Spider Dance (11 page)

“How much actual gold do you have?”

Here he shifted uneasily so the huge leather chair squeaked most disagreeably, like a lapdog with its tail stepped upon.

“Now there, Mr. Holmes, you tread upon what you might call a state secret. There are three or four of us . . . millionaires, that is . . . who have enormous gold reserves. Not Vanderbilts. The others won’t say how much, because that could set the markets soaring or plummeting. And then, too, the government is mighty interested, and it’s to the financiers’ advantage to keep them guessing as well.”

“You are saying that the monetary state of the United States is best kept a mystery?”

“From my point of view, and the government’s, yes.”

“Hmmm. Even your unnamed correspondent seems willing to keep this all a mystery. And this is the last message, until the presumed object lesson left upon your billiard table?”

“Yes.”

“Obviously, he, or they, had intended to kill that poor old fellow all along, for his presence here only announces that these are not people to be crossed.”

“You assume more than one.”

“One man would be sorely tried to import a body into a household as large as yours. There are at least two, and the entire sequence smacks of some sort of cadre. These written notes are in different hands. What is most disturbing is not the wretched soul left on your billiard table but the vagueness of the demands. It is almost as if the blackmailer expects you to know exactly what is wanted: how much gold and which jewels. Can you explain this?”

“Mr. Holmes, I cannot. I am a millionaire. I am known for
amassing money, and the finest form of money is in hard gold bars. It does not rot. My wife is the leader of New York society and as such has always impressed upon me that it is my duty to swath her in jewels.”

“As far as you know, none of your gold or jewels is missing?”

“Not one gold bar, not one diamond brooch. It would appear that these thugs are so vague because they want it all. Of course that can’t happen. Before I call out the entire New York City Police Department, such as it is, I would rather work through you and the Pinkertons or my own discreet staff members.”

“Indeed. These are rather interesting criminals. They threaten before they make their demands known. I suspect a determined band of brigands. I also suspect further warnings, probably even more appalling than the man you will shortly remove from your house. They tortured him for some reason, and are letting you know that they are on the trail of the goods you have that they claim.”

“But all I have is the means I inherited from my grandfather, the Commodore, and that my own father multiplied many times over in the eight years he lived after my grandfather died, and left to me and my brothers and sisters. Who would claim the whole of the Vanderbilt fortune?”

“Who indeed, but a criminal, or criminals, as paramount in the world of misdeeds as the Vanderbilts are in the world of finance? I predict that we confront a truly fiendish scheme concocted by men who are prepared to use any atrocity to accomplish their ends. Were we in London, I know whom I would suspect. Here in America, the possibilities are endless.”

“Then it is hopeless. I must convert my house into a fortress and forbid my family all egress.”

“This house was not designed to be defended, Mr. Vanderbilt, even though some call it a castle. The only solution is to discover who these people are and what specifically they want, and perhaps why they want it from the Vanderbilts. Are there any your family exploited to rise in the world?”

“Many, probably.”

“‘Many’ alone will not do. A few ruthless men driven by desires too dark to divine readily must be behind this mystery, and it must have to do with your family history.”

“How can you say that? Being a captain of industry makes for ruthless competition, and may produce violent unrest among the working force, but none of this rude jostling among the lower classes touches the ruling families.”

“Yes, that is quite obviously the case, Mr. Vanderbilt. My scathing tone was lost on the American millionaire, as it had been on the King of Bohemia earlier. Absolute power not only corrupts absolutely but it apparently renders the possessors deaf and blind.

“Good heavens, Mr. Holmes! I would have to say our most vicious enemies are the newspaper cartoonists. Though they are indeed merciless with pen and ink, I hardly think they would torment old men with knives.”

“I saw nothing artistic in the indignities done to him, although there is a certain element of ritual to the method, if not the means.”

“This is a brutal and senseless puzzle.”

“The first, yes, but I beg to differ on the second. It is a commonplace to call what is brutal senseless, but I have found the opposite to be the case. It is simply that the motive is not evident and makes no sense to us yet”

In any appreciation of the American Renaissance, as the period
from the 1870s to the first world war is sometimes called, the era
that saw the United States emerge from its earlier republican
simplicity and isolation to ingest the glories of European art
and culture, some account has to be taken of the Vanderbdts
.
—
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

I’d gotten my old briarwood going and rose to stretch my legs while I marshaled my thoughts into a form that would penetrate a millionaire’s brain, addled as it must be with buying and selling men and machines.

I was, in a sense, taking the stage in order to keep the attention of this surprisingly dense man. He made Watson glitter like the veriest Aristotle by comparison.

“Mr. Vanderbilt, I have had cases laid before me by everyone from humble clerks to the crowned heads of Europe. In each instance, they reported a puzzle or a dilemma that often had them fearing for their fortunes, their lives, their very sanity. At all times the circumstances that brought them to me were strange, frightening, and contradictory. In all cases, every one, I was the mere epilogue to a string of events that were rooted firmly in my clients’ pasts.

“I am not much a reader of fiction or drama, but I can say that if there is a motto that guides my detection work, it was
uttered by England’s Will Shakespeare four hundred years ago. ‘The past is prologue.’ I know not the play or the speaker, and I don’t care. To help you, I must know your past and that of your forebears.”

“My father has been dead these five years, and my grandfather, the Commodore, has been gone for twelve.”

“Again to quote the Bard, and I assure you I don’t have a large store of such: ‘Age cannot wither nor custom stale’ the interest to be found in a saga of worldly success built from a pittance. I presume that was the Commodore’s story, or was he truly a well-born and placed soul?”

And so I invited upon myself the usual rags-to-riches fairy story, save that it was set against the rude American background of a frontier becoming a world force.

Invited to tell the family tale, the affable William Kissam Vanderbilt, a handsome man only a few years my senior, selected another Havana cigar and gestured me back into the comfortable armchair.

“The Commodore was not an official title, as you divined,” be began. “It came as a result of his extensive shipping interests, and, I suppose, a certain commanding manner.”

He nodded at a black-and-white sketch on the wall framed by a broad border of gilt that would have overpowered the subject had he not been a lean old man of martial bearing. His hat and cane occupied each hand, and he wore a high-buttoned frock coat with the soft collar and tie favored at midcentury, or earlier.

“A large man, I see, muscular and athletic. Something of a frontiersman in his youth, like your president, Andrew Jackson.”

My dapper host blinked in amazement. Ah, it is good to encounter a portable Watson now and then. “How on earth did you know that, Mr. Holmes? There can’t be much knowledge of our family’s roots in England.”

I nodded at the sketch. “All the knowledge I need is there. His size I determined from the length of his arms and size of the hat in relation to the figure we see from head to knees.
His firm grasp upon the walking stick implies a man who has had more concrete rudders in his hands than metaphorical ones. The knuckles are also enlarged, either the sign of a pugilist or a laborer”

“My grandfather was born in a Staten Island farmhouse.”

“Modest, I presume.”

“Quite. He had no education, but a journalist once said that ‘he would have become rich on a desert island.’”

I nodded at the Commodore’s strong old face. With the fashion in which he wore his hair, one need only add a goatee and a hat clothed in Old Glory and he would make an excellent “Uncle Sam.” I said so.

“Unfortunately, your observation is correct, Mr. Holmes, including the cruder aspect of life earlier in the century. The Commodore was never ashamed of himself, but the fact is he was not socially acceptable.”

“How so?”

“He cussed like a pirate’s parrot, loudly, pinched the servant girls black and blue, used chewing tobacco, and believed in the occult. But he never was a true robber baron, like Fisk and Gould. He never preyed on other people’s investments. He simply built huge transportation concerns for a burgeoning country . . . shipping lines all over the world, railroads that crossed the continent as far afield as Nicaragua, where he made a million a year for saving prospectors six hundred miles on the Central American overland route to the gold fields of California. When he died January fourth in 1877, his fortune exceeded the cash reserves of the entire United States government.”

“And how did he leave his wealth?”

Vanderbilt laid his cigar in the crystal tray. Its scent perfumed the air, quite overwhelming my modest pipe.

“There’s the rub. He had ten surviving children. My father, William Henry, the eldest son, was virtually the sole heir of a hundred million dollars.”

“Did this occasion some rancor between the survivors, then?”

“Rancor, Mr. Holmes? It unleashed a firestorm. True,
none of the boys were cut entirely off; they were given from two to five million each. Our scapegrace uncle Jerry, Cornelius Jeremy, got nothing, nor did any of my father’s many sisters. They did challenge the will in court.”