Free City of Promise by Beverly Swerling

her aunt. More important, she didn’t want to disappoint herself. Well, something would have to be done about that.

    Odd, Josh thought, his confiding his story to a girl he’d seen fewer than half a dozen times. The only other people who knew were his father and Zac. Though it was likely the outlines of the tale—the bit about his not having lost the leg in battle—would be apparent to the man he was on his way to meet.
    His destination was the bar of the Grand Union Hotel, across from Vanderbilt’s newly completed Grand Central Depot. The hotel marked the finish of Lexington Avenue, that bastard child inserted in the 1830s between Third and Fourth Avenues from Gramercy Park to Forty-Second Street, and the end point of polite society’s northern reach. Beyond Grand Central hundreds of trains rattled and racketed along Fourth Avenue; so many of them these days that the professors of Columbia University at Forty-Ninth Street claimed they couldn’t hear their own lectures. The Common Council was trying to get Vanderbilt to sink a tunnel and bring his trains in and out of the town belowground. Possibly some property opportunities if he did it, Josh thought, particularly in the wasteland of the East Fifties and Sixties, but so far there was no deal.
    He got to the hotel a few minutes before seven. The lobby was a swirling mass of men in evening dress and women in softly swishing satin and silk, their talk punctuated with laughter and the air around them a heady mix of scents. The smell of success, he thought. Replaced in the gentlemen’s saloon—the Coach and Four it was called at the Grand Union—by cigar smoke and scotch whiskey, the smell of money.
    Trenton Clifford was waiting for him, seated by himself at a small table off to the side of the long mirrored bar. Far enough from any ofthe gaslights so he was in the shadows. Josh spotted him quickly nonetheless. Clifford’s walrus mustache and his full head of pale blond hair caught what light there was around him, for one thing. For another, few men had planted themselves so indelibly in his memory.
    He made his way to the table and stood silently beside it. Clifford looked up, but didn’t rise. Just watched him. “Captain,” Josh said finally. He could not bring himself to wish the other man a good evening, and he did not extend his hand.
    Clifford made a gesture as if to offer his, then thought better of it and nodded toward the chair across from his. “Sit down, Josh. And it’s Mr. Clifford these days. Or Trent if you prefer. War’s over, son. Let it go.”
    “It’s not the war I remember so vividly.”
    Dwindled corpses the poet Walt Whitman called the men he saw released from Belle Isle when peace came. Tobacco-colored and stooped like gnomes, in Whitman’s words. Some days—the hottest of them usually, so the prisoners couldn’t resist—they were encouraged to swim in the river. Inevitably some got too close to the rapids. That’s what the rebel guards were waiting for. “There’s another trying to escape!” one of them would yell. And they picked them off like clay pigeons, one after the other. Target practice. Captain Clifford was camp commandant. Josh remembered him standing on the bank one afternoon with a brand-new Colt revolver. Shooting one after another and calling the tally aloud. “Six hits,” Clifford said as he walked away. “Didn’t jam once. I declare this to be a fine sidearm, gentlemen. Best the North has to offer.”
    “Your note said imperative.” Josh still wasn’t sure why he’d come. Maybe because if he had not he’d have thought himself still cowering.
    “Imperative to you. Interesting for me.” Clifford signaled toward the bar. “What are you drinking?”
    “Scotch,” Josh said, and put his own silver-dollar coin in the waiter’s hand when it arrived.
    Clifford smiled at the gesture, then sat back, looking not at Joshbut at the cigar whose end he was trimming with a gold cutter. “You always were what my old