The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (5 page)

Several months after returning to Princeton, Paul opened the paper one morning to find an article about a bombing of a courthouse in lower Manhattan, allegedly conducted by anarchists. Other bombings followed. He began to fear that Carlo and his band of Italian revolutionaries were responsible; after all, they had claimed to have agents in America. Courthouses, churches, police stations, and even the homes of politicians came under attack. Paul considered placing an anonymous call to the police department, but he wasn’t sure what he’d say. He only had a few names, and he didn’t know any locations or plans. Ultimately, he feared that his own identity would be revealed and he’d come under suspicion, so he kept silent and hoped the attacks would cease.

While Paul was down in Mexico, his brother had married his girlfriend and completed a graduate program at Oxford University. Using his mother’s connections, he had gained admission to the prestigious new Training School for Public Service, the first of its kind. Young Robert Moses was promised a job with the Bureau of Municipal Research—the organization that had founded the school.

Bella was impressed with Paul’s determination to catch up. When he finally graduated from Princeton, his mother said she wanted to help him build some financial security so he could begin thinking about a family. “Opportunity is where you find it,” she told him, “and except for Edison, I’ve never heard of anyone getting rich in electricity.”

She invited him home for a big dinner to be thrown in his honor. Naturally, Mr. Robert was too busy to come. When Paul arrived early at the Midtown manor several days later, he followed Maria into the kitchen, still disgusted by the latest news he had read on the train to the city. The families of the victims in the recent Triangle Shirtwaist fire, after having filed a civil lawsuit against the owners, had been awarded the insulting settlement of seventy-five dollars for each of the 148 young girls who had been burned or fallen to her death.

Maria interrupted Paul’s train of thought, mentioning that his mother had arranged a surprise for him that he wasn’t going to like.

“Who’s this princess?” Paul asked, spotting a pretty little girl peaking out at him from behind a curtain.

“Lucretia, come here and say hi to Paul.”

Paul curtsied, asking, “Are you the Duchess of Ferrara?”

“Who?” the little girl asked.

“Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara,” Paul replied. “She had a ring with a secret compartment in it, through which she could easily poison her unsuspecting adversaries.”

“Well, I never poisoned no one,” the girl said, then dashed off.

At that moment, Bella shouted out Paul’s name from the living room, so he said goodbye to Maria and her young daughter. They were served drinks and sat talking for half an hour until Paul’s father and sister arrived, then they all moved into the dining room.

Maria had prepared a fabulous red snapper dish. When they were finished with dinner, Bella announced that with Emanuel’s help she had arranged for Paul to get a great job where he could make excellent use of his mathematical skills.

“It’s in banking,” his father quietly added.

“Kuhn & Loeb,” Bella elaborated. “David Loeb himself secured you the position. You start in two weeks.”

Paul sighed.

“It’s a very prestigious firm,” Emanuel said. It was obvious that Bella had put tremendous effort into orchestrating this. Usually his father didn’t make a peep.

“Mom, I’m grateful for the offer, but I’m just not a banker. I want to—”

“Paul, you’re still young. Why don’t you just give this a chance?” Bella pushed. Paul smiled, not wanting to make a scene. “Just try it for six months and—”

“I told you repeatedly that I want to work in the public sector and I want to be an electrical engineer.”

“Well, that’s admirable, son, but …” his father began.

“What the hell do you know?” Bella bursted out. “You’re a damn kid who just got home from Mexico. We paid a truckload of money for your college degree.”

“I don’t even like bankers! You just don’t listen!”

“Paul, please,” his father said.

“Robert was right,” Bella said. “I’ve turned you into a snot-nosed brat. You won’t even try this before turning it down.”

Paul rose, grabbed his coat, and hurried out as his mother continued yelling about his wasted time south of the border with Señorita Obnoxchez.

Paul awoke that night with the blanket pulled over his head, and he was once again unable to feel his arms or legs. He could sense an air pocket forming along the top of the blanket, but then he realized it wasn’t actually a blanket. He was having a nightmare of being trapped in a bag filled with water.

But it wasn’t a dream—and he wasn’t Paul. He shook his limbs until sensation started to return.

I got to find some way out of here before I drown.

Reaching around, he twisted the knob on the top of the oxygen tank and took another injection of air.

Focusing on regaining his calm, Uli remembered that he had been inserted into the sleeping bag for protection. A string loosely sealed the top of it. With minimal struggle, he was able to snap the string and pull the bag over him. It was immediately sucked away and he found that he was entangled in a series of crisscrossing lines of some kind. A faint ray of light from above allowed him to see that he was snared in a network of loose cables, like a big fishing net. He was still in the large sewer pipe he had been swept down. His helmeted head was being pushed into a pile of boulders that seemed to be holding down the base of the netting, preventing him from continuing onward. He remembered having read that the average person needed a breath every three or so minutes, but it felt like it had been at least five since his last one: The chemical injected into his system seemed to have lingering effects. He took another gulp of air, then realized he had to break through these ropes to have any chance of staying alive.

9

U
li wondered if the current of water pushing him against the net was powering some massive generator. He remembered Nikola Tesla’s famous hydroelectric generators at the Adams Power Station, powered by the mighty waters of the great Niagara Falls. Their boundless megawatts of electricity were channeled down high-tension wires, bringing fifty thousands volts across New York State to the city.

Apprenticing as a field engineer with the Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Paul had personally inspected a great deal of the system. He had joined the ranks of the linemen in jumpsuits and had climbed up the poles and seen thousands of miles of powerlines racked side by side. He had also descended into the many semiflooded manholes, checking the countless transformers where voltage was stepped down to 220 and routed into households throughout the five boroughs.

Just a quick glance at the sprawling electrical grids that supplied the various communities of the perpetually expanding city—it was evident that a dramatic power shortage was looming. The mouths of ever more babes were suckling at the same fixed row of nipples. Multiple feeders rerouted electricity further and further away. It made Paul realize they didn’t simply need more generators in New York; new ways of moving the turbines were also required.

Uli tried to hold onto the thoughts, but marinating there in the giant pipe, he now recalled the submarine that fired torpedoes into the luxury liner
Lusitania
. Over a hundred Americans had been killed.

Woodrow Wilson demanded that Germany cease its attacks on passenger ships. They complied. Still, domestic pressure increased and blowhards like Teddy Roosevelt denounced Wilson as a coward.

In April of 1917, the United States finally joined the war. After hearing Wilson’s speech about making the world “safe for democracy,” Paul, who had been working as an engineer for two years but still hadn’t risen to the upper echelons of Con Ed, decided to quit his job and follow his president’s call.

He telephoned Robert and said, “Now it’s
our
country at war, not Mexico. I’m enlisting. Will you join me?”

“Does Mom know you’re doing this?” Robert asked cooly.

“Not yet.”

“Tell you what,” Robert said. “If she gives you her blessing, I’ll seriously consider joining with you.”

Paul replied that he would take his brother up on that.

The next day, when Paul visited his mother to tell her that he was intent on joining the army, she screamed, “What, did you meet another girl? Whenever you get horny, you want to go invade some country! Who’s the woman this time?”

“Lady Liberty,” he quipped.

Bella argued that he had already gone through one war, which was more than enough.

“I’m still of draft age.”

“No one’s going to draft you. I’ll see to that.” Then, taking a breath, she calmly informed him that if he joined the army, he should never contact her again.

Paul hugged his mother, who didn’t budge, and then left the house.

Later that week, when he told the recruitment officer that he was an engineer well-versed in electrical circuitry, the man’s eyes lit up. He said he had been waiting months for someone with half Paul’s qualifications. Paul had been partly hoping to get sent to boot camp and fight overseas. Instead, he was immediately commissioned as a first lieutenant and sent to some vague assignment in Washington, D.C. There, he found himself working at a desk in the Weapons Malfunctions Report Unit—the WMRU—reviewing incidents of battlefield equipment breakdown. Initially it was only about half a dozen incident reports per week. Machines guns jamming. Grenades failing to explode. Trucks and jeeps malfunctioning in the heat of combat. Soon after starting, Paul explained to his commander, Colonel Gibbons, that he had no experience in weaponry, and asked to be transferred out.

“I’m drastically undermanned as it is. Reynolds doesn’t even know how to hold a damn gun, much less assemble one. And Lindquist is a bloody pacifist. But you’ve all got great minds and you’re quick learners. Transfer denied.”

Paul’s job was to assess if a weapon had failed for a unique reason or if there was a manufacturing flaw. A key focus was identifying makes or models that required modifications or recalls.

As America’s involvement in the war heated up, reports started pouring in. Paul was promoted to captain and put in charge of all field artillery reports. Soon, however, the work fell into routine drudgery and he began daydreaming about the great struggle happening a quarter of the way around the world. Reviewing reports of the carnage, he found himself recalling his days in Mexico. There was little romance in planting sticks of dynamite and running like mad. Though he had seen dead bodies—and was even shot at once—he had never witnessed combat on the front lines. Most of the men in Mexico barely had guns, let alone uniforms.

His mother never wrote, but he did receive letters from his sister Edna once a week, and on occasion Maria would drop him a postcard updating him on life back home. Several times she enclosed pictures that her daughter Lucre-tia had drawn at school. And it was through Maria that he learned that Mr. Robert had finally gotten his first big break, an appointment in the Municipal Civil Service Commission under the “boy mayor,” John Purroy Mitchel.

10

A
s Uli wrestled with the various squares of netting and tried to shove through, he thought,
A tank could tear right through this like wet toilet paper
. With its steel caterpillar wheels, it could roll right over mines and through waves of enemy fire. The common belief was that it would quickly end the war.

America needed to develop the basic models for a big tank and a small one, the Renault, and this required a complex compromise between British and French designs, as well as the work of over seventy subcontractors and five different manufacturing plants for final assembly.

The entire process was taking so long that no one thought any of the tanks would actually see action during the war. Before the first American tank even rolled off the assembly line, the Germans managed to seize a British one; with their own modifications, the Germans started assembling their own battalion. Soon, the few American tanks in action began breaking down and Paul found himself sifting through stacks of incident reports late into his nights.

A recurrent malfunction quickly became apparent during a spring offensive. The men inside the tanks were getting killed when mines exploded right through their floors. In the space of three weeks, eighteen tanks had been destroyed in the same way, killing more than thirty doughboys. Paul immediately requested to see the blueprints of these particular tanks.

The outer metal skin of the tanks was supposed to be five-eighths of an inch thick, yet the actual thickness varied in four different reports, and two of the torn hulls measured as thin as a quarter of an inch.

He contacted the military attache at the Byrd & Hale assembly plant in Cleveland, Ohio, and asked for confirmation of how thick the hulls of their tanks were. He was told they’d need three days to research that information.

The next day he got a phone call from one Samuel P. Bush, who introduced himself as a government contractor.

“How can I help you, Mr. Bush?” Paul asked.

“I’m Chief of Ordinance, specifically small-arms munitions.”

“You probably want Captain Reynolds. He’s the case officer who handles small-arms malfunction reports.”

“No, I want to speak with you.”

“About what?”

“I just thought maybe I could stop by and we could talk.”

“Fine.”

At 5 o’clock, just before Paul was about to leave for the day, a swollen-looking man with a thick bushy mustache and a bowler showed up and introduced himself as Samuel.

“So you’re a Yale man?” Samuel asked.

“No, Princeton. How about you?”

“Stevens Institute, but both my father and son went to Yale.”

“Were you hoping to raise some money for the alumni? Cause I can give you my brother’s phone number, he went there.”

“No,” the older man chuckled. Looking around the stuffy basement, he said, “Listen, I’m starving. Would you care to join me for a bite? I know a place near here that has great chops—Dutch’s.”