Lady Slings the Booze Page 21

  Impressive guess. Put me in the company of a mind like that and I get a little giddy. That’s the only way I can explain it. What was meant to be a simple agreement came out, “Be he never so humble, there’s no police like Holmes.”

  Lady Sally turned pale and shuddered visibly. Arethusa grimaced and hugged herself. Nikola Tesla merely smiled broadly. “Oh, splendid! I must tell that one to my good friend Sam.”

  Has anyone ever intimated that one of your puns was worthy to be told to Mark Twain? “It’s not mine,” I said hastily. “Mystery writer named Tony Boucher.”

  “Your honesty does you credit, Mr. Taggart,” he said. “You are indeed no Edison.” How weird, to be praised for my honesty under an assumed name! “But I am fascinated to know of your occupation. I have always imagined it to be somewhat similar to my own, in its essentials. As with my work, it consists mainly in collecting information and then phrasing the proper questions: the answers themselves, as I understand it from my reading, then appear in a burst of white light. Is it thus with you?”

  “Well…” I started to say that detective work in real life was nothing like that. Then I thought about it. “More or less, yeah. The tricky part is, when that light starts to shine…don’t squint.”

  He nodded vigorously. “That is indeed the trick. May I ask you to tell me some tales of your work?”

  I glanced at Lady Sally. Shouldn’t we maybe be getting on with averting thermonuclear holocaust? But she was settling back in her chair and finishing off the last of my peach juice. I could see both Arethusas: one of them moved her chin up slightly, the other down. She was nodding, about as discreetly as it can be done. Okay, I would tell Nikola Tesla war stories until it was time to take my narcotics.

  (Which reminded me: I was in next to no pain at all from my wound now. Distraction is almost as good an analgesic as laughter. Next time you’re in pain, try to get a famous dead guy to drop by, and see for yourself.)

  “If you will trade me for some of your own, sir,” I said.

  “I do have one anecdote you may enjoy, concerning a policeman…”

  It seems that one day back in 1898, Tesla was experimenting with electromechanical vibration. He attached an oscillator he’d built to an iron pillar that ran down the center of a loft building he owned on East Houston Street, and sat down in an armchair to play. As he varied the frequency, different objects in his lab began to shimmy around. He became engrossed in trying to determine what he called the “dancing frequency” for every object in the room.

  Meanwhile, all around the neighborhood, for blocks around, windows shattered, buildings shook, and terrified people began pouring into the street, screaming in Chinese and Italian…

  “I had forgotten a basic principle of seismology,” he admitted. “Earthquakes are most severe at a distance from their epicenter.”

  The cops down at Mulberry Street Station had long been darkly suspicious of the notorious wizard in the neighborhood: the sergeant sent two buttons over to Tesla’s place to see if it was his earthquake. They got there about ten seconds after Tesla, belatedly realizing something was wrong, had destroyed the oscillator with a sledge hammer. The buttons became impolite in discussing this with him. One of them went so far as to suggest that Tesla had no business playing around with things he didn’t understand.

  This much of the story had appeared in a couple of Tesla’s biographies, but I pretended not to know it out of politeness. It was worth it to hear the part that hadn’t made it into his memoirs.

  “I told him that on the contrary, I understood what I was doing so well that, if he would care to return later that evening, I would treat him to an experience which Mr. Mark Twain had once pronounced to be the most fun in the world.”

  The cop fell for it. When he returned that night, Tesla had rigged a smaller oscillator, fixed to a free-standing platform. The cop climbed up onto the platform, and when Tesla threw power to the oscillator, the cop did indeed have the experience Sam Clemens had once called the most fun in the world. The platform vibrated so strongly the cop’s whole body blurred. He enjoyed it even more than Twain had, hopping around and yelling obscene suggestions for potential uses of the gadget.

  “But exhilaration was only the first effect,” Tesla went on. “As I had with Sam, I exhorted him to come down after a short time; just as Sam had, he refused. And within less than a minute, the policeman experienced the second effect.” And there he paused, like a good storyteller.

  I already sensed where this was going, but I was not about to spoil an anecdote for Nikola Tesla. “And what was that, sir?”

  “Acute diarrhea,” he said gravely.

  Laughter is even better analgesic than distraction.

  “Regrettably, when I attempted to shut down the oscillator so he could race to the toilet, I accidentally dialed it as far as it would go in the opposite direction, where it jammed. The vibration reached such an intensity that even the policeman could sense it would be dangerous to try to jump clear. By the time I could repair the control, I’m afraid the poor man had become one of New York’s Foulest…”

  Maybe analgesic is the wrong word. If you laugh that hard when you’re post-op, you hurt like hell. You just don’t give a damn. Hard to understand how a painful experience can leave you feeling better, but there it is.

  Sharing the laughter made it even better. It was the first time I had ever seen Arethusa laugh out loud, flat out, and the sight confirmed my already firm intention to marry her. You can learn as much about someone from watching them belly-laugh as you can from making love with them.

  “Your turn, Mr. Taggart,” Tesla said when our laughter had wound down.

  So I told him a few stories. Not disasters, like the Favila Affair or the Prison Break-in. Ones from which I had emerged relatively unscathed. The Robin Hood Bomber, for instance.

  There was this mall going up out on the Island back in the Sixties, a year after I got back from Nam. Nobody wanted one there, experts testified it would ruin the community, but the developer had the fix in.

  One night at three A.M. the site blew up. Six separate explosions within half a minute, five of them scattered around the central part of the site, where the buildings were. Had been. There were no casualties among the watchmen, which cost their agency that contract and a fat lawsuit: the head of the agency asked me to look into it. Enough money was involved that the cops were pushing it, but what do Long Island cops know about bombers? I was an exotic-weapons buff.

  What little evidence they had was baffling. The blasts were clearly high-quality high explosive—but how had it been planted in sufficient quantity without detection? During the day the site crawled with construction workers, and once they left, you had to cross acres of open, lighted asphalt to approach the place. And how had it been set off? No traces of timing devices or radio triggers were found in the ruins. Most confusing of all, why had one of the six bombs been planted uselessly in an open parking lot, three hundred yards from the rest? Even with that anomaly, the job was just too sophisticated for the local community-action leaders the cops were leaning on—librarians and small business types. So I looked at the site, and thought a lot. The five contiguous bombs seemed to have been almost randomly placed. But something about the distribution was familiar…and then I had it.

  I consulted a computer. The search parameters I specified gave me twelve possibles; I pulled their files and eliminated seven. The moment I parked in front of the third address on my list, where two of my suspects lived together, I knew I had found my men.

  The mailbox was not just knocked down, but flattened, with tire marks on it. The front lawn contained abundant crabgrass, beer cans, dog turds, three Harley-Davidson 650 motorcycles, and a pair of dirty red panties. The house itself shook with R&B bass, was very close to being a two-story woofer. The first thing I saw as I went in the wide-open door was a fourth Harley. Or rather, half a Harley, protruding from the living room floor. The back half was in the basement. I later learned that one of
the inhabitants had recently tried to ride his bike upstairs while drunk, and blown it. Drying filthy socks hung from the handlebars. Clearly this was the home of serious social architects.

  Sure enough, four Hell’s Angels lived there, trying to save enough to get the hell back to the West Coast. Two of them had just been discharged after a tour in Viet Nam, like me. Their names were Larry and Teeth. (Apparently he liked to extract them for sport.) It turned out we knew some of the same people. They told me the story.

  Many GIs bring souvenirs home. I’d smuggled out my service .45, myself. Larry had brought home a mortar…and just before his own discharge, Teeth had shipped him six rounds.

  AT this point in the story, Tesla, Lady Sally and Arethusa began to giggle, sensing where I was going.

  “One night a few months later,” I went on, “a little old widow knocked at their door with a petition against the contested mall. She must have had guts to follow through when she realized what she was dealing with, and they were impressed.”

  Louder giggles as everyone visualized her situation.

  “They were also colossally stoned, and bored. So they signed her petition—‘Larry’ and ‘Teeth’—and let her go, and then got out a good map and a pair of dividers. Later that night Larry went out in the backyard and obliterated the mall.”

  Whoops of laughter.

  “I’d figured out the spacing of the rounds,” I told them. “Teeth was spotting for Larry from a pay phone near the site. The first one missed; Teeth fed Larry the correction, and the next five were a textbook example of how much scatter you can get with ‘identically’ aimed mortar fire. It was the Veterans’ Administration computers that helped me track down recent dischargees in that area.”

  Tesla had a pretty good laugh on him for a skinny guy. “What did you do?” he said when he could manage it.

  I shrugged. “What could I do? There was no evidence: you can’t do a ballistics match on an expended mortar round. They still had the mortar, but there was no way to prove they’d ever had ammo for it. And however plausible the story sounded in that living room, with the sweatsocks hanging from the handlebars, I knew it’d be a hard sell in a courtroom with Larry and Teeth cleaned up and shaved, in suits. Besides, who wants a couple of Hell’s Angels pissed off at you?”

  “You left those lunatics loose with a mortar?” Arethusa asked.

  “Hell, no. I bought it from them. For two airfares to the Coast. Even without any ammo, it was enough to get the security firm off the hook.” I didn’t mention that the ungrateful sons of bitches had stiffed me on my expenses: I’d eaten those plane tickets, and they’d cost more than the two hundred I got paid for one day’s work. But why spoil a good story? “And it got the two Angels out of my neighborhood.” Tesla had that eager that-reminds-me expression. “Professor Tesla, you’ve got a story?”

  He nodded. “One of my favorite stories,” he said, “It also involves a man who did something novel with a bomb.”

  Lady Sally and the Arethusas and I exchanged a glance. It was pretty ragged by the time we were through with it.

  “This is a true story,” Tesla said, “about a man named Theodore Taylor, and a Pall Mall cigarette. Taylor designed atom bombs—”

  Another glance was passed around like a basketball.

  “—for the United States government after the Second World War. Among other distinctions, he designed both the physically smallest and the most powerful fission bombs ever fired.”

  My eye muscles were tired; I just kept looking at him.

  “Taylor had what I would call a unique mind. One day, as he was waiting with his colleagues for a bomb known as Scorpion to be detonated, he noticed a discarded parabolic reflector lying on the ground. An idea came to him. He set it up facing Ground Zero, and used some stiff wire to hold a Pall Mall cigarette at its focal point. A few minutes later, Scorpion exploded. The Sun came down to Earth; there was a blast of searing heat; the air split with thunder; the terrible toadstool climbed to the heavens; scientists drew in their breath in awe. And Ted Taylor reached down, plucked the Pall Mall from the reflector, and took a puff.

  “He had become the first man in history to light a cigarette with an atom bomb.”

  I couldn’t help howling with laughter. What breathtaking audacity! But as I roared, I wondered if this Taylor could be one of the peace terrorists Lady Sally and I were stalking.

  It seemed too improbable a coincidence. We consult Nikola Tesla to help us pick a handful of men out of billions—and it turns out he knows a funny story about one of them, and tells it without prompting? Even for Lady Sally’s House, this was stretching plausibility. Yet Taylor was on the very short list of men who can make atom bombs, and he certainly seemed to have a loose rivet or two. An atom bomb designer, afflicted with late-life remorse, might make a fine candidate for a nuclear peace terrorist.

  So ask him, “Mr. Taggart.” You’ll never get a better segué…

  “Dr. Tesla,” I said, when the laughter had tapered off, “do you know this Taylor fellow personally?”

  “I have met him once or twice,” he said. “A most special man.” He smiled. “He commented on my resemblance to Nikola Tesla. When I professed not to know the name, he told me some flattering things about myself. Why do you ask?”

  I looked to Lady Sally. “Your Ladyship? I may safely assume that Professor Tesla knows at least as much about…you and your work as I do?”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Ah,” Tesla said. “You are a member of the Inner Circle, Mr. Taggart. In that case, you must call me Nikola.” (Accent on the first syllable.)

  “If you’ll call me Ken,” I agreed, a little dizzily. “Then you know why Lady Sally is here—or rather, ‘is now’?”

  “To learn why World War Three has not happened.”

  I nodded. “Well, now we think we know, Nikola. Because we’re going to stop it.”

  His turn to nod. “A worthwhile project. Where does Dr. Taylor come in?”

  So I told him my theory.

  As Lady Sally had, he grasped it at once…and liked it. “A most remarkable hypothesis, Ken. Its logical structure is somewhat fragile, but intuitively it is most compelling. May I ask: did you arrive at it logically, or intuitively?”

  I had to think. “Both. No, wait, I’m wrong. First intuitively. Then the logic happened to it, and kind of patted it into shape.”

  He nodded vigorously, his eyes shining. “Yes, yes! It is the same with me! An astonishing sensation, is it not?”

  “Well…kind of like being hit between the eyes with a hammer. Except it doesn’t hurt.”

  “Exactly!”

  Tesla was famous for rarely using drawings or models or notes or experiments. A device would appear in his imagination, complete. He would build it. It would work. The Mark I was the finished product. To have my mental processes compared to his—by him!—was…well, a unique experience. Arethusa was looking at me. What wound? I was ready to kick-box a kangaroo…

  “And you wish Dr. Taylor’s advice on the precise nature of the nuclear mines?” he went on.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Nikola,” I said, “I was more wondering whether he might be…uh, one of the major miners.”

  He broke up. “I laugh at the idea, more than at the pun, Ken. Dr. Taylor would be the last man on earth to belong to such a terrorist group. He gave up building bombs when he saw that even hydrogen bombs could not scare the world into peace, as he had first hoped. His personal nightmare is nuclear weapons in private hands. In recent years he has campaigned vigorously for stricter controls on weapons-grade material, specifically to prevent terrorist groups from building their own nuclear weapons. The great John McPhee wrote an entire book, THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY, about Taylor’s efforts. That is where I learned the story of the Pall Mall. Believe me, Ken: Taylor cannot possibly be involved with your terrorists.”

  Lady Sally said, “Nikky is an excellent judge of character, Ken. Especially with regard to scientists.�
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  “Okay,” I said, “Taylor isn’t one of the terrorists.”

  Tesla looked thoughtful. “But he might be the best possible source of advice on how to deal with them.”

  Lady Sally held up a hand. “Nikky, I’m sorry. I must issue a nolle prosequi. This conspiracy is too large as it is, and I don’t know this Taylor bird. If we can possibly do without his advice, we will. If we can’t, we’ll try anyway.”

  Tesla chewed briefly at his mustache. “Your point is well taken, Your Ladyship. Let us see how far we can go on our own. Let me see, I remember McPhee’s book fairly well.” I’d heard that Nikola Tesla never read anything twice. Polaroid eyes. “Taylor spoke at length on the practical considerations of building a nuclear mine, such as you envision, in order to refute the common belief that a Manhattan Project would be required. He demonstrated that one would need only public domain documents, a small machine shop, and access to weapons-grade radioactives. He even designed such a mine, hypothetically. As I recall, his design criterion was to produce the physically smallest and lightest bomb which would still be capable of knocking down the World Trade Center.”

  “What did it look like?” I asked. “How much did it weigh? I’m trying to get a mental picture of the damned things, and I keep picturing big evil eggs.”

  He shook his head. “I do not think an implosion bomb is likely. It would be very hard for a terrorist to get usable plutonium. The current ‘street price’ is on the order of a hundred dollars a gram: each bomb would cost millions of dollars just for the plutonium. Any that he could steal from the nuclear fuel cycle or from medical sources would be ‘hot,’ poisoned with enough plutonium-240 to make a bomb go supercritical too soon. I envision rather a uranium bomb, most likely a gun-type. A cylinder lying on its side. It could theoretically be as small as a bazooka. It’s difficult to say with any certainty: it depends on what you want the bomb to do, and what design choices you make along the way.”