The Last Days of Night(42)

He was sitting up for his conversation with the detective. Sitting had been a victory recently achieved, and not one to be taken lightly. He felt himself in relatively sound shape as he made pleasantries with the policeman, whose high rank was indicated by his attire—a proper coat and tie rather than a uniform.

“So you’ve no indications as to Mr. Tesla’s whereabouts one way or the other?” asked Paul. “Alive, dead, or anywhere in between?”

“Still none,” responded the detective. “Mr. Cravath, I’d like to ask you a question, and I hope that it won’t offend you.”

“In my profession,” said Paul, “one can’t offend too easily.”

“Do you remember having this conversation with me previously?”

“What conversation?”

“This is the third time I’ve come to visit you, sir,” said the detective. “To get your version of the events of September the nineteenth.”

Paul became instantly concerned. “I don’t…I’m terribly sorry, I don’t remember.”

The detective looked to the bottle of morphine on Paul’s bedside table.

“It’s to be expected, sir,” said the detective. “I don’t wish to alarm you, or to cause you any further discomfort. The doctors said you’d be a bit looped for a while. You’ve seemed more lucid of late, so I thought you’d be ready, but perhaps today is not the day after all for you to receive further visitors.”

“Who else wants to see me?”

“My boss. He wants to check on you personally.”

“Anything I can do to help.”

The detective went out into the hallway. What scared Paul while he waited was not just that he’d forgotten earlier meetings with the detective. Under the influence of the morphine, he was clearly not at his full mental capacities. He would need every ounce of cleverness he could muster if he was to get back to work.

The detective returned to the room followed by a balding man in his sixties. He had the look of a ruffian who’d been tempered by old age. The sort of bulldog who would be forced to do nowadays with bark what he’d more productively done in his younger years with bite. Paul recognized him instantly. When the detective had referred to his boss, Paul hadn’t thought he meant the commissioner of the police.

“I’m Fitz Porter. My man tells me you’ve had a good shaking up, but that you’re handling it well.”

“I hope this constitutes ‘well,’?” replied Paul. “I’m afraid that the morphine has left me a bit duller than I’d like.”

“Miracle stuff, that,” said Porter. “Saved us quite a bit of misery at Bull Run.”

Porter had famously led the Union V Corps during the war, long before President Arthur had sent him to the New York Police Department.

Paul had only been a child during the war. His father had followed the news avidly, reading the day’s grim casualty numbers from The Nashville Dispatch. Since Erastus Cravath was both a committed pacifist and a passionate advocate for Negro rights, the war placed him on uncertain footing. To what depravities should the side of righteousness sink in furtherance of its noble goals? How many men could the Union slaughter and sacrifice in order to free the slaves? His father had not possessed an answer, and so, as far as Paul could tell, Erastus had read the litany of deaths to his family so that they too might share in the moral burden. This had served as a useful reminder over the years: Knowing the difference between right and wrong sometimes did not serve to clarify much of anything. Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn’t mean he’ll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.

Which is what Erastus Cravath finally did. He enlisted as a chaplain for the Union, spending the final year of the war away from his wife and young son. Never once upon his return did he discuss with his family what he’d seen. Or done.

“I’m flattered that you’d come yourself,” said Paul to the commissioner. “This can’t be the only fire in the city that requires your attention. Is there any news on Mr. Tesla?”

“If Mr. Tesla is alive, we’ll find him,” he said calmly. He did not give the impression of a man who lost much sleep on account of missing Serbian scientists. “I’m told by Detective Rummel here that in your earliest conversations, just after the ambulance had brought you to Bellevue, you told him you first saw the fire in the stairwell. Not in Mr. Tesla’s laboratory.”

“Yes.”

“At the time, we thought it likely that the trauma and the morphine had jumbled your memories. We assumed the most likely source of the fire was the laboratory. All that funny equipment. The electrical devices. But we know now that the fire began on the roof. Someone went up there and set it on purpose.”

People had murdered one another for a lot less than a billion dollars. Paul thought of Thomas Edison seated behind his office desk, puffing his cigar, plotting the victory that he believed to be inevitable.

“You don’t appear surprised at this, Mr. Cravath,” said Commissioner Porter as he watched Paul carefully. “Is it the morphine? Or is it easy for you to imagine that someone had it in for your friend?”

Paul didn’t know how to answer without divulging too much information about his case.

“The mayor himself,” Porter continued, “has asked us to make the matter of this arson our top priority. You have powerful friends, you know. They’re looking out for you.”