IGMS - Issue 24

by IGMS

  "Can you think of any reason why someone might have wanted to harm Miss Bester?"

  "I didn't know much about her, personally. I can arrange for you to talk with Mrs. Wilson, if you'd like. She's the head of the secretaries and the typing pool."

  "Would Miss Bester have had access to classified materials, anything worth killing for?"

  "No, no. Doctor Tesla's forever being requested as a guest at charity dinners, ribbon cuttings, that sort of thing. The most sensitive information she might have known was his itinerary."

  "Do you have any idea why Miss Bester was off-base last night?"

  "As I say, she is -- was Doctor Tesla's social secretary. My understanding is that she went to Manhattan yesterday afternoon on an errand related to her position."

  The colonel's adjutant showed Trevelyan and Hargrave to the dead girl's small house on base, which was guarded by two MPs on the colonel's orders. Like all housing at Wardenclyffe, it had been built since Tunguska and so included the latest amenities, like running hot water and wireless Tesla lamps. He and Hargrave spent an hour scouring the small space, finding nothing. A few books, some unremarkable paperwork related to her job as Tesla's social secretary, and almost nothing personal.

  There were no photographs of herself or her family, nothing to hint at a sweetheart. Her bed was unmade, her dressing table cluttered with make-up and perfume. The closet was full of dozens of dresses, some almost unworn, in a very staid palette of browns, dark blues, and blacks. The flower-print dress she died in appeared to be the most colorful item in her wardrobe.

  But what disturbed Trevelyan most was the lack of any sign of her faith. She was devout enough to wear the Byzantine cross daily, yet had no candles or icons in her home? No prayer book or bible?

  They'd looked behind every painting for a safe, behind every piece of furniture…

  Trevelyan grabbed the small coffee table. "Help me with this rug, Hargrave," he said, pulling up the corner of a large Persian that covered much of the living room floor. Rolling it back toward the sofa revealed two small planks cut from the floorboards. Hargrave pried up the boards, reached into the small compartment below, and pulled up a dusty hatbox.

  "Bingo!" he said, lifting the lid and getting a glimpse inside. "I can't make out the name, but that's your girl, right?" Hargrave handed Trevelyan a small stack of documents.

  An ID card and passport, both in Russian and bearing the name and image of an Alisa Bestemianova. A baptismal certificate in that name was also in the stack.

  "Yeah, that's her," said Trevelyan. Alice Bester, indeed.

  "And there's these --" Hargrave produced a bundle of newspapers tied with string. "Russian," he said. "Or looks like it to me. There's more of them down here."

  Trevelyan recognized them instantly, and read the blocky Cyrillic headline of the top issue to himself: tsar and his duma betray workers in name of war with america.

  Why the hell would someone at Wardenclyffe have his brother's propaganda rag?

  Alisa Bestemianova had immigrated as a child, apparently. Her passport was valid, though, so she was still a subject of the tsar, at least technically. She'd returned from a trip to St. Petersburg just prior to the Tunguska Event and the closing of the borders.

  How does a Russian citizen get a job at the most highly-secure military research facility in the United States during a war with Russia, Trevelyan wondered as he flipped through her ID documents.

  "Living under an assumed identity? Doesn't surprise me," said Hargrave, pulling books from the shelves in the parlor. He flipped through each one quickly before discarding it to the floor. "This whole place is run by a damned Russian. It's probably crawling with them."

  "Tesla's Serbian, not Russian," said Trevelyan.

  Hargrave gave Trevelyan a long, incredulous look. "What's the difference?" he said as another book thudded to the floor. "You know, sir, I got a friend who used to be with the Bureau. Left for the Pinkertons, though. Said he didn't like how the Bureau was running things." Hargrave shook a book by its cover and dropped it when nothing fell out.

  "My buddy says there used to be this Russian guy at the Bureau. And after the Russians declared war, the Bureau just let him change his name and carry on like nothing had happened. Funny, huh? But I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference between a real American and someone pretending to be one. So maybe you would know the difference between a Serbian and a Russian, after all."

  "See to the car, constable," Trevelyan said icily. "I'll meet you there when I'm finished."

  "Impossible," said Colonel Hilroy in a tightly controlled voice. He'd met Trevelyan in the foyer of the main building, a grand, ornate space lit by the soft glow of Tesla globes.

  "I'm afraid not, Colonel," said Trevelyan, producing one of the Russian-language papers and the passport for his inspection.

  "You've had a serious breach of security. I suggest you do a thorough double-check on all staff, even the civilians."

  "Find Jones," Hilroy snapped to Carlson. "Have him in my office now."

  Heavy doors swung open behind Hilroy, and from a laboratory beyond them the buzz-crackle sounds of electrical discharge flooded into the hall.

  Nikola Tesla strode briskly across the foyer amidst a gaggle of assistants. He wore a white lab coat over black tie and tails, and his shoes were soled with thick cork that exaggerated his already towering height.

  "The resistance across the terminals is at an unacceptable level," Tesla was saying to a lab-coat-wearing aid that frantically scribbled down on a flip pad everything the inventor said.

  "Special Agent Tretyak! What a pleasant surprise," said Tesla as he noticed Peter.

  Trevelyan cleared his throat, feeling the colonel's eyes on him. "Actually it's Trevelyan, sir."

  Tesla paused a moment and then smiled. "Yes. Of course. Please pardon my mistake. It has been a long time."

  "Yes, it has," Trevelyan said, clearing his throat again.

  "Colonel, Mr. Trevelyan saved my life once. I insist that we treat him as an honored guest!"

  "Special Agent Trevelyan is here on official business, Doctor Tesla," said Hilroy. "Miss Bester has been killed."

  Tesla gasped and his shoulders slumped. "How did this happen?"

  Carlson appeared in a doorway at the far end of the foyer and nodded to Hilroy.

  "Carlson will see to anything else you need, Agent Trevelyan. Doctor Tesla . . ." the colonel said, excusing himself and marching down the hallway.

  "They call me doctor even though I have no degree," said Tesla, smiling wistfully. "Tell me," he said, shooing away his assistants, "what became of Miss Bester?"

  "She died in the subway last night," said Trevelyan, following Tesla as the inventor wandered outside, "during the gas attack. How well did you know her?"

  "She was --" Tesla paused as if looking for the right words. "My social secretary. For almost two years now. The best I've ever had. She'd just arranged the details for my trip to Cambridge. Massachusetts," Tesla added. "I'm to receive an honorary degree next month."

  "Did she ever mention being in any kind of trouble? Can you think of any reason that someone might want to hurt her?"

  "No," said Tesla, sounding dazed. "No."

  Trevelyan let the man walk for a few moments, examining him in silence. He was shaken by his secretary's death, yes, but there was something more . . .

  Tesla led them to a small wooden bench in the middle of a great lawn between the main laboratory and the tower.

  "Had you ever had any difficulties with Miss Bester?" he asked, trying to gauge Tesla's reaction. "Any reason to be unhappy with her or her work?"

  "None," said Tesla. "She was a very capable staff member, helping me with my great work." No sooner had the inventor sat down than a flock of pigeons arrived at his feet, seemingly from thin air, cooing and flapping. Tesla pulled a small bag of birdseed from his lab coat and absently began to feed them.

  "Forgive me, Agent Trevelyan," he said after a few moments silence. "I sh
ould like to be alone with my birds."

  "You seem to have a good rapport with Tesla, sir," said Hargrave as he opened the Model T's passenger door. Trevelyan had seen him watching from the motor pool and there was accusation in the man's voice.

  "I brought him into protective custody once."

  Trevelyan meant to be curt and left it there. He'd been mulling over his first encounter with Tesla, though, from the moment he'd learned Alice Bester worked at Wardenclyffe.

  No sooner had Tesla's press conference about Tunguska finished and the headline "electrical pioneer invents death ray!" gone out across the telegraph than Trevelyan was ordered to Wardenclyffe.

  He had arrived by Model T near midnight, not long after two assassins dispatched by the tsar's spymaster. Brilliant blue-white light flashed from the windows of the laboratory building, illuminating the night like insane Morse code.

  Inside, the high-power electrical generators rained storms of lightning across their terminals. The stench of burnt hair and cooked flesh filled the space. Trevelyan found Tesla huddled in a corner of his laboratory.

  The inventor had been too wily for the tsar's assassins.

  After that President Roosevelt had no choice. The United States had not been responsible for the attack, but there could be no acquiescing to Russian demands for Tesla's extradition, no handing over of a man capable of building such devices.

  The rest followed quickly: the declaration of war by the Russian Empire and its Entente allies, Great Britain and France; the destruction of the Great White Fleet in Manila harbor by an Anglo-Russian naval assault; Hawaii occupied; the militarization of the border with Canada and construction of a fence along the frontier.

  Hargrave drove in silence, which allowed Trevelyan to review his notes. He had interviewed all the girls in the steno pool, but none had been close to Alice and none were able to offer much insight. She'd started two years earlier and kept mainly to herself, not even partaking in the usual gossip about suitors. Mrs. Wilson, the head of the steno pool, wasn't aware of Alice ever mentioning any family, and the next of kin box on her personnel record had been left blank.

  The only oddity was in something Mrs. Wilson said.

  Tesla had a number of idiosyncrasies she claimed were well-known to the staff and the laboratory personnel: he experienced great agitation if he came in contact with human hair; he hated fat people; he detested the sight of women in floral dresses, or wearing pearls. They were largely accepted as the eccentricities of genius by the staff, said Mrs. Wilson.

  And yet Alice had been found dead in a flower-print dress.

  "Oh yes," said Mrs. Wilson when Trevelyan asked. "Mr. Tesla was forever ordering her out of his sight when she'd wear such things. He'd send her to the city to buy a new dress before allowing her to return to work. Seems like it happened every other week."

  "And you put up with this?" he'd asked.

  "I spoke to her about it repeatedly," she had said, taking offense at Trevelyan's implication. "She'd swear not to wear such dresses in future, but in a few weeks . . . Claimed she kept forgetting." Mrs. Wilson had shaken her head.

  "Why not fire her?"

  "Oh, I tried," said Mrs. Wilson. "Several times. But Mr. Tesla wouldn't allow it. Said she was simply the only social secretary he could work with. And when Mr. Tesla makes up his mind about such things, well, there's nothing for it. He's very loyal and generous to people in his employ. Another one of his quirks, I suppose. A good one, generally speaking."

  "When was the last time Mr. Tesla sent Miss Bester to Manhattan for a new dress?"

  "Why, only yesterday," Mrs. Wilson had said.

  Trevelyan closed his notebook and pulled an evidence envelope from the pocket of his great coat. Inside was the small paper bag with the purple stamp that he'd taken from Alice Bester's body.

  "Hargrave, I've got something here I need you to run down for me."

  Trevelyan watched the coffee shop and its clientele for nearly an hour before entering.

  The shop was on the ground floor of a brick building that was all fire escapes up the front, and its customers were either angry-looking young men who hung about the front window for a time before slipping in, or somewhat older men who looked generally not in funds.

  Doubtless many fancied themselves would-be anarchists and freedom fighters. In truth, Trevelyan knew, most had no job and nowhere else to go.

  The bell over the door clattered as he entered.

  The shop was dark wood with a low tin ceiling, a haze of pipe smoke hanging sweet in the air. The ne'er-do-wells he'd watched enter now sat at a hodgepodge of unmatched tables, sipping coffee and conversing in low tones.

  "Pyotr!" the woman behind the counter exclaimed. Her voice, so out of place -- loud and feminine -- drew everyone's attention to Trevelyan.

  "Katya," he said just as surprised. It had been four years since he'd seen his brother Mikhail, longer still Katya.

  With hands plunged deep in their coat pockets, every man in the shop filed out, dodging past Trevelyan sideways, shoulder first, as if they might have to ram him.

  Katya stood silently behind the coffee bar, trembling visibly, her face pale. Her hair was different, worn now in the Grecian style popular since the outbreak of the war. She looked older, too: crow's-feet starting at the edges of her eyes, her mouth newly downcast. Where had the fire in her eyes gone, the fire he'd known all through their youth?

  It took Trevelyan a moment to remember why he had come. "Is --" he tried, and cleared his throat. "Is he here?"

  "Are you here to arrest him?"

  Trevelyan shook his head. Wordlessly, Katya lifted up the flap at the end of the counter to let him pass and held back the curtain that covered the door behind the bar.

  She led him through the back parlor, which was full of furniture that was littered with stacked books and scattered papers. The hiss-clang-swoosh of printing presses was audible in the basement below.

  Katya showed him to a steep flight of stairs at the end of a long hallway. The caustic odor of printer's ink and oiled machines wafted through the open door.

  For a moment Katya looked about to say something, but instead turned and left the way they had come.

  Trevelyan could feel the narrow, rubber-treaded wooden stairs creak as he descended, but their groaning was drowned out by the mechanical clatter of the printing press. Under the light of a bare Edison bulb a lone man in a leather smock stood by the press, checking the printing on the broadsheets that were being run off.

  He looked up from his work and, seeing Trevelyan, paused a long while before hitting a button that wound the press down to a standstill.

  "Special Agent Trevelyan."

  "Hello, Michael."

  "Who? You changed your name, brother, not me."

  "Can we not do this? I'm here for --"

  "I thought I told you never to come here. It's bad for business. My customers are Russians. They can spot the secret police when they see them."

  Still trying to goad, to rile. All these years and nothing has changed, Trevelyan thought. "Mich -- Mikhail!" he said. "I didn't come here to fight with you. I need you to answer some questions."

  "Oh, you don't mean to arrest, then?" said Mikhail, speaking in rapid Russian.

  "I'm not here to arrest you," Trevelyan answered in English. "I need some information. About a girl you might know."

  Mikhail made a puzzled face and spoke again in Russian. "I'm afraid I don't understand," he said. "If only you spoke Russian."

  The muscles in Trevelyan's jaw flexed.

  "Zhopa," he cursed. "Do you know Alice Bester?"

  "So you do remember how to speak your language? I don't know any girl. Who is she?"

  "Who was she," said Trevelyan. "She's dead."

  He watched his brother try to hide his shock: a noticeable pause, and then he busied himself with the ink for the presses.

  "Mischa," said Trevelyan softly. "Who was she?"

  After a moment Mikhail, just as softly, s
aid, "She would come in to the coffee shop. How did she die?"

  "The gas attack in the subway. Was she a subscriber to your paper?"

  Mikhail made an effort to deny it, but Trevelyan tossed across the press a sheaf of the roughly printed propaganda sheets he'd collected from Alice Bester's apartment.

  "So? They are my papers. It's not a crime to subscribe to them. Not yet. Or is the BOI finally going to shut me down? I wondered how long freedom of speech would last in this country for Russians."

  "You were born in Brooklyn! You're an American."

  "That's not what Americans think."

  Trevelyan took a deep breath. "Did you know she was Alisa Bestemianova, a Russian living under an assumed name?"

  "Many of us change our names these days."

  "Mischa, this girl worked at Wardenclyffe," Trevelyan said, moving around the press and close to his brother. "She lied on her application. Your propaganda was found in her house. They'll trace the papers to you and come asking questions. They won't be as forgiving as me."

  "I don't need your forgiveness."

  "As understanding, then. I know you have contacts among the anarchists. Are you caught up in something? If you tell me what you know, I can protect you. Katya, too."

  "You turned your back on us," said Mikhail, darkly. "Collaborating against your own people."

  "Collaborating? You publish propaganda supporting anarchists who gas civilians in subways. Who blow up buses and fire-bomb police stations!"

  "You work for a government that protects that Serb and his death ray. You hold the whole world hostage! That's what they do at Wardenclyffe -- plan when and where they'll strike next with their terror ray, while the world holds its breath. And you, running away just when we needed you. Like Father."

  "Pishill tiye," Trevelyan said, his voice a low rumble.

  "Father was a pig," Mikhail spit. "Like you. Poor little Sonja, lying there in the parlor stiff and cold, mother wailing. What kind of man leaves his family at a moment like that? Tell me!"