Hays was in the lobby of the Hall, talking with a tall man in a long overcoat, buttoned to the neck. The man’s right eye was gone, closed by a thick, pale mass of scar tissue. His good eye glanced at Justy as he approached, then the man nodded to Hays and walked away, the heels of his boots loud on the stone floor.
“Who was that?” Justy asked.
Hays gave Justy a cold look. “I have been looking for you.”
“Good. Because I have to tell you something.”
“I hope it has nothing to do with either the Riker or the Beaulieu families.”
“Then you will be disappointed. Because it has to do with both.”
Hays drew himself up. “I told you to stay away from them. My orders were quite specific.”
“They were. But as you once told me yourself, High Constable, evidence is evidence, and wherever it leads us, it is our duty to follow.”
Hays said nothing for a moment. He stared at Justy, his jaw tight. “Very well,” he said. “Come with me.”
Rather than turning to go up the stairs to his office, Hays walked out into the street. The sky above them was a like a sheet of pounded metal. Hays went quickly down the steps, turning right up the hill and then right again on Nassau Street. Justy had to press himself against a wall to avoid being spattered by mud as a cart rattled by. He saw Hays duck under the lintel of a small tavern a few yards down.
It was dark inside the drinking hole, and he had to blink several times before his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The High Constable was sitting on a low bench wedged into the near corner, under a dusty window set high in the wall. He folded his arms. “Very well. Out with it.”
Justy decided not to ask why they were in a Nassau Street boozing ken, and not in Hays’ office. He sat down on the bench. “I think Tobias Riker is buying land.”
“What of it?”
“The land is here. On Manhattan Island.”
Hays shook his head. “Not possible. Tobias Riker is on the Planning Commission. And all Commission members are banned from property purchases in New York County until five years after the plan is made public.”
I know. Which is why he’s using a third party to buy the land for him.”
“Who?”
“Umar.”
Hays leaned back on the banquette and peered down his nose. “Explain.”
Justy shifted, so that he could look the High Constable full in the face. “Look, Jake, you only have to glance at a newspaper to know the whole city’s trying to guess what the Planning Commission’s survey will say, and where the main roads will go. And no one wants to know more than your speculator friends in the Tontine.”
“They’re not my friends. And I have no knowledge of what the commission has or has not discussed, as well you know.”
“I do. But don’t tell me that every time you go in there some cove doesn’t sidle up and ask you to whid the scrap. What do they promise you?”
“The world, usually.” Hays looked as though he had tasted something sour. “That bumptious prig Joseph Langham offered me forty percent yesterday, if I could tell him whether it was worth buying the Stuyvesant place. Which is precisely why the Mayor selected men of considerable means to serve on the Commission. They’re all wealthy enough that they won’t be tempted to indulge in that kind of speculation.”
“And what if it turned out that one of them wasn’t quite as wealthy as he made out? What if he was close to bankrupt, and therefore highly susceptible to temptation?”
Hays flicked the idea away. “These are public men. It would be impossible for someone to keep up such a pretense for long. And even if he did, how could he get around the five-year moratorium? No. There’s no way he could get away with it.”
“He could if he were clever. And if he were patient. And if he worked with a buyer with whom he had no connection. Someone invisible.”
Hays said nothing. And then he nodded towards the counter at the far end of the tavern. “A stoup of tickle here, if you will, Sam. And a brace of glasses.”
They waited until the landlord had set a dusty bottle on the table beside them. Hays poured a viscous amber slug into a glass, and pushed it at Justy. “Someone invisible?”
The liquor smelled like overripe fruit. “When the Mohammedans arrived here, however many years ago, they were led by a man named Absalom. We know him as Umar Salam now, but he’s been buying land under a version of his original name.”
“I doubt it.” Hays’ Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed half his drink. “Legal it may be, but we both know that it’ll be a chilly afternoon in Hades before any New Yorker dares sell property to a black man. Or any judge dredges up the sand to sign the papers.”
“Which is why Umar does what all wealthy property owners do. He uses an attorney.”
Hays was silent. He turned his glass in his hands. “What land has he bought?”
“Parts of the Lispenard estate, up by Canvas Town. The meadows and the marshland that runs up to the Broad Way.”
“The compound.”
“Not yet.”
“Papers?”
“There’s a file in the State Comptroller’s agent’s office. It names a John Absalom as the buyer and Lucius Lispenard as the seller.”
Hays sighed. “I’m sure I should ask how you know about the contents of a file that should by all rights be safe under lock and key in the offices of Robert Shard, attorney-at-law.”
“Better for both of us if you don’t.” Justy picked up his glass, and drank it off. Armagnac, thick with sugar and heavy with the taste of Normandy apples. The liquor spread like an oil slick across his tongue and burned a long trail down into the pit of his stomach. He exhaled heavily, tears in his eyes and the afterburn from the liquor scalding the roof of his mouth.
Hays chuckled. “Not bad, eh? Liberated a case of it from a French privateer last year. I pay Sam here rent, and he keeps his mouth shut for me. Another?”
“Why not?”
Hays refilled the glass. “So. Why buy a swathe of marshland that’ll take decades to make fit for development?”
“Precisely because of that. The surveyors will tell the Commission that the marshes are practically useless. Which means the city’s development plans won’t include them. So no one will give a damn who owns them. They’ll be worth next to nothing. But what would happen if, in just five years’ time, those lands turned out to be suitable for development after all?”
“In five years? They’d be worth a fortune. But how, exactly, would that come to pass?”
Justy leaned forward. “I was up on the Broad Way the other day. There’s a great view down over Canvas Town, if you ever care to look. It’s hard to pick out the boundaries of the compound, but I noticed a few things. The first is that our friend Umar has extended his walls quite a way north. Much further than you’d think possible, given the marsh. The second is that there are people working the marshlands and the meadow inland.”
“Fishing for eels?”
“Perhaps. But they didn’t look like eelers to me. It looked like they were digging.”
Hays sipped. “Go on.”
“Umar told me that he escaped from a coastal island in the Carolinas. There are rice plantations there, whose owners buy slaves from parts of Africa where they’ve been growing rice for generations, using some very specific techniques. Like land drainage. And flood control.”
A slow smile spread across Hay’s face. “The sneaky devil! He’s draining the meadowlands, right under our noses.”
“And not just the meadows. The papers in Shard’s office suggest he has his eye on the Collect Pond, too.”
Hays laughed. “He’s mad. You remember what people said about poor Jacob Brown when he proposed the same thing last year. They laughed him out of committee!”
Justy shrugged. “We know how to reclaim land along the waterfront well enough. Why not do the same thing with the Collect? Turn Hudson’s Kill into a canal to channel water from the pond to the river, and just fill the damned thing in.”
Hays snorted. “And where the hell would you get enough sand to fill in the pond? Drag it up from the river? Perhaps you’d level Bayard’s Mount?”
“I’m not an engineer. But I’m sure Umar has some idea.”
Hays sipped his Armagnac. “Very well, then. Say you have this correct, that Umar has bought the meadowlands and plans to make them developable. Where does Riker come in?”
“His fingers are stuck into several parts of the pie. The Millennium Bank is the guarantor of the sale. It lent Umar ninety percent of the purchase price. Riker got Chase Beaulieu a job as a surveyor, more than likely to keep him apprised of how the chief surveyor would classify the meadows. Perhaps even to have Beaulieu survey them himself, and pronounce them undevelopable. Finally, Riker’s carriage has been making regular trips up and down to the compound, several times a week. Quite often with a property lawyer on board.”
Hays sniffed. “It’s all very circumstantial.”
“I agree, it is. Until you consider that the lawyer in question is Robert Shard.”
Hays blinked. “You’re telling me the very man tasked with ratifying and approving the purchases of land in the State of New York is acting as a land agent to a runaway slave? How in God’s name is that happening?”
“Well, Shard’s a Puritan, but I’m told he has a yen for the seamier attractions of the city. I think Riker found out, and blackmailed him into helping Umar buy the land.”
“So that Riker can then buy the land from Umar at a later date?”
“He might do that, although I’m willing to bet that if the plan is to buy from Umar, the deal has already been done, and Riker will just need to backdate the papers, once the moratorium on land purchases has expired. Or, Umar could simply default on his loan, making the Millennium Bank the owner. Then Riker could buy the land from the bank in five years’ time.”
“At a nice discount.”
“No doubt.”
Hays nodded. “I see the sense of it. But it’s damned risky. What if he gets caught?”
“By whom? You said yourself, no one’s going to investigate Riker. He’s too powerful.”
Hays nodded again, slower this time, as though he was tasting the theory. “This is all very well. But what does Umar get?”
“I don’t know. It’s the one part of this I can’t work out.”
“Money?”
“I’m sure, but there has to be more. Perhaps Umar really does have an eye on draining the Collect and building a new compound there.”
“It would hardly increase the value of the land if a fort full of Negroes were camped on the edge of it.”
Justy shrugged. “I can’t think of anything else.”
Hays sat in the silence, thinking. “So what can you prove?”
“It depends on Shard. A man like that might prefer to die than stand up in court and confess the kinds of sins he’s being blackmailed for. But we can squeeze him a little, to see if he’ll talk.”
Hays held his glass up to the wan light coming though the grubby window and examined the liquid. “You have built quite a case, Justice. Despite my instructions.”
“The evidence—”
“Hang the evidence. You had it out for young Riker over the girl. You just happen to have scraped this up instead.”
“I think the two might still be connected.”
Hays drained his glass.
“I look forward to seeing what contortions you perform to prove it.”