The Road to Wellville (22 page)

And Charlie Ossining? He was just a little late.

Charlie got out of the cab and walked tentatively round the ruins of the factory, stunned at the havoc a few short years could wreak. The building had been impressive once, a mighty fortress, brick walls and a vaulting roof, but it was a shambles now. There’d been a fire, that much was evident from the street, fingers of carbon clutching at the windows, the roof collapsed in a scatter of blackened timbers. In falling, one of the beams had torn a V-shaped gap in the rear wall, and you looked out past the brick and into the wintry snarl of trees beyond. The doors were gone, too, and the windows stood naked, the panes long since shattered, the woodwork either reduced to ash or prized up for salvage. It was no habitation, but people had sheltered here over the course of the fading months and years—vagrants, itinerant workers, factory hands short of housing during the boom years of ‘02 and ‘03—and they’d left the detritus of their lives behind. There was the usual litter of patent-medicine bottles, cans, boxes, bones, shreds of weathered newsprint and magazines, but there were more personal things, too—a washboard, a bureau with the top staved in and the drawers missing, a boot, a sock, a scrap of gingham. And beneath it all, a fine glittering carpet of broken glass.

The waste of it, that’s what got to him. It was like that poem he’d had to recite in school about the stone head buried in the sand. That’s what this place was like—a stone head buried in the sand. There was no hope for it. None. Charlie felt his stomach drop. His breath came
quick and shallow, and despite the chill blast of the wind he was perspiring under the arms, beneath the brim of his hat, and a single cold wet finger traced the ridge of his spine. Suddenly he was afraid for Mrs. Hookstratten, afraid for himself. This was the place Bender had chosen? This was the place where Per-Fo was supposed to fly? It was cursed, jinxed, a killing floor of failure and despair. He began to doubt Bender’s judgment, his sanity, even.

His first instinct was to turn around right there and go back to Bender and tell him to forget it, they’d be better off building from scratch, but the morbid fascination of the archaeologist was on him and he kicked his way through the debris to the big open back room to have a look at the ovens. A bird—or was it a bat?—shot across the room and out into the gathering dark as he came through the open doorway, and something—rats?—stirred in the far corner. Then it was quiet. Eerily still.

Two of the great three-story ovens remained, rising up out of the ruins and into the sky, rusted, battered, strewn with swallow’s nests and the crushed dark leavings of half a dozen autumns, but powerfully suggestive for all that. For a long moment he stood there in awe of the machinery before him, and in that moment he
was
an archaeologist, a treasure hunter come upon the undreamed-of temple, the rare find, the jewel. He was stunned. This was the source, the fount; this was where all those cereal flakes had come from, all those nuggets, all that cash, the cars and carriages, the libraries, the wine cellars and billiard tables—and it was what he wanted, all of it, his own billiard table especially. And a library, too, of course, not that he’d ever read much more than dime novels, Nick Carter, Frank Reade, Big-Foot Wallace and that sort of thing, but just to have it, all those leather-bound books with their gilded spines, the brandy in a cut-glass decanter, Otard Dupuy ‘78. That’s what gentlemen had, the tycoons and the millionaires and the breakfast-food magnates—he’d bet his eyeteeth C. W. Post had the whole lot of it, billiard tables, London suits, libraries, limousines, stables and a thousand other things Charlie couldn’t even conceive of. And these were the machines that made it possible—the Federal Mint in Washington couldn’t have awed him any more.

It was while he was standing there in the midst of the rubble, gazing
up at the big traveling ovens and trying to picture them in operation, burnished and new, dropping a shower of rich golden flakes, that the stirring in the corner started up again, a rasping, scratching sound that became a distinct rustle and then a crash accompanied by muffled curses. Charlie was not alone. He glanced over his shoulder and through a pair of neatly aligned door frames to where the cabbie sat hunched in his seat, and then back to the corner, behind the far oven, where a figure, cursing and kicking at the litter around him, began to emerge from the gloom. “Hello?” Charlie called. And then, stupidly, “Is anybody there?”

The figure hesitated—it was a man, Charlie saw now, a man dressed in a ragged torn greatcoat and an old silk top hat with the crown punched out so that it looked like a section of stovepipe fitted to his head. A beggar. A bum. Charlie’s hand went reflexively to his wallet, and then he remembered that Mrs. Hookstratten’s money was no longer a concern—and he relaxed. The man’s voice came back at him, gloomy, hoarse, threatening: “Who the hell wants to know?”

The bum advanced on him, his eyes muddied with drink, a glistening spatter of vomit trailing down the front of his coat. His hair was tangled, dark, festooned with bits of leaf mold and a fine filigree of lint and cobweb, as if he’d been mopping floors with it. He stank like a sewer rat.

Charlie wasn’t intimidated. He could go toe-to-toe with anybody, and there were plenty of times he’d had to—at St. Basil’s Academy, where he was the youngest boy, courtesy of his parents’ indifference and Mrs. Hookstratten’s generosity, and afterward in the taverns and back rooms of Peterskill, Tarrytown, Croton and Ossining. Charlie was no stranger to the pugilistic arts—and besides, if anybody had a right to be out here in this dismal, godforsaken place, it was the Chief Executive of the company that was negotiating to buy it. He stood his ground.

The bum approached to within five paces and then stopped suddenly and looked round him a moment, as if he’d forgotten something. Then his eyes came up, sharp and quick, the drunkenness a cloud burned off by something hotter, more intense, sharper than Charlie would have imagined. “You think I’m a bum, don’t you?” the man said. “The sort that begs change and sleeps in doorways? Am I right?”

“Listen, friend,” Charlie hissed, and he folded his arms and set his
jaw, “I don’t give a damn who you are or where you sleep, and I didn’t ask for any introductions, either.”

A curtain of greasy hair fell across the man’s face as he leaned forward to spit, and he was unsteady on his feet. Charlie was ready to knock him down, if that was what he wanted. But the bum was oblivious. He flicked his hair back with a jerk of his neck and gave Charlie a smile. The smile was private, mad, a reflex of the lips above the rotten skirts of the teeth, but Charlie saw in that moment that the man was young, younger than he. “No, you listen to me,” the bum said, his breath going up in smoke. “You wouldn’t think I had a hundred dollars cash on me, would you? Currency? Notes redeemable on the United States Treasury? Well, you bet I have. A hundred dollars—or damn near it, minus something for a whiskey or two.” The wind came up then, a gust that tore through the windows, spun twice round the little amphitheater and rocketed away again. “I could book a room at the Post Tavern if I had a mind to, first-class all the way, you know that?”

Charlie was bored suddenly. Let the poor idiot sleep in his hovel, who cared? The place meant nothing to him. Maybe it was interesting to imagine what it might once have been, but clearly this wasn’t what they were looking for. And he’d tell Bender as much, too. They’d just have to find more investors, that was all. He turned away abruptly and began to pick his way through the rubble and back out to the street.

“Hey, mister,” the bum called at his back, but Charlie kept walking. “Mister, I’m talking to you.”

Charlie paused at the front entrance to dig out a cigarette and light it. He turned to look back to where the man stood in semidarkness, his bearded face working. “It’s the breakfast-food business, isn’t it?” he called. “That’s what you’re doing out here in this shit pile in your shined-up shoes and your new overcoat—breakfast food. Am I right?”

Charlie didn’t bother to answer. He drew on the cigarette and realized he was hungry. What he wanted was a steak. And some oysters—Battle Freaks, pure-foodists and health nuts be damned. He considered the prospects at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s—Norwegian fish-head soup or some such slop—and wondered where he could get a good hamburger sandwich without paying an arm and a leg for it.

The bum was still ranting. “I can see it on you,” he spat, his voice cracked and ragged, “that tinhorn-millionaire look, just like my uncle. Or worse, my would-be father, the holy man of the temple himself. You know him, you know my father?”

Charlie didn’t know his father, and he didn’t care to, either. He flicked away the butt of his cigarette, turned his back and ambled across the litter-strewn yard to the cold leather seat of the hack.

“Where to now, Diamond Jim?” the driver asked.

He should have gotten out and walked to save the money, but he was tired, irritated, profoundly depressed over the ruin of the factory, the mattress stuffed with worthless stock certificates, the scramble of boys at the station—Christ, even the bums on the street were gibbering about breakfast food—and he decided he had to see Bender, right then, right away, no matter the cost. The uneasiness he’d felt all day settled into his stomach like a lump of cold cereal, like oatmeal scraped from the bottom of the pot, and he thought he was going to vomit. If so many had come before them and failed, what chance did they have? What chance of raising money, buying equipment and ad space, paying workers? He’d been a fool, he saw that now, eating his oysters and sipping champagne on the train, playacting at being a swell—did he think the money was going to fall into his lap? Where was the grain going to come from? Who was going to stuff the boxes? Who was going to buy them?
Bender. He had to see Bender.
“Take me to the Post Tavern,” he said, and his voice was so weak he had to repeat himself before the driver heard him.

The streetlamps were softly glowing and the shop windows lit by the time they pulled up in front of the hotel, where a pair of motorcars and half a dozen carriages were taking on and discharging passengers. There was an early-evening bustle to the streets, couples walking arm-in-arm, people darting in and out of the shops, workers heading home to supper, and despite his misgivings, Charlie saw that the city did have its charms. It was prosperous, that was for sure. People had money—cereal money—and they meant to spend it. He made a mental note to stroll around and survey the various grocers to see what brands they were stocking—after he saw Bender, of course, and got something to eat. He
was digging into his pocket when the cabbie turned round and said, “That’ll be eighty-five cents—unless maybe you want to go back out to the Boat Club.”

“Eighty-five cents? Are you crazy? You said fifty cents to the lake and two bits to the factory—”

“And ten cents back.”

Charlie could feel the frustration rising in him, all the driver’s little gibes and taunts come home to roost in that frigid moment. “But you didn’t … I assumed—”

“Assumed, shit,” the driver growled, working the mucus in his throat and rolling it back and forth across his palate before letting it go in the street, “what do I look like, a charity worker?”

Charlie was about to counter this, violently, the words already on his lips, when he looked up and found himself staring into the watchful face of the doorman. The man wore a smug, superior look, as if he knew to the penny what every man who entered the Post Tavern Hotel was worth, and he caught Charlie’s eye as he leaned forward in his crisp uniform to open the door of the carriage ahead of them. Charlie was suddenly embarrassed. Here he was, President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, and he was haggling over a dime on the front steps of the best hotel in town. A dime. When just yesterday he’d waltzed up those very steps with nearly four thousand dollars in his pocket. The doorman helped a woman out of the hack in front of them and turned to Charlie’s cab. “Can you make change, at least,” Charlie muttered, handing the driver a two-and-a-half-dollar gold piece. At that moment, the door swung open as if under its own power and Charlie backed out into the street, preparing to straighten up on receiving his change and nod a stiff, icy greeting to the doorman.

“Well, my goodness,” came a voice at his back, “if it isn’t Mr. Ossining!”

He didn’t jump, but it was all he could do not to flinch as he turned to look into the mocking green eyes of Eleanor Lightbody. She was wearing a fur coat—a different one altogether from the one she’d worn at the station the previous evening—and she was in the company of a fit-looking man with fair hair and a boyish face, the sort that goes into middle age and beyond looking as if he’d just broken the tape at a track
meet. Charlie tried to compose himself. Here was a potential investor, he told himself, not to mention a woman who seemed to offer him more each time he laid eyes on her.

“Ah,” he returned, striking a casual note, the breakfast-food magnate returning in a coach from overseeing his dominion, “Mrs. Lightbody—Eleanor—what a pleasure.” He was uncomfortably aware of the doorman at his side, and of the driver, hunched like a gargoyle over the seat of the hack and poking through a filthy coin purse with clumsy mittened fingers.

Eleanor held him a moment with her eyes, the whole group frozen as if in a portrait—
The Arrival of the Tycoon
, or some such nonsense—and then she turned to introduce the young athlete at her side. “Mr. Ossining, I’d like to present my physician, Frank Linniman. Frank, Mr. Ossining.”

Charlie took the man’s hand in a firm grip. “It’s ‘Charlie,’ please,” he said. “And Mrs. Lightbody,” shifting his gaze back to her perpetually amused little mouth and mocking eyes—what was so funny?—”I hope you’ll call me ‘Charlie,’ too. And I hope you won’t mind my calling you ‘Eleanor.’ After all, we survived the Twentieth Century Limited together, not to mention the Michigan Central Line.” He let an urbane laugh escape him, as if rail travel were a constant and unavoidable nuisance.

“Yes, of course,” Eleanor murmured, but she didn’t join him in a conspiratorial chuckle, as he’d hoped. She turned to her companion instead (she had hold of his arm, Charlie noticed) and let her voice ring out in a coy little trill, “Mr. Ossining is the president of a breakfast-food company, Frank—”