The Phantom of Manhattan by Frederick Forsyth Read Free Book Online

does. By then we had moved to Manhattan.
    I started in a modest brownstone house, staying inside most of the time, for here the clown’s disguise was useless. Darius joined the Stock Exchange on my behalf, following my instructions as I pored over corporate reports and the details of new share issues. It soon became plain that in this amazing country everything was booming. New ideas and projects, if skilfully promoted, were immediately subscribed. The economy was expanding at a lunatic rate, pushing westwards and ever westwards. With every new industry there was a demand for raw materials, along with ships and railroads to deliver them and haul away the product to the waiting markets.
    Through the years I had been on Coney Island the immigrants had been pouring in by the million from every land to east and west. The Lower East Side, almost beneath my terrace as I now look down, was and remains a vast teeming cauldron of every race and creed living cheek by jowl in poverty, violence, vice and crime. Only a mile away the super-rich have their mansions, their coaches and their beloved opera.
    By 1903, after a few mishaps, I had mastered the intricacies of the stock market and worked out how the giants like Pierpont Morgan had made their fortunes. Like them I moved into coal in West Virginia, steel in Pittsburgh, railroads out to Texas, shipping from Savannah via Baltimore to Boston, silver in New Mexico and property throughout Manhattan Island. But I became better and harder than them, through single-minded worship of the only true god, to whom Darius had led me. For this is Mammon the god of gold who permits no mercy, no charity, no compassion and no scruple. There is no widow, no child, no pauper wretch who cannot be crushed a little more for a few extra granules of the precious metal that so pleases the master. With the gold comes the power and with the power even more gold in one glorious world-conquering cycle.
    In all things I am and remain Darius’s master and superior. In all things save one. Never was created on this planet a colder or more cruel man. A creature more dead of soul never walked. In this he is beyond me. And yet he has his weakness. Just one. On a certain night, curious about his rare absences, I had him followed. He went to a den in the Moorish community and there took hashish until he was in a sort of trance. It seems this is his only flaw. Once I thought he might be my friend, but I have long since learned he has but one; his worship of gold consumes him night and day, and he stays with me and loyal to me only because I can spin it in endless quantities.
    By 1903 I had enough to undertake the construction of the highest skyscraper in New York, the E.M. Tower on a vacant lot on Park Row. It was completed in 1904, forty storeys of steel, concrete, granite and glass. And the real beauty is that the thirty-seven storeys let out beneath me have paid for it all and the value has doubled. That leaves one suite for the corporation staff, linked by phone and ticker-tape to the markets; a floor above being half of it the apartment of Darius and half the corporate boardroom; and above them all my own penthouse with its upper terrace dominating everything I can see and yet ensuring that I myself cannot be seen.
    So … my cage on wheels, my gloomy cellars have become an eyrie in the sky where I can walk unmasked and none to see my face from hell but the passing gulls and the wind from the south. And from here I can even see the finally finished and gleaming roof of my one and single indulgence, my one project that is not dedicated to making more money but to the extraction of revenge.
    Far in the distance at West 34th Street stands the newly completed Manhattan Opera House, the rival that will set the snobby Metropolitan by the ears. When I came here I wanted to see opera again, but of course I needed a screened and curtained box at the Met. The committee there, dominated by Mrs Astor and her cronies of the