The Tesla Legacy (5 page)

Edison trotted across the room, took the curtain gently in his mouth, and pulled it closed. The room was safe again. The dog’s ability to read Joe’s moods and respond was uncanny, and Joe loved him for it. He took another treat out of his pocket and gave it to him.

Joe clicked on the desk lamp and took his phone out of his pocket. He settled down to wait. He had made it with a few minutes to spare. He chewed his sandwich, not tasting it, and washed it down with a swig of cold Coke. He was too upset to stomach the fries.

The clock at the corner of his computer screen read one (cyan). He tapped his fingers against the desktop. He wanted the call to come in, and he didn’t want it to.

His phone rang. Vivian Torres was calling him on FaceTime. Characteristically prompt.

Sweat sprang up on Joe’s palms, and he wiped his hands on his pants before accepting the call.

Vivian looked tanner than usual. She’d been soaking up the summer sun, like nature intended. His father would have been proud of her. She’d also cut her black hair shorter, into a bob. It suited her, but just about everything suited her. Even though she didn’t seem to know it, she was a beautiful woman.

“Torres here. I’m at the entrance to the cemetery,” she said.

Hydraulic brakes sighed behind her, probably from the bus she’d arrived on. She tilted her phone to show a wrought-iron gate with
New York Marble Cemetery
written across the top.

Joe’s mouth went dry, and he croaked, “Thanks.”

The funeral was about to begin, and he wasn’t there. He was in some hotel room, alone with his dog.

“I can’t see anyone from out here,” she said. “I’m going to walk into the cemetery and see what’s going on.”

Joe nodded, then remembered she wasn’t looking at him. “OK.”

He took a long sip of Coke and cleared his throat.

She panned her phone from side to side to show brick walls and a faraway strip of bright green grass. “I don’t know how they’ll feel about me filming once I get in the cemetery, so I’m going to put you in my front pocket to be discreet.”

The view dropped a foot, dipped behind white fabric, then settled.

“I feel short,” Joe said.

“If you think I’m taping this thing to the side of my head, you’ve got another think coming.”

Joe smiled, grateful he could. “I’ll go on mute now.”

He didn’t want any hotel noises beaming out into the cemetery during the service.

“Gotcha, boss.” The phone wiggled as if she had nodded. She started forward, and the green grass neared. That must be the cemetery itself.

A guy wearing a black suit and a professional mourner’s face hurried up to her. “Are you here for the Smith funeral?”

Smith funeral? His father’s last name was Tesla.

“I’m here for Mr. George Tesla. Am I in the right place?” Vivian asked.

“Of course. Mr. Tesla is descended from the Smiths, so he will be buried in their crypt. It dates back to 1836.” He gestured to a white plaque resting on grass in front of a stone block wall. “So few families have kept up the tradition. It’s an honor to be able to lay someone to rest here today.”

As Vivian moved closer, Joe saw the name SMITH engraved on the marble plaque. But his father wasn’t a SMITH. He was descended from Nikola Tesla. The Teslas had lived in Croatia, not New York. Nikola Tesla himself hadn’t immigrated to the United States until 1884 (cyan, purple, purple, green). This couldn’t be the right place. Maybe his father was a Smith on his mother’s side, although Joe was pretty sure his grandmother’s maiden name was Morris.

He wanted to ask Vivian to double check, but he didn’t want to make his presence known and maybe get her kicked out. She turned in a slow, unobtrusive circle, clearly trying to show him the full scene. Two older men in black suits stood near the plaque. They must be his father’s chess club—professors who had visited his father in the home. One had removed his suit coat and hung it over his arm, but the other seemed more concerned with propriety than comfort, even on such a hot day.

From his father’s emails, Joe knew more than he wanted to about both men. One was a brilliant mathematician who had never achieved the recognition Joe’s father thought he deserved. The other one might have had an affair with Joe’s mother, or at least his father had hinted at it. In a movie, one of them would have murdered his father, but they hadn’t.

Ever wary, Joe had asked his lawyer, Mr. Rossi, to hire a medical examiner to review the autopsy performed on his father’s body. The second doctor concurred that his father had died of a heart attack. He was eighty-two years old and had suffered two previous heart attacks. The medical examiner had tested his father’s tissues for poisons, and every test that had come back so far was negative. He was an old man who had died of natural causes, like the original report said. Joe was still glad he’d double checked.

The camera moved past the professors to settle on a woman who had just arrived. She held a simple black box and wore a black dress, a wide-brimmed black hat, and a dotted veil that looked like something Marlene Dietrich would have worn. Even though his mother hadn’t performed for decades, she walked with the graceful step of a young dancer, each movement elegant and choreographed. She looked the part of the grieving widow, even though she had divorced Joe’s father twenty years before.

Vivian must have recognized her, because she kept the camera pointed there. His mother looked from side to side, as if searching for someone in the small group of mourners. Her veil fluttered in the breeze.

Guilt rose up in Joe. She was looking for him, her only child. She expected him to be at his father’s funeral, and he wasn’t. The man she had raised wouldn’t have shamed her by missing such an important event. He would have paid his respects. But he hadn’t.

She pulled the simple black box closer to her chest. The box’s ebony surface gleamed in the sun. That box contained his father’s ashes. Joe swallowed the lump in his throat. After he’d received the phone call from his mother telling him that his father was dead, he’d arranged the funeral and picked out the box to hold his father’s ashes, but he hadn’t really accepted that the man was dead until he saw the box in his mother’s arms.

Edison dropped his warm head in Joe’s lap. He stroked the dog’s ears, and Edison wagged his tail—one solid thump (cyan). Joe took a careful breath, held it, and let it out. His father was gone. There would be no reconciliation for them now. Joe had had very good reasons to cut his father out of his life, but looking at the black box made it all so very final.

A man took his mother’s arm. He looked about fifty, ten or so years younger than she, and handsome in a craggy thirties movie star way. Vivian caught the man’s solicitous face in profile, and Joe was struck by how much the man looked like a younger version of his father.

Joe had no doubt this man and his mother were romantically involved. Men had always flocked to his mother.

The camera stayed on her as she stepped across the grass. The chess players watched her advance, both smiling a greeting as if they knew her. Had his mother and father stayed in touch till the end, so much so that she knew his friends?

They’d separated when Joe was ten, and he and his mother had moved around with the circus while his father returned to New York, teaching statistics at New York University, and forgetting Christmases and Joe’s birthdays.

Vivian moved the camera to show a priest walking behind his mother. The man looked fresh out of missionary school. His fresh-scrubbed face was pink, and his priest’s collar looked too tight. He clutched a Bible and marched with the determined steps of an African explorer about to set off into the jungle. Joe bet it was his first funeral.

The priest nodded to his mother, then to Vivian, as did the chess club, even though they didn’t know who Vivian was. Joe’s mother, however, gave her such a knowing glance that he inched back in his flimsy hotel chair. His mother pressed two (blue) fingers to her lips and dropped them to her side. That was the secret “I love you” sign she and Joe had invented when he was a kid. He hadn’t seen it in years, but he instinctively made it back, even though she couldn’t see him.

The priest lined his mother, her paramour, and the retired professors in front of the wall. Vivian fell in last. A giant arrangement of flowers Joe had selected online stood on an easel next to his mother like a proxy for her son. It wasn’t enough, of course—she needed a flesh-and-blood son to hold her hand—but it was the best he could do right now.

Words were intoned, but Vivian’s microphone picked up mostly wind and the faint drone of traffic. It didn’t matter anyway. The priest hadn’t known his father, so what could he say that Joe needed to hear?

He closed his eyes and prayed for his father. He prayed death had brought his father peace from the demons that had haunted him. He hadn’t been an easy man, and there must have been reasons.

But even now Joe couldn’t forgive him everything. The demons that his father had set upon Joe would be with him always. As they say, we carry the dead with us.

When he opened his eyes again, the priest had finished. His mother lifted the urn to hip height and slid it into an empty niche in the stone wall. Her lips moved as if she whispered something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He turned the volume up to full, but heard only the murmur of traffic and the slamming of a faraway door.

Chapter 5

Vivian hated funerals. She’d attended plenty back in the service, and they’d never offered her comfort or closure. They made her angry that everyone was boxed up in the same generic ritual, just like their bodies were boxed up in wooden caskets. When she died, she wanted to have her ashes scattered out the back of an airplane. Then the mourners could parachute after and go have a beer when they landed—adrenaline and alcohol would be a good send-off.

If her mother outlived her, though, Vivian knew she’d insist on this kind of awkward service, where everyone felt compelled to make up something nice, maybe toss in a joke, and cry. At Vivian’s funeral, Lucy would feel guilty because she let her big sister fall off some indoor climbing wall and die and sad because she’d inherited Vivian’s shoes. Vivian’s shoes were too boring for Lucy. She suppressed a smile.

A couple of guys from the funeral home lifted the stone block into place, and that was it. Nobody but the priest gave a eulogy, which was weird. It looked like it was over.

One more thing she had to do, although Tesla hadn’t told her to, and probably didn’t want her to. Whatever. It was the right thing to do.

She walked over to Mrs. Tesla and held out her hand. “My name is Vivian Torres. I’m here on behalf of your son.”

The woman shook her hand. She wore silk gloves, like a movie star, but her tiny hand was surprisingly strong.

“Thank you for coming.” Mrs. Tesla waved her hand at the phone in her pocket. “And thank you, too, Joe.”

“Would you like to speak to him, ma’am?” Vivian fished the phone out of her pocket. Tesla would probably be furious he was being ambushed like this, but the least he could do was talk to his mother. She needed him, and he probably needed her, too.

Mrs. Tesla took the phone and turned away. Speaking in a low voice, she walked a few steps to the wall. Her finger traced the S in SMITH on the plaque.

Her good-looking older escort made a move to follow her, but Vivian intervened. “Had you known George Tesla long, Mr.…?”

“Hugh Hollingberry.” He shook his head. “I never met the man, but my fiancée was married to him once, many years ago.”

Fiancée? Knowing how rich Joe Tesla was, an alarm bell went off in her head. Mrs. Tesla seemed as if she could take care of herself, but even the toughest of women might have a blind spot about men. “I didn’t realize you were engaged to Mrs. Tesla.”

“Two years ago,” he said, which took him out of suspicion. Joe Tesla had been crazy rich for less than a year. “She humors me. How did you know the deceased?”

“I’m a…friend of his son’s.” That made it sound like she was sleeping with him, but she couldn’t say she’d been hired to cover the funeral, even if his mom would probably tell the man anyway.

“The mysterious software genius.” Hollingberry glanced over at Mrs. Tesla. “I’ve yet to meet him. What’s he like?”

“Mysterious.” She softened her non-answer with a smile. “How’d you meet Mrs. Tesla?”

He pointed to a looped ribbon that looked like the pink ones she’d seen for breast cancer, but this one was denim blue. “I met her at a charity event I sponsored to raise funds and awareness for rare genetic diseases.”

Vivian hadn’t expected that answer. She’d Google him later, but she doubted this guy was after Mrs. Tesla’s money. He sounded as if he had money of his own. “A pretty good cause.”

“I think so.” His blue eyes lit up, and he spoke with a passion that reminded her of Tesla. “My sister died from a rare genetic disease, and I realized how few resources are devoted to them. But these diseases can have profound effects not just on those who suffer from them, but also on our understanding of genetics as a whole. I believe these conditions hold the secrets to understanding many of the body’s processes, like aging, metabolism, mental illness, how—”

Mrs. Tesla had returned. “There now, Holly, no need to bore the young woman.”

“It sounds fascinating,” Vivian countered.

Hollingberry took Mrs. Tesla’s arm. “Are we ready to go home, my dear?”

Mrs. Tesla handed Vivian her phone and thanked her, then the two walked across the grass, through the passageway, and turned left at the street. Vivian decided she liked them both.

She looked at the phone in her hand. She was still connected to Tesla. She popped the phone into her pocket and turned so he could see the wall where his father was entombed and the two old guys who seemed to be the only other mourners. The priest and the two men from the funeral home waited as if they had all the time in the world, although they, more than most, had to know that wasn’t true.

Deciding Tesla might want to learn more about those mourners, she headed toward them. The cemetery was a beautiful place—an island of green and peace in the middle of Manhattan. She hoped that came through on the phone and gave Tesla some comfort.