Even more than this news, however, it’s the past that has me off balance these days. Walking alone through the city streets, I’ll start thinking about you and all the ways it could have been different—and then suddenly find myself, as if just woken up, baffled and blinking on some honking street corner, or standing in a fluorescent supermarket corridor, or sitting alone at the dark little bar near my apartment, at a loss for what I’m doing in this ill-fitting world of unknown faces and chaotic shapes, where all that makes sense are my memories of a vanished time, and you.
THROUGH THE AMBER LENS at the bottom of Peter’s glass, the saloon contracts around him into a jumble of figures and voices—a scene that hardly changes when he lowers the whiskey and leans back, gazing drunkenly around.
This is the Harp Pub, an Irish saloon near the river, where men from the subway crews sometimes meet. There are six of them gathered now around the battered wooden table: Peter, Paolo, Michael, and three others from the subway crew—Saul, Jan, and a blond man whose name Peter never heard, or has forgotten. Around them the space is crowded with the noise and heat of other drinkers, the air thick with grease and paraffin smoke.
“Here’s to Tobias,” Michael says, lifting his glass for the twentieth time of the evening. He wobbles to his feet, nearly upending the table, and raises his voice. “A more shit-for-brains, scum-toothed, clockslob sneak of an arsehole brother who’d puke”—he pauses for breath—“who’d puke in his own beer and drink it with a grin, did a man never have!”
“Tobias!” Peter and the others echo, raising their own glasses. Michael drains his whiskey and collapses back into his chair, angrily wiping a hint of wetness from his eyes.
“Damn,” he mutters, “damnit.”
Peter looks away, at a loss for what to say. Since their arrival here, Michael’s toasts have become progressively more incomprehensible and vulgar, and Peter—along with his companions around the table, he guesses—is still struggling to understand what it means.
Gazing up at the low ceiling overhead, Peter recalls the look on Michael’s face when he’d knocked on the subway workshop door, two hours ago now. The absolute emptiness of Michael’s expression when he’d delivered the news that his brother, Tobias, was dead. An accident in his cell, the police had said.
Now, with the room reeling around him, Peter remembers this—and it’s not his place to judge, he reminds himself, if this is what Michael needs. If these obscenities can somehow substitute for, or speak, his grief.
Michael raises his glass again and starts to slur: “To that twat sucking, dog-fucking, piss-drinking, pus-bleeding, sewer-reeking b-bog Irish disgrace of a . . .”
They drink, and drink again, each of them and the pub itself growing steadily more unsteady with the noise of other conversations, comings and goings, interruptions and digressions, liquor spilled or misplaced or both, the fumes of cheap cigarettes, a third bottle of whiskey opened and emptied—
A waitress passes their table and Michael lunges at her, shouting for another round while behind him Paolo tries desperately to signal “No” with throat-slashing gestures. The new bottle of whiskey arrives. Michael lurches to his feet, this time actually upsetting the table, which overturns in a crash of shattering glassware, so that the other occupants of the pub—or at least those at nearby tables—turn to stare. Michael lifts the whiskey bottle over his head. “Come!” he cries. “Come, this way—” And ignoring the onlookers, and the protests of Saul and Paolo, he makes for the door of the pub, leaving Peter and his companions to trail behind, mumbling apologies to the waitresses as they go.
They exit the Harp, ducking between the Scylla and Charybdis of teetering beer barrels and a horse-drawn carriage emerging from the neighboring stable yard as they reach the sidewalk. Michael is storming ahead, bottle hoisted aloft, down the street and around the corner.
“We must stop him, yes?” Paolo grabs Peter’s arm.
Peter nods, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. In some distant part of his brain, he understands that Paolo is right—but another inner voice is whispering to keep going and follow Michael into drunken wreckage and madness. Because she is gone, out there in the city somewhere, in the vastness of the city without him.
She is gone, and now Tobias is gone, Peter thinks confusedly, focusing on the cobblestones underfoot. Paolo says something and Jan says something else that he doesn’t hear. He thinks of Tobias’s laughing face and pushes the memory away. Because he is, and she is, only a stranger in the chaos of the world.
In his coat pocket, he feels the weight of the book that she gave him. He has been carrying it since, although each time Peter has tried to look inside, he’s found himself frustrated by an impenetrable wall of words: a tangle of text that only hints at a hidden landscape of meaning, beyond his grasp.
With a burst of drunken inspiration, he pulls out the book and opens it at random, moved by the notion that maybe now, through the mechanics of chance, the text will reveal some answer to—
“And wouldst thou think how at each tremulous motion trembles within a mirror your own image,” he reads, slurring slightly.
“What is that?” Paolo demands.
Peter shakes his head, returning the book to his pocket. “Nothing.”
Michael rounds another corner, and, following him, suddenly they find themselves facing the East River, the nighttime-shadowed symmetry of the Brooklyn Bridge overhead. Michael stops at the low railing that edges the dark current
“This one”—Michael coughs, chokes, then continues—“this is for you, Toby. Always said we could—we’d cross this. This bloody river. Make our fortune out west.”
In a moment of clarity, through the whiskey-laden tangle of his thoughts, Peter realizes that they’re looking eastward over the water. But that’s not important, he realizes, the important thing is this moment, this night, this—
“This drink’s on me,” Michael mumbles. “I miss you, Brother.”
He uncaps the whiskey and upends it, liquor gurgling into the water below. Peter and the others stand silently. When the bottle is empty, Michael lets it drop. It makes a small splash, and leaves a ring of silver ripples, which disappear almost before they have formed.
Paolo puts his arm around Michael’s shoulders. Michael bows his head.
Peter closes his eyes. A crowd of emotions knot in his stomach: most of all, sorrow for the loss of Tobias, sorrow for the strange woman who wandered across his path for a few days, and the suddenly aching memory of everything he left behind, coming here—and also anger at this weight of the past that keeps finding him each time forgetting seems within reach. He looks up at the bridge, searching for the sense of calm that came to him the last time he visited this place, with Paolo.
Abruptly he is seized by a need for action: as if the right gesture could cut through the tangle of grief that aches inside his chest. A longing for the clarity of open space. Before he quite knows what he is doing, Peter crosses to the bridge and starts to climb.
Straddling the bundle of cables that arcs upward to the central support towers of the bridge—the twined metal thicker than a man’s torso—Peter pulls himself forward. Thirty feet up, pressed against the steel armature, he cannot find another handhold and stops. Remembering himself, he looks down. Traffic passing, the dark water of the river—a chasm of air to swallow his falling body. His heart begins to pound and he reaches out for a protruding bolt to steady himself. As he does, his foot slips and he loses his balance, sliding backward. Managing to catch himself, he clings there, panting and dizzy with fear and adrenaline.
For a long moment he hangs motionless, realizing the craziness of what he’s doing. With a great effort he forces himself to raise his head and look up at the rise of the bridge, fighting the fingers of panic that have gripped his legs and stomach.
From below, he faintly hears Paolo and the others shouting:
“—crazy!”
“Careful, what are you—”
These words
float up to him, and Peter takes a deep breath, willing himself to think clearly. This is not so different, he tells himself, from the cliffs he scaled in Idaho. He closes his eyes and presses his forehead against the cold skin of the bridge. Another breath, and another. He decides that he’s ready to start back down.
Except that suddenly, before he can do so, he feels himself cupped and pushed upward again. He tries to pause, to consider this, but his body will not obey, hands and feet finding purchase with a skill he doesn’t recognize as his own.
The others are still calling to him, but as he ascends their voices change.
“—almost there! Steady—” he hears Michael shout.
“That the way—” This from Paolo, encouragement taking the place of warning, as if somehow his ascent could repay, in some small part, Tobias’s death. He continues to climb, emptying his mind of everything except physics and points of leverage, momentum and gravity’s contract.
Finally, exhausted, hands cut and numb, Peter reaches the top of the bridge tower. Two hundred feet above the river, buffeted and invisible in the nighttime wind, he looks out at the lights of the city below. The drift of barges toward the bay, the lights from a thousand different windows blinking on and off to reveal the ciphered lives of a hundred households’ movements, waking and sleep.
As his breathing and pounding heart slow, Peter looks downward to see his companions standing at the foot of the bridge, waving their arms and jumping around each other in a kind of drunken dance. He watches them, and then turns back to the silhouettes of New York.
Surveying the city, the thought comes to him that the metropolis is like a single gigantic machine. The city is an impossibly complex mechanism of betrayal and justice, and he and its other inhabitants are counters moving through its channels, units of a supreme calculus that allots each in turn their fate. And if this is true, he thinks, then his presence here must be more than an accident: there must be some kind of purpose to it all that he can’t yet recognize or comprehend.
He sits there, unseen and all-seeing, for a long time. Finally, when the cold grows so intense that he can’t stop his teeth from chattering, he starts back down. It’s only during his descent that he begins to wonder: if New York is an immense machine, what kind of engine could power a device of such scale?
CHAPTER VIII
THE FINANCIER
THREE DAYS AFTER HER ARREST, THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE Department released a woman calling herself Cheri-Anne Toledo into the custody of Peter Force.29 In itself, this was an unusual occurrence. Under normal circumstances, even if Tesla had decided not to press charges, as a presumed madwoman she still would have been confined in one of New York’s public asylums: Throgs Neck, Arkham, or Bedlam.30
Less than twelve hours later the police would be called again, this time to arrest two individuals matching the descriptions of Force and Cheri-Anne, at the mansion of the financier John Pierpont Morgan.
Why was she released from jail? And why was she taken to visit the financier? To be honest, I don’t really know the answers (and of course the history books have nothing to say on the subject) but it’s easy enough to guess. After all, what would it have taken for Morgan to orchestrate these events? A murmured suggestion, an offhand mention to some lieutenant, is all that would have been necessary.
But then, who was John Pierpont Morgan? None of my textbooks seem to agree. According to some, Morgan was the epitome of robber-baron capitalist villainy: the “boss croupier” of Wall Street, a financier who bent the course of America’s development to the “psychopathology of his will,”31 he smashed unions, attacked the common man, and crushed his competitors.
Yet at the same time (other historians argue), Morgan champi oned the growth of the United States, funneling billions into the construction of roads, bridges, and manufacturing plants. He acted as a Federal Reserve Bank before one existed, struggling to end the brutal expansion-contraction cycle that racked the country with depression. And on two occasions, he saved the government of the United States itself from bankruptcy. 32
Of Morgan, the photographer Edward Steichen wrote that “meeting his gaze was like looking into the lights of an oncoming express train.”‡ This was a fairly typical remark. In portraits he is a fortress of a man, eyes shadowed beneath the brim of his top hat, overgrown eyebrows arching like Gothic vaults. Though Morgan stood over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, his most prominent feature was without question his nose. Deformed with rhinophyma, the uncontrolled growth of sebaceous tissue, it was (as one wealthy New York widow wrote in her diary), “a Cyrano nose of vast blue oozing glands[,] a hideous deformity.”§ A drooping walrus mustache hangs over his mouth.
Morgan is inarticulate, a man of few words: his British partner, Edward C. Grenfell, reported that he was “an impossible man to have any talk with. The nearest approach he makes is an occasional grunt.” When questioned, he is notoriously terse and direct with his answers: asked to predict what the stock market would do, he replied, “It will fluctuate.”33 As a financier, he is ambitious, patient, and insightful—yet seems to possess no particular genius. Nothing that he does is noticeably flamboyant or innovative, apart from the sums involved. Through what seems to be luck more than any particular brilliance of strategy, he finds himself in a position unique in the world, his smile or scowl able to send Wall Street into a frenzy of confidence or despair.
And from his throneless position of command—his famous glass-walled office overlooking Wall Street—Morgan realizes, perhaps better than any other, the fragility of the world: the tide of tumultuous forces that threaten to disrupt the too-short moments of peace and prosperity. Around the corner, with the next unwise transaction or overextended bank, John Pierpont sees the shadow of the next great depression, war, or famine . . .
Given these things, he has come to think of himself as the world’s protector. All his life Morgan has observed the behavior of financial markets. He has survived cycles of expansion and contraction, price wars and panics. In the face of such unpredictability, Morgan has decided, the only way to keep the economy on track is to control it completely.
MORGAN STANDS in his office at 23 Wall Street, surveying the world that he commands. If there are physical locations on earth where power is woven into the very substance of the air (the Oval Office, the throne room at Versailles, the Forbidden City), this is one of them. Situated at the end of the floor farthest from the front door, guarded by phalanxes of bookkeepers, junior partners, lawyers, and the finest finance men in the world, it is a place of dark wood and quiet. Shelves of ledgers and reports bound in somber brown leather stand along the walls. A thick carpet muffles footfalls. A globe with the names of countries inlaid in gold rests on the plain oak desk that dominates the room, an everyday object suddenly potent with symbolism.
The only piece of art in the office is a framed drawing in charcoal pencil: da Vinci’s sketch for the Mona Lisa. This, along with the windows opposite the door, are the only overt evidence of the power that is concentrated here. The windows are extraordinary: an entire wall of them with only the thinnest strips of lead joining the smaller panes together—no other structural support, an engineering marvel. They had to change the plans for the entire building, half completed, when Morgan announced that he would move in here and that he wanted such windows.
Morgan stands with his back to the door, gazing outward. A massive man, tall and wide. His hair and drooping mustaches are salt-and-pepper gray. Pouches hang beneath his eyes. His nose is an obscenity.
Outside, the city bustles. Up and down Wall Street march bankers, delivery boys, and secretaries in starched collars—carriages and horseless carriages fill the way. Pillars of gray smoke rise toward the overcast winter sky. Looking at the chimneys, Morgan muses that it all must be symbolic of something, the smoke and smokestacks—as, for that matter, must the buildings and carriages and so forth.
But of what, he can’t be bothered—doesn’t have patience—to consider. Things shou
ld be what they are, he thinks—or perhaps thinks is the wrong word: rather, knows—and leave it at that. The smokestacks are smokestacks, the smoke the residue of coal and oil. This is why—he glances over his shoulder at the da Vinci sketch above the mantel—he has always had such a deep appreciation for art. The paintings and illustrated manuscripts that fill his home please him because they exist without trickery or complication. This is why he founded the Metropolitan Museum, currently under construction, with his own pocketbook.
Idly, he muses on such things. Then the man seated on the other side of the desk clears his throat and Morgan turns back to the business at hand.
“That’s all right, Mr. Morgan,” the other man drawls. “No response is necessary.” Without asking, he takes a cigar from the box on Morgan’s desk, grinning at the financier. Morgan regards him coldly. His visitor’s name is James “Bet a Million” Harrison; he is the owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, and a minor competitor of Morgan’s.
“You sure gave me a run for my money,” Harrison continues, leaning back in his chair and lighting the cigar. “But as I told you six months ago, I wanted your railroad and, by God, I wasn’t going to stop till I got it.”
Morgan sighs. “Mr. Harrison, you seem to believe I wanted to keep the Northern Pacific out of your hands for some personal reason.” He lowers himself into his chair. “However, let me assure you that is not the case.”
“Then why’d you turn down my offer to buy you out?” Harrison exhales a cloud of smoke. “I offered a fair price.”
“It was a fair price.” Morgan concedes. “I refused, Mr. Harrison, because you have already bankrupted a dozen companies. For the public good, an essential piece of infrastructure like the NP cannot be entrusted to such irresponsible care.”
Harrison leans forward, his face darkening. “And you suppose that you can decide what’s for the public good? Just like that?”
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