The Phantom Of Manhattan (1999) Read online

  Secondly, never stop learning. There is no end to the process. Be like a squirrel. Store pieces of information and insight that come your way; you never know when that tiny piece of intelligence will be the clinching explanation to a jigsaw of the otherwise unexplainable.

  Thirdly, you have to develop a ‘nose’ for a story. Meaning a kind of sixth sense, an awareness that something is not quite right, that there is something odd going on and no-one else can see it. If you never develop this nose, you will perhaps be competent and conscientious, a credit to the job. But stories will pass you by unsuspected; you will attend the official briefings and be told what the powers that be want you to know. You will report faithfully what they said, false or true. You will take your salary cheque and go home, a good job well done. But you will not, without the nose, ever stroll into the bar on an adrenalin high knowing that you have just blown apart the biggest scandal of the year because you noticed something odd in a chance remark, a column of doctored figures, an unjustified acquittal, a suddenly dropped charge and all your colleagues failed to spot it. There is in our job nothing quite like that adrenalin high; it is like winning a Grand Prix, to know that you have just filed a major exclusive and blown the competing media to hell.

  We journalists are never destined to be loved. Like cops, this is something we just have to accept if we want to take up our strange career. But, though they may not like us, the high and the mighty need us.

  The movie star may push us aside as he stalks to his limousine, but if the Press fails to mention him or his movies, fails to print his picture or monitor his comings and goings for a couple of months, his agent is soon screaming for attention.

  The politician may denounce us when he is in power, but try ignoring him totally when he is running for election or has some self-praising triumph to announce and he will plead for some coverage.

  It pleases the high and the mighty to look down on the Press but, boy, do they need us. For they live on and off the publicity that only we can give them. The sports stars want their performances to be reported, as the sports fans want to know. The society hostesses direct us to the tradesman’s entrance but if we ignore their charity balls and their social conquests they are distraught.

  Journalism is a form of power. Badly used, power is a tryanny; well and carefully used it is a requirement without which no society can survive and prosper. But that brings us to rule four: it is not our job ever to join the Establishment, to pretend that we have, by close juxtaposition, actually joined the high and the mighty. Our job in a democracy is to probe, to uncover, to check, to expose, to unveil, to question, to interrogate. Our job is to disbelieve, until that which we are being told can be proved to be true. Because we have power, we are besieged by the mountebanks, the phoneys, the charlatans, the snake-oil salesmen - in finance, commerce, industry, showbiz, and above all politics.

  Your masters must be Truth and the reader, no-one else. Never fawn, never cower, never be bullied into submission and never forget that the reader with his dime has as much right to your effort and your respect, as much right to hear the truth as the Senate. Remain therefore sceptical in the face of power and privilege and you will do us all credit.

  And now, because the hour is late and you are no doubt tired of study, I will fill what remains of this period by telling a story. A story about a story. And no, it is not a story in which I was the triumphant hero, but just the opposite. It was a story that I failed to see unravelling all around me because I was young and brash and I failed to understand what I was really witnessing.

  It was also a story, the only one in my life, that I never wrote up. I never filed it though the archives do retain the basic outlines that were released eventually to the Press by the Police Department. But I was there; I saw it all, I ought to have known but I failed to spot it. That was partly why I never filed it. But also partly because there are somethings that happen to people which, if exposed to the world, will destroy them. Some deserve it and I have met them: Nazi generals, Mafia bosses, corrupt labour chiefs and venal politicians. But most people do not deserve to be destroyed and the lives of some are already so tragic that exposure of their misery would only double their pain. All this for a few column inches to wrap tomorrow’s fish? Maybe, but even though I then worked for Randolph Hearst’s yellow press and would have been fired if the editor had ever found out, what I saw was too sad for me to file and I let it go. Now, forty years on, it matters not much any more.

  It was in the winter of 1906. I was twenty-four, a New York street kid proud to be a reporter on the American and loving it. When I look back at what I was I stand amazed at my own impudence. I was brash, full of myself but understood very little.

  That December the city was playing host to one of the most famous opera singers in the world, a certain Christine de Chagny. She had come to star in the opening week of a new opera house, the Manhattan Opera, which went out of business three years later. She was thirty-two, beautiful and very charming. She had brought her twelve-year-old son, Pierre, along with a maid and the boy’s tutor, an Irish priest called Father Joseph Kilfoyle. Plus two male secretaries. She arrived without her husband six days before her inaugural appearance at the opera house on 3 December and her husband joined her on a later ship on the 2nd, having been detained by the affairs of his estates in Normandy.

  I know nothing of opera, but her appearance caused a major stir because no singer of her eminence had till then crossed the Atlantic to star in New York. She was the toast of the town. By a combination of luck and good old-fashioned chutzpah I had managed to persuade her to allow me to be her guide to New York and its various sights and spectacles. It was a dream of an assignment. She was so hounded by the Press that her host, the opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein, had forbidden all access to her before the gala opening. Yet here was I, with access to her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, able to file daily bulletins on her itinerary and engagements. Thanks to this my career on the American City Desk was taking off in leaps and bounds.

  Yet there was something mysterious and strange going on all around us and I failed to spot it. The ‘something’ involved a bizarre and elusive figure who seemed to appear and disappear at will and who clearly was playing some kind of role behind the scenes.

  First there had been a letter, brought personally by the hand of a lawyer from Paris, France. By a complete coincidence I had helped deliver that letter to the headquarters of one of the richest and most powerful corporations in New York. There, in the boardroom, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the man behind the corporation, the one to whom the letter was addressed. He was staring straight at me from a spyhole in the wall, a terrifying face covered in a mask. I thought little more about it, and no-one believed me anyway.

  Within four weeks the prima donna scheduled for the inaugural gala of the Manhattan Opera had been cancelled and the French diva invited over at an astronomical fee. From Paris, France. Rumours also started that Oscar Hammerstein had a secret and even richer backer, an invisible financier/partner who had ordered him to make the change. I should have suspected the connection, but did not.

  On the day the lady arrived at the quayside on the Hudson, the strange phantom appeared again. This time I did not see him, but a colleague did. The description was identical: a lone figure in a mask, standing atop a warehouse watching the prima donna from Paris arrive in New York. Again I failed to see the connection. Later it was obvious that he had sent for her, overruling Hammerstein. But why? I found out eventually but by then it was too late.

  As I said, I met the lady, she seemed to like me and allowed me into her suite for an exclusive interview. There her son unwrapped an anonymous present, a musical box in the form of a monkey. When Mme de Chagny heard the tune it played she looked as if she had been struck by lightning. She whispered, ‘“Masquerade”. Twelve years ago. He must be here,’ and still for me the light refused to go on.

  She was desperate to trace the source of the monkey-doll, and I figured it must h
ave come from a toyshop at Coney Island. Two days later we all went there, with me acting as guide to the party. Again, something very strange happened and once again no alarm bells rang.

  The party consisted of me, the prima donna, her son Pierre and his tutor, Father Joe Kilfoyle.

  Because I had no interest in the toys, I handed Mme de Chagny and her son over to the care of the Funmaster, who was in overall charge of the fair. I did not bother to enter the toyshop myself. I should have done, for I learned later that the man showing the child and his mother around was none other than a most sinister figure calling himself Malta, whom I had seen weeks earlier while delivering the letter from Paris, but then he had gone by the name of Darius. Later I learned from the Funmaster, who was present throughout, that this man had offered his services as an expert on toys, but in truth spent his time quietly interrogating the boy about his parentage.

  Anyway, I walked by the sea’s edge with the Catholic priest while the boy and his mother examined the toys inside the shop. It seems there were racks of these monkey toys, but not one played the strange tune I had heard the first one play in her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.

  Then she went off with the Funmaster to examine a place called the Hall of Mirrors. Again, I did not go in. Anyway, I was not invited. Finally I returned to the funfair to see if the party was ready to leave and return to Manhattan.

  I saw the Irish priest escorting the boy back to the coach we had hired at the train station and noticed but only vaguely that another coach was almost beside it. That was odd because the place was deserted.

  I was halfway between the gate and the Hall of Mirrors when a figure appeared, racing towards me in what seemed like a panic. It was Darius. He was the Chief Executive Officer of the corporation whose real boss seemed to be the mysterious man in the mask. I thought he was running at me, but he raced straight past me as if I were not there. He was coming from the Hall of Mirrors. As he passed me he shouted something, not to me but as if to the sea wind. I could not understand it. It was not in English, but having a good ear for sounds if not always their meaning, I took my pencil and scribbled down what I thought I had heard.

  Later, much later and too late, I returned to Coney Island and spoke again with the Funmaster who showed me a journal he kept in which he had noted down all that occurred inside the Hall of Mirrors while I was walking on the beach. If only I had seen that passage I could have understood what was happening around me and done something to prevent what came later. But I did not see inside the Funmaster’s journal, and I did not understand three words in Latin.

  Now, it may seem strange to you young people but in those days dress was pretty formal. Young men were expected to wear dark suits at all times, often with weskit, plus stiff starched white collars and cuffs. The trouble was, that posed a laundry bill that young men on meagre salaries could not afford. So many of us wore detachable white celluloid collars and cuffs, which could be taken off at night and wiped clean with a damp cloth. This enabled a shirt to be worn for several days, but always exposing a clean collar and cuffs. With my notebook in my jacket pocket, I wrote down the words shouted by the man I knew as Darius on my left cuff.

  He seemed half crazy as he ran past me, quite different from the ice-cold executive I had met in the boardroom. His black eyes were wide open and staring, his face still white as a skull, his jet-black hair flying in the wind as he ran. I turned to follow his progress and saw him reach the funfair’s gate. There he met the Irish priest, who had shut the boy Pierre in the coach and was coming back to look for his employer.

  Darius stopped on seeing the priest and the two of them stared at each other for several seconds. Even across thirty yards of November wind I could sense the tension. They were like two pit bulls meeting the day before the fight. Then Darius broke away, ran for his own coach and drove off.

  Father Kilfoyle came up the path looking grim and thoughtful. Mme de Chagny emerged from the Hall of Mirrors pale and shaken. I was in the midst of one hell of a drama and could not understand what I was witnessing. We drove back to the El-train station and then by railcar to Manhattan in silence, except the boy who chattered happily to me about the toyshop.

  My last clue came three days later. The inaugural gala was a triumph, a new opera whose name escapes me but then I never did turn into an opera buff. Apparently, Mme de Chagny sang like an angel from heaven and left half the audience in tears. Later there was a hell of a party right on the stage. President Teddy Roosevelt was there with all the mega-rich of New York society; there were boxers, Irving Berlin, Buffalo Bill - yes, young lady, I really met him - and all paying court to the young opera star.

  The opera had been set in the American Civil War and the principal set was the front of a magnificent Virginian plantation house with a front door raised up and steps leading down each side to the stage level. Halfway through the celebration party a man appeared in the doorway.

  I recognized him at once, or thought I did. He was dressed in the uniform of his part, that of a wounded captain of the Union forces but one who had been so badly wounded in the head that most of his face was covered by a mask. It was he who had sung a passionate duet with Mme de Chagny in the final act, when he gave her back their betrothal ring. Strangely, considering the opera was over, he still wore his mask. Then I finally realized why. This was the Phantom, the elusive figure who seemed to own so much of New York, who had helped create the Manhattan Opera House with his money and had brought the French aristocrat over the Atlantic to sing. But why? This I did not learn until later, and too late.

  I was talking with Vicomte de Chagny at the time, a charming man incredibly proud of his wife’s success and delighted that he had just met our President. Over his shoulder I saw the prima donna go up the staircase to the portico and talk with the figure I had then begun to think of as the Phantom. I knew it was him again. It could be no-one else, and he seemed to have some kind of a hold over her. I had not yet worked out that they had known each other, twelve years earlier, in Paris, and much more besides.

  Before they parted, he palmed her a small note on folded paper, which she slipped inside her bodice. Then he was gone again, as always; there one second and disappeared the next.

  There was a social-diary columnist from a rival paper, the New York World, a Pulitzer rag, and she wrote the next day that she had seen the incident but thought no-one else had. She was wrong. I did. But more. I kept an eye on the lady for the rest of the evening and sure enough, after a while she turned away from the gathering, opened the note and read it. When she had done she glanced around, screwed the paper into a ball and threw it into one of the trash cans placed to receive old bottles and dirty napkins. A few moments later I retrieved it. And, just in case you young people might be interested, I have it here today.

  That night I simply stuffed it into my pocket. It lay for a week on the dressing-table in my small apartment and later I kept it as the only memento I will ever have of the events that took place before my eyes. It says: ‘Let me see the boy just once. Let me say one last farewell. Please. The day you sail away. Dawn. Battery Park. Erik.’

  Then and only then did I put some of it together. The secret admirer before her marriage, twelve years earlier in Paris. The unrequited love who had emigrated to America and become rich and powerful enough to arrange for her to come and star in his own opera house. Touching stuff, but more for your romantic lady novelist than a hard-bitten reporter on the streets of New York, for such I thought myself to be. But why was he masked? Why not come and meet her like everyone else? To these questions I still had no answers. Nor did I seek any, and that was my mistake.

  Anyway, the lady sang for six nights. Each time she brought the house down. December 8th was her last performance. Another prima donna, Nellie Melba, the world’s only rival to the French aristocrat, was due to sail in on the 12th. Mme de Chagny, her husband, son and accompanying party, would board the RMS City of Paris, bound for Southampton, England, to take over at Covent Garden.
Their departure was scheduled for 10 December and for all the friendship she had shown me I determined to be there on the Hudson to see her off. By this time I was virtually accepted by all her entourage as one of the family. In the private send-off in her stateroom I would get my last exclusive for the New York American. Then I would go back to covering the doings of murderers, the bulls and the bosses of Tammany Hall.

  The night of the 9th I slept badly. I do not know why, but you will all understand there are such nights, and after a certain time you know there is no point in trying to get to sleep again. Better to get up and have done with it. This I did at 5 a.m. I washed and shaved, then dressed in my best dark suit. I fixed my stiff collar with back stud and front stud and knotted my tie. Without thinking, I picked two stiff white plastic cuffs from the half-dozen on the dressing-table and slipped them on. As I was awake so early I thought I might as well go across to the Waldorf-Astoria and join the de Chagny party for breakfast. To save a cab fare I walked, arriving at ten before seven. It was still dark, but in the breakfast-room Father Kilfoyle was sitting alone with a coffee. He greeted me cheerily and beckoned me over.

  ‘Ah, Mr Bloom,’ he said, ‘so, we must be leaving your fine city. Come to see us off, have you? Well, good for you. But some hot porridge and toast will set you up for the day. Waiter …’ Soon the vicomte himself joined us and he and the priest exchanged a few words in French. I could not follow them, but asked if the vicomtesse and Pierre would be joining us. Father Kilfoyle indicated the vicomte and told me Madame had gone to Pierre’s room to get him ready, which was apparently what he had just learned, but in French. I thought I knew better, but said nothing. It was a private matter and nothing to do with me if the lady wished to slip away to say farewell to her strange sponsor. I expected that at about eight o’clock she would come rattling up to the doors in a hansom cab and greet us with her usual winning smile and charming manners.