by David Liss
I did not lower my gaze. “Are you one of these men?”
“Should I tell you if I were?” He smiled. “Perhaps so. I would have nothing to lose.”
“Such men,” I said, my quiet voice hardly audible above the din of the room, “attempted my life two nights ago. If you know who they are, inform them that I shall not be deterred.”
“I know not men who would execute so foul a plot,” he said hastily. “And I am sorry to hear of the attempt. I can promise you that no man of business engages in such tricks. You must have been the victim of an enemy from one of your other ventures.”
I said nothing at this speculation that was, after all, not improbable.
Adelman now attempted to soften slightly. “I do admire you, sir; I have not lied about that. Despite your enthusiastic rudeness, I wish you well. You show the world that not all Jews are loathsome beggars or dangerous schemers. I believe that your father would want you to use your talents to enrich yourself and to strengthen your family, not to waste your time upon a fool’s errand that will make you enemies you will never know and harm you in ways you will never see.”
I bitterly thanked Mr. Adelman for his good wishes and watched him effortlessly insinuate himself into the conversation of a group of grim-looking gentlemen. I sat staring blankly for some time, thinking on what Adelman had said, and then returned to the pamphlet, though my concentration was now shattered. So I thought on the things I had now learned.
My mind wandered fitfully, and I took to scanning the room, wondering who among these men knew who I was and what I was after. Who among them could perhaps easily tell me something of use, but would not do so because a fund might fall by ten points should the truth out? What would my father have done? I wondered. Would he have spoken the truth, uncovered a terrible crime, if it had meant losing a great deal of money? What about my uncle? Indeed, what about me?
I had nothing to gain from remaining at Jonathan’s, though I thought it might be worth my while to make an appearance with some regularity until I resolved the current inquiry. Tired and somewhat frustrated, I made my way home, where I hoped to take some sleep.
When I walked through the door, however, I was astonished to hear what I took to be my uncle’s voice coming from the parlor. I approached slowly, unsure what to make of his presence in my home, but the tone of his voice was light, even cheerful. And I thought I even heard Mrs. Garrison laugh.
“I do not believe now is the time to look to East India funds,” my uncle was saying as I entered the room. My landlady and my uncle, playing cards clutched in their hands, were seated at the small table, whose velvet top was strewn with piles of small coins. “And I cannot support the South Sea Company. Government issues, madam, funded by the Bank of England, are your wisest investment.” He sipped at a dish of chocolate that had been laid out for him.
“Oh, Mr. Lienzo, you are so very learned in these matters,” she said with a puerile titter, the likes of which I had never heard burst from her mouth, “but I fear that right now you have rather lost your investment.” She set her cards upon the table. “You owe me four pence, sir,” she announced, in a tone that made it clear that her designs on my uncle were of the amorous variety.
My senses had been too heavily assaulted in the past few days, and I could in no way consider allowing this silliness to continue. “Uncle,” I announced as I walked into the room, “I am astonished to see you here.”
“Mr. Weaver, sir,” Mrs. Garrison cooed, “you never told me you had such a charming uncle.”
“That is because I knew you would attempt to beat him at cards. Now the secret is out.”
My uncle cleared his throat and stood up. He stroked his beard as he ran through a gamut of facial expressions, searching, perhaps, for the one that best fit the moment. “Benjamin, we must speak at once.” He bowed to Mrs. Garrison. “I thank you for your entertainment, madam. You have been most kind. And if you wish to look into the funds, please let me know, and I shall find an honest man who shall meet your needs admirably.”
Mrs. Garrison curtsied. “You are too kind, sir.”
“Shall we talk in my rooms, Uncle?” I suggested.
“By all means.” He collected a bundle of papers pressed into a sheepskin folder and then followed me up Mrs. Garrison’s narrow and steep stairway. When we reached the top, I saw my uncle was agitated and breathing hard. I opened the door, invited him to sit, and opened a bottle of claret that I hoped he would find refreshing.
He clutched his wine in both hands and stared straight ahead, his eyes suddenly having lost their focus. “I am no longer a young man to muster this kind of energy. But still I am clever enough to impress myself,” he said with a smile. He studied the look upon my face and saw that I did not smile in return. “You have no curiosity about what I have to tell you?”
“I am curious at any business that leads you to turn my landlady into a coquette, Uncle.”
He smiled. “She is a bit of a talker, is she not? But there is no harm in kindness to the ladies, I believe. It is what I always told Aaron, and I hope it is a lesson you may learn as well. But I have come to talk rather about the matter of Samuel’s death and to review our progress.”
“There has been little progress, I’m afraid. I grow discouraged,” I said as I took a seat across from him. “I have learned many things, developed many suspicions, but I cannot know if they have anything to do with the matter at hand, and I’m not sure I shall ever know. I wonder if this inquiry will yield anything at all.”
“You discourage too easily,” he said. “And while you get discouraged, I make progress. Benjamin,” he said, tapping the bundle of papers on the table beside him. “I now know why your father was killed.”
FIFTEEN
I STARED AT MY uncle in astonishment.
“Yes,” he repeated as he tapped the envelope with satisfaction. “I believe I now know why your father was killed. We are now closer to learning who is responsible.”
I set down my wineglass and leaned forward, but I said nothing.
“Our conversation the other day,” he continued, “inspired me to return to my brother’s papers and look for anything that might suggest what manner of investment had made him so secretive in his last days. I thought perhaps he had inadvertently become entangled in some kind of scandalous project whose architects had killed him to conceal their treachery. But as I looked and discovered nothing, I became convinced that an investment of this kind was unlikely. Your father was far too canny to involve himself with something not founded upon a solid bottom. As I searched, I wondered if what I sought was not an investment he had made, but rather an investment he had not made, and when I began to look through other kinds of papers, I discovered this.”
He opened the envelope and removed a pile of manuscript pages—perhaps forty or fifty of them—covered with the wide, looping handwriting of my father. “What have you found?”
“It is called A Conspiracy of Paper; or, the South Sea Company Expos’d. It appears to be a pamphlet your father sought to publish.”
“My father publish?” I asked incredulously.
My uncle laughed softly. “Oh, yes. He authored perhaps four or five short works—all on financial matters, and all published anonymously, as is the custom. Two or three of his pamphlets were received with great enthusiasm. He wrote several on behalf of the Bank of England, you know, for it was an institution he saw as vital to the nation’s economy.”
My confusion was now complete. “The Bank of England,” I repeated, hardly above a whisper. “He was a defender of the Bank? I cannot understand it.”
“But why?” my uncle asked. “Your father was a clever man, and he studied the banks of the other great nations, especially those of Holland. He became firmly convinced that the Bank offered the greatest security for the nation’s finances.”
That my father could take the time to write something for the benefit of others shocked me. “Why should he bother to undertake such a project? What had h
e to gain?”
My uncle shook his head. “Your father loved nothing so much as convincing others that he was right.”
I nodded. I had seen him do so a hundred times at dinners and gatherings. That he should try to convince the world of something made more sense than I had first credited. But if this explained why he should publish his views, it did not tell me why he should publish these views. “Is not his enemy, is not Perceval Bloathwait, a Bank director?” I asked cautiously.
“Bloathwait,” my uncle repeated as though I had uttered something nonsensical. “What do you know of him?”
The blankness of my uncle’s face chilled me. If he could so effectively act as though there had been nothing between my father and Bloathwait, what else might he be concealing? I remembered that when I was a boy my uncle and my father had sometimes argued over these matters of prevarication. Indeed, taking pride in his importation of contraband commodities, my uncle often played the wily Jacob to my father’s stoical Esau. “You fear the worst,” my uncle once told my father, “because you are such a poor deceiver. In matters of finance it is easy enough to confuse—all those hard terms and such—and men are often blinded by their own greed. But to deceive a customs inspector, a man whose very livelihood depends upon his ability to find you out—now that is an art.”
It was no difficult thing for me to imagine how my uncle could deceive customs inspectors. He had an ingenuous quality that made it hard not to do aught but like him. For the first time, however, I could not but wonder if he practiced his deceptive arts upon me for some purpose. I was not so suspicious as to assume the necessity of villainy where I found concealment. Perhaps, I considered, my uncle sought to protect some secret that had no connection to the inquiry.
“How can I not know of Bloathwait?” I demanded in a voice with which I hoped to impress upon him that I would not be distracted. “He tormented my father, he tormented me when I was but a boy. Since I have begun this inquiry I have wondered if he might not be in some way involved with what happened to Father.”
“I am surprised you knew of Samuel’s problems with Mr. Bloathwait. He rarely discussed matters in which he appeared at a disadvantage. You say you had some contact with Bloathwait?”
“I did—enough to show me that Bloathwait is a madman, I would put nothing past him. And that is why I am shocked to learn my father defended the Bank.”
“The difficulties with Mr. Bloathwait happened long ago. And your father’s troubles were with the man,” my uncle explained, “not the Bank. Samuel did not change how he felt about something like the Bank simply because one of its directors wished him ill.”
“And is this pamphlet in support of the Bank of England?” I asked.
“Oh, it does indeed support the Bank, but, more important, it exposes the South Sea Company. You will read it for yourself, but your father makes three major points in this pamphlet. First, he argues that for several years now the South Sea Company has been growing in power, despite the fact that its patent to trade in the South Seas has yielded very little real wealth.”
I thought on all of this. “But you have told me as much yourself. I can hardly believe that any organization would propose to kill all men who uttered common knowledge.”
“You are quite right,” my uncle said, “but there is more.” He began to leaf through the papers, looking for nothing at all, I suspect, but drawing some comfort from the sight of the handwriting. “Your father believed that the security of the South Sea Company has been compromised—that someone has been circulating fictitious South Sea stock, and that these activities could be possible only with the aid of men working within the Company itself.”
I own I did not fully understand the implications of such a forgery. “If this were true, would not the Company want the forgery of its stock put to an end?”
“Of course, but it would want to do so quietly. Your father wrote that this counterfeit stock represents a complete failure on the Company’s part to regulate its own business and that the Company should not be trusted with millions of the nation’s pounds.”
I could not but think of what Elias had said, of how his ideas of probability had led him to suspect the involvement of a company. Now it appeared that my father had indeed involved himself in something dangerous, something worthy of the kind of plot Elias had envisioned. “Is it your belief that my father was killed by the South Sea Company in order to keep him from exposing the counterfeit stock?”
“I am not certain I would put it so bluntly.” He spread out his hands. “But I do believe that there may be a relationship between his death and this information.”
I picked up the manuscript and began to leaf through it. “I suppose,” I said absently, “I shall have to pay a visit to the South Sea Company.”
My uncle laughed. “Will you march in there, manuscript in hand, and demand what information they have of your father’s death? This is one of the most powerful institutions in the Kingdom, and it grows more powerful all the time. You must not take it lightly.”
“You sound like my friend Elias. He believes these companies capable of anything.”
“Never underestimate the power and the villainy of stock-jobbers.” His voice held something ominous that I misliked.
“Your brother was a stock-jobber,” I pointed out hesitantly.
“I do not mean to suggest that to work in the funds is to be corrupt, but it is a course that can lead to corruption, and there is power enough to make that corruption dangerous indeed. Your friend is right to advise caution.”
“What of your friend Mr. Adelman?” I asked pointedly. “Can he not help us? If he is connected to the South Sea Company, then perhaps he can offer some insight.”
“Mr. Adelman and I live upon very good terms as men of business. I know him for what he is, and I respect him as such. But I cannot expect that he would think of exposing the Company for the good of our search for justice. He might be just the man to do so, but then he might not. If I must learn which of these he is, I should like to learn upon very safe terms.”
“If,” I said, wondering aloud, “my father was killed for authoring this pamphlet, we still don’t know why Balfour was killed or what the connection was between the two men. I wonder if there is any way at all to speak to Adelman about this matter. I do not suggest you ask him if he had two men murdered, but there might be a less inflammatory way to broach the subject.”
My uncle shook his head. “I think not. Adelman is no fool. He will know precisely what I am doing. There is no point agitating such a man unless we have need to do so.”
I sighed, but I agreed with his sentiments. “Yes. But I wish we could make more sense of it all. To my mind, none of our suspicions quite ring true. I know what you and Elias have told me about these companies and their power, but to murder men over a business transaction—it strikes me as preposterous. I can understand how one man might murder another over business if it was a crime of passion, but this is quite another matter. We are talking about men planning and carrying out murders as part of a business transaction. It is a kind of commercial assassination.”
My uncle nodded. “That may be precisely what it is,” he said. “The scale of this transaction is unprecedented. According to A Conspiracy of Paper”—he gestured toward the envelope—“the South Sea Company is considering offering the Treasury a three-million-pound gift as a bonus for permission to allow holders of certain government bonds to exchange their issues for South Sea stock. They plan, in other words, to encourage the public to trade their valuable holdings, which put the state in so much debt, for the empty promise of South Sea Company profits. Do you understand the magnitude of this exchange? Three million pounds, just for agreeing to the transaction. What can the profits be if they are willing to part with this sum? This is perhaps the largest business transaction in history. Surely men who have so much to gain might kill to protect their interests.”
I put a hand to my forehead as I thought. “I cannot even conceive of suc
h amounts. Who could desire so much? What opulence would be enough for these men?”
My uncle looked grave. “I fear we face a new kind of man along with this new kind of affluence. When lands meant wealth, men could perhaps have enough. Too much land was difficult to govern. But with paper money, more is simply more. In France, you know, where they suffer from their own financial mania, they have a word—the millionaire—to denote men whose wealth is measured in the millions. Millions. It is inconceivable, but there are more than a few men who hold this title.”
“And how do we track men of such great wealth and ambition?”
“That is yet to come,” my uncle informed me confidently. “We must start with a simple conviction—the belief that these two deaths are connected. It will take time to sort out why and how. We must move in small steps, I think.”
“I understand.” I leaned back in my chair and tried to think how I might ask a question I knew my uncle did not wish to answer. “Tell me,” I said after a pause, “what exactly happened with my father and Bloathwait.”
He shook his head. “That was a long time ago, and it is of no consequence now. Your father is dead, and I can assure you that Mr. Bloathwait no longer cares to remember that unpleasantness. He is but an old bachelor now, with a passion for nothing but business.”
“But I should like to know. If I am to find out what happened to my father, does it not make sense that I should know more of him?”
“It does,” my uncle said. “But you should understand him as he was in the days before he died, not when you were a child.”
“I should like to know the truth,” I said solemnly.
My uncle nodded. “Very well, but you must consider that your father was younger in those days. It took him a long time to establish himself in the Alley, and, like many men, particularly men with families they wished to see prosper, he was anxious that his efforts yield fruit. He was perhaps not always as thoughtful of the profits of those he served as he later became.”