The Last Days of Night(55)

“Well,” offered Paul, “I don’t think I ever said it would be easy.”

—

Paul’s young associates began immediately. They were to work half days for the few months until they graduated, and then full ones immediately thereafter. He stored them in an inexpensive one-room office on Greenwich Street, just a half mile from Carter, Hughes & Cravath. It was an old building that had been subdivided into as many tiny offices as possible. He had little trouble securing a lease. He paid for the first month’s rent by his own check, drawn from his account at First National. He set the boys to find their own furniture, and they quickly brought up a long communal table for them to share from a market in Brooklyn.

“Embezzlement” was not the word he preferred to use to describe his plan for paying for the services of his associates. To be sure, he couldn’t very well afford to pay them out of his own pocket indefinitely. He would have to divert funds from the Westinghouse account. But if the attempt to obliterate Edison’s light-bulb patent was not a proper expenditure of Westinghouse Electric Company funds, then what on earth would be?

It was the slipperiness of Carter and Hughes that had put him in this position. If they had not betrayed him before, he would not be forced to go behind their backs now. So in those cold weeks of December 1888, while Manhattan bundled itself in layers of New England wool, Paul enveloped his operation in layers of financial obfuscation.

He harbored no illusions about the risk he was taking. He did not imagine that there remained any end to this story that would not involve the brutal dissolution of his law firm. Eventually Carter and Hughes would find out what he was doing. And then they’d fire him. And probably sue him, at that. If Paul’s scheme proved successful, they would learn of what he’d done at the moment of his victory. If he was unsuccessful, they’d learn of what he’d done at the bankruptcy filing of the Westinghouse Electric Company. Either way, they would punish him. Win or lose, this would end with Paul out of a job. Either way, he would end up on his own. The only question was whether his next firm would be in Manhattan or on the unheated first floor of his father’s house in Tennessee.





Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you, because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.

—BILL GATES



CHRISTMAS OF 1888 arrived with a cold front that further encrusted the hardened city. Yet this Christmas managed to compare favorably with the previous one, which had fallen just before the worst blizzard anyone had seen in decades. The holiday of ’88 was merely freezing.

Tesla spent his Christmas with the ladies Huntington. Paul was not invited to join them. It seemed that Fannie wanted to preserve whatever private moments she could for the sanctity of her family. Tesla was intruder enough. At least he was a charity case. His presence fit the season. Paul was merely their attorney. He was the help. He could fend for himself.

Paul spent Christmas Day working from his apartment. He dined alone at P. J. Clarke’s tavern just down the block on Third Avenue. He’d expected to have the place to himself, but found it even more crowded than usual. He wasn’t the only solitary New Yorker who wanted to enjoy his lamb stew and pint of ale in public.

The next day, he trudged through the cold to an appointment on Park Row, just across from City Hall. He arrived to find the five-story Romanesque building encased in scaffolding. A massive construction project was under way, and the structure seemed to be expanding outward, like an insect bursting from its cracked shell. It seemed an apt metaphor, since Paul did not have great respect for the people who worked inside. They were journalists.

The newspaper he was there to visit was not the largest in the city, nor was it the most prestigious. But The New York Times was certainly the most ambitious, and the most self-obsessed with its own comically high-minded ideals.

The plan had been his, though Agnes had taken to it quickly. Fannie had been skeptical, but even she’d had to admit that it was the best idea she’d yet heard from her lawyer. It was risky. But given the nature of their blackmail, what course of action wasn’t?

Paul’s plan was to use his two clients’ respective reputations in each other’s service. He thought of this like the symbols common to all of Thomas Edison’s products. Each device bore the word “Edison” on it, in the same font, the same size. If a customer liked one, he might be tempted to try another, totally different product, on the logic that it came from the same manufacturer. The very word “Edison” had become a “brand,” no less searing and permanent than those imprinted upon the hides of cattle. Edison’s circular nameplate even resembled that of a cattleman’s iron. This could not have been an accident.

Paul would build his own “brand” as a lawyer. The name Cravath would be at the center of both the cases he was handling, a symbol of impossible difficulties handled with taste and discretion.

There was a reporter at The Times by the name of Leopold Drucker. He would be delighted to conduct an interview with Agnes, as the operetta star submitted to them so infrequently. He could be trusted not to print anything that might cast Agnes in an unfavorable light, as so many of these gossip writers loved to do.

“But why,” Fannie had asked, “grant an interview in the first place?”

“Because W. H. Foster is blackmailing you with the threat of a public scandal. So rather than wait for him to use the newspapers against you, let’s beat him to the punch. Let’s use the newspapers against him. He believes that you’ve much to lose from a public airing? Well, let us make very clear that he does too.”