CHAPTER THIRTY
JANUARY 1872
The backlash from the parade was swift and harsh. All I could do was watch as, one by one, my remaining allies turned against me.
Shaken by the alarm raised by the New York Times—which compared me to Karl Marx, insinuating I shared his belief that a violent overthrow of the capitalist class was inevitable, if not imminent—many of the firm’s most lucrative clients quietly closed their accounts, leaving the brokerage with barely enough business to keep the collectors from our door.
How we would keep even that small clientele was questionable now that Josie, still our main source of tips after all these years, had abandoned us for Paris. When her lover, Mr. Vanderbilt’s loose-lipped stock market rival, Jim Fisk, was brutally murdered, she didn’t wait around for
