Her agreement was matter-of-fact and unsentimental. “Stanford White is using Tesla for a laugh. Edwin Booth is using Stanford for rehabilitation. I’m using Edwin for a night away from my mother. And you’re using me to get in the door. It’s the transactional circle on which the whole world spins.”
Paul watched as she puffed at her long cigarette. This was yet another side of Agnes he had not seen. A serrated edge behind her smooth smile. A dark shadow beneath the genteel flower of high society.
She raised an eyebrow. “Or don’t you like it here, amongst us wolves?”
Paul thought before answering. “I’d like to help him.”
“I thought your client was George Westinghouse.”
“I actually have two clients now, Miss Huntington.”
She smiled at this. Maybe he’d managed to say something witty.
“Cravath,” said Agnes as she dropped what was left of her cigarette on the stone, “na?veté does not become you. You can play their game and you can beat them at it. Or you can let them banish you from New York in tatters. Just as Mr. Foster is trying to do to me. But do you know something? Nobody ever won a game they didn’t play.”
She slipped her cigarette case back inside her purse, then inhaled the night air one last time. “I’m not going back to goddamned Boston. You want to go back to…where is it, Tennessee? Be my guest. But if you want to stay here, if you want to earn your place in Manhattan, remember: You chose to go to this party. There’s no leaving early.”
She turned away, headed back inside. He wasn’t sure which shocked him more—her profanity or the fact that she knew he was from Tennessee.
“Miss Huntington,” he said as he watched her ascend the stone steps, “I’m not going to lose.”
She turned back to face him, the curls of her hair framed by the arch of the doorway. She made a face that was extremely serious—a comical caricature of a grave frown, as if she were trying to peer deep into his soul. And then her frown instantly splintered into a great grin. Her laugh mocked Paul’s earnestness.
“Yes,” she said, turning back in to the house. “I wouldn’t have followed you out here if I thought you were.”
Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.
—NIKOLA TESLA, FROM HIS DIARY
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK the following evening, Paul walked from his office to an address on Grand Street, near the corner of Lafayette. He gazed up at the five-story factory building, wide as a city block, that stood there. The nameplates on the front door indicated that each floor housed a different small enterprise. MASTERS & SONS CARPENTRY on the first floor. JEFFERS LEAD on the second.
This building housed Tesla’s laboratory. Yet the neighborhood was all sweatshops of seamstresses and woodworkers, endless emporiums of buttons and freshly blown glass. The most futuristic scientific thinking in the country was being done amid the rickety wood of America’s jury-rigged past.
Paul pressed the bell for the fourth floor. It was the only blank nameplate in the building. He waited. Again Paul was impressed by Tesla’s ability to disappear.
He had telegrammed Westinghouse that afternoon to report that he’d been granted an audience with Tesla at the latter’s new laboratory near the Italian Quarter. It was an opportunity to see the man’s newest work. “Take him to Delmonico’s,” Westinghouse had responded instantly. “Buy him a very expensive dinner that he won’t eat. And get him back on our side.” There had been no interest, Paul had noted, in what Tesla’s new inventions might actually be.
Paul hadn’t told his partners that he’d made contact with Tesla. He’d caused the royalty problem on his own. He’d fix it in the same manner.
He waited in front of the door for a few slowly ticking minutes before it opened. The man revealed was not, as Paul had hoped, Tesla. It was a workman from another company in the building, whose departure gave Paul a chance to enter through the door.
Paul climbed a set of sagging wooden steps to the fourth floor. The stairs creaked under his weight. It seemed as if they’d been built as primitive scaffolding and had never been replaced.
Paul arrived at a heavily fortified door. It looked both as secure and as uninviting to visitors as was possible. He knocked.
“Mr. Tesla?” he called. “Are you in there? It’s Paul Cravath.” He wondered if Tesla had forgotten their appointment.
But then Paul heard something. Straining to listen, he realized that it was a series of metallic clacks coming from the other side of the door. The sound of locks being unbolted. And then silence once again.
He reached for the doorknob and found that it now turned easily. The door yielded to his push. A puff of musky air greeted him from inside, blowing dust across the landing. Behind the threshold was pitch black. Paul stared ahead into an expanse of nothingness.
“Mr. Tesla?” called Paul. “I cannot see you, I’m afraid.”
Footsteps in the distance. Paul heard what sounded like a hurried shuffling from inside. “Is that you?”
Still nothing in response. Paul took a hesitant step into the black room. Tesla’s laboratory could contain quite literally anything. This was not a place one wanted to wander blind.
“Nikola? Is there a light in here?”
There were a few more creaks in the distance before Paul heard Tesla’s nasal voice.
“I shall not illuminate you with mere light, Mr. Paul Cravath. I shall instead do so by electrical storm.”
Suddenly the heavens themselves split open and a divine lightning cleaved the room. Or so it seemed to Paul as he employed his coat sleeve to shield his eyes. He shut them to find scars of bright reds and purples imprinted on his vision.
A horrible noise accompanied the display. A spitting and sizzling, violently loud; it was as if the air were being ripped apart by elemental forces.
After a moment, he was able to blink his eyes open. What he saw in front of him, in the center of a huge room, was an electrical device the size of a trolley car. A glass shaft, shaped something like a light bulb, only many multiples the size, extended at least twenty feet above it. From its exterior there extended throughout the room what Paul could only describe as enormous tentacles of electrical energy. They grasped at the ceiling, the walls, the far corners of the cavernous space. They snapped out into the room like the grasping arms of a gigantic electrical beast.
Paul flinched from an instinctual fear that this beast might descend and devour him whole. But the maniacal tentacles of energy were somehow avoiding him. They avoided the scattered desks around the room, and they avoided the tall Serbian in a black suit who sat calmly in a wooden chair mere feet from the glass shaft. Nikola Tesla’s hands rested comfortably in his lap as all around him the air sizzled with energy.
“So then,” he said as he crossed his long legs and gave Paul a smile. “How goes the work in Mr. Westinghouse’s laboratory?”
—