Silver

by Graham Masterton

  He paused, and then he said, ‘I know that many people have accused me of being a publicity-seeker, and of gilding my exploits with exaggerated language. But none of those who criticize me have ever been to the jungles of Africa; and seen for themselves the wonders and the horrors of which that continent is almost equally composed.’

  At midnight, Elizabeth curtseyed, and retired, and William handed round cigars. The four men smoked and talked of business, and money, and how Denver could one day become the financial and cultural capital of the west; more prominent than Chicago, more sophisticated than San Francisco, a shining city of wealth and health.

  ‘You’re a storekeeper, aren’t you, Mr Roberts?’ Stanley asked him.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Henry. ‘Stoves, dried beef, blankets, and a little banking, too.’

  ‘Banking?’ asked Stanley, waving aside a curl of smoke. ‘Well, now, that sounds interesting.’

  ‘I’m afraid that it isn’t, in particular,’ Henry told him. ‘I only do it to protect those of my customers who would either lose their money, or drink it, or gamble it away.’

  ‘Still, a bank is a bank,’ said Stanley, and looked at William, who nodded slowly, as if this cryptic remark meant something of particular interest to him. Baron von Richthofen said, ‘You’re right, Mr Stanley. A bank is a bank, and the further away it is, the more of a bank it becomes. What is known in Leadville to be a general store, with stoves, dried beef and blankets, can be represented in New York and Chicago as a very solid financial institution; and in London and Berlin as a counting-house to rival Rothschild.’

  Henry said, ‘I don’t quite see what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Well, nothing, not really,’ smiled Stanley. ‘The baron here is just remarking on the way in which distance lends enchantment to almost anything, including banks. We have been having some difficulty, you see, in finding a bank here in Denver to handle all the funds which our foreign and Eastern investors will be putting into our paddle-steamer enterprise, and into the baron’s resort.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the First National?’ asked Henry.

  William made a face, and shrugged. ‘David Moffat’s all right, but he’s always been too inquisitive, and to finance an enterprise like this, you have to move your funds around in rather unorthodox ways—ways of which I am quite certain David would not approve, for all that he was once a bankrupt himself.’

  Baron von Richthofen laughed; a short, sharp, shout of a laugh, and then leaned forward to slap William in amusement on the knee.

  ‘What do you mean by unorthodox?’ asked Henry.

  Stanley puffed out pipe smoke. ‘Nothing worse than gambling with it a little; using some of it to buy up land; or mining stocks; and then selling them again to make a little extra profit. Nothing that a normal respectable bank doesn’t do every single day of the year, except more ponderously.’

  ‘But surely your investors will expect guarantees against that kind of use of their money? After all, you might make an extra profit; but on the other hand you might not.’

  Stanley said, ‘You’re quite right. But it we advertise honestly for money, and people send it to us, then what can we possibly do? It is not as if we are robbing them at gunpoint. Yes, some may ask for a guarantee, but we are making no secret of the fact that to build the baron’s village and to provide the Platte River with a steam-boat service are very risky. enterprises, and that they might not see a return on their money for several years. You cannot help natural greed, Mr Roberts; neither can you do anything about natural stupidity.’

  ‘Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter seibst vergebens,’ Baron von Richthofen grinned. ‘Against stupidity, even God wages war in vain. It would be a crime not to take advantage of people’s naiveté. It would not be healthy.’

  Henry eased himself back in his chair. He glanced from William to Baron von Richthofen to Henry Stanley, and he began to see why rich men got rich, and stayed that way. Whether they were really planning to navigate the South Platte or not; whether they would really build a Germanic castle out at Mountclair or not, he found it impossible to judge. Perhaps they would: they both sounded like profitable ideas. But quite nakedly, these three gentlemen’s first objective was to muster up as much capital as they possibly could, and put it somewhere accessible, where not too many difficult questions would be asked about whether it was being used both properly and legally.

  ‘I suppose you’re thinking that my little banking counter would be just the kind of depository that would suit you down to the spats,’ he remarked, drawing on his cigar.

  ‘You mean you’re offering?’ asked Stanley, as if the idea had never even occurred to him.

  Henry glanced at William again, trying to seek at least a hint of reassurance. William said, ‘It would certainly solve one of our most difficult problems. Of course, if it would cause you any inconvenience…’

  ‘Well, there shouldn’t really be any inconvenience,’ put in Stanley. ‘Mr Roberts here would have to do very little more than sign the money in and out; and occasionally provide a certified statement to make our investors feel happy. Actually, all of this work could be done by one of your clerks, couldn’t it, William? Mr Roberts would have to do nothing at all.’

  ‘He would have to call himself something like the First Silver Bank of Leadville,’ said William. ‘And, of course, as bank president, he would have to be paid a reasonable salary, for appearance’s sake.’

  William turned to Henry and Henry knew then that he was being flagrantly bribed. The expression on William’s face was calm and remote and non-committal, a poker-face par excellence, so that if Henry were to respond by saying no, the matter would be passed over without argument, and without recrimination.

  William said, with his mouth as tight as a ventriloquist’s doll, ‘I thought one thousand dollars a year might do, to begin with.’

  Eighteen hardscrabble years, thought Henry. Eighteen years of work and disappointment and tedium. Eighteen years of Augusta. Eighteen years that have left me 43 years old, and with nothing to show for my youth but a long-dead girl called Doris and a storeful of crackers and dried navy beans. And here tonight, in Denver, three famous and successful men are offering me one thousand dollars a year for doing nothing at all; and that’s a deal that might lead to other deals; and more money. That fortune-teller had been right: I’ll never make money by skill, nor by working, no matter how hard. The only way that I’ll ever make money is by chance.

  He said, ‘I’m leaving for Council Bluffs tomorrow.’

  ‘How long will you be there?’ asked William. The baron began to fidget with his cigar, unwrapping the outside leaf and sticking it back again with spit. Stanley kept up an unrelenting smile, as if it were necessary for him to smile to stay alive. William said, ‘You haven’t had words with Augusta, have you?’

  ‘Well, not exactly words,’ said Henry. ‘I guess we both get on each other’s nerves sometimes, cooped up in that store in Leadville, with not very much else to do but drink, and serve customers, and count bags of corn-meal, and shout at each other.’

  ‘She’s a fine girl, Augusta,’ said William.

  ‘I never denied it,’ Henry answered.

  Stanley stood up, and walked around the back of his chair, raising his cigar-hand to move away the leaves of a hanging fern as he went past.

  ‘You think about this, anyway, Mr Roberts,’ he said, standing framed in the heavily-draped window, his cigar gripped between his teeth. ‘You put your mind to what we’ve suggested. So, when you get back from Council Bluffs, you can drop in to see Mr Byers here and tell him yes or no. You won’t be longer than a month, will you?’

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘That’s excellent, then. I mean, you can send a telegraph from Council Bluffs if you wish, or a letter, but I think we’d prefer to keep this kind of arrangement verbal, if you know what I mean. In finance, a handshake is generally sufficient. Those who did it remember it; those who weren’t there can never prove it.
’

  William clapped his hands smartly together, and wrung them in a quick gesture of satisfaction. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘that appears to have been an extremely profitable evening, with no small thanks to your fortuitous visit, Henry. What say we open up the ’72 cognac, and drink a toast or two.’

  Giltspur was called for, and the brandy brought. It was almost one o’clock in the morning now, but they lit fresh cigars, and talked and told jokes. Stanley was quite unexpected, especially when he talked about Africa and David Livingstone. For while he had plainly admired and respected Livingstone deeply, even loved him; and while he had dedicated several years of his life to completing Livingstone’s explorations, and locating the source of the Nile, he could still speak amusingly about the old man’s obsessions, and about his own mishaps as he travelled through what he always referred to as ‘darkest Africa’.

  ‘David Livingstone believed unshakeably that the Nile bubbled up out of four fountains, between two magic peaks called Crophi and Mophi. When he died, he still had with him a letter to Lord Russell with a complete description of how he had at last located the fountains. He had left gaps in the letter so that he could fill in the latitude and longitude when he actually got there. Poor dear old man, he was very sick towards the end. But one day in 1874, when I reached Lake Edward, south of the Mountains of the Moon, I happened to catch sight of four blackies standing on the shore, all of them relieving themselves into the lake. There! I said, David would be pleased with us, we’ve discovered them at last, the four sources of the Nile! And my companions laughed so desperately that we almost fell out of the boat.’

  William coughed on his cigar; and even Baron von Richthofen had to smile.

  ‘We shot them, of course,’ said Stanley, matter-of-factly. ‘Four shots with elephant guns, tremendous bangs they make.’ He turned to Henry and smiled widely. ‘I must have been wrong about them, of course, because even after they were dead, the Nile kept on flowing.’

  Henry looked at William and frowned. He remembered reading that after Stanley’s return from his last expedition, he had been widely censured in England for his ruthlessness, and the number of African aborigines he had slaughtered. And the matter of native massacres was still a highly sensitive point in Henry’s long-standing association with William: ever since the Sand Creek massacre twelve years ago, in which 163 Cheyennes had been killed by Denver volunteers. It had been intended as a punishment for a spate of Indian attacks that had been hampering Denver’s trade routes. But most of the Indian victims had been women and children, and the volunteers had scalped the women and sliced off their breasts. William had cheerfully called it a ‘brilliant feat of arms’, but Henry had been disgusted when he heard about it, and told William so, in one of the fiercest arguments they had ever had.

  William could see tonight that Henry was not at all entertained by tales of shooting natives for the sport of it, and he clapped his hands together again, and said loudly, ‘How about a game of poker before we turn in? Come on, Mr Stanley! Baron? How about you?’

  Henry stood up. ‘I have to get back to the hotel now, William. My train leaves at seven o’clock.’

  ‘Surely one game of poker won’t hurt? You can always sleep on the train!’

  ‘No, no, thanks all the same,’ said Henry. He shook Baron von Richthofen’s hand, and then Stanley’s; and said, ‘I won’t forget to let William know about the banking arrangements, Mr Stanley. It’s been most interesting to meet you. When do you return to Africa?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure yet,’ said Stanley, conscious that Henry had suddenly become much more abrupt, even prickly. He looked quickly at William, but all William could do was give him a scrambled smile that meant, I’ll talk to you later, when Henry’s gone.

  William’s black stable-boy Edwin drove Henry back to the Front Range Hotel in the family trap. It was a moonlit night, so with their usual thriftiness the lamplighters of Denver had been around to turn off the gas-lamps. Edwin said nothing all the way down the hill; and Henry was too tired to talk anyway. But when they were near to the Front Range Hotel, Edwin started to hum a sad Negro spiritual tune; and then to sing

  ‘Lord, can’t you hear me weeping

  I’m crying out to You

  My heart is filled with longing

  And my eyes are filled with dew.’

  And it would always seem to Henry in his memory that the low melancholy sound of Edwin’s singing was interrupted not by their arrival at the hotel but by the wild shriek of the Union Pacific locomotive as it clanked into Cheyenne the following afternoon to pick up passengers for Omaha, Council Bluffs, and points east. It was a windy day out on the plains, and as the conductor shouted, ‘Booaarrdd!’ and the long transcontinental consist pulled slowly away from the depot, tumble-weeds and newspapers blew between its wheels, and the smoke fled from its bell-shaped stack as if someone were hurling coal-black cauliflowers, one after the other, towards the thundery-coloured horizon.

  The train travelled at 20 miles an hour through a landscape of dry grass and threatening skies. In the far distance, a prairie fire was burning, lurid orange flames on the edge of the world. A good-looking woman in a green and white striped suit and a feathered hat sat opposite Henry, and smiled at him. Henry was still wondering what he should say to introduce himself when her husband came back from the observation car, where he had been having an outdoor smoke. He smiled at Henry too, and then held his wife’s hand in one of those unconscious gestures of possessiveness.

  It was late the following night before the train at last rumbled over the Missouri bridge, and hissed at a snail’s pace into Council Bluffs. Henry was asleep, his head against the glass of the window. The woman in the green and white striped suit (who was now wearing a pale blue suit) touched him gently on the shoulder, and said, ‘Sir, don’t you get off here?’

  ‘Doris?’ he said. He could smell her perfume, feel her warmth. But then he opened his eyes and it wasn’t Doris at all, just the two of them, husband and wife, sitting opposite him, smiling in their ownership of each other.

  He climbed down from the train into the chilly night. A porter carried his bag for him, and led him through the gaslit depot to the yard outside where two sorry-looking cabs were waiting, their drivers shuffling and smoking and banging their hands together because of the cold.

  ‘There’s a house on the right-hand side of Depot Street, just past the druggist,’ said Henry.

  ‘You want to go there?’ asked one of the cab-drivers, whose head was wrapped up like a swede in a scarf.

  ‘That’s the general idea.’

  Henry climbed up on to the cracked leather seat, and the cab jerked and jolted uncomfortably as the driver turned it around in the yard, and then clicked at his horse to get walking. The town as they passed through it was completely silent, empty streets, darkened windows, deserted sidewalks, and hitching-rails where no horses were tied. Even the wind seemed to be silent, and the wheels of the cab. Henry felt that he must be visiting Council Bluffs in his sleep, or in his memory. It had changed, too, in the time that he had been away. There were solid new buildings, banks and offices brought by the prosperity of the trans-continental railroad, churches and stores. Here and there, in between the proud new brick buildings, one or two of the old wooden shacks still huddled, unpainted, looking shrunken with age; and he saw Deacon’s Lunch Rooms, almost as it used to be, except that it was now Evans Stylish Restaurant. But the Old Misery Saloon was gone, and so was the druggist that he had remembered, and they had passed the small square building with the false facade and the outside staircase before he realized.

  ‘Hey, stop, this is it!’

  ‘This is what?’

  ‘This is where I want to go.’

  ‘Here? There ain’t no drugstore here. Never has been.’

  ‘Well, there was once.’

  The driver sniffed, and spat into the roadway. ‘Fifteen cents for you, two for the bag, five extra because it’s past midnight. And I’ve been
living in this dead-and-alive burg for ten years next Thanksgiving, and I’ve never seen no drugstore here.’

  Henry climbed out of the cab and silently paid the driver a quarter. The driver waited for a minute or two, obviously curious to find out where Henry was going to go, at half after twelve on a breezy night in the derelict part of Depot Street. But Henry himself hardly knew where he was going: back into his memory or forward into his future. And he didn’t know whether he ought to, either. Time changes more than faces, and buildings, and the texture of human skin.

  At length, bored with hanging about, the cab-driver turned his rig around and clattered off slowly back towards the depot. Henry picked up his bag and crossed the street until he was standing at the foot of the wooden stairs. He could picture her now, a picture so clear in his mind that it almost made him ache, that small chubby girl in the white cotton nightdress, with the face like a painted German doll. Her hair wound up in rags, except for those two long plaits. And the way that her big breasts rose heavily beneath the cotton each time she lifted her arms to peg up her clothes, her nipples stiffened because of the morning wind.

  ‘You’re a bit early, aren’t you?’ she had said; and he had answered, ‘Early for what?’ And he could remember with sweet clarity the hot feeling of plunging himself deep between her thighs, the room smelling pungently of sex and sweat and coffee.

  Now that he had arrived here, he knew that he had made a mistake. She probably didn’t even live here any more. She was probably dead. Golden-hearted or not, whores had short lives in the West; either from disease or drunkenness or crude abortions or suicide or violent customers. Julia Bulette, even though she was the favourite prostitute of Virginia City, in Nevada, had been strangled for her jewels a few years ago; and the Western newspapers were crowded every week with items about girls who had been flighty with a razor, or like 25-year-old Grace Fanshaw ‘committed suicide by drinking laudanum during a fit of despondency brought on by blighted love, acute alcoholism, and bad investments.’