As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned. A bold beginning, a thrilling middle, a satisfying end, perhaps one last little twist, and then…gone. Catalogued and boxed, stored for safekeeping.
All Paul had to do was to tell today’s story to himself and it would disappear. To revisit the images over and over in his head. Salvation through repetition.
But as it turned out, a flaming corpse over Broadway was only the second most terrifying thing that Paul Cravath would see that day.
Later that evening—after his secretary had departed to her Yorkville apartment, after his senior partners had retired to their upper Fifth Avenue three-stories, long after Paul had failed to leave for his Fiftieth Street bachelor’s flat and instead penned so many notes with his rubber Waterman that the blister popped on his right middle finger—a boy arrived at the office door. He bore a telegram.
“Your presence is desired immediately,” read the message. “Much to discuss in strictest confidence.”
It was signed “T. Edison.”
Hell, there are no rules here—we’re trying to accomplish something.
—THOMAS EDISON, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 1932
PAUL GRABBED FOR his jacket and refastened his necktie before making his way to the door. He had been engaged in litigation against Thomas Edison for almost six months, but still hadn’t met the world’s most famous inventor.
Edison must have heard about the accident. The very public death by electricity of a man on a city street. He would surely be preparing a response. But what would he want with Paul?
Before leaving, Paul removed a folder from a drawer. He placed some documents into the inside pocket of his wool overcoat. Whatever Edison was planning, Paul would have his own surprise in store.
Broadway was dim at such a late hour. The few gas lamps that lit the street painted the cobblestones with a thin yellow glow. Only one point sparkled in the distance. Wall Street, to the south, was a citadel of bright electrical light amid the murky smoke and gas of Manhattan.
Paul turned to the dark north and quickly hailed a four-wheeled carriage.
“Sixty-five Fifth Avenue,” he instructed the cabby. While the Edison General Electric Company still kept his famous laboratory in New Jersey, the company’s main office had assumed a much more fashionable address.
The man turned around to look at Paul. “You’re going to see the Wizard?”
“I can’t imagine that’s what his mother calls him.”
“His mother died a long time ago,” replied the cabby. “Don’t you know?”
The mythmaking that surrounded Edison’s story never ceased to amaze Paul. In less than a decade of public life, Edison had made himself into a modern-day Johnny Appleseed. It was infuriating, though one had to appreciate the skill involved.
“He’s just a man,” said Paul. “No matter what The Sun says about him.”
“He makes miracles. Lightning in a glass bottle. Voices in a copper wire. What kind of a man can do that?”
“A rich one.”
The trotting horses carried them up Broadway, past quiet Houston and the fashionable row houses of Fourteenth Street. The island was dark until they made the turn onto Fifth. Suddenly the electric lamps that lit the avenue became visible. The vast majority of New York streets were lit at night by coal gas, the same flickering light that had illuminated the city for a hundred years. But recently a handful of wealthy business owners had been able to outfit their buildings with these new electrical bulbs. Just a few streets contained something like 99 percent of the electricity in America, and their names were well known: Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Thirty-fourth Street. Every day these blocks grew a shade brighter as another building was wired for current. The high-strung cables formed a fortress around each block. Paul looked up Fifth Avenue and saw progress.
And yet if he was successful, he would see Edison’s illuminated empire torn down.
Paul entered 65 Fifth at eleven in the evening. The bulky men behind the glass windows carried their firearms casually. There was no need for bellicose posturing. Only a very stupid person would have walked into that building unafraid.
A bearded man of middle age met Paul by the building’s central staircase. He didn’t smile as he extended his hand. “Charles Batchelor.”
“I know who you are,” said Paul. Batchelor was Edison’s right-hand man: the head of his laboratory and his chief goon as well. If Edison required dirt be dug up, it was Batchelor who would till the soil. The newspapers said the two were never far apart. But unlike his employer, Batchelor granted no interviews. His face never joined Edison’s on the front page.
“He’s been waiting for you” was all that Batchelor said. He led Paul up the stairs. Edison’s private office was on the fourth floor. Batchelor opened the oak double doors and ushered Paul inside before hovering silently in the entryway. It was as if he were invisible when not in receipt of further instruction.
The office was richly adorned. Chairs upholstered in Spanish leather. A glazed mahogany desk, covered in electrical devices. A sleeping cot tucked into the far corner. The rumor was that Edison slept only three hours a night. As with most rumors concerning Thomas Edison, Paul wasn’t sure whether to believe it.
Along the patterned walls, beautiful electric bulbs, shaped like roses, had been affixed every few feet. And dear Lord, were they ever bright.
Paul looked down at his hands. He realized that he had never actually seen his own hands under electric lights before. He could see the blue veins running underneath his skin. Freckles, pockmarks, scars, dirt, the ugly creases a man accumulates by the time he’s twenty-six. His telltale middle finger, always twitching when he was nervous. Paul felt not only that the lights were new, but that he was. A spark of the filament, and he had been revealed as something he never thought he might be.
Behind the deep mahogany desk, smoking a cigar, sat Thomas Edison.
He was more handsome than Paul had expected, thinner than he seemed in photographs, boasting a strong midwestern jaw. Even in his forties, his hair remained unkempt as a schoolboy’s. It would make a lesser man look old; it made Edison look like he had more important things about which to care. In the harsh light, Paul could even make out the gray of his eyes.
“Good evening.”
“Why am I here, Mr. Edison?”
“Straight to the point. I appreciate that quality in a lawyer.”
“I’m not your lawyer.”
Edison raised his eyebrows curiously, then slid a sheet of paper across the desk. Paul hesitated before coming forward. He didn’t want to cede position. But he also wanted to see what Edison was showing him.
It was a mock-up of the front page of The New York Times. MET DEATH IN THE WIRES, screamed the headline. HORRIFYING SPECTACLE—A LINEMAN ROASTED ON A NETWORK OF WIRES. Down the column ran a fevered article denouncing the dangers of electrical power. The editors were questioning the safety of running cables stuffed with raw and poorly understood energy across the city.
“This is tomorrow’s paper,” said Paul. “How did you get this?”
Edison ignored the question. “Your little firm, what’s the name? Housed right near there, aren’t you?”
“I saw it happen.”
“You did?”
“I saw the man lit up and I was there when the firemen cut his corpse from the wires. But the cables on lower Broadway aren’t yours. And they’re not my client’s either. They’re U.S. Illuminating Company wires. And since I’m not Mr. Lynch’s lawyer, thank heaven, this has nothing to do with me. Or the dispute between yourself and George Westinghouse.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“What am I doing here?”
Edison paused before he spoke again. “Mr. Cravath, there’s a war on, in case you haven’t noticed. Within the next few years, someone is going to build an electrical system that lights this entire nation. It could be me. It could be Mr. Westinghouse. But after today, it’s not going to be Mr. Lynch. The press will have him chewed to a nub by morning.”
“Sounds like a good day for my side.”