City of Light (15 page)

My heart was beating fast. Hide everything; steady my voice: “Did Susan Rumsey or anyone else speak to the housekeeper about what had happened?”

“Not that I noticed. But by then we were on our third serving of dessert and I was distracted. So, what do you make of it?”

I willed myself to appear indifferent. “Nothing, Mr. Fiske. Nothing at all.”

“Oh.” He looked put out.

Shift the subject, I told myself. “What’s your stake in all of this, Mr. Fiske? What’s your concern with endowments, and a widower and his daughter? Or even with me?”

“Perhaps I wish to be your protector.”

I laughed bitterly.

“No, I mean it. From the moment I saw you perched on that snow mound by the lake, I’ve been quite swept up by you. I can’t get that image of you out of my mind.” I gazed at him in bewilderment; could he be sincere? Had he been sincere at Francesca’s? I could no longer trust myself to judge correctly.

More seriously, he continued. “I must say you are naive to think you can maintain your equanimity among the forces at work here.”

That, at least, I could judge. “Forces at work? You’ve missed your calling, Mr. Fiske. You should be writing Gothic melodramas instead of doing—what is it again that you say you do? ‘Artistic photographs of industrial sites’?”

“Ah.” He leaned toward me, elbows on knees. “You’ve hit on the very thing I meant to tell you tonight.” He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “I’ll be blunt, which I sense you prefer. The fact is, I have not given up newspapering, as I led you to believe when we first met. No, indeed. I’m sorry I had to mislead you. I’m here in secret—as a reporter for the New York
World.”

“Please don’t tease me, Mr. Fiske.”

“No, I’m not. I assure you.”

I thought back: his presence at the lakeshore, his well-cultivated intimacy with the upper echelons of the city, his pressing interest in matters that theoretically weren’t his business. Everything he’d done, he’d done for a hidden cause. I felt as if the pieces of a puzzle had clicked into place.

“The
World
has a great tradition of covert work,” he was explaining. “Nellie Bly, among those women journalists whom you once told me you admired—and a personal friend of mine, I will say in my favor—has often undertaken such assignments, and although I regret deeply that I may have caused you—”

“What are you here to investigate?” I interrupted.

“Ah. Thank you,” he said, obviously grateful that I had accepted him. “Irregularities in the development and operation of the hydroelectric power station at Niagara Falls.”

“You’re joking with me now, Mr. Fiske.”

“No, I assure you.”

“It’s impossible.”

“No—”

“Mr. Fiske,” I interrupted wearily, “there is nothing ‘irregular’ about the development of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls.” Even as I said it, I doubted my words; I heard Grace:
All they ever fought about was electricity
.

“I wouldn’t be so quick in your assumptions,” Fiske insisted. “As you know, I had an appointment to meet Karl Speyer at the Iroquois Hotel on that same fateful day that you and I met. As I may have explained, he and I were planning to visit Niagara together, so that he could show me a piece of machinery of which he was tremendously proud. He’d even named it after himself: the Westinghouse-Speyer, he called it. I believe it was a new type of generator that made more electricity with less water.”

Yes, I knew it only too well; I saw it at night when I closed my eyes.

“Karl Speyer was concerned about the profligate use of water. For you see, although he was justifiably proud of all he’d accomplished at Niagara, he’d already shared with me, when I just happened to visit him at home in Pittsburgh the month before, a healthy skepticism about the goals of the people who happen to have control over his creation.” Fiske stared at me fixedly. “Poor Speyer met with an ‘accident’ before he could meet me, as we know. Speyer was a romantic, or so the theory goes—one theory, that is. He went to view the park in the moonlight, although the night was snowy.”

“We have a lovely park here, Mr. Fiske. People come from around the country to see it. Olmsted and Vaux—”

“I know all about the park, Miss Barrett. I also know something about the character of Karl Speyer, which is that he was unlikely to visit a park after dark in a snowstorm for the purpose of admiring the work of Olmsted and Vaux. No, this man was murdered. I would like to know exactly why, and by whom. Evidently we can’t rely on the police or the coroner to tell us; as I’m sure you’ve noticed, there’s been a distinct lack of official conclusions.” I forced myself to meet his eyes. “Something you said that day, by the frozen lake—by the murder site—led me to believe that you would like to know as well.”

“What was it that I said?” Of course I knew.

“When I told you that Sinclair had claimed that Speyer was one of the few men with whom he’d never exchanged a harsh word, you said, ‘Really?’ as if you were surprised. That ‘Really?’ seemed significant to me, Miss Barrett. What did it mean?”

“It meant nothing. I was ‘just making conversation,’ as you were only a moment ago.”

Abruptly he stood and walked over to the shelves that held my father’s rock specimens.

“You’re interested in stones?” Fiske asked over his shoulder.

“My father was a geologist. That’s what I’ve saved of his collection.”

“How did you decide what to save?”

“I saved what I liked best.”

“That’s an intriguing way to do it, without thought for value.”

“What I didn’t like was worth enough to pay for my last years at Wellesley.”

“Ah. They’re beautiful.” He began to pick them up, one at a time. To caress and cradle them. Possessively, I hurried to join him; I felt an irrational fear that he might mistreat them, these few objects I owned that my father had touched.

“This one is curious. It has snowflakes in it.”

“It’s obsidian. Snowflake obsidian.” I almost snatched the rock away, but managed to hold back my hand. Standing close beside him, all at once I remembered that we were alone in the house. He smelled of pipe tobacco and a citrusy shaving lotion. I could see his chest move as he breathed. “Sometimes I think it’s magical.” I rubbed the snowflake obsidian where it rested in his palm. I looked at his face, and our eyes met for an instant before we both glanced away. “Look at this one. Polished sodalite. You can see yourself in it, like a mirror.”

Gently he put down the obsidian and took the sodalite, holding it up to the gaslight.

“When I was young,” I said softly, letting down my guard, “my father took me with him on his expeditions. I had a miniature hammer and chisel. I knelt beside him in the hills of Colorado and Wyoming, knocking away at the rocks.”

“I wish I’d known you then.”

“I met Indians, and mountain men. When my father died, that entire way of life closed to me.” Remembering my father’s death brought me back sharply to the present.

Perhaps to show his sympathy Fiske offered, “My father died when I was eight.”

Automatically, still feeling my own sadness, I said, “I’m sorry.”

“He was a Unitarian minister.”

“Really?” Now I smiled. “There it is again, ‘Really?’ infused with meaning.”

“And its meaning in this case?”

“I was raised as a Unitarian. Although I now attend the Episcopal church for the sake of the school.”

“Yet another of the small compromises involved in being a headmistress.” He too showed a touch of a smile. “But it’s something we have in common, at least: We’re both presumably free-thinking and undogmatic. That’s good to know.”

I could feel myself easing into a sense of comfort with him. A sense of friendship. “Did you consider becoming a minister?”

“Never. I studied history at Columbia College, and afterward, being too much of a misfit for anything but minding other people’s business, I joined the
World
. I was attracted by its crusading zeal. By old man Pulitzer’s passion to better the lives of the oppressed and powerless.”

He gazed at me as if I were a quarry in the forest, then turned and walked to my desk, examining what he found there.

“Why are you always looking at everything?”

“Because I have no life of my own and nothing whatever to offer anyone except what I discover about them. For example: Here I see a small photo of our esteemed former president Grover Cleveland. What is that doing on your desk? Did you know him when he lived here?”

In spite of myself I blushed; busily I rearranged the stones, hoping Fiske wouldn’t realize. The photo had been on my desk so long that I’d stopped seeing it. “Cleveland had left Buffalo before I moved here.”

“How can you keep a photo of a man whose strongest belief was that a president has no authority to interfere with anything that happens to occur in the nation he happens to be president of?”

“Here in Buffalo his political reputation is somewhat different. Here we remember him when he was mayor and put a stop to patronage and bribery.” Regaining my composure, I turned to him. “And I admired him at the end of his first term as president, when he spoke to Congress about how industry should be serving the people instead of vice versa. About mansions next to tenements. I remember his exact words. That the people were being ‘trampled to death beneath an iron heel.’” I sighed. “I was idealistic in those days. I thought industry would take his words to heart. At any rate, I got the photo around then,” I added wearily.

“He’d certainly forgotten that speech by the time he sent troops to put down the Pullman strike. And when he did nothing to help the starving after depression hit in ’93. Oh, no: six hundred banks may fail but that’s not the proper realm for presidential action; oh, no: coal strikes, textile strikes, rail strikes—can’t let a president get involved with any of those.”

“Yes, you’re right, he did betray my ideals—as well as his own,” I said angrily. “Maybe he finds it even more difficult to live with himself than I do. I hope so. And let us not forget that many would say the
World
was single-handedly responsible for electing him president in the first place.”

“Touché.” As the reform candidate, Cleveland had been extravagantly championed by the
World
in ’84.

I forced myself to relax. “Nowadays I keep the photo on my desk for a different reason: as a constant reminder of the value of following the rules.”

He looked bewildered, and I was glad. “Meaning?” he asked.

When I didn’t respond, he waved aside the perplexities of Grover Cleveland. “Well, be that as it may. I do need your help, Miss Barrett, but not because I have a chill. I want you to help me to discover who killed Karl Speyer—or who ordered him killed—and why. I also want your help exploring bribery and various other types of corruption and greed involving the power station, quite separate from his death.”

I could not accept this. “Now you will think me naive and idealistic, Mr. Fiske, but I believe these are good men, these men who are united to build the power station. I know some of them. I’ve seen the power station—”

“You know nothing. Just because you don’t see little girls getting their fingers caught in machinery doesn’t mean the management has turned altruistic and decided to devote itself to the good of humanity.”

“The power station is different. The men who are building it, they do it with their own money, without guarantee of profits, and they give away what profits they have—witness Thomas Sinclair, with his million dollars to Macaulay.”

“My dear Miss Barrett,” Fiske said in a tone of exasperated patience. “What they give away is nothing compared to what they have. They’re causing themselves no sacrifice by giving money away. And don’t be fooled by the ‘sacrifice’ of millions spent to build the powerhouses, because millions more will be realized as more electricity begins to flow, as more industries take it on. I’ve dealt too often with men like these. I’ve come to see that the truth exists in inverse proportion to the sincerity with which they discuss their noble deeds.”

“What makes you so cynical?”

“I served time in the Philippines, remember? I saw our fine and honorable American soldiers using the too-aptly named ‘water cure’ to exact confessions from prisoners; of course the prisoners weren’t ‘white’ so it didn’t matter. But you can see that I come by my cynicism honestly. This is not a parlor game to me.”

“I thought your newspaper was in favor of American intervention in the Philippines. Indeed, I thought your newspaper virtually instigated American intervention in the Philippines.”

“Quite right. So you’ll be glad to discover I’m not a sycophant. Now when I hear our beloved President McKinley urging upon us our God-given duty to ‘uplift and Christianize’ the ‘heathen’ of the Philippines, most of whom happen to be Catholic, when what he really cares about is selling them things they don’t need—well, my cynicism quite overwhelms me.”

He touched my arm. “Miss Barrett, I came here to follow a trail. A trail of money, power, and avarice. I would like you to join me on this quest.”

“I know nothing of these matters.”

“But you do. And you know you do. That’s the reason I chose you to help me; I haven’t told anyone else what I’m doing here, only you. That’s because you’re apart from them but simultaneously part of them. You’re accepted by them. You’re ‘one of the boys.’ You lunch with them at the Buffalo Club. They let their guard down with you, make jokes in your presence that they would never make in the presence of their wives.”

He was right, of course. How quickly he had pegged me.

“I ask you only to listen, Miss Barrett, and wait until the facade slips. Then report back to me.”

“You mean, betray my friends and spread malicious gossip.”

“Well, that’s one delightful way of looking at it. You could also look at it as helping your country.”

“Indeed. How so?” I asked skeptically.

“The
World
believes—and by happy coincidence I agree—that the utilities should belong to the people.”

“The
World
believes?”

“Yes, I realize this is coming from the very same editors who brought us the glorious war with Spain. Nonetheless, they’re correct on this point. Electricity should be a public service, not a commodity sold to the highest bidder. The electricity created at Niagara belongs to the people. Not to the industrialists, not to the nature preservationists—a gaggle of geese there, if I’ve ever seen one, and self-righteous to boot—but the
people
. Even the poorest of the immigrant masses—even they—should have a stake in the profits of Niagara. You may be interested to know that in Europe, governments own and operate power stations; common citizens get priority in the use of electricity, not industry. People get their homes lighted first, and what’s left goes to make chlorate of potash.”