Part 2 (1/2)

Boyton wanted to pay Darius for 'his' inventions, but I stopped him. Instead I demanded ten cents in the dollar for everything earned by those six rides, for a period of ten years. Boyton had sunk everything he had into his funfair and was deep in debt. Within a month those rides, monitored by Darius, were bringing in a hundred dollars a week to us alone. But there was much more to come.

The successor to political boss McKane was a red-haired firebrand called George Tilyou. He too wanted to open a funfair and cash in on the boom. Regardless of the rage of Boyton, who could do nothing about it, I designed even more ingenious diversions for Tilyou's enterprise on the same basis, a percentage franchise. Steeplechase Park opened in 1897 and began to bring us a thousand dollars a day. By then I had bought and moved to a pleasant bungalow nearer to Manhattan Beach. Neighbours were few and mostly at weekends, times when I was, in my clown's costume, circulating freely among the tourists between the two amus.e.m.e.nt parks.

There were frequent boxing tournaments on Coney Island with very heavy betting by the millionaire gentry arriving on the new elevated train from Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan Beach Hotel. I watched but did not gamble, convinced that most fights were fixed. Gambling was illegal throughout New York and Brooklyn, indeed all of New York State. But on Coney Island, last outpost of the Crime Frontier, huge sums changed hands as bookmakers took the gamblers' money. In 1899 Jim Jeffries challenged Bob Fitzsimmons for the world heavyweight t.i.tle - on Coney Island. Our joint fortune was by then $250,000 and I intended to place it all on the challenger, Jeffries, at long odds. Darius almost went mad with rage until I explained my idea.

I had noticed that between rounds the fighters almost always took a long swig of fresh water from a bottle, sometimes but not always spitting it out. At my instruction Darius, masquerading as a sports reporter, simply switched Fitzsimmons's bottle for one laced with sedative. Jeffries knocked him out. I collected a million dollars. Later that year Jeffries defended his t.i.tle against Sailor Tom Sharkey at the Coney Island Athletic Club. Same scam, same result. Poor Sharkey. We netted two million. It was time to move up-island and upmarket, for I had been studying the affairs of an even wilder and more lawless funfair for the making of money: the New York Stock Exchange. But there was still one last strike to be made on Coney Island.

Two hustlers called Frederic Thompson and Skip Dundy were desperate to open a third and even bigger amus.e.m.e.nt park. The first was an alcoholic engineer and the second a stuttering financier, and so urgent was their need for cash that they were already into the banks for more than they were worth. I had Darius create a 'sh.e.l.l' company, a loan corporation which stunned them by offering an unsecured loan at zero interest. Instead, the E.M. Corporation wanted 10 per cent of the gross take of Luna Park for a decade. They agreed. They had no choice; it was that or bankruptcy with a half-finished funfair. Luna Park opened on 2 May 1903. At 9 a.m. Thompson and Dundy were bankrupt. At sundown they had paid off all their debts - bar mine. Within the first four months Luna Park had grossed five million dollars. It levelled at a million a month and still does. By then we had moved to Manhattan.

I started in a modest brownstone house, staying inside most of the time, for here the clown's disguise was useless. Darius joined the Stock Exchange on my behalf, following my instructions as I pored over corporate reports and the details of new share issues. It soon became plain that in this amazing country everything was booming. New ideas and projects, if skilfully promoted, were immediately subscribed. The economy was expanding at a lunatic rate, pus.h.i.+ng westwards and ever westwards. With every new industry there was a demand for raw materials, along with s.h.i.+ps and railroads to deliver them and haul away the product to the waiting markets.

Through the years I had been on Coney Island the immigrants had been pouring in by the million from every land to east and west. The Lower East Side, almost beneath my terrace as I now look down, was and remains a vast teeming cauldron of every race and creed living cheek by jowl in poverty, violence, vice and crime. Only a mile away the super-rich have their mansions, their coaches and their beloved opera.

By 1903, after a few mishaps, I had mastered the intricacies of the stock market and worked out how the giants like Pierpont Morgan had made their fortunes. Like them I moved into coal in West Virginia, steel in Pittsburgh, railroads out to Texas, s.h.i.+pping from Savannah via Baltimore to Boston, silver in New Mexico and property throughout Manhattan Island. But I became better and harder than them, through single-minded wors.h.i.+p of the only true G.o.d, to whom Darius had led me. For this is Mammon the G.o.d of gold who permits no mercy, no charity, no compa.s.sion and no scruple. There is no widow, no child, no pauper wretch who cannot be crushed a little more for a few extra granules of the precious metal that so pleases the master. With the gold comes the power and with the power even more gold in one glorious world-conquering cycle.

In all things I am and remain Darius's master and superior. In all things save one. Never was created on this planet a colder or more cruel man. A creature more dead of soul never walked. In this he is beyond me. And yet he has his weakness. Just one. On a certain night, curious about his rare absences, I had him followed. He went to a den in the Moorish community and there took has.h.i.+sh until he was in a sort of trance. It seems this is his only flaw. Once I thought he might be my friend, but I have long since learned he has but one; his wors.h.i.+p of gold consumes him night and day, and he stays with me and loyal to me only because I can spin it in endless quant.i.ties.

By 1903 I had enough to undertake the construction of the highest skysc.r.a.per in New York, the E.M. Tower on a vacant lot on Park Row. It was completed in 1904, forty storeys of steel, concrete, granite and gla.s.s. And the real beauty is that the thirty-seven storeys let out beneath me have paid for it all and the value has doubled. That leaves one suite for the corporation staff, linked by phone and ticker-tape to the markets; a floor above being half of it the apartment of Darius and half the corporate boardroom; and above them all my own penthouse with its upper terrace dominating everything I can see and yet ensuring that I myself cannot be seen.

So ... my cage on wheels, my gloomy cellars have become an eyrie in the sky where I can walk unmasked and none to see my face from h.e.l.l but the pa.s.sing gulls and the wind from the south. And from here I can even see the finally finished and gleaming roof of my one and single indulgence, my one project that is not dedicated to making more money but to the extraction of revenge.

Far in the distance at West 34th Street stands the newly completed Manhattan Opera House, the rival that will set the sn.o.bby Metropolitan by the ears. When I came here I wanted to see opera again, but of course I needed a screened and curtained box at the Met. The committee there, dominated by Mrs Astor and her cronies of the social register, the d.a.m.nable Four Hundred, required me to appear in person for an interview. Impossible, of course. I sent Darius, but they refused to accept him, demanding to see me in person and face to face. They will pay for that insult. For I found another opera-lover who had been snubbed. Oscar Hammerstein, having already opened one opera house and failed, was financing and designing a new one. I became his invisible partner. It will open in December and will wipe the floor with the Met. No expense will be spared. The great Bonci will star but most of all Melba herself, yes Melba, will come and sing. Even now Hammerstein is at Garnier's Grand Hotel on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, spending my money to bring her to New York.

An unprecedented feat. I will make those sn.o.bs, the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Whitneys, Goulds, Astors and Morgans crawl before they listen to the great Melba.

For the rest, I look out and I look down. Yes, and back. A life of pain and rejection, of fear and hatred: you of me and I of you. Only one showed me kindness, took me from a cage to a cellar and then to a s.h.i.+p when the rest were hunting me like a winded fox; one who was like the mother I hardly had or knew.

And one other, whom I loved but who could not love me. You despise me for that also, Human Race? Because I could not make a woman love me as a man? But there was one moment, one short time, like Chesterton's donkey 'one far fierce hour and sweet' when I thought I might be loved ... Ashes, cinders, nothing. Not to be. Never to be. So there can only be the other love, the devotion to the master who never lets me down. And him I will wors.h.i.+p all my life.

3.

THE DESPAIR OF ARMAND DUFOUR.

BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 1906.

I HATE THIS CITY. I SHOULD NEVER HAVE COME. WHY on earth did I come? Because of the wish of a woman dying in Paris who, for all I know, may well have been deranged. And for the bag of gold Napoleons, of course. But even that, perhaps I should never have taken it.

Where is this man to whom I am supposed to deliver a letter that makes no sense? All Fr Sebastien could tell me was that he is hideously disfigured and should therefore be noticeable. But it is the reverse; he is invisible.

I am becoming every day more sure that he never got here. No doubt he was refused entry by the officers at Ellis Island. I went there - what chaos. The whole world of the poor and the dispossessed seems to be pouring into this country and most of them remain right here in this awful city. I have never seen so many down-and-outs: columns of shabby refugees, smelly, even louse-ridden from the voyage in stinking holds, clutching ragged parcels with all their worldly possessions, filing in endless ranks through those bleak buildings on that hopeless island. Towering over them all from the other island is the statue that we gave them. The lady with the torch. We should have told Bartholdi to keep his d.a.m.n statue in France and given the Yankees something else instead. A good set of Larousse dictionaries perhaps, so they could have learned a civilized language.

But no, we had to give them something symbolic. Now they have turned it into a magnet for every derelict in Europe and far beyond to come flocking in here looking for a better life. Quelle blague! Quelle blague! They are crazy, these Yankees. How do they ever expect to create a nation by letting such people in? The rejects from every country between Bantry Bay and Brest-Litovsk, from Trondheim to Taormino. What do they expect? To make a rich and powerful nation one day out of this rabble? They are crazy, these Yankees. How do they ever expect to create a nation by letting such people in? The rejects from every country between Bantry Bay and Brest-Litovsk, from Trondheim to Taormino. What do they expect? To make a rich and powerful nation one day out of this rabble?

I went to see the Chief Immigration Officer. Thank G.o.d, he had a French-speaker available. But he said though few were turned back those clearly diseased or deformed were rejected, so my man would almost certainly have been among that group. Even if he did get in, it has been twelve years. He could be anywhere in this country and it is three thousand miles from east to west.

So I returned to the city authorities, but they pointed out there were five boroughs and virtually no residence records. The man could be in Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island. So I have no choice but to stay here on Manhattan Island and seek this runaway from justice. What a task for a good Frenchman!

They have records at City Hall listing a dozen Muhlheims, and I have tried them all. If his name was Smith I would go home now. They even have many telephones here, and a list of those who own them, but no Erik Muhlheim. I have asked the taxation authorities but they say their records are confidential.

The police were better. I found an Irish sergeant who said he would search, for a fee. I know d.a.m.n well the 'fee' went into his trouser pocket. But he went away and came back to say that no Muhlheim had ever been in trouble with the police but he had half a dozen Mullers if that was any help. Imbecile.

There is a circus out on Long Island and I went there. Another blank. I tried their great hospital called Bellevue but they have no record of a man so deformed ever presenting himself for treatment. I can think of nowhere else to go.

I lodge in a modest hotel in the back streets behind this great boulevard. I eat their horrible stews and drink their awful beer. I sleep in a narrow cot and wish I was back in my apartment on the Ile St Louis, warm and comfortable and pressed against the fine fat b.u.t.tocks of Mme Dufour. It is getting colder and the money is running short. I want to return to my beloved Paris, to a civilized city where people walk instead of running everywhere, a place where the carriages drive sedately instead of racing like maniacs and the trams are not a danger to life and limb.

To make matters worse I thought I could speak some words of the perfidious language of Shakespeare, for I have seen and heard the English milords who come to race their horses at Auteuil and Chantilly, but here they speak through their noses and very very fast.

Yesterday I saw an Italian coffee-shop on this same street serving good mocha and even Chianti wine. Not Bordeaux, of course, but better than that p.i.s.s-making Yankee beer. Ah, I see it even now, across this deadly dangerous street. I will take a good strong coffee for my nerves' sake, then return and book my pa.s.sage home.

4.

THE LUCK OF CHOLLY BLOOM.

LOUIE'S BAR, FIFTH AVENUE AT 28TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 1906 I TELL YOU GUYS, THERE ARE TIMES WHEN BEING A reporter in the fastest, hummingest city in the world is the greatest job on earth. OK, we all know that there are hours and days of foot-slogging and nothing to show for it; leads that go nowhere, interviews rebuffed, no story. Right? Barney, can we have another round of beers here?

Yep, there are times when there's no scandal at City Hall (not many, of course), no celebrity divorce, no bodies at dawn in Central Park and life loses its sparkle. Then you think: what am I doing here, why am I wasting my time? Maybe I really should have taken over my dad's outfitters in Poughkeepsie. We all know the feeling.

But that's the point. That's what makes it better than selling men's pants in Poughkeepsie. Suddenly out of left field something happens and, if you're smart, you see a great story right within your grasp. Happened to me yesterday. Gotta tell you about it. Thanks, Barney.

It was in this coffee-shop. You know Fellini's? On Broadway at Twenty-sixth. A bad day. Spent most of it chasing up a new lead on the Central Park murders and nothing. The Mayor's office is screaming at the Bureau of Detectives and they have nothing new, so they're in a temper and saying nothing worth printing. I face the prospect of going back to city desk to say I don't even have a column-inch worth printing. So I thought I'll go in and have one of Papa Fellini's fudge sundaes. Plenty of maple. You know the one? Keeps you going.

So it's crowded. I take the last booth. Ten minutes later a guy walks in looking miserable as sin. He looks around, sees I have a booth to myself and walks over. Very polite. Bows. I nod. He says something in a foreign lingo. I point to the spare chair. He sits down and orders a coffee. Only he doesn't p.r.o.nounce it kauphy, he says kaffay. The waiter's Italian, so that's fine by him. Only I reckon this guy is probably French. Why? He just looked French. So, being polite, I greeted him. In French.

Do I speak French? Is the Chief Rabbi Jewish? Well, all right, a little French. So I says to him, 'Bonjewer, Mon-sewer.' Just trying to be a good New Yorker.

Well, this Frenchie goes crazy. He launches into a torrent of French that is way above my head. And he's distressed, nearly in tears. Reaches into his pocket and brings out a letter, very important-looking, with wax over the flap and a kind of seal. Waves it in my face.

Now at this point I am still trying to be nice to a visitor in distress. The temptation is to finish the ice-cream, throw down a dime and get out of there. But instead I think, what the h.e.l.l, let's try and help this guy because he seems to have had a worse day than I have, and that is saying something. So I call over Papa Fellini and ask if he speaks French. No chance. Italian or English only and even the English with a Sicilian accent. Then I think: who speaks French around here?

Now you guys would have shrugged and walked out, right? And you'd have missed something. But I'm Cholly Bloom, the sixth-sense man. And what stands just one block away at Twenty-sixth and Fifth? Delmonico's. And who runs Delmonico's? Why, Charlie Delmonico. And where does the Delmonico family come from? All right, Switzerland, but over there they speak all the languages and even though Charlie was born in the States I figure he probably has a little French.

So I wheel the Frenchie out of there and ten minutes later we are outside the most famous restaurant in the whole of the United States. You guys ever been in there? No? Well, it's something else. Polished mahogany, plum velvet, solid bra.s.s table lamps, seriously elegant. And expensive. More than I can afford. And up comes Charlie D. himself and he knows it. But that's the mark of a great restaurateur, right? Perfect manners, even to a tramp off the street. He bows and asks in what manner he can help. I explain that I have come across this Frenchie over from Paris and that he has a major problem with a letter but I cannot understand what it is.

Well, Mr D. makes a polite enquiry of the Frenchman, in French, and the guy is at it again, going like a Gatling gun and producing his letter. I can't follow a word so I look around. Five tables away is Bet-a-Million Gates going through the menu from the date to the toothpick. Just beyond him is Diamond Jim Brady early-dining with Lillian Russell who has a decolletage decolletage to sink the SS to sink the SS Majestic Majestic. By the by, you know how Diamond Jim eats? I'd been told it but I never believed it; last night I saw it for real. He plants himself in his chair, measures an exact five inches, no more and no less, between his stomach and the table. Then he moves no more, but eats until his belly touches the table.

By this time Charlie D. has finished. He explains to me the Frenchie is a Mon-sewer Armand Dufour, a lawyer from Paris, who has come to New York on a mission of crucial importance. He has to deliver a letter from a dying woman to a certain Mr Erik Muhlheim who may or may not be a resident of New York. He has tried every avenue and come up with a blank. At that point, so do I. Never heard of anybody of that name.

But Charlie is stroking his beard like he is thinking hard, then he says to me: 'Mr Bloom' - real formal - 'have you heard of the E.M. Corporation?'

Now, I ask you, is the Pope Catholic? Of course I've heard of it. Incredibly rich, amazingly powerful and totally secretive. More shares of more pies quoted on the Stock Exchange than anyone barring J. Pierpont Morgan and no-one is richer than J.P. So, not to be outdone, I say: sure, based at the E.M. Tower building on Park Row.