Ghost Town by Patrick McGrath

he would prosper and they would fail.
    Noah disliked thinking of himself as a servant of the market, as a servant of anything, in fact,but he recognized an ugly truth in what Rinder believed, even if he no longer acknowledged the brutal rapacity of his own activities as a young man. But why should Rinder take care of the Annie Kelly problem?
    —I know girls like that, he said.
    He had identified precisely what troubled Julius’ father: “girls like that” were girls who preyed on gullible young men. Rinder was closer than Noah to the street, where such girls flourished. Noah saw the point. He assumed there would be a payment made.
    —Not overly generous, he said.
    —Of course not.
    —And Julius must know nothing.
    He held the other man’s eye. A profound importance attached to Julius remaining ignorant of the scheme.
    —He must think she has tired of him.
    —He will know nothing of it.
    —You relieve me of a tiresome burden.
    Rinder bowed slightly. So stiff was he, this thin, ageless creature in his black clothes you might almost expect to hear a creaking sound when he bowed from the waist. Rinder’s ambition, his sole ambition, was to assume control of all that Noah van Horn possessed. It had beenhis habit in recent years to take on whatever Noah found distasteful, and the problem of Annie Kelly was distasteful in the extreme.
    Rinder left the room and Noah settled at his desk with a sense of relief which was not altogether comfortable. He was still troubled. It was an instance of an almost imperceptible slackening in his control of his own affairs that he should so quickly have allowed his partner to assume responsibility in this matter. Noah was at last growing tired. For more than forty years he had run the House of van Horn and overseen its steady expansion. He was now among the wealthiest men in New York. He believed that in a few more years he would retire. To travel, perhaps, and to read. He had for years wished that he had more time to spend in his library. He wanted to study the ancient civilizations, for he was curious to draw comparisons between those civilizations and his own. He believed that the American people would in time be as great as any in human history, and he wanted to spend a year in Europe to visit the old sites, the ruins. He would take Julius with him, perhaps set him up with a teacher in Paris, or in one of the German studios. Alone each evening in his library, Noah thought often of this happy prospect,and Rinder, he was confident, would make it possible by assuming the responsibilities he was finding increasingly irksome.
    So Noah permitted himself a sigh of relief. Five more years, he thought, possibly four. Julius would then be twenty-two. He would take the boy to Europe and they would see together what the Old World had to offer the New. He had recently read that the coming of the great cosmopolitan city marked the beginning of the last phase of a civilization, the city being a sure symptom of imminent degeneration and decay. As he sat there in his office on Old Slip, he lifted his head from the papers before him and regarded the wharves and piers built out into the East River to north and south as far as the eye could see, and from the vessels crowded at those wharves a forest of masts rising high as church spires in the shimmering air of the morning. More shipping lay at anchor out in the river and the Upper Bay beyond, among them his own clipper ships, narrow, high-masted vessels which crossed the Atlantic faster even than the steam-driven packets; and seeing all this he knew that what lay ahead was not the first stage of decay but the last preparation for greatness, or more than greatness, forNew York’s triumphant assumption, rather, of the mantle of distinction of being not only the pre-eminent city of America, but of the world.
    He then reflected that he must be getting old. He had never had time to think thoughts of such foolish grandiosity when he was a young man. With a