An hour later, he was hurrying up the steps to the Tontine. It was the hour before luncheon, and trading was in full swing. The noise in the lobby was deafening, as groups of men spilled out of the dining hall. Each group had a nucleus, a single tense-faced man who listened intently as the others shouted at him and waved rolled-up sheaves of paper to attract his attention. Every few moments, the man in the middle would point at one of the other men and shout something back, at which point the chosen man would rush away, red faced and panting. None of it made any sense to Justy, but he was only interested in finding Cantillon. He shouldered his way into the dining room and towards the high white door that led to the kitchens.
The crowd seemed to ebb and flow as men rushed from one group to another, trying to get the best bid or offer for whatever it was they were selling. Before Justy had made it halfway across the room, the tide ran against him, and a short man with a crown of silver hair cannoned into him, shoving him against the long table. He upset a pot of coffee, and the hot black liquid spilled into the lap of a man in a shabby purple coat who was scribbling in a tattered ledger.
The man jumped to his feet, screeching in pain. “You goddamned slubberdegullion! Look what you’ve done!” He gestured at the crotch of his grubby white breeches, now stained with coffee.
“Sorry!” Justy pressed on. He reached the doorway. Thomas stood there, dressed in his immaculate white jacket, watching the mayhem in the crowd.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Flanagan,” Thomas said, as though Justy had strolled in for a light lunch.
“Good afternoon, Thomas.” Justy was breathless. “Have you seen Mr. Cantillon?”
Thomas gave him a steady look. “Not today, sir.”
“You there.” The man in the purple coat thrust his way through the crowd. He stopped and pointed at Justy. “You’ve damned well ruined my kicks, laddie. And you’re damned well going to pay for a new pair. What d’you say to that?” The man had thrown off his wig, and his hair stuck out in sweaty white wisps. His face was flushed red, and his pale blue eyes were watery. His nose and cheeks were pitted with pox scars. He looked like an old boar, spoiling for a fight.
Justy gave him a cool look. “It was an accident. I have apologized.”
The man screwed up his face and leaned forward. Spittle sprayed from his wet lips as he spoke. “These cost me five pounds in London, laddie. Five. Now they’re ruined. So, accident or not, you owe me.”
Justy drew himself up to his full height and stared down at the man, who was a good foot shorter and at least twenty years older. The man frowned and swayed back. “Don’t you threaten me.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
The man’s pink face turned red. “I’ll call you out, you young pup.”
Justy grinned. “Any time, old toast.”
There was a ripple of laughter. Several traders had taken a sudden interest in the spat. They whispered among one another, and then one of them, a skinny man with sunken eyes and a hawk’s beak of a nose, called out, “’Ware, Ramage. That’s Francie Flanagan’s boy. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up getting fleeced again!”
The men laughed, all except the purple-coated man, who flinched as though he had been struck. “Is this true?”
“True as the corns on your fizzog. He’s working with Carrots now.” The hawk-nosed man winked. “It’s just like the old days.”
The purple-coated man made a low noise in his throat. He spun on his heel and stared at Justy. His face was ivory white, his eyes now shiny with anger. “You filthy bog-landing madge. You dare show your face in here, after what your father did?”
Justy hesitated. He knew the man had come after him the first time to gull him out of a few dollars. His anger had been fake, and his aim had been to intimidate. But this was different. Justy looked into the man’s eyes and saw rage, the kind of unthinking, uncaring fury that drove men to kill. He was certain that if this man had a knife or a sword he would have been looking for a place in Justy’s guts to slide it home. He glanced about. The men gathered around them looked pink-cheeked and prosperous. Some were smiling at the theater playing out before them. But they all had the ruthless, dispassionate eyes of the professional deal maker.
The man called Ramage jabbed his finger at Justy’s chest. “Your money-grubbing foister of a father ruined me. Me and a thousand others. And if he hadn’t hanged himself, I’d have gutted him, like the filthy coward that he was.”
Justy grabbed Ramage by the throat. The man’s jowls were loose, stubbled with unshaven bristles that scratched at the skin of Justy’s hand. It was like gathering up a burlap sack, but as he tightened his grip he felt the familiar sensations of tendons, muscle, the ridges of the windpipe.
He squeezed, his whole body like a taut wire, the frenzy like a burning fuse. Ramage scratched at his hand, but Justy was oblivious.
“Justice!”
He let go. It was a moment before he realized where he was. The purple-coated man was lying on the floor, clutching his throat. A tall, dark-haired man was looking into Justy’s face. John Colley.
“Are you right?” Colley said.
“Aye.” He heard his voice, a long way away. He looked down at the man on the floor, who was staring up at him, eyes wide, trembling. He looked at the bloody scratches on his hand. “He called my father a thief. And a coward.”
Colley glanced around at the crowd. He put his arm around Justy’s shoulders. “You’d better come with me.”
* * *
The Club Room was empty. Colley led Justy across the soft blue carpet to the far corner of the room. The heavy door and thick drapes on the walls muted the sound of the crowd in the dining room to a faraway rumble.
Justy felt quite cool. Quite still. As though he was not quite part of the world around him.
“You had me worried there,” Colley said.
“I can look after myself.”
Colley smiled slightly. “It’s not you I was worried about. Another few seconds and you’d have killed that slug Ramage.”
“It takes a lot longer than a few seconds to strangle a man.”
Colley’s eyes were steady. “And where did you learn that?”
“In Ireland.”
They watched each other for a while. Justy broke the silence. “He said my father ruined a thousand men.”
Colley waved his hand. “Ramage is a broken-down Smithfield bargainer. He’s a pamphleteer who puts out a rag once a week that prints the prices of securities and fills the blank spaces with idle gossip. He hasn’t the wit to make his living from trade, so he just writes about others who do.”
“He was very specific about my father. And very angry. You don’t get that bent without a good reason.”
Colley walked to a long, low cabinet that ran along the back wall of the room. He opened one of the doors and took out a pair of small, fine-cut wineglasses and a decanter of a pale golden liquid.
“Sherry,” he said. The glass he handed to Justy reflected the sunlight, and it looked for a moment as though each panel had an individual rainbow painted on it. Justy drank off the glass and felt the warmth spread out from the pit of his stomach. “Is it true? About my father?”
Colley refilled Justy’s glass. “I told you before that your father had a reputation as an honest man. That was the truth. Everybody knew him as a plain dealer, and a man to be trusted. Everyone including William Duer.” He gave Justy a sharp look. “You know who Duer was?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Duer needed to raise capital. He had lost a lot of money buying shares in the Million Bank, and his creditors were restless. He needed cash, lots of it, and quickly. That’s where your father came in.”
“Raising the wind.”
Colley was very still. His eyes were like glass. “Raising the wind. Exactly.”
He poured Justy another drink. “Have you ever wondered why your father struggled to do well on Wall Street?”
Justy shrugged.
Colley sipped his sherry. “It’s not that he wasn’t intelligent. He was. Fiercely so. His problem was that he wasn’t ruthless.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“On Wall Street? It’s not called the Devil’s half mile for nothing. When you have a man on the hook to buy or sell, the last thing you want to do is make him think twice. But that’s what your father did. And too many men wriggled free. That’s why your father failed to find partners. Everyone knew he wasn’t a closer.”
“But Duer went into business with him.”
“Duer was desperate.” Colley stroked the sumptuous leather upholstery of his chair. “He needed money, so he created an investment opportunity. That was the easy part. His problem was raising the wind. For years Duer had been a master at it—he’d start rumors, put on great presentations, promise the earth. And it always worked. People would empty their bank accounts for him, because his ventures almost always paid off. But by the beginning of ’92, everything had changed. Everyone on the Street knew he was in debt up to his hairline. He couldn’t raise a fart, let alone the money he needed to break even.”
Justy’s glass was empty. He forced himself not to glance at the decanter on the table beside Colley. But he could feel the flush of the wine beginning to ebb. His head ached and he felt suddenly weary. “So Duer used my father.”
Colley nodded. “As I said, Francis had a reputation for honesty. Duer coached him in his presentation skills, and taught him how to resist his generous impulses, to go in for the kill.” Colley smiled and drank his sherry. “Their timing was perfect. There was a kind of stock fever on Wall Street back then. If you told the right story, men would fight each other to get a piece of your deal. A lot of people made a lot of money. But Francis raised a whirlwind. More than a million dollars. Much more than Duer needed.”
“So what happened?”
Colley shrugged. “The Panic. All of a sudden, everyone wanted their money back. Some got it, but a lot more didn’t.”
“Like Ramage?”
“Like Ramage.”
Justy thought for a moment. He remembered seeing less and less of his father in the days before his death. He would come home late at night, but instead of going to bed, he would pace about their new echoing, empty house on Dutch Street. Justy would lie in his bed and listen to his father’s footsteps, wearing circles into the floorboards of the rooms that he had never got around to furnishing. “What was the venture?”
Colley swilled his sherry in his glass and watched the viscous liquid slide down the crystal. “The rumor was Brazilian gold. Duer claimed his scouts found a seam of it in a place called New Lima, and that he contracted with the Portuguese officials to bring it out of the ground.”
Justy frowned. “You said it was a rumor? Was it real?”
“Who knows? Duer certainly had people all over the Southern Colonies looking for opportunities. But whether this was a real venture or just a way to raise money to cover his debts we’ll never know. Either way, the money disappeared, and, as Ramage said, a thousand people lost their savings.”
Justy looked away. He stared across the room at the door, over the ocean of blue carpet, the islands of comfortable leather chairs and carved tables. The image of his father seemed to hover at the edge of his vision. He couldn’t quite see it, but he knew it was there, waiting to overwhelm him as soon as he closed his eyes for more than a moment. His stomach was sour, and he felt the sweat under his arms. “Who else was in the deal?” His voice sounded hoarse.
“What do you mean?”
“The partners. Duer, my father, Isaac Whippo. Who else?”
Colley sipped his sherry. “Yes, Whippo was part of it. He was part of everything Duer ever did. But he was merely a whipper-in. Do you know the term? It’s the huntsman who calls the hounds together. That was Isaac. Your father sold them; Isaac made sure they paid. He had no money of his own.”
“Who else?”
Colley looked surprised. He put down his sherry. “Why, Carrots of course.”
Justy felt a cold sensation. “Cantillon was a partner?”
“He didn’t tell you? I’m surprised. Who do you think did all the legal work and the conveyancing?”
Justy swallowed, but his mouth was dry. His throat ached. “How do you know this?”
“There’s not many that didn’t know, I’d say. He and Francis were knotted so tight; they may as well have been spliced. Duer brought them on as a package.” Colley frowned and cocked his head on one side. “He really didn’t tell you?”
Justy said nothing. There was a dull ache in his guts. He realized he’d put nothing in his stomach all day, other than the mouthful of ale he’d swallowed at the Seagull. But he knew that wasn’t what was making him feel ill. He thought about Cantillon’s evasiveness. Justy knew he’d been lying when he claimed not to know about his father’s business, but he hadn’t expected this. And he knew he should have. His father had trusted Cantillon. They had been old friends. There weren’t many Irishmen connected to the investing community, after all. Justy knew all this, and yet he hadn’t seen the truth. Hadn’t wanted to see.
He pushed himself out of his chair. “I have to find him.”
“What d’you mean?” Colley put down his glass. “He’s not here?”
Justy shook his head. “We were together earlier. At his house. He was … upset.”
Colley sighed. “Was he drinking?”
“A little.”
“Poor Carrots. Well, if the past is any indication, he’ll dust it away through the wee hours, then crawl back to his house in the morning. You’ll be lucky if you find him before then.”
“I have to try.”
Justy made his way across the lush carpet to the door. He could hear the sound of men shouting in the lobby. As he opened the door he looked back to see Colley staring at him thoughtfully from across the room.