The Phantom Of Manhattan (1999) Read online

  It was a long hard voyage that brought me here in the first days of 1894. The Atlantic was wild with storms. I lay in my cot sick unto death, my passage prepaid by that one kind person I have ever met, tolerating the sneers and insults of the crew, knowing they could tip me overboard in a trice, and none the wiser, if I attempted to respond, borne up only by the rage and hatred for them all. Four weeks we rolled and thumped our way across the ocean until one bitter night at the end of January the sea calmed and we were dropping anchor in the Roads ten miles south of the tip of Manhattan Island.

  Of this I knew nothing, save that we had arrived. Somewhere. But I heard the crew in their harsh Breton accent telling each other that in the dawn we would move up into the East River and dock for customs inspection. Then I knew I would be discovered again; exposed, humiliated, rejected as an immigrant and sent back in chains.

  In the small hours, when everyone was asleep, including the drunken night-watch, I took a mouldy lifebelt from the deck and went over the edge into the icy sea. I had seen lights dimly flickering in the blackness, how far I did not know. But I began to drive my frozen body towards them and an hour later pulled myself up onto a shingly beach crusted with frost, I did not know it, but my first steps in the New World were on the beach at Gravesend Bay, Coney Island.

  The lights I had seen came from guttering oil-lamps in the windows of some miserable shacks at the top of the beach, beyond the tide-line, and when I stumbled towards them and looked through the filthy panes I saw rows of huddled men skinning and gutting fresh-caught fish. Further down the line of huts there was an empty space in the middle of which burned a great bonfire and round it a dozen wretches were crouched, drawing the heat into their bodies. Half dead from cold, I knew I too must share that heat or freeze to death. I walked into the light of the great fire, felt the wave of heat and looked at them. My mask was stuffed inside my clothes, this terrible head and face was lit by the flames. They turned and stared at me.

  I have hardly ever laughed in my life. There has been no cause to. But that night in the subzero pre-dawn cold I laughed inside myself for sheer relief. They looked at me … and took no notice. For one way or another every one of them was deformed. By a sheer chance I had come upon the nightly encampment of the Outcasts of Gravesend Bay, the rejects who could only make a miserable living by gutting and cleaning fish while the fishermen and the city slept.

  So they let me dry and warm myself by their fire and asked me where I had come from, though it was obvious I had come from the sea. From reading the texts of all the English operas I had learned a few words of this language and told them I had fled from France. It made no difference, they had all fled from somewhere, pursued by society to this last desolate sand-spit. They called me Frenchie and let me join them, sleeping in the shacks on piles of stinking nets, working through the nights for a few dimes, living on scraps, often cold and hungry, but safe from the law and its chains and jails.

  Spring came and I began to learn what lay beyond the tangle of gorse and furze that screened the fishing village from the rest of Coney Island. I learned the whole island was lawless, or rather a law unto itself. Not incorporated into the City of Brooklyn across the narrow strait and until recently ruled by a half-politician half-gangster called John McKane who had just been arrested. But McKane’s legacy lived on in this lunatic island dedicated to funfairs, brothels, crime, vice and pleasure. The last was the aim of the bourgeois New Yorkers who came each weekend and before they had left spent fortunes on foolish diversions laid on for them by the entrepreneurs who had the wit to provide those pleasures.

  Unlike the rest of the Outcasts who would gut fish for all of their lives and never rise above it through their own doltish stupidity, I knew that with wit and ingenuity I could get out of these shacks and make a fortune from the pleasure parks even then being planned and built further along the island. But how? First, in darkness, I crept into the town and stole clothes, proper clothes, from washing-lines and empty beach-cottages. Then I took lumber from the building sites and built a better shack. But with my face I could still not move by daylight into that raucous unruled society where tourists were happily fleeced of fortunes each weekend.

  A new arrival came to join us, hardly more than a boy of seventeen, ten years my junior but old beyond his years. Unlike most he was physically unscarred, undeformed, with a bone-pale face and black expressionless eyes. He came from Malta and had an education, learned from the Catholic fathers there. He spoke fluent English, knew Latin and Greek and had not a shred of scruple in him. He was here because, driven to rage by the endless penances inflicted on him by priests, he had taken a kitchen knife and plunged it into his tutor, killing him instantly. On the run, he had fled Malta to the Barbary Coast, served a while as a pleasure-boy in a house of sodomy, then stowed away on a ship which by chance was headed for New York. But he still had a price on his head, so he avoided the immigration filter at Ellis Island and drifted down to Gravesend Bay.

  I needed someone who could do my bidding in daylight; he needed my ingenuity and skills to get us out of this place. He became my subordinate and representative in all things and together we have moved from those fish-gutting sheds to wealth and power over half New York and much beyond. To this day I know him only as Darius.

  But if I taught him, he also taught me, converting me from old and foolish beliefs to worship of the one and only true god, the great master who has never let me down.

  The problem of my being able to move in daylight was solved most simply. In the summer of ‘94, with savings scrimped from the fish-cleaning job, I had a craftsman make up a latex mask to fit over my whole head with just holes for eyes and mouth. The mask of a clown, with bulbous red nose and wide gap-toothed smile. With baggy jacket and pantaloons I could move through the funfairs unsuspected. People with children even waved and smiled. The clown outfit was my passport into the daylight world. For two years we just made money. There were so many scams and frauds that I forget how many I invented.

  The simplest were often the best. I discovered that each weekend the tourists despatched 250,000 postcards from Coney Island. Most sought a place to buy stamps. So I bought postcards for one cent, stamped the words POSTAGE PAID on them and sold them for two. The tourists were happy. They did not know that postage was free anyway. But I wanted more, much more. I could sense a boom in mass entertainment coming that would prove a licence to print one’s own money.

  In that first year and a half I suffered only one reverse, but it was a bad one. Returning home to the shacks one night with a bag full of dollars, I was set upon by a crowd of four footpads armed with cudgels and brass knuckles. Had they just robbed me of my money it would have been bad but not life-threatening. But they tore off my clown’s mask, saw my face and beat me until I almost died.

  It took me a month in my cot till I could walk again. Since then I have carried a small Colt Derringer on my person at all times, for as I lay there I swore that no-one would ever hurt me again and get away with it.

  By the winter I had heard of a man called Paul Boyton. He was seeking to open the island’s first enclosed all-weather amusement park. I instructed Darius to arrange to meet him and to present himself as a designing engineer of genius fresh-arrived from Europe. It worked. Boyton commissioned a series of six amusement rides for his new enterprise. I designed them of course, using deception, optical illusion and engineering skill to create sensations of fear and bewilderment among the tourists, all of which they loved. Boyton opened Sea Lion Park in 1895 and the crowds flocked in.

  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 ca
lled 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 amusement 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 title - 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 title 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 amusement 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 ‘shell’ 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, pushing westwards and ever westwards. With every new industry there was a demand for raw materials, along with ships 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, shipping 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 worship of the only true god, to whom Darius had led me. For this is Mammon the god of gold who permits no mercy, no charity, no compassion 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 hashish 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 worship of gold consumes him night and day, and he stays with me and loyal to me only because I can spin it in endless quantities.

  By 1903 I had enough to undertake the construction of the highest skyscraper 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 glass. 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 hell but the passing 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 snobby 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 damnable 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 snobs, 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 ship 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 worship all my life.

  3

  THE DESPAIR OF ARMAND DUFOUR

  BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 1906

  I HATE THIS CITY. I SHOU
LD 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 damn 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! 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 God, 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.