Free City of Promise by Beverly Swerling Page A

mammy would have called a long pisser, Joshua Turner. Prepared to aim your stream whether or not you’ve got anything to back it up. But big ideas. Always.”
    Josh tossed back the whiskey, then stood up to go.
    “Sit down,” Clifford said, some of the old authority creeping into his voice. “You’ve come this far through curiosity. Probably as much about yourself as about me. Might as well hear me out, don’t you think?”
    Josh sat down.
    “How’d you lose the leg? You had a matched pair at Belle Isle. And the way I hear it, you didn’t spend any time on the battlefield after that sister of yours cleaned you up and turned you loose.”
    “Lost the leg in a bear trap. And who told you all that?”
    Clifford shrugged. “I hear things. That’s what I do, Josh. I listen. Made my fortune.”
    “Here in New York? A ways out of your element, aren’t you? For a Southern gentleman.”
    “I take it that’s meant to disparage all Southern gentlemen by association. Don’t bother trying to insult me, Joshua Turner. Rolls right off my back.” Clifford paused to light the cigar, holding the match an inch or so away from the end and inhaling the flame toward it, puffing greedily when the tobacco caught. “Excellent cigars,” he said when a wide plume of gray smoke rose above his head. “Excellent everything is available in this city. Sex, food, shelter, whatever a man desires can be had. Only thing at issue is the cost. That’s what’s left, Joshua. The things money will buy. The North destroyed my way of life to protect its own. Only game left to play is the Northerner’s game. And a man like me, I’m bound to play something.”
    “Is that what you brought me here to say?”
    Clifford held up two fingers in the direction of the bar. “You were a clever young ’un, Josh Turner, and you’re a clever man. Doesn’t surprise me. And you are also well enough established in this town tomake those brains count for—Take your hand out of your pocket, damn you.” The refills had arrived and Clifford interrupted himself long enough to insist on paying for them. “Drinking whiskey I buy doesn’t make us friends. And friendship’s not what I have in mind.”
    “I’m still waiting to know what is.”
    “I hear you’ve an idea to make gentlemen live stacked on shelves under a common roof. Like bags of flour. You think they’ll go for it?”
    “Where in hell’s name did you hear such a thing?”
    “Are we back to that? You’re never going to know my sources, son. Not if we sit here for twenty years. Now, tell me why you think gentlemen this side of the ocean will agree to live in French flats.”
    The way Josh saw it, either he answered the question or he got up and walked out. And if he intended the latter, he’d not have come in the first place. “Middling sorts of gentlemen,” he said. “And they’ll agree because pretty soon they’re not going to have any choice. There’s not enough room on this island for the numbers of people who want to live here. It’s that simple.”
    “Keep ’em out then. Make the place more exclusive. What’s wrong with that?”
    “They’re needed, these engineers and accountants and senior clerks. Business can’t run without them. New York’s all about business.”
    Clifford nodded, but raised another objection. “Brooklyn,” he said. “Queens. The Bronx even. What about them?”
    “Nothing about them. Some will move there. Many already have. But it’s inconvenient. Brooklyn in particular’s a devilish journey. The ferry’s unreliable in any kind of harsh weather.”
    “There’s the bridge,” Clifford said. “Going to change everything. Don’t you agree?”
    “Might do if it ever gets built.” The granite tower on the Brooklyn side was complete, rising an improbable two hundred seventy-two feet above the high water mark, but the one on the Manhattan side—at Dover Street and the river—was a much slower effort. John Roebling,the engineer who designed