City of Dreams

CITY OF DREAMS

BOOKS BY WILLIAM MARTIN

The Lost Constitution
Harvard Yard
Citizen Washington
Annapolis
Cape Cod
The Rising of the Moon
Nerve Endings
Back Bay

CITY
OF
DREAMS

WILLIAM MARTIN

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed
in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously.

CITY OF DREAMS

Copyright © 2010 by William Martin

All rights reserved.

“Let’s Keep It Superficial” copyright © 2005 by Jake Rat.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-2197-8

First Edition: May 2010

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For the Ancestors of my Children.
They came from Mayo and County Cavan,
From Lithuania and Bavaria, too.
Some came to Boston and some stayed in New York,
But they all saw America first as the City of Dreams
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some rainy Saturday afternoon when you’re cleaning out your attic or flipping through a bin in your favorite secondhand bookstore, you may uncover a pile of flimsy, crudely printed notes from the American Revolution. They may appear to be nothing at all, but be careful with them, because they may be New Emission Bonds.

Of course, you won’t be able to call Peter Fallon for an opinion, because he’s a fictional character. But I was lucky because whenever Peter Fallon needed an opinion, I could call Ned Downing.

Ned is one of the nation’s leading scripophilists and scholars of eighteenth-century American capital markets. He first told me about the bonds, more properly called New Emission Money, over a decade ago.

And what a story. A struggling Congress attempts to finance the Revolution by printing money and issuing promissory notes backed mostly by air. Alexander Hamilton takes the financial reins of the new government and tries to make good on all the promises, and those that remain unfilled, including interest payments on the New Emission Money, he calls debts “of honor.” Two centuries later, modern collectors and historical institutions attempt to redeem the New Emission Money, which may still be accruing interest.

And then what happened?

I told Ned that some day I would write a novel about the New Emission Money. Now I have put Peter Fallon and Evangeline Carrington on the case in New York. But I could not have written this book without the generous advice, insight, and historical perspective that Ned Downing has offered at every phase of the process. As I say of a character in the book, he introduced me “to a new way of seeing American history.” He answered all my questions during the research and writing, and he read the manuscript, too.

I have, of course, taken a novelist’s liberties in fashioning my historical fiction out of the story of these flimsy pieces of paper and their passage through New York history. But the broad contours and most of the specifics are true, thanks to Ned.

There are many others who deserve my thanks, too. They have offered research help, insights, advice, reminiscences, eyewitness accounts, and friendship.

So, my thanks to Mark Bartlett and the staff of the New York Society Library, Alice Beale, Thomas Cook, Peter Drummey and the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society (which owns a collection of New Emission Money), Patty Garcia, John Harrison, John Herzog, who founded the Museum of American Finance and graciously gave me a personal tour, William Kuntz, Katherine Kunz, Stephen Martell, Linda Nakdimen, Joseph Riley, Andy Rosenwach of the Rosenwach Tank Company, John Spooner, Susan Terner, Pamela Thomas, Martin Weinkle, and my research assistants, Corwynn Crane and Lauren Dye.

Also a more general thanks to the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York, who own and operate the Fraunces Tavern Museum; to the staffs of the Federal Hall National Memorial, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New-York Historical Society; to the priests and parishioners of Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, in Lower Manhattan, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church on Fifty-first Street.

Thanks for their continued support to Bob Gleason, my editor at Forge; and to Tom Doherty, my publisher; and to Robert Gottlieb of the Trident Media Group, my agent for a quarter century.

Thanks to my kids, Bill, Dan, and Elizabeth. They’re spread around the country, but they still offer their opinions and can now offer professional judgments, too, on subjects as diverse as IPOs, dramatic structure, and human psychology.

And thanks as always to Chris. She makes the hard work much easier.

W
ILLIAM
M
ARTIN
December 2009

CITY OF DREAMS

ONE

Monday Afternoon

P
ETER
F
ALLON READ THE CALLER
ID, pushed the Talk button, and said, “I am
not
moving to New York City.”

“That isn’t why I’m calling,” said Evangeline Carrington.

“But that’s where every conversation ends up.”

“Listen, Peter, I’m in a bookstore.”

“What are you doing in a bookstore?”

“Buying you a wedding present.”

“I have enough books.”

Peter was sitting in his office.
Books everywhere
. And in the outer office, more books. But not just
any
books: a Shakespeare Second Folio from 1632, a first edition of Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, a signed first of
Tales of the South Pacific
, the rarest Michener, three million dollars worth of books, all bought, sold, and brokered from the third floor of a Boston bowfront, above an art gallery that was above a restaurant.

“If you think I’m getting you golf clubs,” she said, “forget it.”

“I’d love a new Callaway driver,” he said. “We can play on the honeymoon. Nice golf courses in France.”

“Forget France,” said Evangeline. “I want you to come to New York.”

“See? I told you. This is where every conversation ends up. I don’t want to live in New York. And there’s a wedding in ten days. In Boston. There are details.”

“Name a detail that I haven’t already taken care of.”

“I have to put the dance tunes on my iPod. I have to shuck the oysters—”

“Peter, get serious.”

He sat up straight, as if she were in the room. “Okay. I’m all ears.”

“I’m in Delancey’s Rarities on Fourth Avenue, in the back. I’m going through a bin of engravings, because I know how much you like them, and this bag lady comes in.”

“A bag lady? In New York? There’s news. Does she smell?”

“Of rum. I can smell it back here. But she doesn’t sound drunk, or old, or especially derelict. That’s what’s got my attention.”

“Eight million stories in the naked city, babe.”

“She’s saying how Delancey is an expert in old money, and so is she, so they should team up, because she knows where there’s a lot of it, and if they work together—”

“Smart bag lady. She knows enough to go to Delancey. A major player in the scripophily market.”

“Scripophily?”

“Collecting old money. Antique stock certificates, bonds . . . it’s hot right now.”

“Oh, hey, wait a minute . . .”

Peter could hear Evangeline breathing. He could almost hear her listening.

While he waited, he clicked the Internet and glanced at the stock market. The Dow was dropping—and fast—in the last half hour of trading.

Then Evangeline was back. “The bag lady says she has something that’ll impress Delancey. But she’ll only show it to him on her turf.”

“She sounds batty. Don’t let her hear you or see you, or she’ll make herself
your
pain in the ass instead of his.”

“She can’t see me in the back. And she can’t hear me because I’m whispering, and Delancey’s playing his old-timey music.”

Peter could hear the music, too. “That’s Benny Goodman. The term is timeless, not old-timey.”

“Okay. Timeless. Now they’re talking about a room papered in old money. You know, Peter, I think we should see what this is about.”