Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(22)
Free. He had never appreciated that concept until it was taken away from him.
After paying the cost of the ticket, Dimitri was down to his last few pennies, and he still needed to contact Natalia. San Francisco was nowhere close to New York, and he’d need more money as soon as he arrived in California. Natalia could get it to him.
The telegraph office inside the American shipping terminal only took cash, and a wire to New York would be expensive. He calculated the costs, carefully figuring the charges for the telegraph fee.
It was going to cost more than he had.
His boots were worth something. They were the finest thing in his possession, even though they’d been taken off a dead soldier. He wandered toward a street of market stalls and food vendors. The aromas of fried fish and baked dumplings made him weak with hunger, but he ignored them and headed toward a tinker’s cart to sell his boots.
The haggling took a while, but in the end, Dimitri walked away with twenty rubles and the cheapest pair of shoes on the tinker’s cart. They were a tattered pair of lapti, a traditional shoe worn by peasants and made of woven birch bark. They were neither sturdy nor warm, but it didn’t matter. Soon he would be in California, and Natalia would be able to help him.
He took his remaining funds to the shipping office. Telegrams cost by the letter, so he parsed his words carefully. The only thing on which he could not afford to scrimp was the salutation. Dearest Natalia. If he opened the wire with those two words, she would know it came from him.
Dearest Natalia. Arriving on Pacific Star, March 25. Wire a thousand dollars to port of San Fran. Dimitri
He bowed his head and prayed that she would come through for him, for he was going to need Natalia desperately in the months ahead.
11
Natalia sat in the bank’s conference room for the monthly review of their investments. A mahogany table with space for eighteen people dominated the center of the room, her father on one end and her grandfather on the other. Bank executives sat on the sides according to rank, and the remaining chairs were filled by managers reporting on the state of their projects.
Natalia was the only woman in the room. Even the stenographers and secretaries taking notes were men, but Natalia had been invited to these meetings since the day she turned sixteen. At that point, her father had become resigned to never having a male heir and began grooming her for a significant role at the bank. At first she sat with the stenographers in the chairs that hugged the wall. After earning her college degree, she was entrusted with her first account, a modest plan for road-paving, and she was invited to sit at the table. Over the years, her seat at the table moved to increasingly more prominent positions, and now she sat next to her father.
The topic of this morning’s review was an investment to deepen the harbor in Seattle so it could accommodate the new freighter-class ships the navy was building. The bank had loaned the Hammond Construction firm a fortune to perform the task, but this was the third month in a row they’d missed their target. Silas Conner was the bank’s executive handling the account.
“The Hammonds have a new excuse each month about why the project is lagging,” Silas reported. “They claim that persistent fog is interfering with the dredging operations.”
Her grandfather was skeptical. “The Hammonds just built a warehouse for the Union Pacific, who will be introducing refrigerated railroad cars next month. I think the Hammonds are using our money to expand their railroad investment instead of the port.”
Trust was the most important commodity in any banking relationship, and it was hard to monitor how the Hammonds spent the bank’s money from the opposite side of the country. It was one of the reasons Natalia valued her relationship with Count Sokolov. Not that she had any reason to doubt his replacement, but trust could take years to build. The Hammonds dutifully reported how they’d been investing funds in the harbor, but how could the bank be certain it was truthful?
“Let’s set this aside for now,” her grandfather said. “We’ll take a break, then move on to the discussion of bonds for the Boston subway.” He looked pointedly at Silas Conner. “I will expect a more definitive report from you next month.”
The break gave Natalia an opportunity to move her stiff muscles as she headed into the lobby and helped herself to tea from the elaborate service set up outside the conference room. Silas stood before a bank of windows overlooking Wall Street, his face stormy as he glared at the street below.
She empathized, since it wasn’t easy bringing bad news before her grandfather. She joined him at the window.
“Have you thought of going to Seattle to see the harbor for yourself?” she asked.
He looked surprised. “What for?”
“It’s harder to pull off a shell game with our money if the Hammonds know a bank executive might suddenly appear for an inspection.”
His brows lowered. “Forgive me, Natalia, but I don’t recall you going out to inspect the Trans-Siberian Railway in person.”
“That’s different,” she defended.
“How so?”
“The Russian project is ahead of schedule, and the port of Seattle is lagging.” Plus, for three years she had an agent in Russia she implicitly trusted, while Silas relied on accountants in Seattle he’d never met. She was about to point that out when an office clerk handed her a folded card.