A Conspiracy of Paper bw-1

by David Liss

  Fortune favored us, for no sooner did we step inside than a trio of men vacated a table just before us, and we moved quickly to beat out a large crowd that had been waiting longer, all the while conducting their business afoot. Shouting above the din, I asked one of the boys who passed by us with a tray full of dirtied dishes to bring us coffee and some pastries.

  I looked about in amazement. I had not been inside Jonathan’s since I was a child and my father had dragged me and my brother along to watch him conduct his affairs. We had sat in mute discomfort, half stemming from the dull terror a child feels in the presence of inexplicable adult mania, the other half from pure boredom. Now, in Jonathan’s as a grown man, and in my own way here upon business, I still felt small, towered over, and a bit awed. At least I was not yet bored.

  The boy brought us our coffee and food, and Elias wasted no time stuffing one of the pastries into his mouth. “Do you know Mr. Theodore James, the bookseller upon the Strand?” he asked me, his words muffled by dough and jam.

  “I have passed by his shop,” I said.

  Elias bubbled with excitement as he spoke. “You might try stepping inside sometime. He’s a grand man. He printed my volume of verse, you know. Mr. James possesses no small amount of influence, which he has used to obtain for me an audience with Mr. Cibber at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, who is to consider staging my play. It is an astonishingly exciting thing really. I grow giddy at the idea of having my play acted upon the stage. It is truly marvelous, don’t you think?”

  I could not help but smile. Elias was, after all, a man of many talents. “I had no idea you had a play to stage.” I shook his hand with pleasure.

  He giggled foolishly. “I hadn’t. I shall tell him I have labored hard. Not too hard, for I don’t want him to believe me one of those silly playwrights who think themselves a Jonson or Fletcher. I wrote it yesterday,” he added in a whisper.

  “An entire play in a day?”

  “Well, I’ve seen enough comedies to know how to order these things. And yet, despite its haste, it is not without some very original turns. I call it The Unsuspecting Lover. Who could resist a play with so merry a title? Come, Weaver, I consider you a man of taste. Let me read it to you.”

  “I should love to hear your work, Elias, but I admit I am a bit preoccupied. I promise to attend to it on another occasion, but now I must seek your guidance regarding this Balfour business.”

  “Of course,” he said, sliding out of sight the bundle of papers he’d pulled from his pocket. “The play can certainly wait. It has but so recently hatched into the world that perhaps a rest shall do it some good.”

  I could not help but find Elias a marvelously agreeable friend. “Thank you,” I said, hoping that I had not hurt his feelings by shunting aside his literary efforts, “for I very much require your assistance in this matter. I am somewhat at a loss. Here, after all, we have two men who had some sort of acquaintance, if not a friendship, who died within twenty-four hours of each other. One under mysterious circumstances, the other under scandalous circumstances. I can assure you that the talk about the town is that there is something amiss in this matter, but I have no idea how to begin to settle upon what precisely that is. I shall attempt to locate the man who ran down my father, but I cannot imagine he will allow me to find him too easily.”

  Our conversation was momentarily interrupted by one of the boys, who walked past us ringing a bell. “Mr. Vredeman. Message for Mr. Vredeman.” These interruptions were but part of doing business at Jonathan’s.

  Elias had no difficulty ignoring the distraction. “Yours is a complicated matter,” Elias agreed as he sipped at his coffee. I could tell he wished to talk more of his play, although there was something in this affair he found irresistible.

  “It seems,” I explained, “that there are those who do not wish me to seek out the truth behind these deaths. My life was attempted two nights ago.”

  I now had Elias’s full attention, to be sure. I related to him the story of my encounter with the hackney coach, giving particular emphasis to the coachman’s parting words to me.

  “It can have been no random assault,” he noted, “for you say the culprit knew you to be a Jew. Those who murdered Balfour and your father clearly do not wish you to expose their doings.” I had seen such a sparkle in his eye before when he had helped me out. In truth, I was used to seeing that sparkle when he helped me in matters that concerned amiable young women. Nevertheless, this inquiry obviously awakened Elias’s voracious curiosity.

  “These villains have gone to great lengths to disguise their work, and now it seems they will go to greater lengths to keep their secrets hidden. It will be difficult for you to find them out.”

  “Not difficult.” I nearly sighed. “I fear impossible. I am used to following trails that men foolishly leave behind. Now I am upon men who have been careful to leave no trace of their presence—indeed, who have gone to some lengths to obfuscate their business. I do not know that there is a way for me to proceed.”

  “I wonder.” Elias lifted up his head thoughtfully. “There has to be a trail, just not the type you are used to looking for. A trail of ideas and motives, if not one of witnesses. You will have to do some guessing, you understand, but that is no matter.”

  “Guessing will get me nowhere.” I now wondered if Elias was not off on some flight of fancy when I needed his clarity. “When a man comes to me for help in finding a debtor, do I guess where I shall find him? Certainly not. I learn what I can of his life and his habits and then look for him where I know I shall find him.”

  “You look for him where you guess you will find him, for you do not know that he will be where your reasoning directs you. You guess every day, Weaver. I only suggest that you make some bigger guesses. Locke, you know, wrote that any man who admits to nothing but that which can be plainly demonstrated may be sure of nothing but perishing quickly. In your case there may be more truth to that than Locke intended.”

  “This is but wordplay, Elias. These games do not help me.”

  “Not so. I believe you are more used to acting upon speculation than you realize. In this case you are going to have to make some reasonable assumptions and then proceed as though they might be true. Your task is to look at the general and conclude the particular—for generals and particulars are always related. Consider what Mr. Pascal says of Christianity—he writes that since Christianity offers rewards for adherence to its tenets and punishments for the failure to adhere to its tenets, and the absence of Christianity offers neither, a reasonable man would opt to become a Christian because by doing so he receives the maximum chance of reward and the minimum chance of punishment. Now, the Christianity business does not apply to you, and I should think Pascal was more or less pretending that Christianity was the only religion available to a reasonable man. His thinking is precisely what will allow you to resolve this matter, for you must work with probability rather than facts. If you can only go by what is probable, you will sooner or later learn the truth.”

  “Are you suggesting I conduct this matter by randomly choosing paths of inquiry?”

  “Not randomly,” he corrected. “If you know nothing with certainty, but you guess reasonably, acting upon those guesses offers the maximum chance of learning who did this with the minimal amount of failure. Not acting offers no chance of discovery. The great mathematical minds of the last century—Boyle, Wilkins, Glanvill, Gassendi—have set forth the rules by which you are to think if you are to find your murderer. You will act not on what your eyes and ears show you, but on what your mind thinks probable.” Elias set down his coffee and fidgeted with his hands. When he believed himself to be brilliant, he instantly turned into a great fidget. I wondered how he dared ever bleed a patient, since he believed so strongly in the curative powers of phlebotomy that I fancied his hands would grow unmanageable at the very idea of the powers of bloodletting.

  I confess I did not even vaguely suspect the importance of what it was that Elias told me. I
did not see that he was helping me to change the very nature of my reasoning. “And how might I know where to begin my guessing and my acting upon probability?”

  “You don’t credit your own intellect sufficiently. I think you reason in this way all the time, but because you have not read in philosophy you don’t recognize the types of thinking you engage in. I shall be happy to lend you some of my books.”

  “You know I have no head for your hard books, Elias. Fortunately I can depend on you to look into them for me. What does Mr. Pascal’s philosophy tell us we should guess about the matter at hand?”

  “Let me consider,” he said slowly, and looked up to study the ceiling. I must say that I never grew tired of my friendship with Elias, for he was a man of so many different aspects. Were a comely whore to walk by at that moment, he would have forgotten that men such as Pascal had ever trod the earth, but for that moment I had the full powers of his intellect at my disposal, and I believe that he took the greatest pleasure in applying them to my cause.

  “We have a man,” he intoned slowly, “whose death has revealed the ruin of his estate. His son thinks this self-murder a ruse and that the ruin of the estate is connected with the death—indeed, the death was brought about to accomplish the ruin of the estate. Certainly,” Elias mused, “the killer could be no ordinary thief. One cannot simply take another man’s stocks—they must be brought to the issuing institution and transferred.”

  “Which institutions issue stocks?” I asked.

  “The Bank of England has a monopoly on issuing government funds, but there are of course the companies—the South Sea Company, the East India Company, and so forth.”

  “Yes, I have recently come to hear much of these companies. Particularly of the Bank and the South Sea. But how came you to know so much of these matters?”

  “You know I am a bit of a dabbler in the funds.” He puffed himself up, looking about Jonathan’s as though he owned the place. “And as I am something of a coffeehouse denizen, I cannot but learn a thing or two of the business. I have held some issues that have yielded a pleasing return, although my interests lie predominantly in projects.”

  I believe that when Elias was born the projectors and schemers of the world drank a bumper to his health and another to honor his parents. Since I began my friendship with Elias, he had invested in, and lost money on, projects to fish for herring, to grow tobacco in India, to build a ship that sailed underwater, to make salt water fresh, to produce an armor for soldiers that would resist musket fire, to create an engine that runs on steam, to make a kind of pliable wood, and to raise a species of edible dogs. Once I had mocked him mercilessly for investing fifty pounds (which he borrowed of a group of unsuspecting gulls, myself included) in a project “to produce enormous sums of money through means that, once revealed, will utterly astonish.”

  So, while I did not believe Elias to be the most cautious investor in the world, I believed he understood something of the financial marketplace. “If a mere thief could not rob a man of his funds,” I continued with my querying, “who could, and for what purpose would he do so?”

  “Well”—Elias bit his lip—“we might consider the lending institution itself.”

  I guffawed as though I found the idea preposterous. But I could not forget my father’s old enemy, Perceval Bloathwait, the Bank of England director. “You mean you think the Bank of England, for example, could kill two men for some purpose—that the Bank of England was responsible for the attempt upon my life as well?”

  “Mr. Adelman!” the coffee boy shouted as he walked past our table. “A hackney awaits Mr. Adelman!”

  I watched from afar as my uncle’s friend made his way across the coffeehouse, trailed by a cluster of sycophants who hounded him even as he tried to pass through the doorway. For a moment I felt startled, as though it were a strange coincidence that he should be in the very place I chose to drink a dish of coffee. I then recalled that I chose to drink a dish of coffee in his place of business. It was not he who haunted me, but much the other way around.

  I turned back to Elias, who had, while I had been lost in my thoughts, speculated on the murderous intent of the nation’s most powerful financial institution.

  “Perhaps the Bank realized it could not afford to pay the interest and had to dispense with all the investors,” he proposed. “What better way to order the books than to make some of the issues disappear? Perhaps your father and Balfour had large holdings from a particular institution.”

  I felt something of a chill. Elias raised a specter that my uncle had dismissed as preposterous. “I am told such a thing is unlikely. I do not believe the Bank of England goes about murdering its investors. If it needed to renege on a loan, I am sure there are more effective ways of handling it.”

  Elias gesticulated. “Good Lord, Weaver. What do you think the Bank is about?”

  “Not murder, surely.”

  “Such is not its function, but there is no reason to believe that murder is not among its tools.”

  “Why so?” I asked. “Is it not more probable that these murders are the work of a man or perhaps a group of men rather than the program of a company?”

  “But if this man or men is acting to serve a company, then I am not certain I see the distinction. The company remains the villain. And what is the life of a man or two in the eyes of an enormous institution such as the Bank of England? If the death of a man suggests a strong probability of a good financial return, what is to stop the Bank or one of the other companies from making such a bloody investment? You see, the very devil of it is that this kind of probability theory, which will help you learn the truth behind these atrocities, has allowed for the rise of the institutions most likely involved in your father’s murder. The Bank and the companies but engage in large-scale and organized stock-jobbery, and what is stockjobbery but an exercise in probability?”

  “Between you and my uncle, Elias, I feel as though I have enrolled in one of the universities. I know not that I can fathom all of this probability and government issue and heaven knows what else.” I paused for a moment and considered that I perhaps rejected what Elias said too quickly. “How does your probability relate to these companies?”

  The smile upon my friend’s face told me that he had been hoping I would ask this question. “It is the theory of probability that has allowed for the rise of the funds. To invest, you must think of what is probable, not what is known, and act accordingly. Consider the business of insurance. A man pays out insurance because he knows something might happen to his goods. The insurance company, in turn, accepts the money, knowing that in each individual case, it is probable that nothing will happen, so when it is forced to pay out, the bulk of its money is secure. Now it is possible that every ship a company insures might sink to the bottom of the ocean, and the insurance company would then go bankrupt, but so monstrous an event is not probable, and so our wealthy friends at the insurance companies sleep well at night, indeed.”

  I felt as though Elias was on the cusp of something that I still could not understand. “None of this explains why the Bank of England should involve itself in murder.”

  Elias’s eyes lit up like twin candles as he returned to the topic of the Bank’s villainy. “Again, you must think in terms of probability. What could, in all probability, explain these two murders? Old Balfour died under mysterious circumstances, and his estate proved to be missing a great deal of money. We do not know how much, but if it is an amount that could be the difference between his very large estate being ruined or no, we must assume at least ten thousand pounds. Perhaps more. Do you agree?”

  I told him that I did.

  “Now, funds of this value would either be stock of one of the trading companies, or government shares issued by the Bank of England. In either case, those shares would be nontransferable, meaning that in order for someone other than the holder to own those stocks, he would have to officially transfer ownership in the company or the Bank during designated transfer hours.
I cannot simply pick up old Balfour’s holdings and claim them as my own. He or his heirs must sign them over to me.”

  “I believe I begin to understand you. No common thief would gain anything from these stocks, so the murderer must be someone involved with the company—for only such a person could turn the stocks to gain.”

  “Exactly,” Elias said.

  “But that does not tell me why an institution itself must be involved. Could not the murderer be a company clerk—someone who could transfer the stolen issues to himself or a partner?”

  “A solid conclusion.” Elias smiled somewhat patronizingly. “But you told me that old Balfour and your father had some mysterious business together before their deaths. Your father’s estate does not seem to be missing any issues. To my mind, it is therefore probable that these murders are about more than a theft. Old Balfour and your father knew something or they were planning a venture or involved themselves in a scheme that made them dangerous to some very powerful men. You see, you keep considering old Balfour’s death and then your father’s death—not both of them together. And if these deaths are related, then the motive is more than money—and that to me suggests a plot, and plots suggest power.”

  I remained silent for a moment as I considered Elias’s dexterous hops from conclusion to conclusion. I did not fully believe what he said, but I could not deny the power of his ability to draw possible answers from what I had seen as a jumble of facts. “What sort of plot do you envision?”

  Elias sucked on his lower lip. “Give me a shilling,” he said at last. He waved his hand impatiently at my quizzical look. “Come now, play along, Weaver. Put a shilling on the table.”

  I reached into my purse and felt around for a shilling, which I slapped down.