Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street (2 page)

‘No, I didn't lose,' Holt agreed. ‘I had the sense to get out in time.'

‘And you didn't tell me.'

Another shrug. ‘Since when have I been your nursemaid?'

This was something very wrong about all this, Knox thought. When he had played out the scene in his mind – and he must have done that a hundred times – things had been quite different.

‘
What's that?' this fantasy Holt says in a trembling voice, as his eyes fix on the gun.

‘
You know what it is,' the fantasy Knox replies, his own voice as firm and steady as the hand in which he is holding the weapon.

‘
Please don't kill me!' he sobs. ‘Please!
'

That was what
should have
happened – but it
hadn't
!

Holt was continuing to sit behind his desk.

Angry – yes.

Frightened – possibly.

But still sitting there
!

Knox pulled out the revolver and pointed it at his enemy.

‘Put the gun away, before you hurt yourself,' Holt said.

But the fear was in his eyes now – just as Knox had dreamed it would be.

‘Stand up!' the man with the revolver said.

‘Why should I?' Holt demanded.

Why indeed, Knox wondered.

Because, he supposed, that was how he had scripted it to be – how it was
meant
to be.

‘Stand up, and you may just live,' he said. ‘Stay where you are, and I'll kill you right now.'

Holt still made no move. ‘I'll pay you back all the money you lost. I'll pay you back
double
what you lost.'

For an instant, Knox almost gave way.

But
only
for an instant – because he knew that the moment he lost the upper hand, Holt would crush him.

‘I'm going to count to three, and if you're not standing up by “three”, I
will
kill you!'

Slowly and reluctantly, Holt rose to his feet – to reveal that he was naked from the waist down.

‘What the . . .' Knox gasped.

And then he understood.

‘You got a
whore
under your desk,' he said. ‘You've spent the money you stole from me on a
whore
!'

Holt forced a smile to his face.

‘Oh, not all of it,' he said. ‘Even the best prostitutes are nowhere near as expensive as that.'

He was trying to make a joke of the whole situation, Knox realized. Because he knew it would make him seem more human – make him more difficult to kill.

But that wouldn't work. In fact, it only made matters worse, because only a monster would rob two fine young men of their college education and then squander the money on a common prostitute.

‘If you still believe in God, then pray to Him now,' Knox said, his finger already tightening on the trigger.

It was the woman's scream which made his hand jerk – made the bullet he fired strike Holt not in his black heart, but only in the shoulder.

Big Bill rocked, but somehow managed to hold his ground.

And then the woman herself appeared – rising up suddenly from behind the desk and burying her head in Holt's massive chest.

As if that would protect her!

As if she would have been worse off staying where she was!

Knox looked down at the gun in his hand, almost as if he were wondering how it had ever got there.

He couldn't shoot again, he told himself, because the woman was in the way.

But even if she hadn't been, he understood – deep down – he would not have fired a second time, because he had only ever been brave enough to loose off one shot, and that shot had already gone.

Despite his wound, Holt was struggling to get from behind the desk – to come at him just as he had done in the fantasy – but the woman was clinging on to him with all the strength that her fear had given her.

And suddenly, there was a fourth person in the room – a stocky young man in a nightshirt.

That's George, Holt's eldest son, Knox thought in the detached way of someone who has withdrawn from the drama and is now only part of the audience.

George Holt looked at his father and the woman, then at Knox, then at his father and the woman again.

‘Oh my God!' he said in a voice which was almost a moan. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .'

‘For Christ's sake, be a man for once!' his father said harshly. ‘You see what the problem is. Deal with it.'

But George stood rooted to the spot – as if he couldn't have moved even if he wanted to.

‘Deal with it!' his father repeated.

And slowly – almost like a sleepwalker – George Holt turned to face the man with the gun.

There were still five bullets left in the chamber of the revolver, Knox thought. And at this range, he couldn't miss. But he had no argument with
George
Holt. Besides, he was feeling very, very tired, and pulling the trigger seemed like just too much of an effort.

And so he stood there.

Watching as George crossed the room towards him.

Watching as George came to a stop and bent his elbow back to give the blow he was about to deliver more force.

Watching as the big fist came towards him – growing ever larger until it filled his whole world.

And then everything went black.

ONE

T
here were barmen who would have been uncomfortable about working in a saloon that was only a short step from Sing Sing Prison, but this particular one – Jack O'Toole – considered himself a student of human nature in all its manifestations, and saw the location almost as a bonus. He liked the fact that his customers were not the run-of-the-mill carpenters and plumbers who patronized most saloons, and prided himself on being able to spot which side of the law each of them had been drawn from.

The saloon had been busy that morning – it always was on execution days – but the rush had eased off somewhat by the time the two men came in, and as they walked across the room to the counter, O'Toole made one of his famously rapid assessments of them.

They were an odd pair, and that was for sure, the barman thought.

The older of the two looked around forty. He was over six feet tall, and thin as a rake, but there was a hardness emanating from his wiry frame which would make even the beefiest troublemaker think twice about tangling with him. He had a large nose which – the barman thought whimsically – he could almost have borrowed from the Old Testament, and dark eyes which were not actually blazing with righteousness and anger at that moment, but looked as if they could manage the trick quite easily. He was dressed in a brown suit that had seen better days and had a decidedly un-American cut.

The other man was younger – possibly only twenty-three or twenty-four – and though he looked fit enough and manly enough, there was still evidence on his face of the boy he had so recently been. His disposition seemed sunnier – more overtly optimistic – than his companion's, and
his
suit had a sharpness and style about it that made the barman green with envy.

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?' O'Toole asked.

‘I'd kill for a beer,' said the shorter man.

‘So would I,' the taller man agreed. ‘Kill for it – and damn the consequences.' He paused, and smiled down at his companion. ‘But if I was to be executed for the crime, I still think I'd prefer the rope to the electric chair.'

‘What do you
really
think of the way we dispatch our murderers over here?' the shorter man, Alex Meade, asked, as the barman was filling a jug for them.

‘It was . . . interesting,' replied the taller man, Sam Blackstone.

‘You mean,
impressive
.'

‘I mean
interesting
.'

Meade chuckled. ‘You just can't bring yourself to say that we've got the edge on you in this matter, can you, Sam?' he asked. ‘You just can't admit that while you Brits are still stuck in the fifteenth century with your executions, we Yanks have embraced living in the twentieth.'

Strictly speaking, it wasn't the twentieth century until next year – 1901 – Blackstone thought, but there seemed little point in getting into a pedantic debate with the American colleague who had been kind enough to take the trouble to bring him to Cayuga County to witness the execution.

‘To tell you the truth, the whole process seemed rather slow and ponderous,' Blackstone admitted.

‘Slow and ponderous?' Meade repeated. ‘The guy was dead within fifteen seconds of pulling the switch.'

‘Maybe he was,' Blackstone conceded. ‘But, dear me, it seemed to take for ever to get him into a position where the switch
could
be pulled.'

‘And how long would it take in Limeyland?' Meade asked, sounding a little aggrieved.

‘If everything goes smoothly, there's never more than twelve seconds between the condemned man leaving his cell and taking the drop which breaks his neck.'

Meade shook his head in wonder. ‘You guys,' he said. ‘England must be the only country in the world that makes a positive
virtue
out of being old-fashioned. It's a miracle to me that you ever gave up bows and arrows.'

‘Being old-fashioned is not just one of our greatest strengths,' Blackstone replied, as the barman handed him the jug of frothing beer. ‘It's also an important part of our charm.'

‘Is that right?' Meade asked, as he turned and headed for a free table. ‘I must admit, I never knew Englishmen
had
charm.'

There were many things about America that Blackstone found strange and disconcerting, and the saloon culture was one of them. Back in England, each pub was a series of small rooms, only vaguely connected to one another. Here, on the other side of the pond, intimacy seemed to have been sacrificed in the interest of ostentatious democracy, and most drinking establishments were like this one, consisting of one vast, almost prairie-like room.

The beer was different, too. It had none of the gravity of a pint of London bitter. It was lighter and more frivolous – a sign, as he saw it, that Americans had still not come to appreciate what a serious matter drinking was.

‘You're drawing comparisons again, aren't you?' Alex Meade asked him, from across the table.

‘Yes, I suppose I am,' Blackstone admitted.

But then, wasn't it only natural that he would?

It was less than a month since he had disembarked from the second class deck of the liner that had brought him to New York, and been met on the quayside by the fresh-faced detective sergeant in the straw boater.

His mission had been simple – to identify a prisoner and take him back to England, where the man was under sentence of death. But things had not worked out quite as intended. Within a few hours of first setting foot on American soil – or rather, on American concrete – Blackstone had found himself involved in an investigation into the murder of a police inspector.

Nor had the successful conclusion of that case done anything to speed his return home. His prisoner had escaped – been
allowed
to escape, bribed his way
into
an escape – and until he was recaptured, Blackstone was seconded to the NYPD.

‘Did I ever tell you how the invention of the electric chair came about?' Alex Meade asked innocently.

But there was nothing really innocent about it – Meade had an almost missionary zeal when it came to explaining his country to his English friend, a zeal which Blackstone found fascinating and irritating in almost equal measure, and often both at the same time.

The Englishman smiled again. ‘No, you never did tell me,' he confessed.

Meade took a long sip of his beer, which Blackstone guessed meant that this would be one of his longer anecdotes.

‘As with so many other things in this great country of ours, it was driven by commerce,' Meade began. ‘Specifically, it was driven by the War of Currents.'

‘The War of Currents?' Blackstone repeated, as he knew he was supposed to.

‘Indeed,' Alex Meade replied. ‘See, the first person to start supplying power in America was Thomas Edison.' He paused. ‘You'll have heard of him?'

Blackstone nodded. ‘Invented the light bulb, didn't he?'

‘Among other things,' Meade agreed. ‘At any rate, Edison's power system used direct current, which was fine and dandy in a way, but had the drawback that the power generator could never be more than a mile and a half from the place that was using the power. That didn't matter at first, because direct current was the only show in town, so everybody used it. Then along came Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse with their alternating current.'