Crazy for Cornelia (28 page)

Kevin stood awed as licks of blue electric current began to shoot around the top of the tower. Suddenly, the little licks
burst into a spider’s web of huge blue bolts that danced and crackled over this dingy old rooftop in the crummiest part of
the West Side of Manhattan.

“Hello,” somebody greeted them from behind.

A man with thick, silvery hair and a trim beard appeared beside them. He wore a charcoal suit and silver tie. His skin looked
ruddy, like images he had seen of nineteenth-century Englishmen. Kevin expected him to speak with a British accent, or whip
some snuff out of his pocket.

“We missed you.” The man flashed his teeth at Cornelia. His accent
sure wasn’t British. Pure Brooklyn, maybe Flatbush. The man gave Cornelia a bear hug. Then he shook Kevin’s hand with a kind
of reverence. “And you’re Kevin Doyle. I’m Gene Powers, the museum’s curator. I saw your picture in the
Globe
today. I know a lot of people who’d thank you, if they only knew what this woman did for this museum. She’s too modest.”

Cornelia shrugged. Powers looked at her, then at Kevin.

“Well, I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

“Nobody knows you helped build this museum?”

“Nobody but Dr. Powers. And now you.”

“What got you into this?” Kevin asked.

She evaded him. “Tesla started out as a penniless immigrant in America, digging ditches. Then he went to work for the Edison
Electric Company and invented modern electricity.”

“Not Edison?” Kevin asked her.

“Edison invented DC, direct current, but it was limited by wires. New York City in 1906 was a rat’s nest of electrical wire.
So Tesla discovered AC electricity.”

“What we use today.”

“Yes, but Edison got the credit, didn’t he?”

He waited. She hadn’t really answered his question.

“What’s this?” Kevin pointed to a small open airship. It looked like a helicopter some kid would make. It had a boxy frame
with a tufted seat for two, a propeller on top and one in back, and a rudder. A row of big batteries was stuffed between the
seat.

“It’s a Tesla airship design.”

“Where’s the engine?”

“Under the propeller mast,” she told him proudly. “It’s an electric engine to run the propellers. I had it designed to run
on AC current.”

“That looks like a box made out of Tinker Toys,” he pointed out. “You sure it can fly?”

“Dr. Powers and I flew it once in Connecticut. It’s called a gyro-copter.”

She placed an almost maternal hand on the airship, beaming. She didn’t look like a crazy nun anymore. The fact was, she looked
like a real person with a spark of the divine.

“Cornelia, all you’ve done, I mean, I’ve never known anybody
who could even dream up something like this”—he waved his arm at the exhibits—“and you made it happen.”

“I just helped.”

Like she had just helped with his Sebastian.

Cornelia Lord could spend her whole life on yachts, eating caviar with little flecks of gold. But she didn’t. She had spent
her time and money on a dead inventor, more like a half-nutty artist than an engineer.

She’d shown him her secret world. And he liked it. But why, of all people, had she turned her candlepower on him? How long
could a mortal man cling to a goddess?

“Kevin?” she giggled. “Hello in there. Let’s go work on your saint.”

T
he dense snowfall, driven by a cold wind, swirled over the city for a second day of stung cheeks and school closings.

Cornelia wound her arm into his and rested her head on his good shoulder. Like explorers or penguins, they helped each other
navigate the icy streets, crossing half the West Side on their way downtown to the New York Institute of Art and Technology.

As they tramped through the street slush, Kevin noticed that it hadn’t had time to turn gray. New waves of powder kept falling
to bleach the old. They kept their heads down and hugged the buildings, just in case some hawk-eyed
Debwatch
reader might recognize Cornelia Lord.

As they crossed by the rent-controlled tenements between West 42nd Street and Chelsea, Kevin noticed that Cornelia Lord never
looked wrong anywhere. Her creamy skin belonged to the world of Fifth Avenue. But she seemed right at home among the hangdog
buildings on Tenth Avenue. At street level, she seemed enchanted by the flower shops run by broad-faced Koreans, and happily
sniffed pungent smells from the Greek luncheonettes. On the second floors of the old tenements, she pointed out the young
mothers with kids and elderly Medicare patients crammed into tiny rooms waiting for doctors and dentists.

They were walking just like a couple through his New York, not hers. And she was having fun. He nudged her. “That’s where
I used to go to church, when I was a kid.”

On the corner, even the arched roof of St. Agatha’s Church had been covered with a layer of snow. The gray stone, dusted white,
made the stained glass shine brighter than a fire in an oven. This sprawling urban church, where Kevin had taken his Communion
and they’d held his mother’s funeral, never looked less oppressive. Today he saw grandeur in the twin spires instead of boredom
and authority, maybe the way a peasant like Giotto was inspired by the medieval churches.

The two big oak doors to the church opened suddenly. Children in white angel gowns with gold-braided necks roared out, shoving
and yelling at one another, carrying white candles.

“That’s the Christmas pageant,” Kevin said. “I was in it when I was eight. I still don’t see Round John Virgin.”

“Who?”

“From the Christmas carole, ‘Round John Virgin, mother and child.’ I got the words wrong, looking for some fat kid.”

She laughed, then pulled away from Kevin, stretching her arms out to each side in the oversized leather coat.

“Snow angels!” she yelled.

She fell backward, thumping into a pile of snow, and waved her arms back and forth. She leapt to her feet.

“Look!” She showed Kevin the outline she made. “Come on!”

Her angel looked more like a melanic snow moth in its patch of city grime. His arm and shoulder still throbbed, and he hesitated.
But she’d already got him into the spirit. He closed his eyes, stretched his arms, and fell backward too. He worried, falling
like a toppled tree, that he might get hurt when he hit the ground.

“Oooof.” He blinked, looking up at the sky. He felt fine. The fresh layer of snow he had landed on cushioned him like a velvety
mattress.

“See?” she squealed. “Nothing hurts as much as you think it will.”

Then without warning, she ran off into the alleyway beside the church, gray coat flapping, and disappearing around the corner.
Kevin ran after her. He puffed through the alleyway onto the crosstown street
looking both ways, but didn’t see her. He ran in the direction of the Hudson River. He couldn’t find her.

“Cornelia!” he yelled.

He ran a long city block in the other direction and looked up and down Ninth Avenue, then all the way back to Tenth Avenue
until he couldn’t run anymore. He stood bent over, hands on his knees.

Whatever kept him from getting too attached to her failed him now.

Then he felt cold hands over his eyes.

“Gotcha.”

He turned around and saw the red tip of her nose. She laughed, catching her breath. Then she slipped on the ice with a gleeful
whoop, and he leaned over to help her up.

“Are you okay?”

“I think I twisted my ankle,” she said.

He bundled her up in the pewter-colored coat and carried her the last ten blocks to his school building, as carefully as he’d
held Sebastian. The throbbing in his shoulder didn’t bother him at all now. Finally he got the door to the school building
open with his foot and it closed behind him.

Neither of them saw the two New York City police officers who spotted them from their car.

They had followed the young subjects discreetly in their white and blue cruiser for the past few blocks. Now they pulled to
the curb across the street from the school.

The officer in the driver’s seat, an antsy male sergeant named Cantwell with gray-flecked hair and a painfully inflamed prostate,
took the duty clipboard and flipped it over. He stared at the photo on the faxed and photocopied handout, a muddy blotch of
lines and smudges. He squirmed uncomfortably. His black leather jacket squeaked against the car seat. The car’s blasting heat
made their close space feel like the inside of a tank.

“I can’t tell.” He shook his head. “Lemme see that
Globe
.”

He scrunched his forehead, analyzing the picture on the second page under the headline, “Where’s Corny?”

“It’s her,” said his partner, Officer Diaz, a compact woman with
muscles like pistons and very long hair pulled up under her cap so the visor sat slightly high on her head.

“Better call it in as a possible abduction,” Sergeant Cantwell instructed his partner.

“You sure about that?” Officer Diaz said. While Sergeant Cantwell possessed many useful police skills, she believed that his
prostate condition made him overly eager to find something physical to do to take his mind off the burning gland.

Cantwell gave her a sidelong look. He was a sergeant and she wasn’t. She took the radio and checked their clipboard again
for the special code name they’d been given at their shift briefing.

“1348,” Diaz spoke softly into the radio, so she wouldn’t break the dispatcher’s eardrum. “We’ve got subject Charlie Oscar
Romeo, corner of 14th and Ninth. Possible, I repeat,
possible
802. Requesting instructions.”

“Copy 1348,” the short crackle came back.

They watched the old loft building, then watched some more. They sat in dead silence, as only partners on surveillance can,
except for Cantwell’s leather jacket squeaking on the seat. Each had started to wonder what the hell was going on when the
dispatcher’s voice squawked out of the dashboard.

“1348, secure the location. Blue Dog is responding.”

“The captain. Do you believe this?” Cantwell said, rolling his eyes.

Officer Diaz turned the rearview mirror her way to check out her uniform. “This debutante’s supposed to be a mental subject.”

“Maybe she’s dangerous,” Sergeant Cantwell said.

Officer Diaz could tell that her partner had taken a personal dislike to the girl for bringing their captain into the picture.
Now she’d have to make sure Sergeant Cantwell, prisoner of his angry prostate, didn’t accidentally shoot some debutante for
running at them with a lipstick tube.

“That sly old Max,” Cornelia chuckled. “Watch.”

In the institute’s vast blackened loft floor, she lit up Sebastian’s halo again with the freestanding fiber optics.

“So how many do you use?”

“Less is more,” she said. “The light has to be subtle, just barely luminous. There. You try his face, Kevin.”

He struggled to slip the tiny coils carefully into the thin, brittle tubes.

Freestanding fiber optics
.

In a way that he admitted to himself was stupid, he hated the little glowworms. Max, the sneaky bastard, had kept this technology
from him.

But they were hard to work with, thin little threads that slipped away from his fingers like silverfish. Then she guided him
just slightly and he implanted two of them in Sebastian’s face. The glass-tube profile sputtered into life, shimmering. He
didn’t even have to plug the transformer in.

“See?” She clapped her hands. “All Max can make is little circles and squares. You’re a genius, Kevin. You should start working
on something new.”

“Like what?” He asked her, staring at Sebastian’s face. The fiber optics gave off an amazing light.

“I don’t know. A heart. A dance of light.”

“What about you, Corny?” He used her nickname for the first time. He realized that little slip broke through the last thin
membrane of his resolve to not get involved, so he might as well go on.

“What about me?”

“I mean, your Tesla Museum’s done. What happens next?”

“I go to South America.”

A very bad feeling. “Why South America?”

“Because it’s possible that Tesla did some work there.”

“Okay. But what are you going to do after the whole Tesla project gets finished?”

She looked startled, and sounded slightly defensive. “Why, nothing. That’s what I do.”

“What I used to do,” Kevin reminded her, “was make a saint that looked like a Bud Light sign. You showed me something better.
Now maybe I’ll move on. Don’t you ever want to move on?”

She bit her lip. “Answer me honestly. Do you think I’m crazy?”

He took her chin and drew it up close to him, gently touched her lip with his.

“I think you have this thing my mom called the spark of the divine. But nobody around you knows what to do with it.”

Officer Diaz, watching Sergeant Cantwell’s back, poked around the first floor of the industrial building on reconnaissance.
It was a dump, old and badly maintained.

She peered at the tenant registry. So many different typefaces, it looked like a ransom note. The six-story building housed
a nest of marginal businesses, and she took no special notice of the New York Institute of Art and Technology. She determined
that the building could be accessed through one front door, one back door, and a door on the roof.

“We just got backup,” Sergeant Cantwell said in his low business voice.

She looked outside to see another cruiser from her precinct running without lights or siren. It turned next to the building
and crunched down an alley in the snow to block off the building’s back door. A third unit skidded to a stop at the curb.
Two officers got out and hustled into the lobby to join them. They huddled.

“Nobody in the super’s office. I think we ought to check the roof,” Officer Diaz said. “The staircase is locked up and so’s
the elevator.”

So the four officers went outside, stayed close to the building to be invisible to anybody upstairs, and entered the lobby
of the building next door. They found a superintendent’s office where a young man tried to run from them. They caught him
by the back of his jeans. He explained in Spanish that his name was Carlos from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and he had a family
here. And no Green Card, Officer Diaz finished for him, also in Spanish. But they would develop amnesia about his being an
undocumented alien if he quietly helped them check out the building next door. Carlos from Tegucigalpa took the four officers
to his building’s roof where they could just look down a few feet and see the rooftop of the subject building. Officer Diaz
immediately spotted the broken knob on the door to the staircase.