Sally Spencer: Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street

‘Ah, now I understand,’ Blackstone exclaimed. ‘The chair was to be powered by alternating current!’

‘Exactly! The message he was sending out was, “If AC can fry a man to death, do you really want it in your home?” So Brown developed the chair, and Edison held a number of public demonstrations to show just how dangerous it was. It was mostly stray cats and dogs he electrocuted — kids were paid fifty cents to collect them for him — but he would sometimes use it on unwanted cattle or horses. Course, he didn’t want the process to be called “electrocution” — that would give all electricity a bad name. What he was pushing for was for it to be known as being “Westinghoused”.’

‘Clever,’ Blackstone said, grudgingly.

‘It sure was,’ Meade agreed. ‘Anyway, New York State bought the idea of the electric chair, and was all set for its first execution. Then it hit a snag.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Westinghouse didn’t want alternating current associated with the electric chair, and so he refused to sell the prison the generator. So what Edison did was to set up a fake company in South America, and buy a generator for a university down there. Then, once he had his hands on it, he shipped it right back to New York, where it was used for the execution of a man called Kemmler.’

‘And it was a great success, was it?’ Blackstone asked.

Meade suddenly looked slightly cagey. ‘Not immediately,’ he admitted.

‘So what went wrong?’

‘It took a little longer than expected.’

‘ How much longer?’

‘Well, the first seventeen second burst didn’t kill him, and the doctors in attendance said he should been given a second dose, straight away. But they couldn’t do it straight away, because the generator needed to be recharged.’

‘But when it was recharged, it did work?’ Blackstone asked.

‘Sure,’ Meade agreed — much too quickly.

‘Immediately?’ Blackstone pressed.

‘Well, no,’ Meade conceded. ‘Not until the blood vessels under his skin had burst and he’d caught fire.’

‘Very humane,’ Blackstone said drily.

‘Yeah, it was a botched job,’ Meade admitted. ‘George Westinghouse said, with some glee, that they could have done a better job with an axe — but we’ve improved since then, as you’ve just seen for yourself.’

A uniformed prison guard entered the saloon, looked around him, and then walked over to the table where the two men were sitting.

‘Detective Sergeant Meade?’ he asked tentatively.

‘That’s right,’ Meade agreed.

The prison officer held out a telegram. ‘This just arrived. They said it was urgent.’

Meade slit the cable open, quickly scanned the words, and then whistled softly.

‘Ever heard of William “Big Bill” Holt?’ he asked Blackstone.

Blackstone shook his head. ‘Is he important?’

‘He’s about the most important reclusive millionaire in the whole of the USA.’

‘And just how many reclusive millionaires are there?’ Blackstone asked, with a smile.

‘Must be hundreds of them,’ Meade said. ‘Well,’ he corrected himself, ‘ten or fifteen, anyway. But like I said, Big Bill’s the most important.’

‘And I take it something’s happened to him — or someone close to him,’ Blackstone guessed.

‘To him,’ Meade confirmed.

‘Robbed?’ Blackstone speculated. ‘Murdered?’

‘Possibly both,’ Meade said. ‘But all we actually know at the moment is that he’s been kidnapped .’

The first stage of the streetcar journey from Manhattan to Coney Island took them along the canyons which ran between brown and crumbling tenement blocks, but soon they had left the City of Brooklyn behind them, and were out in open country, where the only buildings they now saw were white clapperboard farmhouses.

‘Strictly speaking, this case is outside our jurisdiction,’ Alex Meade said, as the streetcar rattled noisily along. ‘If we were playing it by the book, the whole thing would be handled by the local boys on Coney Island.’

‘So why isn’t it being handled by them?’

‘My guess is that the powers-that-be in Albany — the Governor and the Attorney General — think that the kidnapping of a man like Holt is far too important a matter to be left in the hands of hayseeds.’

‘So if it’s that important, why has the case been given to a detective sergeant and a Limey who’s just passing through?’ Blackstone pondered.

‘Because we’re good?’ Meade asked.

‘Or could it be that if things go wrong, there’ll be a lot of shit flying about, and none of the higher-ups want any of that shit sticking to them?’ Blackstone countered.

‘Maybe,’ Meade conceded. ‘But with two guys like us on the case, nothing is going to go wrong, is it?’

Blackstone shook his head in wonderment. There really was no limit to Alex Meade’s optimism, he thought. Place the man in front of a thousand angry tribesmen who were waving spears at him, and he would be still be planning what he was going to do the next day.

Nothing is going to go wrong!

There were a hundred things which could go wrong with any investigation — and in a kidnapping, you could multiply that by ten.

The streetcar rattled on, taking them ever closer to the place where nothing could go wrong.

‘So what can you tell me about this Big Bill Holt?’ Blackstone said.

‘Very little,’ Meade told him, almost shamefacedly.

Blackstone raised a surprised eyebrow. If this case had been on his own patch, back in London, then he would have known very little, too, because, as a boy brought up in an orphanage and a man mainly used to dealing with common criminals, Holt would have moved in circles far above him.

But Alex Meade was different. His father was a very successful lawyer, he himself was Harvard-educated — and, before he had chosen to disgrace himself by becoming a policeman, he had been very much a part of fashionable and prosperous New York society. Besides, Alex was an incorrigible gossip who collected information in much the same way as other men collected stamps or grievances, and it was almost inconceivable that he didn’t have a full tale to tell.

‘Big Bill dropped out of the limelight when I was little more than a kid,’ Meade said, as if he felt the need to defend his ignorance. ‘Nobody says much about him any more — because there’s not much to say.’

‘But he is still in business, is he?’

‘Oh hell, yes, he’s never off the financial pages. When William Holt catches a cold, the whole of Wall Street shivers.’

The streetcar crossed a bridge over a muddy creek, and suddenly they were in another world, as distinct from the countryside they had recently travelled through as that countryside itself had been from grim industrial Brooklyn. Immediately ahead were lines of single-storied brick buildings, but beyond them — beyond them — lay some of the most fantastic structures Blackstone had ever seen in his life.

There were Chinese towers and Moorish domes, castles painted in gaudy colours, swings which hung from a fulcrum dizzily high in the air, and a huge wheel which turned with majestic slowness while its passengers jabbered and pointed excitedly into the distance.

‘Welcome to Coney Island, the entertainment capital of America,’ Alex Meade said complacently. ‘Bet you ain’t got anything like this over in old England, Sam.’

No, they hadn’t, Blackstone admitted to himself. It would never have occurred to the English to indiscriminately borrow bits of half the cultures of the world and lump them in all together on one garish site. And yet, he had to concede, it somehow worked.