“Suffering fools is unavoidable,” said Ray Ipsow, “but don’t ask me to be ‘glad’ about it.”
The guards lounging by the doorway seemed to grow more alert. Foley got to his feet and strolled over to the window. Scarsdale squinted, not sure if this should be taken as an affront to his faith.
Ray gathered his hat and stood. “It’s all right, I’ll be down at the bar,” as he went through the door, adding, “praying for wisdom.”
Down in the elegant Pump Room, Ray ran into Merle Rideout and Chevrolette McAdoo, who were “out on the town,” owing to a fortunate wager Merle had made earlier that day.
Couples in boutonnières and ostrich-plume hats paraded self-composedly among the dwarf palms or paused by the Italian Fountain as if thinking about jumping in. Somewhere a small string orchestra was playing an arrangement of “Old Zip Coon.”
Ray Ipsow regarded the surface of his beer. “He seems different these days. You notice anything?”
Merle nodded. “Something missing. He used to get so fired up about everything—we’d be designing something, run out of paper, he’d take his shirt collar off and just use that to scribble on.”
“Lately he’s been keeping those ideas pretty much to himself, like he’s finally learned how much they might be worth. Seen that happen enough, Lord knows. This big parade of modern inventions, all spirited march tunes, public going ooh and aah, but someplace lurking just out of sight is always some lawyer or accountant, beating that 2/4 like clockwork and runnin the show.”
“Anybody feel like dancing?” offered Chevrolette.
UP IN HIS PENTHOUSE SUITE, Scarsdale had moved on to the business at hand. “Back in the spring, Dr. Tesla was able to achieve readings on his transformer of up to a million volts. It does not take a prophet to see where this is headed. He is already talking in private about something he calls a ‘World-System,’ for producing huge amounts of electrical power that anyone can tap in to for free, anywhere in the world, because it uses the planet as an element in a gigantic resonant circuit. He is naïve enough to think he can get financing for this, from Pierpont, or me, or one or two others. It has escaped his mighty intellect that no one can make any money off an invention like that. To put up money for research into a system of free power would be to throw it away, and violate—hell, betray—the essence of everything modern history is supposed to be.”
The Professor was literally having an attack of nausea. Every time Tesla’s name came up, this was the predictable outcome. Vomit. The audacity and scope of the inventor’s dreams had always sent Heino Vanderjuice staggering back to his office in Sloane Lab feeling not so much a failure as someone who has taken a wrong turn in the labyrinth of Time and now cannot find his way back to the moment he made it.
“If such a thing is ever produced,” Scarsdale Vibe was saying, “it will mean the end of the world, not just ‘as we know it’ but as anyone knows it. It is a weapon, Professor, surely you see that—the most terrible weapon the world has seen, designed to destroy not armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, our Economy’s long struggle to evolve up out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to the rational systems of control whose blessings we enjoy at present.”
“But,” too much smoke in the air, not much time before he’d have to excuse himself, “I’m not sure how I can help.”
“Speak bluntly may I? Invent us a counter-transformer. Some piece of equipment that will detect one of these Tesla rigs in operation, and then broadcast something equal and opposite that’ll nullify its effects.”
“Hmm. It would help to see Dr. Tesla’s drawings and calculations.”
“Precisely why Pierpont’s in on this. That and his arrangement with Edison—but there I go again spilling secrets. Bankrolling Tesla has given Morgan’s access to all Tesla’s engineering secrets. And he has operatives on the spot, ready day and night to rush us photographed copies of anything we need to know.”
“Well in theory, I don’t see any great obstacle. It’s a simple phase inversion, though there may be non-linear phenomena of scale we cannot predict till we build a working Device—”
“Tell me the details later. Now—how much do you reckon something like that would actually, um,” lowering his voice, “cost?”
“Cost? Oh, I couldn’t really—that is, I shouldn’t—”
“Come now, Professor,” boomed Foley Walker, holding a hotel whiskey decanter as if he meant to drink from it, “to the nearest million or so, just a rough guess?”
“Hmm . . . well . . . as a figure to start from . . . if only for symmetry’s sake . . . say about what Brother Tesla’s getting from Mr. Morgan?”
“Well, ring-tailed rutabagas.” Vibe’s eyes with a contemptuous twinkle which colleagues had learned meant he had what he wanted. “Here I figured you fellows spend your time wandering around with your thoughts all far, far away, and Professor, why, you’re just a damn horse trader without mercy’s what it is. Guess I should summon the legal staff, before I find myself hanging in a poultry-shop window, two bits away from getting fricasseed. Foley, would you just crank us up long distance there on the telephone—get us Somble, Strool & Fleshway, if you’d be so kind? Could be they’d share some ideas on how best to ‘spring’ for a project of this scale.”
The call went through immediately, and Scarsdale, excusing himself, withdrew to an instrument in another part of the suite. The Professor was left to stare into the depths of his ancient hat, as if it were a vestiary expression of his present situation. More and more in recent weeks, he had found himself approaching likewise the condition of an empty cylinder, only intermittently occupied by intelligent thought. Was this the right thing to do? Should he even be here? The criminality in the room was almost palpable. Ray certainly didn’t care for any of it, and the boys today, even in their usual unworldliness, had regarded him with something like apprehension. Would any sum the New York lawyers might be suggesting now be worth the loss of that friendship?
The Chums of Chance could have been granted no more appropriate form of “ground-leave” than the Chicago Fair, as the great national celebration possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency. The harsh nonfictional world waited outside the White City’s limits, held off for this brief summer, making the entire commemorative season beside Lake Michigan at once dream-like and real.
If there were any plots afoot to commit bomb or other outrages upon the Fair, the Inconvenience was ideal not only for scanning the grounds fence to fence, but also for keeping an eye out against any sea-borne assaults contemplated from the Lake side. Fairgoers would see the ship overhead and yet not see it, for at the Fair, where miracles were routinely expected, nothing this summer was too big, too fast, too fantastically rigged out to impress anybody for more than a minute and a half, before the next marvel appeared. Inconvenience would fit right in, as one more effect whose only purpose was to entertain.
The boys began regular surveillance runs the next day. The “spotter” from White City Investigations showed up at dawn, packing a small observatory’s worth of telescopic gear. “Broke these in on the Ferris wheel,” he said, “but couldn’t figure out how to compensate for the movement. Gets blurry and so forth.”
Lew Basnight seemed a sociable enough young man, though it soon became obvious that he had not, until now, so much as heard of the Chums of Chance.
“But every boy knows the Chums of Chance,” declared Lindsay Noseworth perplexedly. “What could you’ve been reading, as a youth?”
Lew obligingly tried to remember. “Wild West, African explorers, the usual adventure stuff. But you boys—you’re not storybook characters.” He had a thought. “Are you?”
“No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly,” Randolph supposed. “Although the longer a fellow’s name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction.”
“I guess I read the sports pages mostly.”
“Good!” declared Chick Counterfl
y, “at least we won’t have to get on to the Anarchist question.”
Fine with Lew, who wasn’t even sure what Anarchists were, exactly, though the word was sure in the air. He was not in the detective business out of political belief. He had just sort of wandered into it, by way of a sin he was supposed once to have committed. As to the specifics of this lapse, well, good luck. Lew couldn’t remember what he’d done, or hadn’t done, or even when. Those who didn’t know either still acted puzzled, as if he were sending out rays of iniquity. Those who did claim to remember, all too well, kept giving him sad looks which soon—it being Illinois—soured into what was known as moral horror.
He was denounced in the local newspapers. Newsboys made up lurid headlines about him, which they shouted all through the civic mobilities morning and evening, making a point of pronouncing his name disrespectfully. Women in intimidating hats glared at him with revulsion.
He became known as the Upstate-Downstate Beast.
It would’ve helped if he could remember, but all he could produce was this peculiar haze. The experts he went to for advice had little to tell him. “Past lives,” some assured him. “Future lives,” said other confident swamis. “Spontaneous Hallucination,” diagnosed the more scientific among them. “Perhaps,” one beaming Oriental suggested, “it was hallucinating you.”
“Very helpful, thanks,” Lew murmured, and tried to leave, only to find that the door would not open.
“A formality. Too many bank drafts have come back unhonored.”
“Here’s cash. Can I go?”
“When your anger has cooled, consider what I have told you.”
“It’s no use to me.”
He fled in among the skyscrapers of Chicago, leaving a note at work suggesting he’d be back shortly. No use. A close business associate followed, confronted, and publicly denounced him, knocking his hat off and kicking it into the middle of Clark Street, where it was run over by a beer wagon.
“I don’t deserve this, Wensleydale.”
“You have destroyed your name.” And without speaking further, turned, there, right out among the city traffic, and walked away, soon vanishing into the summertime clutter of noise and light.
Worst of all, Lew’s adored young wife, Troth, when she found his breezy note, headed straight for the interurban and up to Chicago, intending to plead with him to come back, though by the time she got off at Union Station, reflection to the pulse of the rails had done its work.
“Never more Lewis, do you understand, never under the same roof, ever.”
“But what are they saying I did? I swear, Troth, I can’t remember.”
“If I told you, I would have to hear it once again, and once has already been more than enough.”
“Where’ll I live, then?” All through their long discussion they had been walking, walkers in the urban unmappable, and had reached a remote and unfamiliar part of the city—in fact, an enormous district whose existence neither, till now, had even suspected.
“I don’t care. Go back to one of your other wives.”
“God! How many are there supposed to be?”
“Stay here in Chicago if you like, it’s all the same to me. This neighborhood we’re in right now might suit you perfectly, and I know I’ll never come here again.”
In an ignorance black as night, he understood only that he had struck at her grievously, and that neither his understanding nor his contrition would save them. By now he could not bear her woundedness—the tears, through some desperate magic, kept gelid at her lower lids, because she would not let them fall, not till he had left her sight.
“Then I’ll look for a place here in town, good suggestion Troth, thank you. . . .” But she had hailed a hansom-cab, and climbed in without looking back, and was quickly borne away.
Lew looked around. Was it still Chicago? As he began again to walk, the first thing he noticed was how few of the streets here followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of town—everything was on the skew, narrow lanes radiating starwise from small plazas, tramlines with hairpin turns that carried passengers abruptly back the way they’d been coming, increasing chances for traffic collisions, and not a name he could recognize on any of the street-signs, even those of better-traveled thoroughfares . . . foreign languages, it seemed. Not for the first time, he experienced a kind of waking swoon, which not so much propelled as allowed him entry into an urban setting, like the world he had left but differing in particulars which were not slow to reveal themselves.
Occasionally a street would open up into a small plaza, or a convergence with other streets, where pitches had been set up by puppeteers, music and dance acts, and vendors of everything—divination books, grilled squabs on toast, ocarinas and kazoos, roast ears of corn, summer caps and straw hats, lemonade and lemon ice, something new everyplace he turned to look. In a small courtyard within a courtyard, he came upon a group of men and women, engaged in slow ritual movement, a country dance, almost—though Lew, pausing to watch, was not sure what country. Soon they were gazing back, as if in some way they knew him, and all about his troubles. When their business was done, they invited him over to a table under an awning, where all at once, over root beer and Saratoga chips, Lew found himself confessing “everything,” which in fact wasn’t much—“What I need is some way to atone for whatever it is I’ve done. I can’t keep on with this life. . . .”
“We can teach you,” said one of them, who seemed to be in charge, introducing himself only as Drave.
“Even if—”
“Remorse without an object is a doorway to deliverance.”
“Sure, but I can’t pay you for it, I don’t even have a place to live.”
“Pay for it!” The tableful of adepts was amused at this. “Pay! Of course you can pay! Everyone can!”
“You will have to remain not only until you learn the procedure,” Lew was informed, “but until we are sure of you as well. There is a hotel close to here, the Esthonia, which penitents who come to us often make use of. Mention us, they will give you a good discount.”
Lew went to register at the tall, rickety Esthonia Hotel. The lobby clerks and the bellmen on duty all acted like they’d been expecting him. The form he was given to fill out was unusually long, particularly the section headed “Reasons for Extended Residence,” and the questions quite personal, even intimate, yet he was urged to be as forthcoming as possible—indeed, according to a legal notice in large type at the top of the form, anything less than total confession would make him liable to criminal penalties. He tried to answer honestly, despite a constant struggle with the pen they insisted he use, which was leaving blotches and smears all over the form.
When the application, having been sent off to some invisible desk up the other end of a pneumatic house-tube, at length came thumping back hand-stamped “Approved,” Lew was told that one of the bellmen must conduct him to his room. He couldn’t be expected to find it on his own.
“But I didn’t bring anything, no luggage, not even money—which reminds me, how will I be paying for this?”
“Arrangements are in place, sir. Please go with Hershel now, and try to remember the way, for he won’t want to show it to you again.”
Hershel was large for one of his calling, looking less like a uniformed jockey than an ex-pugilist. The two of them scarcely fit into the tiny electric elevator, which turned out to be more frightening than the worst carnival ride Lew had ever been on. The blue arcing from loosely dangling wires, whose woven insulation was frayed and thick with greasy dust, filled the little space with a strong smell of ozone. Hershel had his own notions of elevator etiquette, trying to start conversations about national politics, labor unrest, even religious controversy, any of which it might take an ascent of hours, into lofty regions no high-iron pioneer had yet dared, even to begin to discuss. More than once they were obliged to step out into refuse-filled corridors, negotiate iron ladders, cross dangerous catwalks not visible from the streets, only to reboard the fiendish conve
yance at another of its stops, at times traveling not even vertically, until at last reaching a floor with a room somehow cantilevered out in the wind, autumnal today and unremitting, off Lake Michigan.
When the door swung open, Lew noted a bed, a chair, a table, a resonant absence of other furnishing which in different circumstances he would have called sorrowful, but which here he was able, in the instant, to recognize as perfect.
“Hershel, I don’t know how I’m supposed to tip you.”
Hershel holding out a banknote, “Reverse tip. Bring me a bottle of Old Gideon and some ice. If there’s any change, keep it. Learn frugality. Begin to see the arrangement?”
“Service?”
“That, maybe some conjuring too. You disappear like an elf into the woodwork, the more professionally the better, and when you reappear, you’ve got the hooch, not to mention the ice, see.”
“Where will you be?”
“I’m a bellhop, Mr. Basnight, not a guest. There ain’t that many places a guest can be, though a bellhop can be just about anywhere in the establishment.”
Finding bourbon for Hershel was a breeze, they sold it here out of every street-door from dry-goods shops to dentist’s offices, and they all waved away Hershel’s greenback, being strangely happy for Lew just to start a tab. By the time he tracked down the bellhop again, the ice had all melted. Somehow this got back to Drave, who, deeply though perhaps unhealthily amused, struck Lew repeatedly with a “remembrance stick.” Taking this as acceptance, Lew continued to perform chores assigned him, some commonplace, others strange beyond easy reckoning, transacted in languages he didn’t always understand, until he began to feel some approach, out at the fringe of his awareness, like a streetcar in the city distance, and some fateful, perhaps dangerous, invitation to climb aboard and be taken off to parts unknown. . . .
Through the winter, though it seemed like any Chicago winter, that is a sub-zero-degrees version of Hell, Lew lived as economically as possible, watching his bank account dwindle toward nothing, haunted both sleeping and waking by unusually vivid reveries of Troth, all stricken with a tenderness he had never noticed in their actual life together. Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.
Against the Day Page 5