don’t care. I’m not interested. I’m paying for this voyage and those are my instructions. If that ship moves one tenth of an inch away from that dock I’ll flay your skin off and hang it out to dry. Do you understand me? Good.’
He waited for two or three minutes more. Then he said, to Effie, ‘Why don’t you get yourself off to New York? You’ve done quite enough damage in Edinburgh for one person’s lifetime.’
Effie turned towards the doorway. Alisdair was standing there, his face questioning and pale. Effie looked back towards Robert and said, ‘Yes. I shall.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dougal met her at the pier, accompanied by a very pretty young American girl with curly brunette hair, a fluffy blue fox coat, and a frantically modern cloche hat with a feather in it. Dougal looked so much heavier and older: he was nearly forty now, and his curly blond hair had grown thinner and greyer. His muscle had run to fat, and there were indelible purple circles under his eyes. He wore a perfectly-cut vicuna coat, though, and he smelled of brandy and La Chasse cologne, $25 an ounce. There was no doubt that he was wealthy.
He took her hand. ‘Come this way,’ he said, in a marked American accent. ‘There’s a limousine waiting outside.’
Effie said, ‘I feel as if I’m dreaming.’
‘You and me both,’ said Dougal. ‘So don’t let’s say anything. Let’s just get into the car, and get back to my house, and have lunch, and see where we go from there. By the way, this is May, my assistant and stenographer and life-preserver.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ said Effie, surprised by Dougal’s democracy.
‘Well, mutual,’ said May, raising her thin-plucked eyebrows. ‘You’re even better-looking than Dougal, and that’s saying something.’
As they came out of the pier entrance on to the crowded street, they were met by a bracing New York wind, and by a spotless white Peerless automobile, driven by a Negro chauffeur in a white uniform with gold buttons and a white cap. The chauffeur opened the door for them and tipped his cap to Effie as she climbed in. ‘Welcome to the United States of America, Miss Watson,’ he said.
‘This is Nat,’ said Dougal. ‘The only chauffeur who can drive safely and play chess in his head at the same time.’
‘You used to play chess at home,’ Effie smiled, as she settled down in her seat.
‘I still keep it up,’ Dougal told her. ‘Nat – King’s pawn to Bishop’s four.’
‘Yes, sir, Mr Watson,’ said Nat, engaging the Peerless’ gears, sticking out his arm, and pulling out into the downtown traffic. ‘Bishop’s four to Knight’s two.’
Queen’s rook to Bishop’s three, and checkmate,’ said Dougal.
Nat laughed, ‘You got me again, Mr Watson.’
They were waved across Bowling Green by a policeman who obviously recognised the car, because he saluted to Dougal as they swept past him. ‘I see you’re famous,’ Effie remarked.
Dougal smiled. ‘I should be. They print my picture in the business columns three times a day. On Wall Street, they call me the Tartan Tycoon. Look over there; that’s Broad Street. That’s where our offices are.’
‘You sound so American,’ Effie told him, holding his arm.
‘The Americans all think I sound like a Scotsman. They keep asking me how I manage to survive without my regular haggis. I think I’ve been given twenty-five copies of the collected poems, of Robbies. Burns since I’ve been here. They make me recite Comin’ Thro The Rye after every dinner-party. They’ll adore you.’
‘It’s your accent,’ smiled May. ‘I could sit and listen to it all day long.’
Effie was amazed at how busy the streets were. The sidewalks were crowded with bustling people, and the avenues were teeming with automobiles of all shapes and colours, trucks, trolley-cars, and motorcycles. The morning was particularly sharp and clear: one of those New York mornings when everything is bright and the wind is as keen as a hatful of razors.
‘That’s the Woolworth Building,’ said Dougal, as they passed Barclay Street. ‘You’ll have to crane your neck up to see it. The tallest building in the world! Seven hundred and twenty-nine feet tall – the “Cathedral of Commerce.”’
Effie stared up in amazement at the huge cliff of the Woolworth Building’s façade. Above the façade, there were Gothic ledges and ramparts, and up above these ledges soared a tower that reached so high into the sky that it made Effie giddy to look up at it.
‘I’ll take you up to the top tomorrow, if it’s a clear day,’ said Dougal. ‘Fifty-eight stories up! You can see Long Island, and eastern New Jersey, and even as far as the Adirondacks. It’s just like flying in an airplane.’
The Peerless took them across town to Fifth Avenue, past rows of old Federal buildings, demolition sites, filling-stations, elegant new office blocks, and the jumble of destruction and construction where the city was tearing down the twisting, brownstone-flanked streets of the West Village to lay down Seventh Avenue South. New office buildings, tall and elegant, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with rows of tattered and neglected tenements. Faded but still superior nineteenth-century houses were flanked by vast placards that
encouraged New Yorkers to eat Washburn-Crosby’s wheat bread three times a day; or Wards Cakes ‘imitated but never duplicated’; or Weeds Ice Cream. And there was the noise: instead of the sedate flow of traffic up and down Princes Street – which Effie was used to – or even the polite frustrated jostle of cabs and Rolls-Royces and motor-buses along Pall Mall and Piccadilly, there was a constant hammering of construction work, a tirade of motor-horns, and a terrible echoing whooping noise which Dougal explained were police sirens.
‘New Yorkers don’t believe they’re alive unless they’re making a noise,’ he told her.
Nat drove them at last to 57th Street, and then turned south on Fifth Avenue, past the Huntington mansion, until he drew up at last outside a narrow bay-windowed house with black railings.
‘This is it,’ said Dougal. ‘Chez Watson. Not quite the Vanderbilt mansion; but swanky enough.’
‘Nat opened the door of the Peerless for them, and they stepped down. ‘King’s pawn to knight’s one,’ he said, without blinking.
Dougal said, ‘The Krausenitch opening.’
‘Yes, sir. I have to get my own back somehow.’
Dougal’s house may have been small, by the standards of those American billionaires like the Goulds and the Vanderbilts and the Astors, whose huge chateaux lined the sides of Upper Fifth Avenue like the dwellings of kings and queens in Effie’s childhood fairy-stories; but it was very opulent. The carpets were thick and silent; the walls were crowded with oil-paintings by John Frederick Kensett and Jean Baptiste Corot, as well as three sketches by Constable and a silverpoint study by Leonardo for a sculpture of an angel. The living-room was over-furnished in the Victorian tradition: full of glided mirrors and chiming clocks and side-tables, with tablecloths covered by more tablecloths, and then by runners, and then by crochet doilies, and finally topped with petrified flowers in shining glass domes.
Straight away, Dougal introduced Effie to Kitty, a young black girl he had hired as soon as he had heard by telegraph that Effie was coming to America. Kitty was small, big-breasted, and ebullient, a pretty and personable girl who had first been trained in the house of Mrs Hermann Oelrichs, but had been obliged to leave her employment for six months to nurse her sick father. ‘You come straight upstairs with me. You look tired,’ said Kitty, and led Effie without any formalities up to the rooms which Dougal had opened for her: a purple-and-pink-decorated bedroom with a tester bed draped in purple brocade, a small sitting-room crammed with books and framed collections of butterflies; and a bathroom with a bright green Corwith bath with overhead shower.
‘Let me take your coat, Miss Watson,’ said Kitty. You must be fairly exhausted after that long sea-voyage. Me, I get seasick just looking at a boat! Would you like to go for a tub now? Miss May bought some dresses for you, so you could change into something fresh before you unpack your trunks.’
Effie sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I’d love a bath. I feel quite dizzy, as a matter of fact. This is all so different.’
‘Don’t you worry, you’ll soon get used to it,’ smiled Kitty. ‘My parents brought me here from Red Bank, New Jersey, when I was nine years old and my word I thought I was on the moon! I thought I was Little Nemo, in dreamland.’
‘How old are you now?’ asked Effie, as Kitty knelt down and took off her shoes for her.
‘Eighteen, Miss Watson. What my father used to call the eligible age. Eighteen, he used to say, that’s the age when a girl should be married up, and settled, and ready for her first-born baby.’
Effie smiled. ‘Do you have a young man?’
‘I did, but he went off to work on the Penn Railroad, as a conductor, and I don’t see him no more. His name was Eustace. He had a wonderful moustache!’
Effie bathed, and changed into an off-white dress with a tiered skirt. May had also bought her a dozen pairs of silk stockings, and a pair of fancy day slippers.
‘At least May has good taste,’ said Effie, as Kitty brushed up her hair for her.
‘She’s a clever girl, and she’s really in love with your brother.’
‘She’s in love with him?’
‘Sure she is! Don’t you see what a fuss she makes of him? And they step out together almost every night.’
‘Well,’ said Effie, pulling a face at herself in the mirror.
Dougal spent most of the morning in his study, talking on the telephone and chain-smoking cigars. A lot of the time he seemed to be shouting very loudly at someone called Horace, and complaining about somebody else called Sherman. But at lunchtime he came out of his study, and into the living room, where Effie had been drinking coffee and reading a copy of Colliers; and said, ‘Let’s go for something to eat. I must introduce you to the great American lobster. Cuttle’s is probably the best place; unless you want to see Delmonico’s right away.’
‘Whichever you prefer,’ smiled Effie. ‘I’m an innocent here, don’t forget.’
They went out into the bright daylight again, taking a taxi this time for the convenience of it. Cuttle’s was on East 56th Street between Park and Madison; a restaurant in the grand Edwardian manner, with acres of starched linen and forests of dark mahogany panelling, and dim stained-glass Tiffany lamps. Giancarlo, the maitre-d’, was so haughty that Effie could almost see right up his nose. But she and Dougal were beckoned straight past the line at the rope, and taken to a corner table under a large oil-painting of Darien, Connecticut, in summer. ‘Mr Watson,’ beamed the maitre-d’, drawing out their chairs for them. ‘And this must be Miss Effie Watson,’
Dougal smiled at Effie, and said, ‘Giancarlo knows everything about everybody who is anybody. And you’re somebody, because they announced your arrival yesterday in the Globe.’
‘I didn’t realise it was so easy to become famous in America,’ said Effie.
‘It helps if you’re stinking rich,’ Dougal grinned.
‘I only wish I were.’
‘You will be,’ Dougal assured her, and then to the waiter, ‘Bring me a bottle of the Dom Perignon ‘89, will you? And put another bottle in iced water for later.’
‘Yes, sir, Mr Watson.’
Dougal reached across the table and held Effie’s hands. ‘Effie,’ he said. ‘It’s so good to see you. I’ve been looking forward to this for days. I’ve missed you so much.’
‘You forgive me for sending you off with Henry Baeklander like that?’
‘I forgave you the minute I made my first quarter of a million dollars. And besides, Henry was a good friend, and a very considerate employer, and he taught me everything I needed to know about American banking.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Dead, of course,’ said Dougal, in surprise. ‘Didn’t you know?’
Effie shook her head. At the table next to her, a young girl in diamonds and pearls said, at the top of her shrieking young voice, ‘That’s hilarious! Oh, Gilbert!’
Dougal said, ‘After the Baeklander Trust collapsed, Henry scarcely ever showed up on Wall Street. That isn’t to say that he didn’t have plenty of money of his own. He could have lived in affluent retirement until he was a hundred. Maybe not in the style to which he was accustomed. No yachts; and no twenty-bedroom cottages in Newport; but something pretty much better than your average fellow in the street. But that wasn’t enough for him. He tried to make an overnight fortune by investing in a silver-mine in Nevada; one of the old James Flood mines; but it turned out that the mine was quartz and nothing else.’
‘And so what happened to him?’ asked Effie.
Dougal sat back, as the wine-waiter arrived with their bottle of champagne. ‘He was found in a hotel room, in Chicago, shot dead. Nobody could quite say how or why. He left no letters. Only his will.’
Effie watched as the wine-waiter expertly removed the cork from the champagne, and poured a little for Dougal to taste. ‘You know who was responsible for the Baeklander crash, I suppose?’
Dougal gave a quick grimace. ‘It wasn’t hard to work it out. I warned Henry against Robert; but
he would never listen. Henry considered himself a judge of character, and he believed that he was capable of handling anybody, no matter how tricky they were. But that deal with Baeklanders and the Deutsche Kreditbank was a marvellous piece of Robertry. Unassailable! I’ll give Robert one thing: he has superb timing when it comes to business deals, and a wonderful sense of human gullibility. Whenever he arranges one of his deals, he sets it up so carefully and so obviously that nobody can believe they’re going to be caught, not even when it’s staring them in the face. He’s so good that he’s hypnotic.’ Dougal shrugged. ‘Henry was caught, and went down for over thirteen million dollars, protesting all the time that he was an excellent judge of character. Karl von Ahlbeck was caught, despite the fact that he was quite bright enough to know better. And I was caught, too, I’ll admit it, although not so badly, because I had already been thinking of leaving Baeklanders for two or three years, and I had excellent credit connections arranged, and quite a bit of money of my own.’
The head-waiter brought the menus. Effie said, ‘You order. As long as it isn’t porridge or kippers, I’ll eat it.’
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