City of Promise (19 page)

“Stop that racket this minute. What is it?”

“I’ve a message, ma’am.”

Mollie immediately recognized Eileen’s elegant Tiffany’s stationery. “Come at once,” her aunt had written. “A matter of urgency for your husband.”

“Mr. Tweed’s been arrested on charges of fraudulent activity,” Eileen said when Mollie was hardly in the door.

“I know. I heard the newsboys.”
Boss tweed arrested! Bail set at one million dollars!
“I didn’t stop to buy a paper because I was sure you’d have one.”

“I have, but I’ve better sources of information than that. Come upstairs where we can talk.”

Even with no whores entertaining in the downstairs parlor, Eileen continued to think of her private sitting room as the appropriate venue for confidences. Mollie left her coat in the entry hall and followed her aunt up the stairs.

“Mr. Tweed’s already posted bail and been released,” Eileen said as soon as they were sitting by the fire. “I imagine he’d have done the same if they’d made the bail five million.”

“I don’t think anyone,” Mollie said, “believes Mr. Tweed to be shy of resources.”

“That’s not going to matter this time,” Eileen said. “The so-called reformers mean to get him and they will.”

“Shall they bring down Tammany?” Mollie asked.

“I doubt it.”

“Rather a shame. It won’t be the same without Mr. Tweed, but if they’re still functioning I suppose you must continue to pay seven hundred dollars a month.”

“Three fifty since the start of last month,” Eileen said. “As you’d know if you’d come to bring the ledgers up to date. I’ve less need of him these days, as Mr. Tweed agreed.”

“Well and good, Auntie Eileen, but surely that’s not what you meant when you said urgent. Josh’s affairs are not directly involved.”

“I know that.” Eileen waved away the suggestion that her nephew-in-law’s business depended on Tammany good will. “But what happens on Fourth Avenue does matter to him.”

Mollie sat up straighter. “It does.”

“There’s to be a tunnel,” Eileen said. “From somewhere just above Fiftieth Street to ninety-something. Ninety-Sixth Street seems to be favored.”

“For the trains?”

“Of course for the trains. Whatever else?”

“But Mr. Vanderbilt has flatly refused to—”

Eileen waved that notion aside. “Mr. Vanderbilt has always known he wouldn’t be allowed to run his disruptive and noisy trains along the Manhattan streets indefinitely. He is a clever negotiator. That’s all his stubbornness was about. Now, with Mr. Tweed about to be brought down and the forces of ‘good government’ ready to take over, Mr. Vanderbilt’s decided it’s the right moment to make an arrangement. The proposed tunnel is projected to cost six million dollars. The city is putting up half and Vanderbilt the other half. Construction will begin in the spring.”

“Auntie Eileen, are you sure? How do you know all this?”

“I am entirely sure. As I’ve told you before, Mollie, over the years I’ve had opportunities to make useful friends.”

That was true. Mollie knew Auntie Eileen’s influential acquaintances to have guided the investments that allowed her to continue living so well. Whatever information her aunt had, whoever it came from, it was likely to be accurate. “I must tell Josh.”

Mollie half rose, but Eileen put out a hand to stop her. “You must, and time is indeed important. I am among the first to know, but I do not deceive myself that I’m the very first. Nonetheless, Mollie—”

“Yes?”

“Your husband is a ticklish sort, my dear. He needs to prove things. Josh copes remarkably well, but surely you realize his ambition is goaded by his loss.”

Mollie folded her hands in her lap, looking at them rather than her aunt. “I think so, yes. And I try to be aware of his needs. Mostly without his knowing, though sometimes he discusses business with me quite openly.”

Eileen did not seem satisfied with the depth of her niece’s understanding. “Times of his choosing,” she said.

“Yes, that’s correct. Though I don’t know—”

“For heaven’s sake, child. He’s a man. They simply don’t believe
women can be trusted in matters of business. And frankly, they seldom grow up, Mollie. Most of them secretly measure themselves by their physical prowess, however successful they may be in other areas. That’s why all the reckless coaching and racing and, to be honest, whoring occupies so much of their time.”

“Josh isn’t like that! He wouldn’t—” All the while thinking of how he’d looked that first day when he took her coaching, and jockeyed the modest little phaeton ahead of so many grander carriages. Beaming like a classical hero, she’d thought, his head circled with laurel.

“Of course he’s not,” Eileen said. “But whatever else, my dear, you and any offspring you produce”—Mollie started to say something, but Eileen ignored her and went on—“whatever offspring whenever they arrive, must be financially secure. It’s a man’s job to provide, Mollie, but a woman’s to manage what’s provided. In this case you must take the reins, but never let Joshua know you’re holding them.”

Mollie had once asked Josh why he sometimes flourished a whip when he rode, but never really used it. Whether he sat astride or drove a carriage, she’d never seen his whip actually land on a horse. “Not what it’s meant to do,” he’d told her. “It’s the crack of the whip in the air, feeling the wind and hearing the whistle, that lets the horse know you’re in control.”

“What are you suggesting I do?” she asked. There was no doubt but that Eileen Brannigan knew as much about the proper management of men as Joshua Turner did of horses.

“First,” Eileen said, “bear in mind that your cleverness can sometimes be intimidating. So you must take this information to him immediately, but leave it to him to decide how to best use it.”

Mollie shook her head. “A dunce would know how to use it. He must buy more lots. The thing is, until the flats are built and sold, Josh has no spare capital to invest.”

“I am aware of that,” Eileen said. “And there isn’t time for me to dip for what you need. Successful dipping requires thought and planning.
And I would need time to practice, be sure my hand was as steady and as quick as it used to be.”

“No, Auntie Eileen, you mustn’t! Not ever. I cannot bear the thought of you in that wretched place—”

“I have no intention of returning to the Tombs. And I wouldn’t have gone there that one time if it hadn’t been exactly what Josh called it, a put-up job with that wretched Teddy Paisley behind it. But dipping isn’t what’s wanted on this occasion. It’s not fast enough, as I said.” Eileen was pulling the rings off her fingers while she spoke. “Neither can I liquidate some other investment quickly enough to achieve our end. So, you are to tell Joshua that I do not have as much ready cash as once I did, but I am nonetheless interested in participating in this profit opportunity. He is to use these diamonds to raise capital—pawn them, don’t sell them, I want them back. My contribution is an interest-free loan, as with the hundred thousand, but I will have a twenty percent share in whatever lots he purchases with the funds.”

“Auntie Eileen, that’s—I have no words to thank you.”

“I will see a profit out of it, I have no doubt.” Eileen spoke brusquely and being who she was did not shed a sentimental tear, but nonetheless produced a handkerchief and patted her cheeks as if she had.

“I . . .” Mollie stopped. “I’ve just thought of something, but I think you would tell me not to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Take these rings straight to a pawnbroker. I’d have cash ready for Josh by the time he comes home this evening.”

“The time gained would be valuable, but the price you’d pay is too high. A woman should never be that forward or that obvious. You must let Joshua determine to buy the lots and tell you to go to the pawnbroker, not go on your own.” While she spoke Eileen took from her pocket a roll of blue velvet tied with satin ribbon. “I’m giving you as well a diamond bracelet, one of sapphires, and my peacock brooch. Taken all together . . . You’ll get a fair amount.”

“But unless I go right away it may be too late. You said yourself that other people are bound to know about the tunnel being agreed.”

“No doubt of it. By tomorrow morning Josh won’t be able to touch anything on Fourth Avenue, however much you get for these stones. But Fourth Avenue’s not where he should be looking. I suspect it will soon be entirely too grand for what he intends. The East Sixties, Mollie. Over near Third and possibly Second. Where the elevated railroad is to be. Those are the lots Josh must buy.”

Until a few years earlier the streets around Tompkins Square had been a bastion of middle class respectability. These days the area east of Greenwich Village wasn’t considered nice enough even for rooming houses. The old single family homes had been torn down and replaced with four- and five-story brick-fronted tenements, each filled with as many of the laboring poor as could be crammed between the walls. The few remaining brownstones had illegal wooden backhouses tacked on behind, the whole jammed with a mix of German and Irish immigrants. It was in precisely such an area that the sort of financial business Mollie intended was regularly transacted.

On the morning after her aunt had summoned her, Mollie stood on East Seventh Street considering her options. “I’ll leave to you the matter of which pawnbroker,” Josh had said. “I’ll be at City Hall meanwhile. Filling out their endless papers. Pretty much everything on East Sixty-Third’s owned by the town. They’ve been known to give huge bits of the undeveloped East Side away to worthy institutions, but not to a private citizen. Not even up there. The standard price is a thousand per lot, though I’ve no doubt they’ll raise it once the tunnel’s built.”

“How shall you know how many lots to buy, since we can’t know how much the pawnbroker will give me?”

Josh had spread Eileen’s jewels on the dining-room table and he leaned over and studied them. “Is that peacock’s eye an emerald?”

“It is. And those are pearls and rubies in his tail.”

“All genuine?”

“Of course.”

“Then it looks like a spectacular haul to me, but I don’t claim to know much about precious stones. What do you reckon your aunt to have paid for this lot? All together, I mean.”

Mollie considered for a moment, recalling the various sums she had entered in Eileen’s ledgers over the years. “Something close to seventeen thousand dollars.”

“And we know pawnbrokers offer on average a third of retail value . . . I’m going to try for five lots, Mollie. I can always back off one or two if I must. We’ll do well out of four thousand dollars, or even three, but we’re in clover with five.”

Up to her now.

There were two storefronts displaying the traditional three golden balls on the block of East Seventh Street that fronted on Tompkins Square. Mollie’s decision about which to enter was based on the dismembered body of what she thought might be a cat. It lay on the pavement a few feet ahead of where she stood. If she chose the second shop she had to walk over it, or skirt it by stepping into the road across a gutter filled with garbage. She chose the closest pawnbroker.
WALLACE AND SONS
, the sign said, and beneath that, in gold letters on the window, “Always fair and patient.”

Patience turned out to be an attribute required by the customers. The shop was narrow and dim, with a counter stretched along one side, and behind it a floor to ceiling array of boxes, each identified with a letter and a number. There was a dumbwaiter in the middle that Mollie surmised to be for carrying larger goods to the storage rooms above, and at the far end three stalls that allowed a measure of privacy for each transaction. It was not yet nine o’clock, but the line Mollie joined stretched halfway down the length of the counter. The customers were all females and each carried something. She saw any number of suits of men’s clothes—pawn it on Monday the story went,
claim it back on Friday, wear it on Sunday, then start again—and a few tool bags of different sizes. One woman had brought a large chair upholstered in worn brown leather. She shoved it along beside her as the queue moved slowly forward.

“That one’s a regular furniture dealer.” A woman had joined the queue behind Mollie and she spoke the comment into Mollie’s ear. “I saw her bring in a bed and a chest of drawers just last week. She’s got five little ones. Must all be sleeping on the floor by now. New here, ain’t you, love?”