The Whiskey Rebel

by David Liss

  “Enough!” Hamilton slammed his hand against the desk. “You would not dare.”

  “Just a simple question, Colonel. Much easier that way.”

  “Damn it, Saunders, what is this about?”

  “It is about Fleet and about his daughter. I would think you, of all people, would understand. It was always said that you were a man for the ladies.”

  His eyes narrowed in anger. “If you think-” he began to bark.

  “I don’t mean you are a scoundrel, as your enemies like to cast about. I mean you understood the old ways, that a man must do what is right to protect a woman, a woman who, however incidentally, has crossed under his protection. So long as I think there is any chance of Cynthia Pearson being in danger, I will try to protect her. You may as well settle in for a long siege.”

  He shook his head sadly and slumped slightly in his chair. “Very well. If it will make you go away.”

  “See? Nothing simpler. My question is fairly simple. Does the name Reynolds mean anything to you?”

  I had anticipated denial or obfuscation or genuine confusion. I did not anticipate what actually happened. Hamilton leaped to his feet. His heavy chair toppled behind him. Even in the poorly lit chamber I could see his face had turned red. “What do you mean by this?” he shouted. “Do you think to push my endurance to its limits?”

  I exchanged a look with Leonidas, who was as confused as I. To Hamilton I affected calm, always the best way with a man in a rage. “I mean nothing, Colonel. The man who paid my landlady to cast me out said his name was Reynolds. I merely wished to see if you knew him. Apparently you do.”

  Hamilton blinked at me several times and then at Leonidas. He turned around, righted his chair, and sat down again. He dusted off a spot on his desk. “I don’t know the name. It means nothing to me.”

  “Just so,” I said. “I thought as much, for your ignorance of the name effectively explains your outburst. Well, I’ll just post a letter to Mr. Freneau. Perhaps he can do a bit of digging into the matter for me.”

  “Oh, sit down.” Hamilton suddenly sounded tired. “I’ll tell you, but you must promise not to pursue this. And I don’t want you coming to my office and threatening me every time you have a question.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, knowing full well I meant to take the information on any terms now and worry about the meaning of those terms later.

  “Since you are such a close reader of Mr. Freneau’s paper,” Hamilton said, “you are undoubtedly familiar with the name William Duer.”

  “From the war as well. He supplied the army, didn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” said Hamilton. “He also served as my assistant for the first few months of my term at Treasury, but Duer, despite his patriotic impulses, was always looking for a better opportunity. He and I were once close friends, but things have been strained between us. I did not like the way in which he executed his duties while he served as my assistant, and he has also shown a coarse side at other times.

  “As you know, the Bank of the United States launched last summer, and the price of shares soared astronomically. Duer invested heavily, but his investment became not only a sign but a symptom. He is so wealthy, he invests so much money, and his choices are of so much interest that Duer’s actions not only reflect or even moderately affect the market, they directly shape it. When he buys, everyone buys. When he sells, everyone sells. Try to understand what I am telling you. Ours is a unique economy, unlike any in the history of the world, for two reasons. In most nations trading is centralized-in London, Paris, Amsterdam. In our country, a man is used to thinking of his state as an autonomous entity, and the first reason is that trading is decentralized-in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and so on. The other reason is that the nation is new and, in terms of the number of major participants, very small. One man, a single actor, can alter the shape of the market if he is careful.”

  “Or careless,” observed Leonidas.

  Hamilton nodded. “Precisely. Duer, I fear, may be both. He uses his undue influence-understand me that he has an influence unlike any other single man in any single market in the history of finance as we know it-he uses this power to manipulate prices to his advantage, sending up the price of shares. He planned to raise them to their limit and then sell at an enormous profit, crashing the value of bank shares as he did so. Before things could get so far out of hand, I let it be known that I thought the trading price of bank shares was inflated-and in doing so depressed the market, costing Duer a great deal of money. He was very angry with me.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “This Reynolds works for Duer. I believe he may have been exacting some revenge on you in order to get to me.”

  “Colonel, you and I have not spoken in ten years. Why would he use me to harm you?”

  “He may have made assumptions. He knows of you from the war. Perhaps he thought I would use you to conduct my inquiries, such as the one involving Mr. Pearson. He wished to thwart me for the sake of vengeance.”

  I took a moment to let the silence do some work. “So, Duer is angry with you over an incident last summer and chooses to inconvenience me now as a way of extracting revenge?”

  “Revenge,” said Hamilton, “or merely to push back at me and show me he still has power, yes. That is my theory, in any case. Now you need but let the matter alone, and I will see to it that you are not troubled any longer.”

  “Very kind, but you know, I think I’d like to speak to Duer myself. I presume I can find him with the other speculators at the City Tavern?”

  Hamilton sighed. “Duer lives in New York. He comes here on business but has not been in town for some weeks. I believe he has some business in New York that absorbs his attention. You see, there is nothing for you to do, and this matter has nothing to do with Pearson. I am asking you to let it alone.”

  I stood up. “Of course. It is hardly worth a trip to New York over something like this, and I have other things to do besides hunting down Duer’s man. I am sorry to have troubled you. Good night, Colonel.”

  We strolled out of the office and past the clerks stationed outside.

  “Surely you did not believe any of that?” said Leonidas.

  “Of course not,” I said, “but it was hardly to our advantage to push him further. He did not want to tell us more, and he would not have done so. Pressing him would have only made him angry. For now we take what he has given us and see where it leads us.”

  Leonidas was about to speak when a thunderous roar erupted from inside Hamilton ’s office. “Damn it!” cried the Secretary of the Treasury. This cry was followed by the sound of glass breaking. Several of the clerks looked up from their work, hesitated nervously, and then returned to their business.

  For our part, we hurried outside and toward our next destination.

  T he Crooked Knight was a decidedly Jeffersonian tavern on the cusp of the Northern Liberties, a wretched place on Coats Street near the Public Landing, frequented by workingmen full of private rage masquerading as political anger. These were the sorts who read Freneau’s National Gazette aloud, jeered at each mention of Hamilton, and cheered at every reference to Jefferson. Indeed, off in one corner a spot had been roped off for a cockfight between one bird, stout and muscular and resplendent with shiny black feathers-this one called Jefferson-and another, scrawny and weak and pale-called Hamilton. Each time the larger bird attacked the lesser, the crowd cheered and cried out in praise of liberty and freedom.

  This was, in other words, a tavern wholly dedicated to men of a democratic republican turn of mind. These men believed the American project to have been already tainted by venality and corruption. These were men who worshiped George Washington as a god but were willing to damn him to Hell for admitting Hamilton into his inner circle. These men had rioted against the ratification of the Constitution without having troubled themselves to read it-if they could read at all. They would only have known that some petty John Wilkes in their number had cried out that their liber
ties were in danger; if there was beer enough, they were always ready to answer the call.

  It was not the sort of public house I frequented with any regularity. I prefer taverns where I may game or drink in quiet or talk in peace with those to whom I wish to speak, not cheer while a man I hardly know gives voice to a resentment I never knew I had.

  The owner, however, was an old acquaintance, if not precisely a friend, and I had a reasonable expectation of obtaining some little help in that quarter. The Irishman outside the Statehouse had identified himself as a man of the Jeffersonian faction, and, if he drank in Philadelphia, it would likely be in the Crooked Knight or someplace like it. It was my hope that there I could find some means of learning his name or location.

  It was far less wet and cold than recent nights and, as the tavern was the sort of place not likely to make a Negro feel at his ease, I asked Leonidas to wait outside. Pushing open the wooden door, I walked into a long low-ceilinged room filled with tobacco stench, wood smoke, and the scent of sausages roasting in fires. The men sat in small groups, huddled around low tables, their feet pressed into the dirt of the floor. Conversation, which had been boisterous but a moment before, at once tapered down as all inside stared at me. The Crooked Knight was the sort of place outsiders sought to avoid.

  I went at once to the bar, where a man of exceptional shortness stood upon a box, polishing mugs. I knew him as Leonard Hilltop, a humorless sort with deeply lined skin that looked like carved stone and hollow eyes dark in color and bright with thick swaths of red, visible even in the poor light of that room. In his youth, he had been part of a network in occupied Philadelphia that had passed intelligence, often to me. It did not make us friends but it made us familiar, and there was undeniably trust and respect between us.

  “Go back to your drink, you sods,” called the little man. “He’s all right, this one.”

  The men did as they were told, and at once the space was filled with the hum of conversation.

  “Well, now,” said Hilltop. “That was my first lie of the evening.”

  “Let us hope it is the last,” I said.

  He snorted. “What is this? You run too big a debt in every other tavern in town, and now you must drink here? A bit of a risk, isn’t it? The men here might not know your face, but they know your name and what you’re said to have done. If I were to tell them who you are, you’d be torn to bits like that there Federalist chicken.” He waved a hand toward the cockfight.

  “It’s well I can trust you to keep quiet then,” I said. “In any case, you know the truth. My reputation was fouled by Federalists. Indeed, you told me so yourself those many years ago. You said it was Hamilton that exposed me. How precisely did you hear that, Hilltop?”

  “Christ, I can’t recall,” he said. “It was a long time ago. It was just what I heard. Everyone said so.”

  I was not hopeful he would remember, but it did no harm to ask. “In any case, I’m sure you can spare a drink for an ill-used patriot. Perhaps that most American of elixirs, which we call Monongahela rye, that drink of border men, hideously taxed by the nefarious Hamilton. Just a single glass of whiskey shall serve my purpose.”

  “As you put it so,” said Hilltop with a grimace, like a man who had been outplayed at cards and now must accept defeat. He poured a hearty quantity into a mug and handed it to me undiluted. I tasted it and found it remarkably like that which the Irishman had given me.

  I set the glass down. “It’s good, this whiskey.”

  “Aye, the best there is.”

  “Where do you get it?”

  He grinned. “I’ve my sources.”

  I took another sip. “Is your source a rugged Irishman with a hairless and leathery skull?”

  Had I knocked Hilltop off his stool I could not have astonished him more, and that was certainly my goal. I might have worked the matter over slowly, like a tongue in search of the precise location of a vaguely aching tooth, but I saw no point in it. Hilltop was a suspicious sort, and a direct approach seemed best.

  Hilltop had aided spies in the war, but he was not a spy himself and had no training other than to hope what he did went unnoticed, and this was often enough crudely practiced. I noticed his eyes shift to a table where a man sat alone. He was of about forty years, with dark receding hair and a flat, long-mouthed, froggish sort of face. He sat hunched over a piece of paper, quill in hand, and did not so much as look up. Hilltop next glanced near the fire where two men sat in close conversation, working hard to pretend they did not see me. I took in this scene without giving hint to the men or to Hilltop that I did so. Indeed, I was able, over the course of the next several minutes, to reposition myself so I could keep a perpetual eye on these men without letting them know I did so.

  “What do you know of him?” Hilltop asked me.

  “I know you know him,” I said, “as you’ve not troubled to inquire of whom I speak. I’d like a word with him, and I should very much prefer if he did not know I was coming.”

  “What, do you work for Hamilton again?” Hilltop asked me. “After all he done to you?”

  It was uncomfortably close to the truth, and I could not afford the luxury of believing I was the only clever man in this conversation. “I have my own business with him.”

  “I ain’t seen that man in here in some time,” Hilltop said. “Few months back, he sold me a dozen barrels of this whiskey, and I was happy to get my hands on it. He ain’t been in since, though I did hear tell of him not two weeks ago.”

  Hilltop certainly had my attention, though it was not so full as he believed, but thinking me riveted by his intelligence he gave the slightest of nods to the two men by the fire. One of them, the taller and younger of the two, handed something to the shorter and older. Then the first of these men rose and left the tavern. I hated to let him go, but I could only attempt to apprehend one man, and I thought it might as well be the one who had whatever item had been passed off.

  “Haven’t seen him,” Hilltop was saying, “not personally, but a week ago a patron of the Knight says he saw him coming out of a boardinghouse on Evont Street, near the corner of Mary, down in Southwark. I don’t know if the Irishman lived there or was visiting, but this man said it was him, all right. I hoped to find him myself on account of wanting to buy more of his whiskey.”

  “You know who he is?” I asked. “His name, his business?”

  Hilltop shook his head. “Didn’t say much, but he’d been hurt by Hamilton ’s whiskey tax, that much is certain.”

  The whiskey tax had been approved by Congress as a simple means of helping fund the Bank of the United States. What better way to raise revenues, it had been argued, than to tax a luxury, and a harmful one at that, that many enjoyed? Let the men who would waste their time with strong drink pay for the economic growth of the new nation. This had become a major cause of resentment among the democratic republican types who liked to pass their time, as fate would have it, by drinking whiskey.

  The shorter and older man, the one who had been given something of import, now pushed himself away from his table and began to head for the door. Hilltop must have noticed my interest, because he said, “Let me pour you another one, Saunders. Even better than the first, I’ll warrant.”

  It was tempting, but I thanked Hilltop, and told him I would be back to collect it soon enough. I moved to the door. The man had his eye upon me, and there could have been no way to move without attracting his notice. He opened the front door and broke into a run. I began to run as well. A large man immediately stepped forward into my path, but I dodged past him, more lucky than skillful, and was out of the tavern and into the cold.

  Leonidas was already on alert, and I needed only to point to the running man to send him off in a mighty sprint. I checked behind us, and while the drinkers at the Crooked Knight had been willing to block my passage, they were not willing to venture out into the night in an adventure that did not concern them. Seeing that no one pursued us, I redoubled my efforts. I felt a stitch in m
y side, but I pushed onward, not because I thought I could overtake Leonidas, but I wished not to be too terribly far behind when the man was brought down.

  They turned north on St. John toward Brown Street, where the man headed west. As he reached the corner of Charlotte, Leonidas gave a great leap and tackled the man. He landed flat, with his arms outstretched, and I arrived upon the scene just in time to observe the stranger attempt to slip something into his mouth. I could not see it well in the lamplight, but it was small and shiny. Leonidas did not notice, for he was too occupied in keeping the man down, so, though I was still twenty feet away, my side ached, and I feared I might vomit up the whiskey I’d been drinking, I found strength to dash forward and stomp my foot down upon the man’s wrist.

  It did the business, for his hand opened, and out rolled a silver ball, about the size of a large grape. I had not seen one since the war, but I knew what it was immediately, and I felt a chill of terror run through me. Whatever I was now involved in, whatever Cynthia Pearson had become trapped in, was far more dangerous than I had imagined.

  I had only just secured the ball when things happened in an astonishing succession. Leonidas slumped forward, letting out a loud grunt. The man under him scrambled backward and ran off down Charlotte Street, and I was once more surrounded by Nathan Dorland and his several friends.

  I t was Dorland and the same three men who had assaulted me outside the tavern in Helltown. I could not imagine how they had found me, but they must have followed us to the Crooked Knight and then out again.

  Without taking more than a cursory glance toward Dorland and his men, most of whom had pistols, I slipped the silver ball into my pocket and leaned down to see if Leonidas was hurt. He had been struck in the head with a pistol, and he bled, but not egregiously. He stirred now and rubbed the back of his head and then rose, slowly and deliberately, like a great monster rising from its lair.