He sat at his desk, which was covered with four or five high piles of neatly stacked papers. He had a quill in one hand and a near-empty inkpot by his side.
“I am very busy, Captain Saunders,” he said.
“So am I. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
He set down the pen. “What can this be about? Mr. Pearson has returned, so I know you don’t visit me upon that score.”
“You know I do, and that Mr. Pearson’s return is not an answer but another question.”
“I seem to recall asking you not to involve yourself in this matter.”
“I recall that too, but you and I both know you did not mean it. You would much rather I ran an inquiry parallel to that of Lavien. You will yield far better results if you have two men competing for the same ends. I will not say you engineered this competition, but you cannot regret it. Now let us end this dissimulation. You wish me to proceed, don’t you?”
He looked at me directly. “No.”
“Of course you do. There is too much in the balance. Perhaps it is time for you to tell me why you wished Lavien to find Pearson in the first place. Why is he of interest to you?”
“It is a private matter.”
So he said, but I began to think it must be a public matter. There was no personal connection I could divine, so there was but one obvious reason Hamilton might take an interest in Pearson. Given what the bearded Scotsman had told me this morning about defaulted bank loans, I could but conclude one thing. “He has borrowed money from the bank, hasn’t he?”
Hamilton blinked and looked away. “I suppose he may have.”
“How much?”
“The bank was, in its conception, my idea, and I take an interest in its operation, but I do not run the bank, and I do not take an interest in its day-to-day operations. I doubt that even Mr. Willing, the bank president, could tell you about individual loans without resorting to files. You cannot expect that I, who am far more removed, can summon such information instantaneously on any possible borrower.”
“No, I don’t expect you to know any possible borrower. I do, however, expect you know about this one. How much?”
He sighed. “He has borrowed fifty thousand dollars.”
“Good God, you give that much to a single individual?”
“It was for investment and development. You have seen how the city thrives under bank money. Pearson is a respected dealer in real estate, and he presented us with a specific plan for developing land to the west of the city.”
“But he hasn’t done it, has he? You received word that not only was Pearson not buying and developing land, he was losing the properties he already had. You don’t keep an eye on the day-to-day minutiae of investment, nor does the bank president, I’ll wager. No one was going out to Helltown to see if Pearson was developing it. He was a respected man of business, and it was safe to assume he was doing what he said. But then you receive word that his properties are being foreclosed, and you learn that no one knows where he is. Suddenly fifty thousand in bank funds may have vanished. Can the bank withstand such a loss?”
“Of course it can. It is a serious loss but there are systems built into the bank’s charter to enable it to weather defaulted loans.”
“Easily?”
“It is never easy.”
“It is never easy,” I said, “because what you fear most is Jefferson and his faction getting word of this. That is the issue, isn’t it? Your bank has just launched and endured a rocky first half year with wildly fluctuating share prices. Now, it will be said, it is granting loans to the personal friends of the bank president, loans that will not-cannot-be repaid. You know what they will say: that the bank is an engine of the northern money men to feed their own greed.”
Hamilton nodded. “That is, indeed, what they will say. That is part of it.”
“There is more?”
“You will keep this quiet?”
“Of course.”
“There is also the method of the bank’s funding, the whiskey excise. Jefferson ’s faction will waste no time in saying that we tax the poor men of the frontier to pay for the irresponsible spending of the rich. That is what they will say.”
“And the truth?”
“The truth is that the Bank of the United States is a large bank that makes large loans, so of course it is of direct benefit to the rich. There are smaller land banks that benefit small landholders, and that is what they should do, but projects that benefit the rich also benefit others. Had Pearson done with the money what he was supposed to do, he would have built properties, which would have employed men and caused goods to change hands. Those buildings would have provided housing, space for shops and services, for the growth of the economy. That benefits all, rich and poor.”
“Clearly that is not what happened with Pearson. Now he has returned, what has Lavien learned about the fate of the money?”
“Very little. Pearson won’t answer any questions.”
“And, I suppose, you haven’t given Lavien permission to break his elbows or cut off his feet. Not with someone so prominent.”
“Pearson is clever,” said Hamilton. “He has openly refused to appear at the bank to explain the status of his loan, and he knows we dare not press the matter, lest it become public knowledge that a loan of this magnitude is in danger. I’m sure Pearson knows that that scoundrel Philip Freneau, who writes Jefferson ’s newspaper, has been sniffing about, asking questions. If Freneau learns the truth, he will use it to ruin us all. Jefferson and his men would gladly sacrifice the national economy if only to prove I am wrong and they are right.”
“Which is why the bank has not seized Pearson’s assets. To keep this from becoming a scandal?”
“Yes. While there is the chance of a quiet repayment of all or even some of the loan, we prefer to avoid a public fiasco that will only feed Jefferson ’s public animosity toward the bank. Until we know more, we will have to find other means of discovering what Pearson is up to.”
It seemed to me that, whether it was what he intended or not, I was those other means. There was no reason not to press it. “What of Duer?”
“What of him?”
“What is the link between Duer and Pearson?”
“None that I am aware of,” he said.
I thought about the note I had found in the tree stump. Duer has used him monstrous ill, and it cannot be undone. That was, in itself, of no consequence. Let these men ruin one another to their heart’s content; it was nothing to me. And yet there was obviously more to it. The BUS will feel it soon enough, and Hamilton has no notion of it. All this was a scheme to harm the bank. Pearson was but a tool, Cynthia but a casualty.
“Who would like to destroy the bank?” I asked.
Hamilton sighed. “Destroy it? Jefferson, I suppose.”
“No, not malign it, or see it fail, or rejoice in its adequacies. Jefferson wishes to find political advantage. Who wishes to destroy it by his own hands?”
“No one,” he said. “No one who could.”
“And if anyone could, who would it be?”
“The rabble,” he said. “The rabble prompted by Jefferson would see it destroyed. The western rustics, filled with democratical ideas by Jefferson, would rather go to war than hand over a penny in excise taxes. Things are not so complex as you imagine, and you cannot see that only because you have been out of the game too long.”
It seemed to me they were far more complex than I could imagine. That was the difficulty.
I f I was going to attempt to chip away at this complexity, the first thing I had to discover was the nature of the secret and financial relationship between Hamilton and Duer’s man, Reynolds. I might well have told Hamilton more if I could have better trusted him, but so long as he was secreting purses of gold to men of this sort, I would have to hold fast to my secrets. More to the point, I needed to know why the men who acted against me, and acted against Cynthia, wished to point me toward this man. Reynolds worked for Duer-that much was certain-but it now seemed to me that the bearded Scotsman, who was so clearly involved with the threat against the bank-wanted to make certain I noticed Reynolds and perhaps was set against him.