The Ghost in the Tower: An Episode in Jacobia

by Earl H. Reed

“One night when we were out on the steps back of the Washington statue we saw a shade drifting up and down Wall street in a hazy, dreamy, uncertain sort of way. He looked queer. Evidently he had been portly, and had worn a gray suit, a mess of side whiskers and a straw hat when he had passed into the immaterial world. We made ourselves known to him. We learned that he had been translated early that afternoon and he was trying to find out what the market had done since.

“His name had been Waters and he had been shot by a woman for some reason that he did not explain. We invited him up into the sub-treasury, and while he seemed even more anxious than Red Beard and Teach to get his hands on the gold, he floated blissfully back and forth among the currency and bond stacks so long that we had difficulty in getting him out through one of the pipes and over to the church yard before dawn. We were only able to do this by assuring him that he could go in and mingle with the money every night forever, if it lasted that long, and he replied that he never had suspected that heaven was so fine as all that. We thought that anybody who could regard that neighborhood as heaven was an abnormal optimist, and in the material world he would need immediate medical attention, but then you know some people are that way. After we had heard Water’s history we knew that there was no heaven anywhere that he could ever break into.

“The second night after it had happened, he took us up to what had been his office in one of the robber baron towers on Broad street, in which he had been shot. We found his partner there, a man named Rivetts, who was looting the safe and fixing the accounts so that Waters’ estate would come out at the small end of the horn. Waters visualized and haunted Rivetts so effectually that he jumped through the nineteenth story window into the street, to the great delight of Teach who regarded it as one of the best jokes he had ever known.

“Waters told us that when he was translated he was long a big block of U. S. Steel and short a lot of Reading, and some hyenas were trying to shake him out of the Steel and run him in on the Reading. He pulled over and studied with feverish avidity a basket full of paper tape, from what he called a ticker in the corner, and declared that if he had lived another two days he would have had all their hides on his back yard fence. You may know what some of these expressions mean. To us they seemed technical and confusing, but we gathered that death had deprived Waters of a ship load of pieces-of-eight and we felt very sorry for him.

“After that he took us around to dozens of offices at night. We saw the daylight haunts of swivel chair buccaneers, whose quarter decks were mahogany desks, and who preyed upon the vitals of the country of their birth, and the nests of merciless super-piratical combinations that mulcted mankind by impounding the necessities of life. We went to a building on lower Broadway where Waters said there were huge vaults full of the products of the most highly refined rascality in existence. He took us to the vaults of several food trusts, corporation attorneys, and banks, and showed us various documents and other evidence of wholesale plunder and remorseless nation-wide robbery that would have taken our breaths away if we had had any. It was a sort of a travelogue—a sight seeing tour in a region of unbelievable iniquity. We were indeed in shark infested waters.

“It occurs to you no doubt that the word buccaneers and other sea terms that I am using, pertain, properly speaking, to nautical financeering only, but it is not out of place to apply them to similar professional activities on land, for it really makes little difference to a genuine pirate, or to those he despoils, whether he stands on a wooden deck or on an oriental office rug.

“After these nocturnal rounds among the robbers’ roosts it was our custom to assemble in the belfry, where Waters would deliver thrilling talks on the methods of the ‘Wizards of Finance’ and the ‘Kings of the Street’, as he called them. These meetings were necessarily open, and many stranger shades often hovered about and listened. Hosts of evil spirits moved in the surrounding gloom and mocked with sepulchral and mephitic laughter when Walters dilated upon famous financial atrocities in which some of them had been participants.

“We naturally had a professional interest in Waters’ tales of present day freebooting, and for several nights he held us spell bound.”

At this point I asked my shadowy friend on the stairway if he didn’t think it rather incongruous, or at least in bad taste, for the shades of such a malodorous bevy of professional villains as he had with him, to hold spiritual convocations in a church belfry.

“Not at all! Not at all!” he replied. “We found after spending a few nights with Waters that we were as a small flock of babbling goslings, or like little twittering snow birds on a limb, so to speak, compared to the voracious human hawks and grand larceny specialists in the neighboring towers, from the tops of which no Jolly Rogers flew—they were too smooth for that. The church was quite the appropriate retreat for our party, considering the character of the neighborhood, and it might not be out of place to suggest that we would not have been safe even there if we had had money. The gold of a stranger in these parts would disappear like autumn leaves before the wind. A doubloon dropped anywhere in the vicinity in the day time would scarcely have got to the sidewalk and might have caused instantaneous bloodshed. It would be like tossing a yellow canary bird into a cage of wild cats.