The City Tavern was but the most principal of trading taverns, where the most powerful and reputable speculators plied their trade, but one building was not enough these days to house the mania that had infected the city of late. At virtually any tavern within two or three blocks of the Treasury buildings, men might be found buying and selling securities, stocks, loans, and bank issues. The success of Hamilton ’s bank had created a frenzy for bank stocks of all sorts, and the trade in Bank of New York and Bank of Pennsylvania issues was brisk. Much of this new business sprang from a general sense of possibility and euphoria, but much was merely because the Bank of the United States had millions of dollars to lend and did so at easy rates to help promote the economy. Hamilton believed in making credit widely available and making it cheap. The end result was trade, frenetic trade. Men bought and sold with wild enthusiasm but also created: new businesses, new ventures, and yes, new banks. These sprang up almost monthly, and though most were mere opportunistic adventures, occasions for selling worthless shares to men who hoped to sell again before the bubble burst, the trade appeared unaffected by the common knowledge of worthlessness. Hamilton had hoped to invigorate the economy with his bank and he had done so, but his enemies argued that he had not merely given the markets energy, he had rendered them mad.
I asked Leonidas to wait outside and stepped through the front door. In doing so, I thought I had stepped into the middle of a brawl, for in the front room some two dozen men were upon their feet, shouting most vociferously and waving papers at one another. Each man appeared to have with him a clerk, who sat by his side, frantically scribbling down the devil knew what upon pieces of parchment or in ledger books. Their pens moved with such rapidity that ink sprayed in the air like a black rain.
I stared at the chaos, hardly knowing how to respond. I must have remained there a few moments, transfixed by the lunacy around me. At last I heard a whisper in my ear. “Curious, is it not?”
It was Lavien, and he wore a look of extreme satisfaction. “I wondered how long it would take you to find your way here. Come sit for a moment.”
He led me to a table and called for tea. I called for porter. Our drinks arrived with relative dispatch, and Lavien leaned back, to watch the confusion of the room around me in which men in fine suits acted as though they had been possessed by devils. I could make nothing of it, but my companion watched the proceedings as though it were a race conducted with horses whose skills and particulars he knew well.
“What brings you here?” he asked me.
“Once again, you hope to get information from me yet offer nothing in return,” I answered. “But I will be more generous than you. I look for a William Duer. Do you know if he is in Philadelphia or has been recently?”
He pointed. “The one waving papers in both hands-that is Duer.”
Hamilton, who evidently had not troubled to inform Lavien of his lies, was now exposed, and I looked over at the man the Secretary of the Treasury was so anxious I not meet. The madman in question was not very tall. He had narrow shoulders and delicate, nearly feminine features, though he had a high and balding forehead and hair cut short with a dandyish curl to it. He wore a crushed velvet suit, dark in its blueness, almost purple, and he would have appeared comical had he not conducted himself with the most astonishing seriousness. I found nothing compelling in him myself, but the men in the room appeared to attend to his every sound, his every gesture. A mere shift in the direction of his small eyes was enough to change the course of whatever lunacy took place before me.
“Why are you looking for Duer?” Lavien asked me. His expression betrayed nothing.
“Oh, this and that,” I said. “Any thoughts on why Hamilton would tell me that Duer was not in Philadelphia and had not been for some time?”
Lavien paused, but only for a blink of an eye. “I doubt Hamilton remains informed of Duer’s comings and goings. Tell me how the two of you happened to discuss him.”
“How odd. I don’t recollect. But what can you tell me about him?”
“He is the king of the speculators,” Lavien said. “He is both daring and reckless, caring for nothing but his own profits. In my opinion, he is plotting something this very minute.”
“What?”
“I don’t know precisely, but I have seen him consistently shorting six percent government issues-that is, gambling that they will lose value. He is important enough that when he predicts stocks will decline, others presume the same and follow suit.”
“Is that illegal?”
“No,” said Lavien. “Merely interesting.”
A fter another hour of commotion, the frenzy died down. Men settled at their tables. Clerks ceased their writing. Most of the speculators now turned to the business of drinking tea or left the tavern altogether. Duer sat at a table speaking with a pair of speculators Lavien did not know. All appeared easy and jovial.
“You very obviously want a word with him,” Lavien said. “Let me introduce you.”
“Why are you helping me? I thought you and Hamilton wanted me to keep my distance.”
“Merely showing some respect for a brother of the trade,” he answered, his face typically, troublingly, blank.
I did not believe. I think he knew Duer would prove uncooperative and I would learn there was nothing I could accomplish on my own and that attempting to meddle with a government inquiry would prove a waste of time. It is what I would do, were I in his place.
Duer was in the midst of some tale about how he had extricated himself from the decline of value that the Bank of the United States scrip had suffered the previous summer. According to the little I heard, the value reached a low point and would have caused financial disaster throughout the country had Duer not convinced Hamilton to take action. Once Hamilton did so, the value of scrip rebounded. It was, in other words, the precise opposite of the version Hamilton had told me: namely, that he, the Secretary of the Treasury, had refused to be swayed by friendship and had defied Duer for the benefit of the nation.
The story came to a rather abrupt end when Duer noticed us standing within earshot. He coughed rather ostentatiously into his fist and sipped at his coffee. “Mr. Levine is it? Have I not told you I have no more to say to you?”
“It is Lavien, sir, and I am not here to speak to you myself but to introduce this gentleman. Mr. William Duer, may I present Captain Ethan Saunders.”
“Captain Saunders? Where have I heard that name? Nothing good, I think.” He waved his hand, as though I were a fly to be shooed. “Wasn’t there some business about betraying your country? I’ve no time for traitors.”
“And yet here I am, making time for traders. Ironic, don’t you think?”
He did not answer.
“And what of Jacob Pearson?” I asked. “Have you time for him?”
“Is he here? What of it? He has more to fear from his creditors than I have from him.”
“His creditors?” I said.
Duer clucked like a schoolmaster reviewing some unsatisfactory work. “Have you not heard? Pearson is in dangerous straits. He’s been selling off his properties all over the city, though it shan’t be enough, I’ll warrant. A reckless man, and reckless men always stumble.”
“And what is your connection to him?” I asked.
“I know him from about town, of course. He has proposed business with me on more than one occasion, but I cannot work with one such as he, and his current crisis merely proves my earlier suppositions. Now, I’ve given you more time than you deserve. I must go.”
“One moment, Mr. Duer. Are you familiar with a large Irishman?” I asked. “Bald-pated, red-mustached, muscular?”
“You must have mistaken me for a juggler,” he said, “or perhaps a bearded circus performer. I know no one of that description. Good day.”