Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2)

by Steven S. Drachman

  And now, here it was.

  Master Yu shuddered.

  A tottering, apparently drunken man appeared at the end of the street, pulled the brim of his hat down over his face. The two stopped walking. After a moment, the man waved cheerily, shouted a greeting in Chinese, and turned into a side alley.

  Master Yu and Li-Ling began to walk again.

  “You know a lot,” Master Yu said to Li-Ling.

  “I do,” she said. “I’ve been preparing for battle for a long time. If you are preparing for battle, it is best to know everything you can about your enemies.” She turned to him. “They are your enemies too, are they not, Master Yu?”

  He agreed. What was his mission, precisely, in this great battle against the Red Eyebrows? “To go to America,” said the Empress Dowager. “And to see what the future has planned for you. And to be brave. You will have to be brave” So his mission could be anything and everything, or nothing at all. He would stay alert and see what he could learn. An ant crawling up the side of a brick building could be an essential clue. Nothing was unimportant.

  “What happened to the men who used to run the bank?” he asked.

  “Ah,” the southern girl said. “Now that’s an interesting one.”

  A man named William C. Ralston, Li-Ling told Yu Dai-Yung, built the Bank of California when he was still in his thirties, youthful, boyish, casually dapper, going a little bald. For a man with a terrible secret, he had a friendly laugh and a nice smile.

  Ralston owned the thirsty Ophir Mine in Comstock, not a drop of gold or silver in it. That is, until he made a crazy alliance with Sidonia, and his mine suddenly rose from the dead like a vampire. Gold filled the coffers in his Bank and flowed through the streets of San Francisco like a great river, and Ralston’s influence grew on the West Coast like mushrooms after a rain. Ralston dined on caviar served in golden bowls in a mansion that Sidonian coin had bought. Did Ralston know that the Sidonians were emissaries sent by demons from Hell? Probably not. Like all wicked demons, they had a good sales department, and they served the best wine.

  Sometimes, during those heady days of wealth and power, Ralston would leave the Bank by the Sansome Street exit, mount his black horse and ride up Montgomery Street to the top of Telegraph Hill to look out over the city he had built almost with his bare hands. Three times a week, he leapt into the frigid Bay and swam halfway to Alcatraz Island. My body is my temple, he would say, and he was apparently the originator of the expression. But his body was not really his temple, and maybe he knew it. The blue sandstone Bank was his temple, and the Sidonian leaders, Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley, were his high priests.

  The story ended sadly and inevitably for young Mr. Ralston, for though the banker gave the Sidonians much, William Sharon, the Bank’s Nevada agent and Ralston’s friend and distinguished father-figure, offered more. He offered his soul, his children’s souls, the neurons in his brain.

  Mr. Sharon would kill for Sidonia, and he did.

  Suddenly Ralston’s mine dried up. William Sharon dumped his Bank shares not a moment too soon (but not a moment too late). Crowds formed in the desperate San Francisco streets. The Bank closed its doors and went dark.

  Mr. Ralston resigned his position, left the Bank alone by the California Street exit and drowned alone in the Neptune Bath House on Larkin Street. Although he was a young and powerful man, and although he swam across the icy bay three times a week, he somehow collapsed in the bath, somehow unnoticed, expiring like an old man and sinking beneath the water’s bubbling surface. An attendant cleaning the pool found him dead hours later, swelled up like a baby’s blue birthday balloon.

  The Sidonians bequeathed San Francisco’s Mantle of Heaven to Mr. William Sharon. The trim and deceptively dignified man wasted no time moving himself and his impeccable graying mustache into Ralston Hall, the mansion of his old dead friend, where he could eat Ralston’s caviar, and, if he wished, humiliate and otherwise abuse Ralston’s destitute and thoroughly ostracized wife and children, whom he permitted to remain in a couple of rooms off the east wing.

  “He is more demon himself than man, by now,” Li-Ling said. “And U.S. senator, recently, by the way. You see what we are up against? The Sidonians can do anything. And soon they will be everywhere. Under every rock, in every puddle, behind every locked door.”

  Now in the thick of Chinatown, Master Yu felt deflated. He had anticipated that Chinatown would look like China, and it did not. It looked like America. He sighed, and he kept quiet. They walked along Jackson Street, down a steep hill, and they neared a narrow alley, which the Chinese called 火胡同, which the peasants pronounced as “Fo Sue Hong,” and which means “Fire Alley,” so named for the great fire which forever darkened its name. As they passed the dreary back street, Li-Ling turned away. “Slave market,” she whispered. “Where men buy slave girls. Slave girls like me.” Master Yu imagined her standing in a row of young girls, in this very alley. How young had she been? He didn’t want to know. A few blocks to the west they came to a similarly overcast alley, “Fay Chie Hong” in Chinese, or “Fat Boy Alley” in English. It was indeed named for a boy who had wandered its stained cobblestones a few years back, a boy who must surely have been exceptionally fat, the fattest boy that anyone in Chinatown had ever seen.

  They wound up in Duncombe Alley, the site of whorehouses and opium dens, and a few haggard drug tourists were still wandering the street, even at this hour. Li-Ling unlocked a metal door set beneath a grubby, two-story brick building. Inside, she lit a lantern and led him down into a damp cellar, through a dark cave of a room furnished only with a few wooden benches and idle oil lamps, and which smelled of human failure. She unlocked and unbolted a door in the back and they sank, further, into a windowless, nearly airless alcove empty but for a flat, damp mattress on the grimy floor.

  “Not a very nice dwelling,” she said, “for a man sent by her esteemed majesty the Empress to save us all. But, still, a little hole in which to sleep. To make your plans.”

  He sat down on the mattress.

  “Li-Ling?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “What’s a crimp?”

  “Crimp gets you drunk, then slips you a little mild poison,” she said. “You sleep two days. When you wake up, you’re a ship’s slave. You never see home again, never see family, never see friends. Never write your poems or drink your fine nobleman wine. Fung intended to sell you like a fat cow, but for less money per pound than a fat cow would have fetched at market. I saved you from that, Yu Dai-Yung.”

  “Thank you,” he said gently.

  “We both saved each other, more than once, this night,” she added.

  Master Yu imagined and even hoped for a moment that Li-Ling might stay with him for a while, or for the night, but she did not. With a small bow, Li-Ling was gone. The metal door swung shut.

  He tried for a while to read, but the Red Chamber (such a passionate saga of the homeland!) burdened his heart. He blew out the lantern, shut his eyes, and he fell into a fitful sleep. He woke periodically, looked at his surroundings, became convinced that all this was certainly nothing more than a nightmare, realized with a painful start that it was reality, screamed, woke up, fell back to the damp mattress exhausted and began the whole cycle again.

  Once, when he awoke, a bald Chinese man dressed in Western clothes stood in the center of the room, lit by a low glow.

  The man was nearly transparent, and he looked very sad.

  Yu Dai-Yung lit the lantern, and he huddled in the corner.

  “Are you a ghost?” Master Yu asked.

  The man did not answer his question directly.

  I am sending you a message from the past, the specter replied, inside Yu Dai-Yung’s mind. My name is Tang. As a practitioner of the Dark Arts, I am not very skilled. I cannot live forever. I cannot change the past, or the future. However, I can eliminate an unneeded essence, leaving a man apparently dead. I can roam Time. I can cure certain ailments. I can talk to dolphins, whic
h does not come in handy out West. And I can occupy your thoughts, as you see. I am not here in this room. I am in your mind.

  Master Yu nodded, though he had begun to realize that the ghost could not see him.

  If you are receiving this message, the specter said, it is because I was either killed in Weedville, Nebraska or expelled from the interlinear Maze, and thus unable to retrieve a package that I left for the management in the Golden Sky Hotel in Denver. In my absence, this package has been mailed to you, Yu Dai-Yung, care of the Donn Quai theater, in San Francisco.

  It is important, Tang said, that you claim it.

  And then Tang, who had so thoroughly inhabited Yu Dai-Yung’s cerebellum, was gone, leaving behind just a slight whiff, a little stain, on the neuroepithelial cell lining of the terrible poet’s neural tube.

  This inspired a poem, and so he leaned back and wrote. It was a poem of lust-stricken specters, paper lanterns floating in the wind over the Yangtze River, unwashed peasants climbing a great mountain of gold to find a hoopoe alighted on the branch of a dark brown Chinaberry tree. He was swept up in a great wave of romantic fervor, which washed over him as he wrote what he was certain would be his masterwork, a poem which, if not perfect, if not equaling the paeans of Yang Hsiung, his father in another life, would be at least marvelous.

  At length he slept, his poem wrapped in his arms like a lover.

  Chapter 3

  J.P. Morgan was forty-one years of age and nearing a pinnacle of power from which he would fall neither during his lifetime nor after. He had a wife, Fanny, and four children (Jack, Anne, Juliet and Louisa) and he ran a thriving business at 23 Wall Street, down there in that “Wall Street” area that you may have heard about, doing whatever it is that people do down there, and apparently doing it well. Still, as we shall see, he was a sad, lonely lost soul.

  His business was called Drexel, Morgan & Company. (In addition to Morgan, there was a fellow named “Drexel” who worked there.) As I mentioned, Morgan was only forty-one years of age, which even in 1878 was relatively youngish, but he resembled a man in his sixties. He was obese, and while to a casual observer he looked obese in the way of men who were born to be obese, he was in fact obese in the way of men who are born to be happy and loved and handsome, yet find themselves unexpectedly sad and alone and ugly. His eczema had attacked not just his face, but had recently worked its way into his soul, and now his soul itself was eczemous, puffy, red-veined and unsightly. (In my humble opinion.)

  He sometimes mused that he had diseased lungs, but this was not really true. His lungs were healthy. Yet he wished that his lungs were diseased. He did not entirely want to live. There was someone with whom he wished to be reunited, someone he loved, and she was no longer alive.

  He had just returned from a summer at Cragston, his barony in Highland Falls.

  Highlights of his summer:

  As usual, on July 4, fireworks popped and exploded and bled a reddish orange into the Hudson River, all to the joy of the financial barons (and their wives and youngsters) who’d won such a coveted invitation, and in the morning Morgan peered blearily out his bedroom window and enviously watched those still spry enough to play tennis bound about on the courts he had expended effort and capital to build. In the early afternoon, he chatted with them in a not-unacceptably-gruff fashion as they milled about in the flowering stone courtyard, wine glass in hand.

  Bastards all, whom he hated, even their blameless spawn.

  Through late July and all of August, he sent urgent letters to Washington and Manhattan, letters that, according to his instructions, the recipients read quickly and then burnt.

  At 9:45, on this first full day back in Manhattan, he met with the firm’s chief accountant – finances were “top notch,” said the little man in suspenders – and then Morgan shut and locked the door of his office, lit a Cuban cigar, opened the top drawer of his desk and grasped a gold-framed photograph of his first wife.

  The lovely Mimi Sturges Morgan was frozen for now and for always at the tender age of twenty-six years, seven months, twelve days, and some-odd hours, minutes and seconds, at the terrible moment when her breathing had ceased and her soft, warm hand had slipped lifeless from his grasp. Back then at that terrible moment, Morgan had sat, suddenly all alone with her lifeless body, in their lavish honeymoon suite at the Villa St. Georges in Nice, just as he was now still all alone with her lifeless photographic image in his office on Wall Street, with the door locked.

  He stared at Mimi’s photograph for ten minutes, at fragile eyes that seemed to sense the future, at a gentle young smile. Mimi, who would never age.

  “Once a lovely flower grew near me,” he whispered, “and entwined around my heart …. But it withered.”

  He did not love his second wife, Fanny.

  He loved his first wife, Mimi.

  A year or so ago, when the first sniff of Sidonian magic had wafted into Manhattan, Mimi had returned very briefly as a deadling, to hold his hand, to flirt a bit, and to stroll with him along 36th Street, just outside his mansion. And so, while he had never for a moment entirely forgotten young Mimi, it was quite understandable that since his first wife’s merely momentary resurrection, she had haunted Morgan’s thoughts at every moment of every day.

  “How,” he muttered aloud, caressing her photograph, “can one be alive and not-alive concurrently?”

  He did not love his second wife, Fanny.

  At 11, Morgan met with his partner, Tony Drexel, a man who, as I have noted in the first volume of my Memoirs, was short and fat and possessed of genuinely exceptionally gigantic nostrils. His voice was beautiful and deep, a voice so lovely that it made up for his shortness and his fattiness and could nearly (but not quite) cause one to overlook his quite unsightly nostrils, nostrils so large and deep that they seemed to present a visible tunnel into his brain, into his thoughts and deepest wishes and dreams and very being itself. Morgan had by this point in our story long since ceased to be surprised by Drexel’s nostrils, though he was not yet used to them, and would never be used to them; no man born of this Earth ever could be.

  Their syndicate partner Levi Morton was seeking a Congressional office in an election to be held in less than two months; Drexel updated Morgan on progress, and the two discussed what they could do to ensure success. Then they turned to financial matters. The United States was shortly to return to the gold standard, a development that Drexel expected would have a spectacular impact on the firm’s financial fortunes.

  “We shall shortly be rather magnificently rich,” Drexel gushed, and Morgan noted without much passion that they were both already rather magnificently rich, so who the Hell cared, at this point, after all?

  Morgan sighed, and Drexel muttered, “Richer, then, if you wish.”

  Drexel picked up a small ivory sculpture from his desktop, a Greek goddess with long, flowing hair. He fondled the goddess between his soft pink hands. This, with a bit of unconscious randyness, it seemed to Morgan. Morgan looked away.

  As he left Drexel’s office, Morgan recalled that Fanny would return from Cragston early in the evening. He felt rather guilty about the hateful thoughts that had flitted through his mind earlier in the day, and so he summoned his secretary, an eager and well-groomed young man, and asked him to have a roomful of roses delivered to their house on 36th Street, along with a sniveling note, which Morgan dictated to the embarrassed but still enthusiastic employee: I am a beast and a louse, and you deserve better. Because of you, I am a blessed man – with all my love ….

  At that, he exited the second floor office of Drexel & Morgan, thumped down the carpeted stairway and passed into the street. The air had the new crispness of Fall, as though Nature knew that this was the day Morgan had returned to New York. In the center of Wall Street, a lost squirrel barreled through a gaggle of pigeons; the startled birds bounced into the air a bit, then returned to their places. A line of cabs and snorting horses stood before the Stock Exchange on the west side of Broad Street, and a heav
ing, buzzing swarm of curb-stone brokers spilled out onto the street from between the front columns of the four-story, white marble building, snarling, failing small-time businessmen in sun-faded bowler hats, fighting their way into the Long Room.

  Morgan crossed Nassau Street, passed, without looking, the Sub-Treasury building, another multi-columned, shimmering marble palace, and slipped into the Bakir & Bushong Bank building on Broad Street. He rumbled down the hallway till he reached the furthest dead-end. He rapped on a dirty wooden door, whose window announced that it was the entrance to the American Cigar Distribution Company. A natty, muscular man answered the door, familiar smirk glued firmly to his crooked, handsome face, and Morgan entered a narrow, dim suite of rooms that bustled with visitors, but in which not much cigar distribution was proceeding. The wooden filing cabinets were cracked and fusty, and dusty sunlight squeezed its way through the office’s two dirty, neglected windows.

  If you have somehow managed to put your hands on the first volume of my Memoirs – perhaps in a shoebox in an attic somewhere – you may recall the unsavory yet officially reputable cast of characters who greeted Morgan in the cigar company’s office. The aforementioned smirker was a government agent named Mr. Sneed. (I have to this day learned neither his first name, nor the specific government agency of which he was an agent.) He held out one calloused, thick-fingered hand and grasped Morgan’s shoulder roughly, overly familiarly. Sneed had short blond hair, which now showed some signs of very recent thinning, a face that was beginning to vein from drinking, and a broken nose, now less attractive than it had been in his earlier youth. Beside him was Filbank, Sneed’s shadow, another ambiguous government agent, but he was soft and fluffy and seemingly hapless where Sneed was scarred and rough and seemingly competent. Filbank wore an identical black frock suit, but it hung loosely in the wrong places, bulged fatly in others. He looked itchy and uncomfortable, and he hovered invisibly in the background just behind Sneed’s left shoulder. In the center of the room, in a suit that had once been lovely, perhaps before it had found its current owner, stood the always groggy and always irritable W. Marley Talzek, counsel to the American Cigar Distribution Company, a man who (as he periodically reminded colleagues and clients, and, constantly, himself) had once had rather impeccable ethics, in those now golden days when he’d owned a manufactory, bequeathing lovely glassware to tasteful homes throughout New York and beyond, and more affordable glassware for the working classes of America. Before he had become a lawyer.