The Last Days of Night, page 18
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.”
As they had arranged, Paul met Agnes in the lobby of the Times building. A secretary pointed them up the stairs to the fourth floor.
“Don’t say too much,” said Paul. “Just enough.”
“I know how to give an interview,” said Agnes. “This is not my first. Though if we’re successful, I daresay it’ll be my most fun.”
That Agnes relished an attack on W. H. Foster did not surprise Paul. There was a vengeful side to her, when wronged. It was another trait that he appreciated.
“Mr. Drucker is friendly to our side,” Paul said, “but he’s not ours completely. This will be a proper interview.”
“You paid him,” said Agnes boldly. It wasn’t a question.
Paul paused before speaking. “Not exactly.”
“Edison bought off some men from the Evening Post, so you followed suit with some men from The Times?”
“Westinghouse has given Mr. Drucker exclusive interviews, exclusive access to reports of coming products. In exchange, Drucker has written generously—and honestly—about those products. It’s not a bribe. It’s a relationship.” Paul emphasized the point: “We haven’t stooped to Edison’s level.”
Agnes raised an eyebrow. “Well,” she said, “do you think that might be why you’re losing?”
They found Leopold Drucker among the reporters scribbling away at their messy desks. Even the day after Christmas, the newsroom was loud with the clack of typewriters.
Paul watched raptly as Agnes sat for her interview. She was, in a word, excellent. Her performance was no less masterful than any he might imagine of hers onstage. Drucker’s secretary transcribed every word she uttered. Agnes spoke at a calm pace, as if this were any other social call. She treated Drucker like an old friend, despite their having met only minutes before. Her tone was light, both funny and refined. She was a small-town girl just delighted at what big-city dreams she now lived. And at the same time, she was a winking doyenne of New York society, elegant in her habits and ladylike in her proprieties.
She spoke of Paris, of London, of her lifelong passion for song. She mentioned her devoted mother, ever at her side. She was a naïf in the rough business of the theater. She let Drucker do the work of asking about the short midwestern tour in which she’d sung—why so quick? Hadn’t she liked Chicago?
“Chicago will forever be in my heart,” she said. “It is the Paris of the Middle West. There was only a small unpleasantness with a manager on the tour that bade me take my leave of it.” When pressed as to the nature of this unpleasantness, she demurred. “You’ll have to speak to Mr. Foster about all of that. He runs the troupe I was then singing with. Such lovely people. If you speak to any of the ladies in the troupe, please give them my love? They suffered such an unfortunate time. But yes, Chicago—what a heavenly town!”
Paul had to restrain himself from bursting into applause. Drucker could print that as it was. Only a few words, carefully chosen, had been required to do all the damage she’d wanted. “Ladies.” “Unfortunate.” “Suffered.” “A small unpleasantness.” She wasn’t smearing Foster’s good name. There was nothing libelous in what she’d said. Nothing even that smacked of a grudge. She sounded like she was attempting not to sully his reputation. And it was from such a tone that any reader of good judgment might draw her own conclusions about what sort of theater manager had caused an unpleasantness with his female singers. Any speculation as to the nature of this trouble would be left solely to the province of the reader’s ample imagination.
As the interview concluded, Mr. Drucker instructed his secretary to submit the transcribed interview to his editor by the evening. The newsroom seemed to silence itself as Agnes strolled out among the clerks and typists. Paul watched as she floated across the room.
“Oh, Cravath,” Drucker said to Paul. “There’s something came in yesterday that I thought you might want to see. It’s down on the second floor—I’ll show you. It’s a submission from the desk of Harold Brown.”
“Surely,” said Paul, “The New York Times is not going to print an editorial of Brown’s.” The Times had never been a Westinghouse paper, exactly, but neither had it been as sycophantically pro-Edison as its peers.
“It’s not an editorial. It’s an advertisement. A full page.”
“An advertisement for what?”
“For a demonstration,” said Drucker. “And dear Lord, does it look like it’ll be a show.”
What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what is going on.
—JACQUES COUSTEAU
PAUL’S COLLECTION OF Harold Brown’s incendiary editorials had grown considerably over the previous months. The pile rested on the floor in his office, stacked to a point of structural instability. Almost every major newspaper in America had published one of the screeds. Their tone was as unyieldingly hyperbolic as the first. Alternating current had arrived, it had come to murder your children, and its deliverer was George Westinghouse.
Paul and Westinghouse had tried to educate the public on the science involved, to explain why alternating current was in fact less dangerous than direct. Westinghouse had personally penned editorials vouching for the safety of his systems. But so far the public had not been as moved by scientific reasoning as they had been by Brown’s colorful fabrications.
Brown was now taking his campaign a step further. He was set to launch a traveling road show. He would demonstrate to the public just how deadly Westinghouse’s current would be.
On New Year’s Day, 1889, Paul took the train to West Orange, New Jersey.
He found a crowded lecture hall. He guessed there to be almost a hundred other attendees besides himself, comprised of city safety officials, lighting company representatives, assorted engineers, and a healthy contingent of reporters. Brown’s tour was being advertised all along the East Coast. He was to perform in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. Edison country, Paul thought. Though on such trips Brown would have to travel on trains with brakes designed by George Westinghouse.
Harold Brown entered the lecture hall. To Paul’s surprise, he looked more like an actuary than a huckster. He was small, mild of demeanor, soft voiced; if he wasn’t the man of the hour, he would have disappeared into the crowd. Brown began his lecture by explaining that he had no “financial or commercial interest” in the nationwide debate over A/C versus D/C; his involvement in this scientific dispute was motivated only by his commitment to the truth. He then directed his audience’s attention to an animal cage. It was constructed from wood, but strung with copper wires between the bars. Inside, Brown had placed a generously sized black retriever. An assistant attached wires to the animal’s legs. One on the front right, the other on the rear left. The unsuspecting retriever did not bark as the copper pressed against its fur. Brown then showed his assembled crowd a direct-current generator. It was of “the type manufactured by Mr. Edison,” he explained. With the flick of a switch, Brown sent what he described as three hundred volts through the dog. The animal emitted a small yelp and briefly struggled to shake free. But of course the shackles wouldn’t budge.
“You see,” Brown intoned, “the direct current hurts no worse than a pinprick.”
He then turned the generator to four hundred volts and reapplied the current to the unhappy retriever. The barking grew louder.
Next it was seven hundred volts of D/C. The dog bellowed violently, banging its head against the bars of the cage. The poor thing shook until managing to loose the electrical wire on its front paw. Brown’s assistant dutifully reapplied it.
Shouts of protest erupted from the audience. Surely, a few men yelled, this was too much. Paul placed his head in his hands. He had a terrible feeling.
“Even up to seven hundred volts,” Brown explained, ignoring his audience’s pleas for mercy, “this direct current is quite simply incapable of doing lasting damage to the animal.
“But,” he then added, “let us see how alternating current compares.” His assistant replaced the D/C generator with a different one, bigger and newer. Brown described it as an alternating-current device, identical to the variety produced by Mr. Westinghouse.
“We return to a humble three hundred volts,” he said as he flicked a switch on the new machine and alternating current poured through the dog. It took only seconds of thrashing and an unholy screech before it slumped to the floor of its cage, dead. “Terrible thing,” said Brown as he shook his head ruefully. The crowd was too shocked to move. “I am sorry for having to show you such terrors. But if you have concerns, I suggest bringing them up with Mr. Westinghouse. He is the one attempting to string this current up to every thoroughfare in the country. If this is what it does to a dog, imagine what it might do to a child!”
—
Despite a note of official protest from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Brown performed a nearly identical demonstration the following day. A Newfoundland work dog was electrocuted by A/C for a full eight seconds before it died. The next night it was an Irish setter, with identical results.
The following weeks brought a pattern of newspaper coverage of these demonstrations that was almost comical in its predictability and its absurdity. Paul had assumed that the controversy surrounding such grotesqueries would be to his advantage. Surely no one could take seriously the scientific claims of a man who had literally taken to burning animals alive?
Paul found himself in the wrong. Every report went like this: First there was a throat-clearing denunciation from the newspaper editorial board about the moral abomination of animal killing. But then, a breath later, the same paper would reluctantly suggest that if Brown had perhaps gone too far to make his point, that did not invalidate his message. And based on the horrors witnessed, his message was both sound and vitally important.
“While Brown might find a wider audience for his arguments if they were not posed in such an unchristian manner,” declared The Philadelphia Inquirer, “there can be no denying the dangers he so successfully elucidated by the frying of a Labrador.” The controversy itself begat more ink, which in turn brought more attention to Brown’s cause. It seemed that in the circus of public opinion, no act was too extreme. Brown’s villainy had been successfully painted as Westinghouse’s.
—
“Mr. Paul Cravath,” said Tesla as Paul entered his upstairs bedroom two weeks later. “You are looking more pale even than I.”
Paul had to smile. Tesla had rarely greeted him by name since the accident. “I’m not getting as much sleep as I might.”
Tesla didn’t respond. Instead, he turned to the window and stared at the shapes being formed by the ice outside the glass. Geometric paintings in slow-moving frost. Paul spent another twenty minutes trying to re-engage him in conversation, but it was no use. This brief flash of lucidity was all that Paul would get that night.
Yet it indicated improvement. Agnes had even heard Tesla refer to Edison the day before. Names were coming back to him, events too. Paul hoped that soon he might recall how he had survived the fire. And, much more important, that he might regain the creative capacity to invent an original, non-infringing lamp. While production of their A/C generators was going as planned, Westinghouse and Fessenden had reported little progress on development of a new light bulb. It would take, suggested Fessenden, a particular genius to conjure up such a device. Tesla’s recovery could not come too soon; Paul could only hope that it would come eventually.
Paul joined Agnes in a late-night glass of port. This had recently become a ritual on his midnight visits, one that he spent all day looking forward to. As a result of his position, not to mention his workload, he was left with few real friends. He had, he realized, only one person with whom he could be fully honest. How lucky, and how fantastic, that it was her.
“Any progress on your friend Harold Brown?” asked Agnes as she sipped from her tiny glass. She’d kept her black silk gloves on, despite their having sat in her drawing room. She was a curious mix, Paul noted, of proprieties adopted and abandoned.
He wondered what it would be like to put down his glass and kiss her. Instead, he talked about his case.
“We haven’t found a connection yet to Edison. We can’t even find any record they’ve ever been in the same place at the same time. It’s as if Edison is Dr. Jekyll, and Brown Mr. Hyde.”
“I’ve never read that one.”
“Neither have I,” admitted Paul. “One odd thing my associates did find, though: patent applications, in Brown’s name. All rejected.”
“Rejected?”
“He submitted his own design of a light bulb, four or five years ago. A few of his own generators. My boys unearthed two dozen of the things.”
Agnes considered this, tapping her gloved fingers against her delicate glass. “He’s a failed inventor?”
“It appears that way. I asked one of Westinghouse’s engineers to look over the rejected applications. He told me they’re trash—poorly thought-out mimicry, far from the real thing. The patent office is famously instructed to err on the side of granting too many patents rather than too few, on the logic that it’s cleaner for the courts to invalidate them in hindsight than to attempt applying them after the fact. But Brown’s ideas were too middling even for them. He wanted to be Thomas Edison, but he couldn’t cut it. So instead…”
“He gets to pretend to be Edison for the press.” Agnes appeared thoughtful, as if allowing the port to percolate through her mind. “The Sun ran a profile on him.”
“So did the Boston Herald. A few others.”
“They make mention of his laboratory, in Manhattan.”
“On Wall Street no less,” said Paul. “He’s dressing the part. The stained work pants, the scuffed boots, the Manhattan laboratory.”
“Except what does a pretend inventor do in his real lab?”
Paul realized that he didn’t have an answer.
Picasso had a saying—“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
—STEVE JOBS, MISATTRIBUTING A QUOTE TO PABLO PICASSO
THE CORNER OF Wall Street and William Street was quiet at one in the morning. Four days after his conversation with Agnes, Paul stood there under a great pedestal arc lamp, the lone figure beneath the artificial moonlight. The hours between sunset and sunrise felt different under a mechanical brightness. The area beneath the arcing lamp was the color palette of the Italian Renaissance, while the city beyond it fell into a murky swirl of French Impressionism.
Beneath the brightest public lights that money could buy, Paul contemplated the dirty business on which he reluctantly found himself. Harold Brown’s laboratory was on the third floor of 45 Wall Street. The building stood before Paul just at the edge of the illuminated circle that surrounded him.
“You Cravath?” came a voice from behind. Paul turned to find a slim, clean-shaven man approaching. The man was short, dressed in simple work clothes and a warm hat. His hands rested comfortably in the pockets of his coat.
“I think I have a pretty good idea of who you are.”
The man shrugged before gesturing to 45 Wall Street. “If your aim is to have a long career in burglary, I suggest starting a little smaller.”
“I appreciate the advice,” said Paul. “But I’d prefer my career to be as short as possible.”
“Suit yourself.”
The man was a professional picklock. It had taken some time for Paul to make inquiries, to find a public house where men of murky repute would be likely to congregate. He couldn’t very well ask his law school friends if they knew any handy burglars, could he?
It had taken some negotiating and more than one two-dollar bill pressed into the palm of a talkative bartender. Whiskey wasn’t Paul’s drink of choice, but he made do, given the places he had to inquire.
This man, whose name Paul preferred not to know, had come highly recommended. Tonight Paul would see if his reputation was deserved.
The thief removed from his jacket what appeared to be the tools of his trade. Paul could hear the gentle clink of metal instruments against the lock on the door of Number 45.
Paul watched the street. He hadn’t been instructed as to his role in all of this, but manning the lookout seemed the logical thing to do.
Three interminable minutes passed before Paul heard the satisfying click of the tumbler. The two men stepped into a pitch-black marble lobby. There were electrical lamps on the walls—Paul could make out their shapes—but he dared not turn them on.
He had a few candles ready in his coat pocket. He lit two with a match, and handed one to the thief. The light was underwhelming. They couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of them.
Paul found his way to a staircase. He’d spent an afternoon idly walking through the area at midday. He knew where Harold Brown’s office was. It didn’t take long to make it up to the third floor, and to Brown’s door.
