Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  At his customary table in Diedrich Frank’s saloon, in a booth upholstered in tufted leather beneath a poster showing Eva Tanguay, the Queen of Perpetual Motion, in tights and an hourglass corset, he shoveled in a platter of sauerkraut, three kinds of sausage, and a wheel of Pinconning cheese, chasing each course with a glass of lager. When the boy arrived with the first of the afternoon papers, he tipped him a nickel, lit a cigar, and read with keen interest the details of yesterday’s National League baseball match between the Tigers and the Orioles at Bennett Park. He scowled upon learning that a routine ground ball hit by Uncle Robbie Robinson to Pop Dillon at first base had turned into a game-winning RBI for Baltimore when the horsehide bounded off an exposed cobblestone and past Dillon’s ear. For years Dolan had been after Georgie Stallings to dig up all the stones and prevent such “cobbies” in future, but the general manager, bound by club owner Sam Angus’s Scotch purse strings, could offer nothing more permanent than an occasional application of fresh loam. Big Jim was fond of repeating that he’d lost fifty cents in a friendly wager on the old Detroits in 1895 and had spent five thousand dollars trying to win it back. Betting on baseball was the most scrupulously managed of his vices. Jakob Wiess, proprietor of the Star of Israel chain of cleaning stores in Cleveland, boasted that he owned the most modern steam pressers in the Middle West and magnanimously declared that he owed this distinction to the Indians and James Aloysius Dolan of Detroit. Dolan acknowledged this with an outward show of bluff good humor and an inward loathing for Wiess, whom he considered an unscrupulous businessman and a Christ-killer into the bargain.

  Next he reported to Falco’s Barbershop (haircut, fifteen cents; shave, ten cents), where amidst the sparkling white tile and endless mirror images he sank back into a leather armchair and pretended to amuse himself with Harper’s and the Police Gazette while eavesdropping upon the conversation between the barbers and the customers seated in the five Union Metallic chairs. He found these exchanges more enlightening than the newspapers, and considered his decision to eschew the status of an in-home tonsorial visit a signal advantage over his equals. Moreover, the man on the street pointed to his presence in such establishments as evidence of Big Jim’s accessibility and democratic nature.

  When Sebastian, his favorite barber, was free, Dolan sat for a trim, then, pink-necked and freshened with witch hazel, gave him a quarter. He snapped open the face of his watch, sighed, and took a streetcar back to Corktown, where Abner Crownover II’s backward son awaited him in his study.

  Jimmy Dolan loved this room. Small compared to those of many men less important than he, it was packed with mustard-colored law books in a walnut case that filled the wall to the right of the desk, a massive slab of carved and inlaid hickory supporting a stained blotter, a heavy brass inkwell and pen stand, and a bust of Socrates done in green marble with a chip out of one eyebrow that made the old pedant look as if he were winking slyly. A full-length oil portrait of Himself with his thumbs in his vest pockets hung behind the desk, still smelling faintly of turpentine; it had been finished just last week. Over everything, Turkish rug and leather humidor, Regulator clock and elephant-leg wastebasket, hung a pungent and masculine odor of bootblack and tobacco and decaying paper and dust; no feminine invasion with feathers and lemon oil was tolerated. The English sparrow that had built its nest on the sill outside the leaded window seemed unaware that it had settled so near the center of the great machine that drove the city of Detroit, and by extension the state of Michigan and a large part of the Midwestern bloc in Congress. The bird alone accepted such crumbs as were sprinkled before it with no thought of returning the boon.

  Not so Harlan Crownover, who sprang up from the leather armchair in front of the desk when Dolan entered. He was a rather stocky twenty, darker than his father, but he possessed the long Gallic upper lip that to some degree bore out the family’s claims to descendancy from the French who had settled the region two hundred years before. This distinction was in no small part responsible for the gulf that separated the Crownovers from the Dolans in the New World; in a hundred years of continuous residency, Big Jim’s great-grandchildren would still smell like peat to the Abners and Harlans of the next century. The Irish Pope noted with distaste his visitor’s costume of faded flannel shirt, stained dungarees, and thick-soled work boots; he hadn’t even bothered to go home and change on his way there from work. Well, Charlotte had said he only had an hour. Still, he might have put on a necktie. If Noche had answered the door, he would have told the son of one of the city’s richest men to go around back.

  No trace of Dolan’s displeasure showed as he wrapped his big soft hand around Harlan’s small calloused one. “Merciful Mary, can this be Abner Junior’s middle boy? I’m after remembering a skinny lad in knickers with a swollen nose. You slid down the Washington Street hill into the wheel of a milk wagon.”

  “That was Edward,” Harlan said. “I think it was a coal wagon.”

  Dolan grunted and indicated the armchair. He was vain about his memory for personal details and didn’t care to be caught in error. Seating himself between the wings of his great horsehair swivel, he asked after the health of Harlan’s parents.

  “Mother’s very busy with the Orphans’ Asylum. I’m afraid Father’s working himself to death, but he won’t be dissuaded.”

  This literal answer displeased Dolan, who preferred to reserve such straight talk for matters of greater gravity. It was no secret that Abner III, Abner Junior’s eldest son, had been promoted to an executive position of no real authority when his incompetence in the office of president had driven the company to the brink of bankruptcy, and that Abner Junior had been forced out of semiretirement to assist young Edward with his new presidential duties. Edward was his father’s rubber stamp, an adequate functionary but incapable of arriving at a decision that differed with Abner Junior’s nineteenth-century fundamentalism. Harlan, the dimmest star in the family constellation, had been passed over entirely. A long tradition of genius had ended with old Abner.

  “Will you have a brandy?” Dolan asked.

  “Thank you, sir, no. I reserve my drinking for the Pontchartrain bar.”

  So far nothing the young man had said had elevated his station. Less than six months old, the Pontchartrain Hotel had replaced the fine old Russell House, which for half a century had sheltered such world luminaries as the former Prince of Wales. No one of a certain vintage had been encouraged when it was demolished to make room for a pretentious palace for transients whose bar catered to a particularly disagreeable clientele: motormen who tracked grease and oil across the Oriental rug in the lobby and hoisted their pistons and things onto the mahogany bar for the admiration of their cronies.

  “Are you a frequent customer?” Dolan asked.

  In his eagerness to curry favor, Harlan misunderstood the motive behind the question. “I’m a two-drink man, sir. Never more nor less. I don’t mind saying most of those fellows enjoy tipping the tankard and distrust those who limit themselves to one glass. Henry Ford is the exception. He’s a total abstainer, but he is a genius.”

  “A genius, is it?” Dolan was amused. “You’re a fortunate young man. In forty years I’ve never met one.”

  “You would if you visited the Pontchartrain.”

  He shifted in the swivel; the sauerkraut had begun to work. For a young man without much time the fellow was taking the long way around the barn.

  Harlan sensed his discomfort. He leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees as if in prayer. “I intend to invest in Mr. Ford’s automobile company. If you’ll agree to lend me the money. I intend to repay it with interest within a year.”

  Dolan was suddenly serene. Pleas for money were solid ground. He’d been afraid he was going to be asked for a job. Charlotte, who for some mysterious female reason had taken a liking to the young man, would make life difficult if he turned him down, yet he didn’t want to alienate Abner Junior by employing a son who had decided to desert the family enterprise. Money
was another thing entirely. To challenge a man’s decision in regard to his funds was as indelicate as questioning his religion.

  “I heard this fellow Ford was out of the automobile business.”

  “He closed his plant for lack of capital. Now he has the support of Alexander Malcolmson.”

  “The coal dealer?”

  “He has faith in Mr. Ford, as have I. Five other men are interested: John Gray, a banker, and John Anderson and Horace Rackham, who are successful lawyers. Another John and Horace, the Dodge brothers, have agreed to manufacture engines and other parts in return for shares. Mr. Ford feels that he can arrange a hundred thousand in capital if he can raise a quarter of that amount in cash. Five thousand would entitle me to twenty percent of the common stock. I own a thousand dollars in shares in Crownover Coaches. I wish to borrow the rest.”

  “Have you approached your father?” Dolan asked with a smile.

  “My father is a traditionalist.” Harlan clamped his mouth tight at the end of the statement.

  “Surely nothing so bad as that.” This young man had begun not to amuse him. “Why did you come to me? There are banks.”

  “I’ve been to the banks. The bankers are all very patient until they learn my father isn’t interested. They’re businessmen.”

  “Automobile manufacture is not a business?”

  “It’s more than that. It’s the future. It occurred to me that a politician such as yourself might be expected to see beyond the next fiscal year. When I was small, I saw a picture of you in the newspaper, wearing overalls and leaning on a hoe in one of those vegetable gardens Hazen Pingree started throughout the city when he was mayor. I never forgot it. When everyone else was complaining about the bad economy, you and Pingree were doing something about it, to feed the hungry. Men who take action is what the automobile industry is all about.”

  So now it was an industry. Dolan remembered the picture very well. It had elected him to city council, his first public office. Charlotte had had to let out his old switchman’s overalls, and he had borrowed the hoe from an unemployed bricklayer who was tending the garden. Ping’s Potato Patches, as they were called, hadn’t done a jot to improve conditions among the poor, but they had gotten the old man a statue in Grand Circus Park, if they ever got around to finishing the thing.

  “The last time I invested money, I lost every penny,” Dolan said. “Although lost is not accurate. It’s on the bottom of Lake Michigan with the Great Lakes Stove Company’s first and only shipment.”

  “I’m not asking for an investment, but a loan. I intend to repay it with interest come fire or flood. The risk is mine.”

  “The money is not.”

  “Are you turning me down?”

  “I am. We live in an age of interesting inventions, of which the automobile is just one. I’m afraid I haven’t the vision for which you credit me; I can’t tell which will survive and which will be supplanted by the next interesting invention. If you lose your investment, you will remain indebted to me, and you will come to resent me for it. I value my association with your family too much to jeopardize it.”

  “The decision is final?”

  “I’m afraid it is.” Dolan smiled. “Please give my regards to your father and mother. I haven’t seen them since the last bicycle race I attended on Belle Isle. The elections,” he added by way of explanation.

  “You’re making a mistake, Mr. Dolan.”

  He frowned. The boy was no gentleman. Dolan was not either, by way of birth and occupation; he had long ago resigned himself to that truth, but it upset him that someone could take the privilege so far for granted as to reject it out of hand. It was like a man born to wealth telling a poor man that money was not important.

  “Good luck to you, Mr. Crownover.”

  After Harlan had shaken his hand and left, Big Jim Dolan sat back down and set fire to a cigar. Had he not made it his business not to muck around in another man’s business, he might have considered warning Abner Crownover that he was risking too much to trust his loading dock to his middle son.

  chapter two

  The Coach King

  IN CONTRAST WITH THE PRINCELY portrait of James Aloysius Dolan that hung behind Big Jim’s desk in Corktown, the likeness of the founder of Crownover Coaches might have been lost in his son’s office at the corner of Shelby and Jefferson were it not for the oversize frame in which it was matted and mounted. It was a three-by-five-inch tintype, orange and wrinkled, of a bulldog face in a stiff collar and pale side-whiskers, a fleshy badge of mid-Victorian prosperity with an incongruously hollow stare, as if the eyes had been punched out of a mask. The picture was made in 1859, the year John Brown hanged for treason. Abner would stand trial that same year for conspiracy in the raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia; although the jury would vote for acquittal, the ardent abolitionism that had driven him to meet with Brown and Frederick Douglass at the Detroit end of the Underground Railroad and agree to help finance their bold plan to arm the slaves would destroy his reputation as a stable businessman. He sold his wagon-making business and died, a broken man, shortly before the Second Battle of Bull Run.

  Abner Crownover’s descendants weren’t quite sure what to do with him. They felt little concern about the wife and three children he deserted in England to build wagons for pioneers departing the Northwest Territory for Oregon; such footnotes were infinitesimal in the book of the Great Expansion. They pointed with pride at the site in Miami Square where the wheels and sideboards were fitted, reminded people that A. Crownover &Company had been the largest private employer in antebellum Detroit, and insisted that its founder’s name be included in the roll of those who were present under the oaks in Jackson when the Republican Party was created in 1854. That he should have thrown all this over in favor of an idealistic dream was a subject upon which they chose to remain silent. Treason was one thing, and a bad enough job at that; it was the poor business implicit in the decision that they abhorred.

  Abner Crownover II seldom mentioned his father, and since the age of eleven, when he had gone to work as a grease boy in the firm that had once belonged to his family, had corrected people when they addressed him as “Junior.” He considered himself as much the founder of the company as was his father. Hard, uncomplaining work and perceptive suggestions made deferentially and through channels had earned him an executive position at an age at which the sons of most successful men were starting college. In that capacity he persuaded his superiors to acquire a bankrupt manufacturer of short-haul freight vehicles and passenger coaches. The day of the great wagon trains was coming to an end; within five years Crownover &Company had abandoned wagon making altogether for the business of providing brass-fitted carriages for the well-to-do. A mechanic at heart, Abner worked out an ingenious suspension system that smoothed cobblestones and potholes and delivered the 400 to their destinations with diamonds and silk tiles intact. The Crownover opera coach, bearing the firm’s elegant coronet in gold leaf on the door, became a staple among the gentlefolk of the Gilded Age.

  Then came the Panic of ’73. Overextended members of the board of directors had reason to thank young Abner for buying out their shares at a more favorable rate than the stunned market offered, and at an age when most young men of good family were attending college, “Junior” acquired controlling interest in Crownover Coaches. His story was written up in Harper’s and inspired a laudatory book written by a journalist from Toledo, handsomely bound in green cloth with gold, circus-style lettering, entitled The Coach King. It sold well throughout the end of the nineteenth century to readers whose shelves sagged beneath the weight of volumes by Horatio Alger and G. A. Henty. In the meantime the plant moved from Miami Square to its present larger quarters, with two floors of offices separated by soundproofing from the hammer clatter and wailing steam saws at ground level. Crownover vehicles had been made to order for Governors Pingree of Michigan and Cleveland of New York, William Randolph Hearst, and Sarah Bernhardt. A grateful nation had prese
nted Admiral Dewey with a Crownover cabriolet in mahogany with ivory side panels in honor of the victory at Manila. William McKinley rode to his second inauguration in a one-of-a-kind Crownover phaeton with gold-plated headlamps and the presidential seal inlaid in the door.

  The nation’s youngest tycoon was now in his fifties. Long hours and total responsibility for the operation of his company had added twenty years to his appearance, disappointing those visitors who expected, on the evidence of The Coach King, to meet a man in whom some semblance of youth still resided. His pale hair, fine as spun sugar and cropped close to his pink scalp, was so little removed from total baldness that it might as well have fallen out years ago. The long upper lip, which in the tender years had contributed to his boyishness, gave him in age the face of a mummified monkey. His glittering black browless eyes did nothing to detract from this impression. In recent years he had formed the habit of sitting motionless and unspeaking behind his plain desk, staring with his bright simian eyes at speakers, then dismissing them with nothing more than a reference to the time. These speakers repaired directly to the bars of the Pontchartrain and Metropole, as much in search of human contact as refreshment. Abner II was not a warm man. It was said his first wife had committed suicide because of loneliness.

  In fact she had simply died, albeit of neglect and a related condition; scarlet fever, however, was announced as the cause. He had married again in 1876, scandalizing Edith Hampton’s eastern aristocratic family with the notion of a grease boy entering its halls. Edith gave birth to six children, four of whom survived infancy. The daughter, Katherine, eloped at fourteen with an adventurer bound for the Oklahoma territory and vanished from the family history. Abner III, the oldest of the three boys, became president of the Detroit office of Crownover Coaches in 1898, and was reassigned to an executive position with fewer responsibilities and a more impressive-sounding title when it became clear that pressure did not bring out the best in him; he was, in truth, incapable of making a decision and holding to it. For his replacement, Abner II passed over Harlan, his second son, and promoted young Edward from the upholstery shop. He would assume control of the company upon his father’s retirement.