“Days.”
“Astonishing. Buying up a controlling interest takes time, particularly when trying to mask your intention. And buying from grieving heirs who are battling each other for the spoils takes even longer. Even if the deceased’s will was rammed through probate. Which is not impossible. If there is a more corrupt breed of judge than probate, I’ve never heard of them. Interesting, though, unless it was already in the works. Has it occurred to you that whoever bought Gleason had advance notice the shares would come to market?”
“I wondered if you would ask,” said Bell. “Fact is, whoever blew up Gleason’s yacht would know precisely when.”
After an hour, during which time Isaac Bell concluded that the Boss had made a brilliant decision to invest in a research department, and doubly brilliant to hire Grady Forrer, a weedy young man sidled into the Normandie Bar and spoke urgently to Forrer.
“Himself has gone to supper and won’t return ’til morning. Our boys are back at work.”
“Come on, Isaac! Now’s our chance.”
• • •
FORRER’S OFFICE was a collection of shabby rooms that connected by a narrow hall to the lavish Van Dorn suite. It was a windowless warren, unlike the agency’s big open front office. Cabinets, chairs, and tables were stacked with newspapers from towns and cities around the country, and, as Bell and Grady entered, a mailman staggered in under a canvas sack, which contained, he announced, three hundred subscription newspapers, none more than a week old. Clattering ceaselessly in one corner was the research division’s own telegraph key, presided over by an operator sending and receiving the Morse alphabet with a lightning-fast fist. A telephonist with a listening piece pressed to his ear was taking notes in another corner. A typewriter banged away, printing catalog cards, and the rooms echoed with shouts of “Boy!” as file boys were sent scampering to the ever-growing stacks.
Forrer explained that at this early stage he was devoting all his energy to collecting a library of information. He had hired students part-time from Columbia College and the seminaries to clip stories from the thousands of newspapers published around the country.
Bell asked, “How will you keep track?”
“I’m adapting the Dewey decimal system to Van Dorn requirements,” Grady explained. “All the information in the world is worth nothing if we can’t find it.”
• • •
ISAAC BELL worked at a desk deep in clippings of newspaper headlines, features, cartoons, and pen-and-ink sketches about coal interests in Wall Street. The railroads had a powerful hand in the mineral, as he had seen in Pittsburgh. But Kenny’s father was only one of several line presidents depicted as grasping for controlling interests in the transport and sale of coal.
The western railroad builder Osgood Hennessy had attracted far more cartoonists’ ire than Mr. Bloom. Bell found the titan drawn in the images of an anaconda, an octopus, and a spider, all with more teeth than such creatures possessed in their natural state. Wall Street financiers—especially Judge James Congdon, founder of U.S. Steel; John Pierpont Morgan, consolidator of General Electric and lender of gold to the U.S. Treasury; and the lamp oil magnate John D. Rockefeller—received similar treatment, portrayed as sharks and alligators and rampaging grizzly bears.