Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

“I am impressed.” The voice came from behind her moments later, precise English with a mild East European accent. She turned to see Tesla, slender and intense, wearing khaki shorts and a peach-colored polo shirt.

  His eyes owned her now, dark and infinite, letting her in and stroking her soul. “I know all about what you did for me in New York City. How you preserve my inventions. I keep up. And you are very beautiful. Where I was born, you would be called a princessa.”

  He let the word flow, “preenchaysa. “She could only nod.

  “Why would a princessa want to visit a recluse?” He smiled.

  “Because you have the most wonderful corona, “she said. The curved band surrounded his head with a subtle, translucent blue, more heavenly than the sun and sky.

  He motioned her into his Tesla airship. A match of her replica from the museum, the steel-ribbed antique gyrocopter.

  “My antigravity aircraft,” he told her. “Like the one you flew. Just more bells and whistles.”

  He lifted his shoulders and the rickety airship left the ground, elevated straight up in the air, and lounged at a few hundred feet. Then he moved his hand to the left and the airship peeled off into the sky.

  “You are appreciated here, very much,” he told her fondly. “Watch this. We will play together now.”

  The maestro twisted his wrist, and soon they hovered over Iguazú Falls. His eyes twinkled at her. In photographs he looked like a scientist, in real life like an impish artist.

  “I didn’t think you’d be fun,” she admitted.

  “Ah, you thought an electrical engineer would have no sense of humor,” he said with a chuckle.

  She touched his hand, moved by his tenderness. Then things began going wrong. Her hand on his caused the airship to suddenly jerk out of its glide pattern. It tipped over, spinning wildly.

  “What are you doing?” It was Tucker’s voice she heard now.

  She saw night, with red and blue waves painted across the black. Popping white flashes burst in her eyes.

  Tucker stood in front of her.

  A black man in a long coat pointed a camera at her, which made obscene whirring and clicking noises, exploding flashbulbs in her face.

  Her head throbbed. Police lights. The Plaza Hotel. Her stomach turned over. She felt something unsavory coming up her throat. Sake martinis. An unspecified number of them.

  She stood in a fountain. Very cold, very wet, obviously very drunk. Possibly she had blacked out for a while. “Tucker, “she remembered saying, “I’d really like to go home.”

  Oh, God. How had she let the fountain thing happen? Drinking, feeling trapped. She just wanted to cool off a bit in the foamy spray from Iguazú Falls. Cornelia opened her eyes and saw Sergeant DiBlasi’s face two feet away, staring at her.

  “I guess I zoned out,” she apologized to the police officer. “It’s my medication.”

  Sergeant DiBlasi nodded, and Cornelia could feel her watching as she shuffled into her bathroom. The door closed. She hadn’t redecorated in here. The floor was still a rosy marble. Plump, fluffy towels hung over an ornate Queen Anne tub. She noticed that the sergeant had already removed all sharp objects or anything that could be used to hang herself, such as the pantyhose she had left hanging on a towel rack.

  “Ms. Lord,” she heard the sergeant say through the door, “I want you to talk to me while you’re in there. Okay?”

  “That’s fine, but would you mind feeding my fish?” she called to her. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

  She imagined Sergeant DiBlasi looking suspiciously at the bathroom door, then at the fish tank. She heard a chair squeak and guessed that the sergeant now hovered over the tank. The fish would come up to the glass wall nearest her. The Red Queen and Alice and the blue eel would all work their mouths, hungry and pleading.

  “Where’s the fish food?” Sergeant DiBlasi called out, irritated.

  “In the cabinet under the tank. Don’t just pour it in though, okay? Use the rod with the little basket at the end to kind of swirl it around inside.”

  She could hear Sergeant DiBlasi banging around inside the cabinet, making more noise than necessary to find the fish food and the utensil.

  “The eel’s kind of stubborn,” Cornelia called. “You have to shove the food right in his face or he won’t eat.”

  “I think I can handle it,” the sergeant called right back gruffly.

  Cornelia sat on the side of her bathtub, waiting. She could imagine Sergeant DiBlasi jamming the metal rod in the tank, shoving it at the eel to release the food in his face. Then his tiny jaws would open.

  “Eeeeeeeek. ” That would be Sergeant DiBlasi’s voice. The whole tank would be glowing like blue neon now.

  She waited until after she heard a distinct thump, then walked out of the bathroom.

  She stepped around the sergeant, who was lying on her back on the thick Persian rug and not moving.

  But Sergeant DiBlasi would be fine. The temporary shock from the pulsing six-hundred-volt force field of her Electrophorus electricus, the electric blue eel, had sent a jolt from her hair follicles to her toes. Enough to knock her out, but nothing that would leave any lasting damage.

  “See?” she whispered to the sergeant’s face, now locked in an expression of surprise. “We weren’t grounded after all.” And she slowly began pulling off the sergeant’s clothes to borrow for the evening.

  * * *

  The fire in Chester’s study had burned out. Stoking the fire was O’Connell’s job, and he had gone home. It smoldered with a damp, smoky aroma, but neither Tucker nor Chester wanted to break off their serious tête-à-tête to throw another log on.

  Chester felt cold inside his shirt, his back and armpits damp. He had never had to deal with more confounding issues. Both his family fortune and his daughter’s life were at stake. And Tucker promised a neat all-in-one solution.

  What kind of husband would Tucker make for Cornelia? A strong one, certainly. The young man might finally make Cornelia feel protected. She never talked to him about Tucker, but that proved nothing. She never talked to him about anything. So what would be so wrong with letting the boy take it up with her himself? Even though she lived in her own little world, she never failed to exert her free will. Usually to his torment. She could just say no to him, if that was her wish.

  He watched the young man’s fingers fly over his diabolical laptop. Tucker had used even this brief pause in their discussion to catch up on some business for Lord & Company. Tucker tending to business once again while Chester drank and dithered. He felt a rush of warmth as he looked at the sleek blond head. How he needed Tucker. They made such fine partners, his protégé so young and fearless, Chester an older and more cautious mentor.

  “Tucker, I’ve thought it over.”

  The young man stopped working. His head darted up with an enthusiastic smile.

  “Speak to Cornelia about marriage. If that’s what she wants, a February wedding would be fine.”

  Tucker’s grin spread across his face, his huge gleaming-white teeth expanding like a row of refrigerator doors. He stood up and took Chester’s hand in both of his. Not a hug, thank God.

  “I’ll speak to her tonight,” Tucker said.

  “Good. I don’t want to keep her in the dark—” Chester began.

  At that moment, the lights in Chester’s study went out.

  The electrical power was down, Chester thought as he looked out his study’s bay window. But lights still twinkled across Central Park.

  “Do you have any matches?” Tucker asked him.

  Chester got up, feeling his way around the cold, blackened room. “Ouch.” He banged his knee while rummaging around his desk, but found a matchbook. He fumbled as he lit one, and the whole pack ignited, almost burning his fingers. The flame cast a yellow halo over the two men. Chester carried the fragile light to the mantel and lit a beeswax candle housed in heavy sterling. He clutched the candlestick like a torch and carried it to the telephone, then called downsta
irs.

  “840 Fifth.”

  “Are the lights on in the building?” Chester asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the doorman on duty told him.

  “Well, they’ve gone off up here. Send up an engineer, please.”

  “You were saying?” Tucker asked him as Chester put the candlestick back on the mantel and settled into his seat.

  “Yes. You can speak to Cornelia about your feelings.” Chester kept his voice low. As they sat close together, Chester imagined that the yellow halo made them look like two conspirators plotting in a dark room.

  “Don’t worry,” Tucker told him matter-of-factly. “She’ll be Mrs. Tucker Fisk on Valentine’s Day.”

  Chester stiffened in the yellow glow.

  “If it’s what she wants,” Tucker added quickly.

  A sharp knock rattled the study door.

  “Come in,” Chester called out.

  The door swung open, but it wasn’t the building engineer. Sergeant DiBlasi’s thick outline stood in the semidarkness. Even in the dim light behind her, Chester could see that her hair stood out, wild and frizzy.

  “Sir, it appears Ms. Lord has left the building.”

  Chapter Six

  Vibrating from the excitement, Cornelia left 840 Fifth by the back service door. She timed her exit so she could slip out just behind the noon-to-eight doorman.

  The Russian, Vladimir, could often be caught napping.

  Once in the alley, she hid behind a Dumpster. She held herself as still and patient as an urban guerrilla. Then she darted out and sprang for the iron fence, crawled over it, hopped down silently, and hugged the building’s walls to blend with the night.

  She allowed herself a brief whoop of triumph as she bounced on her Keds to the corner of Park Avenue. Then she took in a huge breath and blew into the shrill doorman’s whistle she’d borrowed from a locker in the staff room.

  The whistle brought a yellow cab to the curb. She gave the driver the address through the Plexiglas shield and smiled at the recorded cartoon-character voice that told her to buckle her seat belt.

  The driver flung the cab from left to right, speeding up and braking harshly. She gripped the door handle as she considered her father’s stubborn resistance. If only Chester could listen to reason without skating off into panic. Her father had exhibited only one mode—a sad, ticking-toward-crisis angst, regular as a metronome—ever since her mother died. She wished she could speak to him with a pure heart, the way she used to talk to her mother, but Chester tended to back away from her honesty. His fear-filled parenting style had become smothering, but always with that Chesterly degree of separation. He would retreat into his study, ask O’Connell for a pitcher of martinis, and hire a psychiatrist to do his talking for him. But now even calling a psychiatrist wasn’t enough for him. Now he’d felt the need to bring in a bodyguard. Chester couldn’t even play the tyrant with his daughter except by proxy.

  She ached to tell him all about the Tesla Museum, sometimes wanted to just blurt it out and let them pick up the pieces together. Two years ago, when she first saw an opportunity to sponsor the fledgling Tesla Museum, she had visited his office at Lord & Company to broach the issue in a businesslike fashion.

  “Dad, I’ve been thinking about what to do with all my money,” she began.

  But then Tucker Fisk had burst into her father’s office and yanked him out with a few whispered words. Something about the Asian markets crashing and burning. Her father jumped up as though strings jerked his limbs and joined a group of frantic executives outside his door.

  She waited a full two hours, then left. From that day forward, the Electric Girl worked alone.

  It hadn’t been her father’s fault that an economic typhoon had chosen that particular day to blow in from somewhere in Asia and devastate their meeting. Still, on that evening she stopped calling him Dad and began referring to him as Chester.

  They seemed so star-crossed, she and her father. If she could only make him understand the severity of the Lord family’s wrong against Tesla.

  But her hope for that cleansing moment had slipped away inch by inch. She clung only to the knowledge that beneath his parental confusion, his heart ached to love her.

  One day, she willed against all prevailing logic and evidence, Chester would be stunned by what she had built and dedicated to the inventor. But until that day, Nikola Tesla didn’t seem to be a topic that he could discuss rationally.

  * * *

  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.