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Matters himself was no stranger to coded messages. He communicated with his assassin with cryptic instructions in the want ads of daily newspapers. He felt so strongly that this cable was big—something huge, the sort of deal the supposedly retired president had time to pursue thanks to underlings like him taking over day-to-day operations—that he decided to risk consulting a clandestine partner he had cultivated among his fellow managers.
Old Clyde Lapham, an early Standard Oil partner, was losing his grip to dementia. When the others realized he was no longer striking a high batting average, they had begun excluding him from private deals. Lapham knew, or sensed enough of what was happening to accept, warily, the kindness and respect that the much-younger, vigorous Matters pretended to offer.
Lapham said he suspected a secret deal, too, when Matters broached the subject. Stung that he had not been invited to partake, he translated the basics of the message over a supper Matters invited him to at Mcdonald’s Oyster House up by Bleecker on the Bowery, where no one would recognize them. Matters ordered wine to loosen him up. Lapham’s vague eyes kept locking on the empty littleneck clamshells as if they held some secret. He had a thin voice.
“‘Delightful breezes’ means big changes are under way,” he reported matter-of-factly. “‘I enjoy watching the fishermen with their nets on the beach’ means that Mr. Rockefeller is spying on competitors.”
But the old man was baffled by “gazing upon the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea.” Pawing purposefully across the table, he picked up an empty clamshell and examined it closely.
“Sir Marcus Samuel’s father got his start selling these.”
“Selling what?”
“Seashells. Old Marcus Senior imported oriental seashells, sold them to people decorating their houses. Where did you think Junior got the money to invent his goddamned oil tankers?”
Sir Marcus Samuel, who had pioneered a fleet of bulk-oil-carrying steamers, commanded their powerful English competitor, Shell Transport and Trading. The richest distributor of refined oil, in cans packed in wooden cases, to India and China, Samuel had run circles around the mighty Standard for more than a decade and had recently increased his sales force by forming the Asiatic Petroleum Company with the Royal Dutch Company.
Matters regained Lapham’s attention, with some effort, and coaxed him to concentrate on “The days pass pleasantly and profitably.”
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p; Lapham finally said that he believed that “The days pass pleasantly and profitably” meant that Rockefeller was laying groundwork for his next move. He picked up another shell.
“What move?” Matters asked.
Lapham shrugged. “The sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea rises in the east.”
Of course! The rich Baku oil fields on the Caspian Sea that pumped half the world’s oil were in the east. Chaos threatened Baku. January’s Bloody Sunday massacre at the Russian czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg had inflamed revolutionary unrest and Muslim–Christian hatred simultaneously. Civil war threatened the oil fields.
In that instant, Bill Matters had to restrain himself from lunging across the table to kiss Lapham’s wrinkled hand. The looney old man had done him a huge favor and ripped the scales from his eyes. He had been thinking too small. Way too small. He suddenly saw the world as Rockefeller did.
That it was definitely code galvanized Matters. He made an educated guess based in part on the six years he’d been circling the rim of the inner circle of the Standard Oil Gang and based in part on a perceptive analysis by the assassin who speculated that Rockefeller sensed an opportunity to break the stranglehold that his overseas enemies—the Nobel and Rothschild families and Sir Marcus Samuel—had on Russian oil.
How could Rockefeller not be tempted by the spoils? Fighting and destruction in Baku would shut down half the world supply and the price of oil would double or triple to two, to three, to four dollars a barrel, prices that hadn’t been seen in decades. American oil men would cheer. But John D. Rockefeller was no ordinary oil man.
Wouldn’t he imagine much-richer spoils than a temporary jump in price? Wouldn’t he see the chaos of civil war as an opportunity to displace the Rothschilds, overthrow the Nobels, sink Shell, and own it all?
Bill Matters knew in his gut that this was the chance he had been working for. Something this big would never come again. Whatever Rockefeller was scheming in the east, Matters had to make himself part of it.
His success thus far, since joining the Standard—his growing wealth and power within the corporation, though still not in the inner circle—proved he had been right to bank on the secrecy that pervaded the trust. Secrets had given him room to operate, as had the madcap distraction of everyone from Rockefeller on down who were busy getting richer.
Business was roaring. New markets were enormous: fuel for ships and power plants, gasoline to feed the automobile boom. But supply, too, was growing; vast new oil fields in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico, and California surpassed the old Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana fields. It was becoming impossible for the Standard to control production to keep prices high. Competing producers—Gulf Oil and the Texas Company—were springing to life even as the monopoly came under increasing fire from Progressive reformers determined to break up the trust. Rockefeller himself was distracted by the government prosecution and equally by his attempts to repair his reputation by becoming a philanthropist.
The pressure was on the old president to do something.
Thus the Baku push.
—
Bill Matters approached white-haired Averell Comstock, a charter member of the “gang” who often profited from private deals. “I have a scheme for a joint adventure.”
“What sort of scheme?”
“A private partnership with you and Mr. Rockefeller to persuade the Russian government to let Standard Oil build new, modern refineries and refurbish the old ones owned by Rothschild and Nobel.”
Comstock was immediately suspicious.
“Where did you get that idea, Bill? It’s as if you read our minds.”
