New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [372]
And lo and behold, there was.
On Wednesday, October 30, the market went back up by a staggering twelve and a half percent. A little before noon, William confided to Charlie: “I’m buying.” The next day, the market closed at lunchtime, up another five percent. As they left the office, he told Charlie: “I just sold again.”
“Already?” said Charlie.
“Profit-taking. I lost a bit of money last week, but I just made half of it back again.”
The following week, however, the market slumped again. Five percent on Monday; nine percent on Wednesday. And it just kept sliding, day by day. By November 13, the Dow was at 198, only just over half its September high.
Investors, small and large, with big margin calls were being wiped out. Brokerage houses that’d lent money that couldn’t be repaid were failing. “Plenty of the weaker banks may fail, too,” William told Charlie. But each morning the street witnessed William Master arriving at his office in his silver Rolls-Royce, as he calmly carried on with business as usual. “We’ve taken losses,” he told people, “but the firm is sound. And so is this country’s economy,” he liked to add. He said the same thing to his wife and son.
His confidence was rewarded: after reaching its November low, the market stabilized; and as 1930 began, it started to rise. “There’s plenty of credit, at low rates,” William pointed out. “And if people are borrowing more carefully, that’s no bad thing.”
Meanwhile, Charlie became aware that his father was trading vigorously on his own account. He didn’t see the trades, but he knew they were large. “Are you buying on margin?” he asked. “Somewhat,” was the reply. Late in March, however, when a clerk checked one of these deals with him instead of his father, Charlie saw that William was borrowing nine dollars for every one he put down himself—just like the ten percent margin boys before the crash. When he asked his father about it, William took him into his office and closed the door.
“Fact is, Charlie, last November I had to put my own money into the brokerage to hold things together. Don’t tell your mother. Or anyone else. Confidence is everything in this game. But I’m making my money back pretty fast.”
“You’re sure the market’s going up?”
“Look, 198 was the bottom, Charlie. I don’t say we’ll get back to 381, but we’ll see 300. I’m sure of it.”
And from that day, this message became the daily litany of the Master brokerage. “We’ll see 300,” they told each other. “We’ll see 300,” they told their customers. “Mr. Master says so.” And before long, it looked as if Master was right. On April 30, the Dow hit 294.
It was a hot morning in August and Salvatore Caruso was high in the sky. He was setting bricks rapidly and with precision. But he was hardly paying attention to his work. Every few minutes he found himself glancing down, searching the street far below, looking for signs of news.
Not that he was unhappy in his work. He’d been on several sites in the last eighteen months, but this one was easily the most exciting. The job was on Fifth Avenue, down at Thirty-fourth Street. At the start of the year it had still been magnificently occupied by the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. By March there had been nothing but a huge hole, forty feet deep, down to the solid bedrock below. Now, arising from that bedrock with astonishing speed, was the skyscraper to surpass all the skyscrapers that had gone before.
The Empire State.
Everything about the project was larger than life. The entrepreneur, Raskob, had risen from poverty to be the right-hand man of the mighty du Pont family, and chairman of the General Motors finance committee. The frontman, Al Smith, was still poor, but he’d been New York’s Democratic governor, and might have been elected President of the USA if he hadn’t been a Catholic. Both men were flamboyant. Both hated the hypocrisy of Prohibition. Both loved a challenge.