Crazy for Cornelia (11 page)

* * *

In the lobby of 840 Fifth Avenue, Tucker Fisk took his usual course through doors held open by others.

He brushed by the two doormen on duty, noticing only that one was black and the other white, as generic in their uniforms
as packets of salt and pepper. He stepped into a small gray Panda limousine double-parked in front of the building. The car
door shut with a tinny rattle, like someone at the factory had left a Coke bottle inside.

“We’re looking for Ms. Lord,” he told Mike. A lumpen man with dull eyes, Mike, the Lords’ driver, was little more than a human
autopilot. But he was obedient and discreet. “We’re going to find her and bring her home.”

“You say so, Mr. Fisk.”

As the car pulled away, Tucker tried to settle into the limousine’s cramped interior. This was a custom stretch version of
a Koi compact car. They bought it as a business courtesy to the Kois, though both he and Chester had instantly regretted the
decision. Padding the interior with plush seats and burled walnut paneling hadn’t made it luxurious. The little Panda still
felt like the inside of a cigar tube. As Mike headed downtown, the frame of the brittle, overstretched sedan groaned around
corners, as if it might suddenly break in half.

Tucker punched “C” into his laptop and found his “Cornelia Lord” file. Among other data, it contained a list of all the clubs
where Cornelia crawled with old friends from the Gramercy School. He had instructed people to bribe a waiter here, a bartender
there, to satisfy Tucker’s need to know about her nightlife. He still couldn’t pin down how she spent her days, but so what?
All that would change soon.

Cornelia Lord would be his wife. And, as far as creating problems went, she would be a nonfactor. Scrolling down the list,
he identified a few clubs where she might turn up.

He had a thought and looked up. “Hey, Mike, you don’t know where she’d go, do you?”

“Nope,” Mike said.

Tucker grunted absently.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found, Mr. Fisk.”

“That’s not her decision,” Tucker said.

He took out his cell phone, little bigger than a matchbook cover with an antenna, and called his secretary at home.

“Cancel your plans for the evening,” he said. “I need you to start calling nightclubs.”

Cornelia sent the cab away and walked the last two blocks to the museum.

With her hands in her pockets, she enjoyed the bite of the strong wind that raged across the Hudson River and threaded through
the canyons of the West Side warehouses.

Her trip to South America had taken on a new urgency. Before, her intentions had been deliciously random. The remote chance
of finding Tesla’s plans for a new tower, the thrill of escape and adventure, all these possibilities had been like wild mushrooms
to be gathered up at some future date.

Now, with Chester and Tucker confining her as though she were some medieval princess swooning with hysteria, she needed to
organize quickly.

Her pulse fluttered as she approached the building.

The new museum, not yet open to the public, might seem uninviting and a bit scary from the outside. It stood in a bleak warehouse
district on the far West Side, occupying a brick building that used to be a car dealership. The ghostly outline of a Cadillac
crest still appeared in the soot over the front door.

Her New York Tesla Museum.

And once inside, she could touch the man’s genius. The force of his ideas filled the vast space.

Soon, visitors would come to see that it was Nikola Tesla, not Thomas Edison, who invented today’s electricity. Edison merely
got all the credit. Here, under one vast roof, they had gathered the evidence of Tesla’s astonishing gifts. In the early 1900s,
he discovered radio and television waves, X rays and particle beams. He’d lit the world’s darkness, handed us all the sparkle
and energy we take for granted. Then he lived to see each of his inventions taken away from him by some of the greediest men
on earth. One of the worst was her own forebear, Chester Lord I.

Giving Nikola Tesla back his reputation mattered deeply to her.

For nine months, she had worked day and night to create the New York Tesla Museum as one of its principal founders. And she
did
it in total stealth. Nobody knew she helped to build it. Not even Chester. When the time came, it would be a surprise that
he would come to view with respect and admiration. Or so she hoped.

But, until that moment came, the Electric Girl worked alone.

She opened the door with her key, fumbled for the light switch. The overhead xenon spotlights blazed on, those intense beams
used to light the stages of rock concerts, illuminating the exhibits in their shafts of cold blue light. The temperature in
the museum had purposely been set bracingly cold to conserve energy. Con Ed, the electrical power company formally named Consolidated
Edison, didn’t give away warmth.

In the light of the crisp spotlights, she trembled not so much from the chill inside the cavernous space as from the presence
of genius.

The museum was her cathedral.

In the center of the great cement floor stood the forty-foot-high replica of the Tesla Tower, his invention to broadcast free
electricity through the airwaves. The tower resembled a giant steel-girded mushroom with a bulbous top. If she pushed a button,
it would begin to dance with blue licks of electric current. Tesla built two towers, one on Long Island and one in Colorado.
Like Tesla’s actual towers, the museum’s replica couldn’t broadcast electricity. But that wasn’t the point.

On her way to the curator’s office, she stopped to linger by her favorite exhibit. It was a full-scale model of an airship
that Tesla had invented almost one hundred years earlier. His design, U.S. Patent #1665114, resembled a quaint Victorian helicopter,
a ribbed aluminum cage with two propellers and a tufted velvet seat for two. With the museum’s curator, Dr. Eugene Powers,
she had commissioned an engineer to build this replica with an electrical engine. When they had taken a test flight over Connecticut,
wiggling in the crosswinds, she had whooped with excitement.

She touched the aluminum frame and, through its cold sting, felt the warmth of moments shared with her mother in that sunny
glass room of their apartment. She never went in that sunroom anymore. She thought about her visit to the museum just the
night before.

After the horrible plane ride with Tucker, she had come to the museum to energize herself. Oh, had she needed a Tesla fix
then. She
had obligated herself to attend some dull party at the Plaza, a sort of starchy rave for Young Republicans.

As she stood by her Tesla helicopter, she yearned with all her being to share the museum with someone whose world was not
defined by printed invitations. But would that person ever arrive on the scene?

Would the Electric Girl always have to work alone?

For luck, she had touched the aluminum frame. Then she had shut off the spotlight and trudged out to the deserted street,
dressed in her black evening dress over her practical Keds, passing the shadowy figures of prostitutes who were the only other
women in the warehouse district at night. She hailed a cab to the Plaza, more than unfashionably late for the party where
she would join Tucker. He’d probably have a new anecdote about the afternoon dogfight. He would certainly emerge as the hero.

The fountain in Grand Army Plaza across from the hotel still sprinkled bravely in December. It looked positively refreshing
compared to the prickly heat she would feel in the crowd. The moment she joined the black-tie mob in the ballroom, conversation
dribbled off, as usual. Really, could anyone stare like the women whose eyes drilled out from those frantically smiling photographs
in
Town & Country
? She smiled thinking of that timber wolf grin, baring all teeth and gums. The full
Town & Country
jawbreaker.

Tucker stepped from a clutch of snarky socialites to greet her.

“Corny, where have you been?”

“A museum,” she hedged, weary immediately, looking toward a long and tiresome evening.

“Well,” Tucker said with a smile, “how about a sake martini?”

And she froze on that moment, because that’s when all the trouble started. The flashbulbs. The cold, wet dress…

Well. One couldn’t dwell on past mistakes when there was work to do.

She crossed the cement floor to the curator’s office.

She thought about Dr. Powers. He looked a bit like a dignified werewolf, with his bushy silver Brillo eyebrows and beard.

When she had first sought out Dr. Powers and told him what she wanted, he had dismissed her as one of the marginal Tesla groupies
who loved to spin government conspiracy theories about what the FBI or CIA or even KGB had done with Tesla’s work. But, slowly
and methodically, she had convinced that naturally skeptical man. He had grilled her to her shoes with questions. When she
emerged from their first meeting—scheduled for thirty minutes, but lasting three hours—she was so soaked in perspiration she
might have been staggering out of a sauna.

Then, after months of gauging her resolve, checking her out, working with her on a test basis, Dr. Powers had gradually turned
from wary werewolf to her best friend, in a sense, and confidant. Finally, he had agreed to give up his Edison Chair of Electricity
professorship at M.I.T. and be the museum’s curator for a dollar a year. Such were the passions Nikola Tesla could stir in
scientists and debutantes, if not investment bankers.

Dr. Powers kept his small space orderly and functional, his furniture industrial. If he ever hung his degrees, they would
probably cover the entire wall, but he left his office the same distressed red brick as the rest of the warehouse. His only
decoration was a large poster of Coney Island at night, dated 1904. The amusement park lit up like a magical city made of
light bulbs or fireflies.

She admired the world in the poster as she planned her next step.

A friend would be such a delicious luxury now, just someone to listen. Her friendships had lapsed over the years, to put it
mildly. She could count only her oldest friends to be a comfort. But should she risk contact with anybody?

Finally she called her friend Tina French. Tina lived on Sutton Place. She had a sense of humor, if not responsibility, and
was given to mood swings. When she felt terribly upset, Tina always shaved her head, which advertised her current feelings
quite effectively.

Cornelia heard a series of high-pitched beeps as Tina’s phone rang. Tina carried a pager around with her, even though she
had never worked for a living. Her grandfather had invented the hot-dog spit that turns frankfurters at refreshment counters,
so her whole family lived on fat royalty checks. But Tina’s nightlife, connecting with the right people at the right time,
was important enough to her to carry a pager.

Cornelia punched in the museum’s number. Tina would be on
her side, whatever the issue. They had been close since second grade, had seen each other when she’d worked long, frustrating
days and wanted to blow off steam partying. It was good that she and Tina could always pick up and reactivate their relationship
like a solar clock. She didn’t have to tell Tina what she was doing. Tina cared about Cornelia, and she never judged.

Cornelia now called Air Brasilia. She wrote notes in her neat, squared-off writing, jotting down times and flight numbers
for Rio, Sao Paulo, and the quaintly futuristic capital city of Brasilia.

“Obrigado!” she thanked the airline agent, practicing her Portuguese.

Line one trilled. “Tina?”

“Corneee,”
Tina screeched. “Where have you been hiding?”

They agreed to join up below 14th Street, at a nightclub called the Meat Chest.

“Byee,” she heard, drawn out as though her friend had fallen down a deep hole as she hung up.

Cornelia clicked onto Dr. Powers’s Mac and went right to the official New York Tesla Museum Web site. She wouldn’t know a
soul in South America, and the prospect of such a free-spirited adventure made her scalp tingle. Of course, the Tesla Society
would have members in Brazil. She would ask Dr. Powers for help, and query the discussion groups that shared ideas in excited
bursts of text over the Internet. She typed in her inquiry three times, in English, Portuguese, and Spanish:

Tesla researcher traveling to South America needs immediate guidance on possible Tesla visits to your area, including papers/plans/evidence
of Tesla Tower
.

She tapped “Send” and settled back in the curator’s chair.

A few on the fringes would talk about flying saucers that appeared over Rio in the 1950s, supposedly from some secret city
where scientists worked on his antigravity theories. Obsessed Tesla groupies thrived in the woolly world of the Internet.
But although their messages might wobble at the edge of sanity, responsible members of the Tesla Society’s South American
chapters would help her.

She left Dr. Powers’s office, making clickety-click sounds on the cement floor as she walked to one of the exhibits, striped
with blue light from the xenons. This was a life-size mural of the young, kinetic Tesla at the turn of the century, toiling
in his laboratory on 33 Fifth Avenue, wearing a black suit. His shoulders danced with bolts of blue flame, running electricity
over his body as a parlor trick for friends, among them Mark Twain.

She walked to their replica of the Tesla aircraft. It always excited her, the memory of that blissful day.

She had researched Tesla’s original plans. Then she and Dr. Powers contacted a helicopter designer in Connecticut. At first
the no-nonsense aeronautics engineer laughed at their plans; because Tesla’s original design was so boxy and top-heavy, it
didn’t look as though it could fly at all. But they’d all worked together to come up with the gyrocopter. It ran on an electric
engine with four batteries. Sputtering into the wind, flying the noiseless airship over the field, Dr. Powers had let her
take the controls. He taught her how to bank the airship, then keep it in a wobbly but level flight. It was the best time
she’d had since her mother died.