I'm standing here again — the morning of the stock market crash of 1929.

5:45 PM.

The twilight over Manhattan was bruised, purple, and heavy with the smell of wet coal smoke.

The sleet had stopped, leaving the streets coated in a treacherous skin of frozen slush. Along Wall Street, thousands of office workers were streaming toward the subway kiosks in stunned, absolute silence. There was no conversation, no laughter, no shouting. Just the shuffling sound of thousands of leather soles crunching against ice—the sound of an army retreating from a defeat so total that language had failed them.

I stood on the sidewalk outside 11 Wall Street, waiting for my car to be brought around from the Pine Street garage.

The heavy mahogany doors of the Exchange opened, and Arthur Sterling stepped out into the freezing dusk.

He was unrecognizable.

His camel-hair overcoat was missing two buttons; his expensive silk tie was stained with whiskey and ink; his silver-dusted mustache was limp, drooping over his trembling lower lip. He carried an old leather Gladstone bag—the bag he had brought to the Street thirty years ago as a clerk—containing the few personal effects he had cleared from his private office.

Beside him walked Marcus Vance.

Marcus didn't look like an emperor anymore. He looked like an old, broken thief who had barely escaped the gallows. His fur collar was turned up against the wind, his eyes hollow, staring at the pavement as if he expected a federal marshal to step out of every doorway.

When Arthur saw me standing under the streetlamp, he stopped.

He hesitated, his boots slipping slightly on the frozen slush, before walking slowly toward me. He didn't look angry. The bluster, the paternal condescension, the arrogant belief in his own financial invulnerability—all of it had been burned away by five hours of trading.

"Julian," Arthur rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves rattling across gravel.

"Arthur," I nodded, keeping my hands deep in my coat pockets.

"The upstate accounts..." Arthur swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. "The clearinghouse confirmed the releases forty minutes ago. Every single family in our country ledger was protected. Not a single farm was liquidated."

He lifted his eyes, looking at me with an expression of profound, bewildered, and humiliating awe.

"How did you know, Julian?" Arthur whispered, tears welling in his red, ruined eyes. "How did you know the bottom would drop today? How did you know the bankers would walk away?"

I looked down the long canyon of Wall Street, toward the dark spire of Trinity Church rising against the gray evening sky.

"The warning signs were there for six months, Arthur," I said softly, my voice carrying cleanly across the cold street. "The production drops. The call-money spikes. The foreign gold drains. You didn't miss them because they were hidden. You missed them because you were making thirty percent a year on paper, and you wanted the music to keep playing forever."

Arthur bowed his head, a single, heavy tear dropping from his cheek and freezing on his wool lapel.

"I lost everything, Julian," the older man wept softly, clutching his battered Gladstone bag. "My house in Greenwich. My wife’s trust. My seats on the Exchange. I have three thousand dollars left in a personal savings account in Brooklyn... and a mountain of margin debt that will take me two lifetimes to pay."

I looked at the man who had been my mentor, who in my previous life had allowed me to take the fall for his own speculative greed.

I didn't feel hatred. I didn't feel triumph.

I reached inside my coat, pulled out an envelope containing five hundred dollars in cash—enough to pay his rent and keep coal in his furnace for a year—and slid it into the pocket of his overcoat.

"Go home to your wife, Arthur," I said quietly. "Take the train to Greenwich. Plant a garden in the backyard, and never touch a piece of stock paper again as long as you live."

Arthur looked down at the envelope in his pocket, then up at me, his chin quivering with an emotion he had no words to describe. He didn't say thank you; he simply nodded once, turned on his heel, and shuffled down the dark street toward the subway stairs, disappearing into the crowd of ghosts.

My car pulled up to the curb—a sturdy, dark-blue Buick sedan, its engine humming with a steady, reliable thrum.

I opened the door, climbed into the front seat, and closed the heavy steel door against the freezing New York wind.

"Where to, Mr. Mercer?" the driver asked, looking back through the partition.