Spider Dance (70 page)

Had I not already seen Green-Wood Cemetery across the harbor in Brooklyn, I would never have believed that only a bit of water separated New York City, which was Manhattan Island, after all, from such pleasantly bucolic acres.

Our party was even farther south than Brooklyn tonight,
on Staten Island, where the land was even more empty and unspoiled. Even in the dark of night . . . even in the true dark of midnight, I could see that.

We’d crossed by private ferry, Quentin standing on deck beside me and pointing out the lights of Coney Island as they twinkled to our left like some constellation fallen from the dark night sky.

I shivered deliciously in the cool breeze that wafted from the direction of the island to agitate the sulky warm night air on deck.

Several coaches were waiting to bear us inland and upland on the winding road to the hill William Vanderbilt had bought so providently near his early death.

The Commodore and William had been here for four years, and so had Pinkertons on guard twenty-four hours a day, punching a time clock every fifteen minutes.

Half-shuttered lanterns borne by Pinkertons surrounded the shambling bulk of a vast monument crowning the hill.

One might have thought another overbearing temple to the journalistic art and commerce had risen in these fallow fields, but this was a temple to death.

I could barely make out the look of the Vanderbilt family mortuary in the darkness, yet I was able to see stepped wings to either side of some triangular pediment and the rough pyramid shape spoke of unassailable walls and of a city of the dead, much like a necropolis in ancient Egypt.

Irene held a lantern herself, reminding me of Alice Vanderbilt in her signature ball gown as Electric Light from six years earlier, when her sister-in-law, Alva, had challenged Mrs. Astor and the Four Hundred and won. Alva was not here. Only her husband. And myself, Quentin, Irene, and Godfrey, and a dozen Pinkertons.

“If you are right,” Mr. Vanderbilt. was telling Irene, “no one must ever know of it.”

“Including Mr. Holmes?’

“This is quite different from the case he was brought in to solve.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Vanderbilt It’s the same case,”
Irene said. “I require no credit, however, so Mr. Holmes may have it.”

“He won’t take it!” I objected.

As their gazes focused on me, I added, “He only takes credit where credit is due.”

“I’ll pay the man,” Mr. Vanderbilt said. “I just don’t want anyone unnecessary to know about this.”

Unnecessary? Holmes? I felt an odd sense of indignation. This midnight expedition seemed secret and underhanded. Before I could express these unfortunate objections, a man cried out from inside the constructed portion of the mausoleum.

We all hastened within, lantern lights converging like falling stars.

By their conjoined light, I saw several large marble slabs and a large bronze grating dislodged from the floor. A dark passage led down into a stone-lined tunnel. I suppose Schliemann at the site of fabled Troy felt his pulse pound as mine did now. Gold. Ancient gold and enmity and legend, all buried in as-yet unhallowed ground.

Pinkertons surrounded us front and back, armed with light and the darker accompaniment of firearms. Irene and Godfrey and I were invited to join Mr. Vanderbilt in leading this descent into what amounted to a hidden mine shaft.

And there, about fifty feet along the lower level, covered in sackcloth, if not ashes, we found bar after bar of gold bullion, gleaming dull ocher in the lantern light, heavy as the lead weights that lift and lower theatrical curtains across Europe.

Mr. Vanderbilt’s face was illuminated with wonder, not greed.

“You were absolutely right, Mrs. Norton. A king’s ransom. Or a . . . republic’s redemption. How did you know?”

“You owe this unexpected ‘gold strike’ to your sagacious grandfather, the Commodore, who made the railroad that ran through Nicaragua, making possible the discreet transfer of so much pure gold from California to New York almost thirty-five years ago, without either robbers or robber barons knowing anything of it.

“And,” she went on, for once she had the stage she felt unfinished leaving it without delivering an aria or a curtain speech, “you owe that act of legerdemain to a bold and adventuresome woman who called herself Lola Montez. She died virtually penniless in New York City a few years afterward, forgotten and unrewarded, yet in her notoriously excessive number of trunks your grandfather was able to secretly transfer his California investments made solid metal to this spot, the Vanderbilt family ‘vault’ indeed.

“And you owe it to your harried and underestimated father,” she added, “who followed your grandfather’s instructions to begin constructing this . . . fort under the guise of a mausoleum, without even knowing about the treasure hidden beneath its foundation.”

“I imagine,” Godfrey put in, “that the Vanderbilt family architect who created Vanderbilt Row, Richard Morris Hunt, would have been trusted to keep the secret of the gold vault beneath the burial vault.”

“My God!” Vanderbilt said. “And Hunt might have thought the secret had been duly passed on to the heirs. No wonder my father ordered the guards around-the-clock. We children thought it was for fear of grave robbers. A few years ago the remains of another business colossus were stolen and returned only after a sizable ransom had been paid. But he really must have been more concerned about this. I can’t believe it. For this Consuelo was taken! How did these madmen know? How far does the tunnel extend?”

Not very far, we soon found at Irene’s suggestion.

For as we pushed deeper into the unlit byway, we saw a beam of lantern light ahead!

We caught our breath as one to stand stock-still, and listen.

When we heard nothing after several moments, Irene produced her own pistol from a skirt pocket. We moved toward the distant light. I was reminded of Lola leading the miners to the site of the shots in the dark.

Would gunfire greet us when we found whoever had lit that light? Godfrey must have been thinking the same thing, for he’d pushed up alongside Irene.

So we followed that lone light to its source, where we found none other than Sherlock Holmes lounging atop another hoard of gold-stuffed sacks and smoking a pipe like an Irish leprechaun guarding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Everyone professed astonishment as well as relief, but I wasn’t surprised.

The
man would not give up a denouement, or a dramatic moment on center stage, any more easily than Irene.

It has been my principle to use females for the detection of crime . . . .
I can trace it back to the time I first hired Kate Warne . . .
and I intend to still use females . . . I must do it or falsify
my theory, practice and truth . . . female detectives
must be allowed in my Agency
.
—LETTER FROM ALLAN PINKERTON, FIGHTING HIS SON’S AND
UNDERLINGS’ INTENTIONS TO CLOSE THE “FEMALE DEPARTMENT,” 1876

What a merry group of treasure hunters assembled in the library of 660 Fifth Avenue that night!

Champagne flowed, although neither I nor Mr. Holmes partook.

He, however, did accept one of Mr. Vanderbilt’s exceedingly long Havana cigars, which also offered an unusually pungent aroma. But how could I complain? All the gentlemen were smoking, including Mr. Belmont, Godfrey, and Quentin.

Irene also restrained herself on this occasion. When I
leaned near to inquire why, she merely fanned herself with her fingers and commented that the room contained enough smoke already to hide Jumbo the elephant.

“Now,” Mr. Vanderbilt was saying, “I understand why my father insisted I follow my grandfather’s wishes in completing the family crypt, post haste. And now I understand why he wanted Pinkertons to guard it night and day.”

“Were you never meant to find the gold?” I asked.

“Of course I was. Perhaps the instructions got lost because of my father’s unexpected death, or in the drawn-out inheritance process. The Commodore’s will was quite nastily contested. The fact and location of so much gold had to be kept secret from all but the principal heir. I’ll discreetly question Hunt on the matter.”

I had to ask another undoubtedly ignorant question. “And what is the point of hiding it so well? What use would it be?”

Mr. Vanderbilt leaned back in his chair, smiling at me as contentedly as a man asked to tell a story by a favorite grandchild. I suppose that is what you get when you ask a multimillionaire to make something clear about money.

“Miss, uh, Moxleigh, you ask a timely question. Did my father expect his heirs to know of this hoard by instinct? Had he left instructions that were too cryptic? I can’t say. I do know that gold is soon bound to become a matter of great national importance. After the silver strike in Colorado followed the Gold Rush in California, a silver standard was adopted as well as a gold one, but that can’t last. It always comes down to gold in the end, and the American government has always been narrow-pocketed when it comes to gold.”

“Standard?” I asked in all ignorance.

“Simply put,” Godfrey said, “it means that a supply of hard gold backs up the government’s paper money. Silver certificates are available now too, due to the enormous amount of silver mined from the Rockies, but will likely not last as long as gold.”

“So,” I said, “for every piece of paper money, some tiny
part of an ounce of a hard gold bar lies in a vault somewhere to guarantee its worth.”

“Oh, no, Miss Huxleigh,” said the other millionaire in the room, Mr. Belmont. I much appreciated his accurate usage of my surname. No doubt my Worth gown at dinner last night was the reason. Clothes may make the man, but they make the woman memorable. “Paper money by nature propagates past the amount of gold behind it. That’s when governments falter, and sometimes fail.”

I still was not the master of international finance I’d hoped to be. “So everyone wants gold, but settles for paper money?”

The men chuckled in that self-satisfied way a woman less versed in manly matters like money can inspire.

“Amassing and holding such large amounts of gold,” Quentin explained, because he had not paused to chuckle, “is beyond the reach of most governments and more so of most individual men.”

“I beg to differ,” Mr. Vanderbilt said. “Here in the States, more than one millionaire is rumored to have huge stocks of gold. We Vanderbilts were not among them, until now.”

“And should never be known as one of that rare company,” Quentin said. “I hope our joint descent on the mausoleum didn’t alert any persons of ill intention.”

“I doubt it.” Mr. Belmont sounded certain. “The presence of two women among our party made us look like various Vanderbilt offspring inspecting the family plot. Perhaps we would appear a bit eccentric to do so at midnight, but American millionaires are known to be eccentric.”

“I’m glad,” Irene said, “that Nell and I proved useful for something.”

“More than useful,” Mr. Vanderbilt hastened to assure her. His irritated look at Mr. Belmont for the unconscious slight to his family seemed to penetrate deeper than this moment and this issue. “Mrs. Norton solved a riddle she wasn’t even invited to investigate in the first place. Perhaps, madam, you’d care to say how you suspected the mausoleum held gold as well the eventual family bones.”