The seventh day's dawn was gray and frigid. At breakfast in Kykuit's morning room, the atmosphere was funereal. A heavy, oppressive stillness hung in the air, broken occasionally with a tinkling of silver on china.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. sat in his usual seat, deliberately avoiding Ezra. He wasn't rubbing it in, which would've been crude. He exuded an air of solemn, sad vindication instead. He compiled his morning mail with deliberate slowness, a superior, "I told you so" confidence emanating from him like a beacon. He knew what he was going to do with his day. He would let the markets open, let one nail after another be driven into Ezra's fiscal coffin, and then he would go to his father. He would make a formal announcement of disaster with regards to his experiment with Ezra and advise, for Alta's own good, that he take legal action to take over her finances.
Alta was not present. A servant had quietly informed them that Mrs. Prentice was unwell and would be taking breakfast in her room. It was a fiction everyone accepted. She was too distraught, too humiliated to face the family.
Ezra sat alone at the long table, a pariah in his own home. He calmly drank his coffee and ate his toast, a portrait of such unnerving serenity that it was, in its own way, more infuriating to Junior than any outburst would have been. He looked like a man without a care in the world, a man who had not just lost a fortune and alienated his entire family.
Just as the grandfather clock in the hall started striking nine o'clock, a shrill ring filled the stillness of the hallway from a telephone. A footman took it, his voice a low hum. A moment after that, he stood at the door of the dining room, a silver tray in his hand. On it lay a solitary, folded telegram.
"For you, Mr. Prentice," replied the footman, his face deliberately neutral.
Junior looked up from his mail, a moment of sour satisfaction in his eyes. He assumed it would be a margin call from the broker, the ultimate, humiliating end.
Ezra took the telegram. He unfolded it slowly, his movements deliberate. He read the single, cryptic sentence printed on the slip of paper.
RFC BILL PASSES HOUSE COMMITTEE. VOTE IMMINENT.
A slow, chilly smile smoothed Ezra's lips. This was it. The trigger. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He knew from his 21st-century brain that it was a titanic government intervention, a precursor to the New Deal, to provide federal loans to save stumbling banks, railroads, and agricultural organizations. It was a footnote in history's great design, a program that would be signed into law in early 1932. But he had staked all on timing of news. He gambled that advance accounts of its passing though Congressional committees would leak now, at the stock market's moment of greatest despair, that the starved, desperate street would react like a man in the desert who sees a mirage.
Then from the wing of the house where Senior's private study was, a new noise started. A harsh, mechanical chattering. It was the ticker-tape machine, which for days had been nearly still, erupting viciously into action.
The sound was so unusual that everyone was taken aback. Junior frowned, setting his letters down. Whatever would cause that type of movement? He stood up and went towards the study, a feeling of nervousness grabbing him. He flung the door wide open.
The brass machine hummed on its bench, pouring out a continuous paper tape that was even beginning to coil on the floor. Junior grabbed for the end of the tape, his eyes scanning over the printed symbols and numbers.
RCA +8%. P&G +6%. US STEEL +10%. GENERAL MOTORS +12%.
He couldn't believe his eyes. It was a sea of green. Not a insignificant green, mind you, but explosive, violent green. Just news of the RFC bill had come over the wire. Wall Street, having priced in Armageddon for months, was suddenly pricing in salvation. It was a monster, systemwide relief rally. Shorts who had been feeding for months were being killed, their compulsory buybacks pouring gasoline on the fire. Cash that had been cowering on the sidelines for years was pouring back into the fray in a panic not to miss the bottom.
It was one of history's fiercest bear market rallies.
And at its very center, soaring above almost everything else, were no other stocks than those selected personally by Ezra. The "radio toys" were moving into first place.
Junior's jaw went slack. His mind struggled to process what he was seeing. In the space of a single morning, Ezra had not only recouped every penny of his paper losses but was now showing a staggering, almost obscene profit. It wasn't just the win that was stunning; it was the timing. It was perfect, down to the very day he had promised Alta. This wasn't investing. This wasn't luck. It looked like sorcery.
It took him one moment for his entire whisper campaign to be reduced to helpless ash. How could you define a man as unstable who had just worked a fiscal miracle? How could you question a man who had just shown what appeared to be omniscience as mentally unhinged?
The climax occurred that night, once more within the lion's den. Senior's private office was still. The ticker-tape machine no longer whirred, its labors complete. Its proof of fruitful battle for the day consisted of a long, coiled mass of paper upon the floor, like a great serpent's shed skin.
Ezra stood before the old man, who sat in his customary throne-like armchair. Senior picked up a length of the ticker tape, his bony fingers tracing the final closing prices. RCA. P&G. Haloid, which had been dragged up with the rest of the market, was also showing a handsome gain. He didn't smile. He offered no effusive congratulations. That was not his way.
He simply looked at Ezra, his cold, analytical eyes holding his gaze for a long, silent moment. He was re-evaluating him, repricing him, just as the market had repriced the stocks. Finally, he gave a single, slow, deliberate nod.
"A good hunt," he rasped. It was, for him, the ultimate compliment. Seal of approval. Initiation into the killing brotherhood.
Then, Senior reached to the small table beside him and slid a thick, plain manila file across its polished surface. It stopped just at the edge, an offering. The file was labeled with a single, stark word in black ink.
CREDITANSTALT.
"My son," Senior said, his voice going low as a whisper, "is worried about a specific great bank back in Vienna. He has read the available reports. He thinks it is a regional Austrian issue of no significant importance to the family holdings back in America."
The old man tapped a long, skeletal finger on the file. "He sees what he is told to see."
Senior's pale eyes sparkled in the lamplight.
"Tell me what you see."
Jason glanced down at the file. Creditanstalt. He recognized the name. It was not an isolated Austrian issue; it was the first domino. Its collapse would set off the collapse of the entire German banking industry, which in its own collapse would devastate the delicate post-war economics of Europe and plunge all of humanity into a darker, more desperate era of the Depression.
The game had only been escalated. Hehad shown he could track in the American woods. Now, he was being asked by the old king to look beyond the ocean, into the vast, dying animals of European finance.