Crazy for Cornelia (16 page)

He got past the gate and onto the sidewalk, approaching the stalkarazzi where they stood.

“Kevin Doyle, how you doin’?” Philip said, wary.

“I got something for you.” Kevin looked over his shoulder, keeping away from the lobby, out of Vlad’s line of sight.

“Yeah? What?”

Kevin walked over to the trio and motioned for a huddle. Slowly, Grace leading, they stepped over to him. He waited. One…
two… three.

He could see, over the backs of their heads, the girl in black hugging the darkness of the street, shuffling out of the alley.
He waited some more. She came out of the shadows and raised her hand. A passing
cab with its “vacant” light on pulled over and stopped for her. She opened the cab door with difficulty.

“I’m thinking,” Kevin said very low, to keep the three men bent in around him. “Giants, pretty good spread.”

The photographers looked puzzled, then figured it out. They swiveled their heads to see who Kevin made them miss.

“Shithead.”

“Asshole.”

One of the stalkarazzi spat on the sidewalk.

“Thought we had an understandin’,” Grace told him, hurt.

“Yeah.” Kevin waved cordially at him. “But I owed you one for the alley.”

Cornelia found 153 responses to her e-mail on Dr. Powers’s computer.

Sitting in the curator’s chair, working at his Mac, she sorted through them, dumping the few delusional types who claimed
that Nikola Tesla abducted them in a spaceship or was still living in a
ciu-dad subterrálneo
. One wrote that a week before Tesla had been seated on the living room couch, watching the TV show
Sabado Gigante
.

She filed the more useful responses into “Definite” and “Possible.” All told she found fifty-eight people who could be helpful.
Many were members of the worldwide Tesla Society, South American division. Of those, some provided information. Others wanted
to hear back from her. She formatted her replies, becoming even more excited about the adventure. It was possible that nobody
from the United States had ever gone to South America on a similar mission before. The best replies came from Rio and Sao
Paulo in Brazil, and Buenos Aires in Argentina. There could indeed be Tesla papers in all those places.

She also believed it possible, if unlikely, that years of rumor in the Tesla community about a third secret tower in South
America could be true.
A lost Tesla Tower
. She felt a chill. Perhaps too good to be true, but she couldn’t totally dismiss the notion. History revealed that Tesla’s
work had turned up in extraordinary places. She knew that the FBI confiscated many of Tesla’s papers when he died in New York
City in 1943. They delivered them to the U.S. government for use in the war
effort. The Russians had taken keen interest in Tesla’s particle-beam theory. After a strange “disturbance” in Siberia scorched
several thousand acres of woodland, the whispered stories out of Russia said that it was a Red Army experiment using Tesla’s
formula.

If they could find his papers so could she. Her eyes moistened thinking how Tesla had suffered. He spent his entire life frustrated.
She drifted, imagining him in his prime, playing with electricity in his laboratory on Fifth Avenue, creating a blue corona
to dance over his head and shoulders to amuse his friends.

Kevin Doyle, of the lovely blue eyes and matching corona, teased himself into her image of Tesla. After the first time she
saw Kevin, she had checked for his name on the list of building employees that Chester kept in his study. That first time
had only been a glorious tease. But she had glimpsed his corona again tonight. She had never seen, except in her Tesla fantasies,
a corona so pure.

Kevin Doyle.

His eyes pulled her in, a magnetic force drawing her gently toward him. Something about his gentle corona reminded her of
an afternoon in her mother’s arms. They had been at the beach when she was nine. The waves rolled over them, deliciously foamy
and salty. They giggled and screeched together, riding the waves to the shore. She felt happy as a dolphin that day, playing
in the sea, leaping with her mother in love and trust.

She realized that Kevin’s corona matched the color of the sky that day. It had the texture of summer, arching over a world
that felt the way life always should.

She shuddered. It was so cold.

That’s why she needed South America. A fresh start. In nineteen and one half hours, she would board an Air Brasilia flight
and escape to warmer, dreamier horizons. Then she could find anything.

She worked on translating the responses to her e-mail.

It thrilled her to realize that, in South America, interest in Tesla had swollen beyond cult status. Rational professors and
engineers studied his inventions. Historians glorified his life. In the U.S., Nikola Tesla might be another dead nobody, like
so many brilliant people without a knack for business. But in South America, Tesla seemed a mythical hero who dreamed of changing
the world with free electricity,
until he’d been mugged by the
norteamericano
robber barons. A martyr to his cause.

Perhaps in that mystical continent vibrating with youth and energy, she could finally bring Tesla the worldwide recognition
he deserved. A fitting payback to the maestro. And to her mother.

She rubbed her cold hands together. She hated to admit it to herself, but the Electric Girl’s anonymity bothered her.

If only she could stand up on top of the museum, scream out her whole story, and let everybody know the truth of Cornelia
Lord, faux–party girl.

Perhaps it was selfish, but she couldn’t help it.

People were treating her like the wasted debs of song and story. Sad girls like Barbara Hutton, who married enough men to
form a conga line. And poor Brenda Frazier, who made her own face up like a clown’s in her dwindling years, thinking she was
still the toast of the Stork Club.

The Electric Girl would show them once she arrived in South America.

Then she felt a chill through her like an icy finger. What if her plane hit a mountain, as those perfectly normal flights
to South America sometimes did? She could be squashed on the face of the Andes and lost forever.

What would people gossip about her then? What would her father think? That she had left this earth with no greater legacy
than using her Saks First card and sucking on sake martinis?

She tapped at the keyboard with one finger, thinking. Oh, why not? She owed it to herself to write a little something.

She picked at the keys in earnest now, making a disk. Then she needed to get a few hours rest.

She turned off the xenon spotlights, curled up on Dr. Powers’s couch. She could no longer fight the drugs. The energy quickly
drained out of her. She wondered if she would find all she was looking for.

And she fell asleep with a glimpse of Kevin Doyle’s sky-blue corona.

* * *

“Mike, be careful,” Chester fumed as the brittle limousine groaned around a corner. “Panda limousines… the Koi Tower. As
soon as we get that bastard Han Koi straightened out, we’re moving Lord & Company back to Wall Street.”

Tucker nodded solemnly while Chester seethed, shifting his weight uncomfortably on the slick leather seat.

“Chester,” Tucker began, as he played with the laptop he balanced on one knee, the other leg arched as far as it could stretch
in the small compartment. “I need to know more about Corny’s obsession with this Tesla.”

Chester felt his mind empty, suddenly going numb when the name “Tesla” stung his ear. He labored to organize his thoughts
about the miserable inventor. Cornelia had shown him his picture many times. He had been a tall, ascetic European with long
black hair and a smug grin suggesting deep and hidden knowledge.

Chester began stammering what he knew while Tucker got busy on his laptop. The car slowed and Chester looked up to see lights
burning feverishly on the Lord & Company executive floor of the Koi Tower, even now at 4:30
A.M.

Only two years old, the office tower hovered over Madison Avenue like the Colossus of Koi. Chester climbed out of the car
and glowered at the Hong Kong–scale office building. He never liked visiting Hong Kong, that chaotic city bristling with gaudy
office towers like hostile missiles. The Koi Tower made a spectacle of itself, brassy and raw, housing mostly corporate raiders
and their law firms. Old Han Koi spent tens of millions hiring a cast of architects and theme park designers to create the
flamboyant structure.

“We do not want a building, we want a happening,” Chester remembered overhearing old Han hectoring his architects with a phrase
he must have heard in the 1960s, perhaps on some Asian rerun of
Laugh-In
.

Chester’s thoughts shifted to his hatred of the Kois, he dimly realized, as a lesser torture than thinking about Cornelia.

He thought of Koi driving him to the Hong Kong racetrack, in a blindingly ostentatious Rolls-Royce they’d actually had covered
with gold English Sovereign coins under many coats of clear lacquer. No cheap Panda cars for Han. Now he had been forced to
move Lord &
Company to this bronze and gold monstrosity. It made his buttocks boil. This shameless monument to greed and glitz made Donald
Trump’s buildings look puritan.

The doorway to the Koi Tower’s twelve-story glass atrium lobby had purposely been built lopsided, to conform to the principles
of feng shui. It always disoriented Chester when he walked through. To the left of the crooked doorway, a theme restaurant
called Splendid Shanghai beckoned. Its red-enameled facade reminded him of Mann’s Chinese Theater. Chester despised the sepulchral
glitz of the lobby and hated seeing the three tiny Panda sedans in red, white, and blue that turned on pedestals on the lobby
floor.

The express elevator deposited Chester and Tucker on the executive floor. They headed for Tucker’s office, decorated in hard-edged
slabs of glass, marble, and hammered steel. His X-shaped desk had once belonged to his teenage hero, a junk-bond king. Tucker
had plucked it out of his idol’s former office in Beverly Hills, and Chester had gratefully paid a fortune for it.

Tucker stopped by the gunmetal-colored desks where his two secretaries sat within his shouting distance. Both wore dark gray
or black as Tucker required.

“Susan,” Tucker snapped, and the older blond woman jumped and followed him.

Chester noticed for the first time as he looked at the forty-year-old woman’s downcast eyes, how Tucker’s few older staff
members behaved as though they’d had the stuffing kicked out of them.

Tucker’s phalanx of ten young executives stood assembled in his office. Chester entered, briefly and tentatively, to say hello
to the group. They were just kids, and reminded him of the wide-eyed, frightening youngsters who worked for politicians. They
stood eager as Jack Russell terriers, practically quivering in their conservative shirts and ties and clutching their own
laptops, their busy foreheads crammed full of tactical moves. The tireless fury of their youth deflated him, making him feel
old and ineffectual.

“Hi,” he said, stopping before adding, “kids.”

“Hello, Mr. Lord.” Their heads all bobbed, unfailingly polite to him. Now Tucker would ask them for something impossible and
they would give it to him.

“People,” Tucker barked, “you have eight hours to do a worldwide information search. You will prepare me a detailed briefing.
You’ll also need to find a sophisticated electronics store, get our travel people out of bed and working the phones, and send
a shopping team to a number of retail stores that I’ll list for you. Problems?”

The energy in the room sizzled.

“Tucker,” a red-cheeked woman with short hair said. “Can I ask you what client this is for?”

“No, you can’t,” Tucker told her.

“Is there a billing number?” Susan his secretary asked.

“Yeah,” Tucker sat with a tiny smile. “Tesla 001.”

Cornelia arrived at JFK Airport at 7:30
P.M.
She’d slept in the museum and stayed there until it was time to leave in the early morning. Dr. Powers, keeper of her secrets,
hugged her and warned her one last time to be careful traveling alone. “You can change your mind,” he told her, but she was
determined.

Early in their relationship, she had worried that Dr. Powers might call her father at some point, outraged at seeing her working
anonymously and misunderstood. But he had stuck to his promise to never reveal her secrets. Since the day they met at the
event for the Tesla Society, she and Dr. Powers had bonded over the museum. When they flew the Tesla airship together and
he taught her the controls, she almost cried to be so appreciated and trusted.

But she never allowed herself to view Dr. Powers as a surrogate father. No matter how exasperating he might be, her real father
would one day come to his senses. She believed that.

Cornelia moved rapidly through the big, modern International Terminal at JFK, no Thorazine Shuffle now. Bushberg’s drugs,
those sly paralytic juices, had mostly evaporated from her bloodstream. The blue and white Air Brasilia counters she approached
held a row of nutty-brown Brazilians, festive-looking even in their dark blue uniforms.

“Hi,” the woman behind the counter said, a caffe latte face under curly hair. “How can I help you?”

“I have a reservation on the 9:30 to Rio.”

The night flight to Rio
. A delicious thought.

She placed her credit card and passport on the counter tentatively. Could Chester have reported her to the State Department
to revoke her passport? No, that was silly. And he knew nothing about her American Express platinum card. He would have no
way to cancel it, nor could a detective trail her transactions, she didn’t think. But still she held her breath as the creamy
Brazilian’s fingers flew over the keyboard. The agent studied Cornelia’s passport and handed it back with her ticket and platinum
card.

“Have a pleasant flight, Ms. Lord. Please use our first-class lounge to wait.”

Gotta dance
, ran through the Electric Girl’s head.