Thunder City (17 page)

They were not alone. In a studded leather wing chair in the corner opposite the desk, smoking a cigar, sat a beautiful man with thick snowy hair brushed back from his temples and healthy widow’s peak and a vandyke beard trimmed to a perfect point. His skin was pink and unwrinkled, his eyes clear gray, and he wore a black morning coat, striped trousers without the suspicious crease that marked a garment as ready-to-wear, and gray kid spats on black patent leathers polished to a mirror gloss. The coat was buttoned to his neck, allowing only a glimpse of white collar and burgundy satin tie to show at his throat, which had begun to sag slightly, the only flaw in his finish. Abner, who took no small care with his own appearance, felt positively slovenly against such meticulous attention to detail. It had been thirty years since anyone had managed to intimidate him; he found the sensation intriguing.

“William C. Whitney, Abner Crownover,” Dolan said. “Commodore Whitney was secretary of the navy under President Cleveland.”

Whitney deposited his cigar in a crystal ashtray balanced upon the arm of his chair and rose, exhibiting none of the effort associated with age, to grasp Abner’s hand. The old man’s grip was dry and no firmer than it had to be. Abner, who could not recall the last time he had been presented to someone else rather than the other way around (Yes, he could; it was when he met President McKinley), approved. The custom of the new century seemed to be the importance of crushing another man’s metacarpi in establishing one’s station; by this reasoning, circus strong man Sandor the Magnificent occupied a position higher than Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“Pierpont Morgan and I were discussing recently the relative merits of our nation’s largest cities,” announced Whitney, without preamble. “We agreed that Detroit boasted two strings to its bow: the birthplace of the Pullman car and the headquarters of Crownover Coaches.”

Abner smiled, genuinely pleased by a statement which coming from anyone else he would have dismissed as empty flattery. “Not Michigan Stove?”

“Our wives might have insisted upon including it. It’s quite possible there’s one in my kitchen. Never having visited the room, I couldn’t say.”

“You’re not a drinking man, I think,” Dolan said. “I can send Aurora out for whatever you’d like.”

“It’s not necessary.”

“Then I won’t beat around the bush. I asked Commodore Whitney here because he’s organizing a group in which you and I should have more than passing interest.”

“I’m not a political man,” Abner said.

“It’s not a political group. I keep forgetting the name.” Dolan turned to Whitney, who had reseated himself and reclaimed his cigar from the ashtray.

“We’re calling it the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers.”

Abner said, “Now I know I’m not interested.”

Dolan said, “The A.L.A.M. has no intention of producing an automobile. It exists mainly to prevent them from being produced, or at the very least to collect tribute from those who attempt it.”

“Specifically, it’s been formed to exercise one man’s exclusive right to manufacture automobiles.” Whitney blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling. “It may interest you to know, Mr. Crownover, that the internal combustion engine as a practical factor in transportation is not in public domain. It has been patented.”

“By whom?”

Dolan, who was standing by the door to the reception room, opened it and leaned out. “We’re ready now, Aurora.”

A moment later, the man whom Abner had seen waiting outside walked in. He was taller than he appeared when seated, but that fact did not add to his stature. If anything, he appeared to be cowering inside himself. He had restless eyes and a habit of moving his head jerkily to take in the room and its occupants, like a particularly nervous bird. When he was introduced, his handshake confirmed Abner’s impression of the man’s relative unimportance in the world scheme. It was self-consciously firm, as if he practiced gripping one hand with the other in private when he should have been concentrating upon something more significant.

“William Whitney, Abner Crownover, George Selden,” Dolan said. “Mr. Selden designed an automobile in 1895, and had the foresight to apply for a patent. Washington granted it. He is the only man in the United States who possesses the right to manufacture and sell automobiles. It is his intention, with our help, to prevent anyone who does not belong to the A.L.A.M. from doing so. That includes Henry Ford.”

I
N THE STICKY JULY HEAT
a haze of sawdust and iron shavings hung motionless inside the Mack Avenue plant. It stirred to admit James Couzens, then closed in behind him like shifting sand. Harlan thought the congested bulldog face a portrait of a man about to be stricken. Couzens swept past him without looking in his direction and handed Ford a copy of the
Detroit Evening News,
folded to a full-page advertisement in the first section:

To Manufacturers, Dealers, Importers, Agents, and Users of Gasoline Automobiles

No other manufacturers or importers are authorized to make or sell automobiles, and any person making, selling, or using such machines made or sold by any unlicensed manufacturers or importers will be liable for prosecution for infringement.

Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers

7 East Forty-second Street, New York

Ford’s deep-set eyes raced over the legend. He alone of the small knot of company executives present had kept on his suitcoat and his necktie drawn to his collar. He alone was dry of perspiration. He returned the newspaper without comment.

“Well?” Couzens’ face remained red.

“Well, what?”

“What are you planning to do about this? Can these cranks really sue our
customers?”

“Anyone can sue anyone. That’s how the courts work.”

“Can they win?”

“That depends on the judge and jury.”

“Well, what in thunder is the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers? I can’t find them listed in any directory.”

“That’s because the directories were printed before it existed.”

“You seem to know something about it.”

“The automobile business is small. Not much goes on that I don’t know about. A man named Selden designed an automobile in ninety-five. He didn’t build it, but he did the next best thing. He took out a patent. The A.L.A.M. controls him and his patent. It intends to put out of business every manufacturer who doesn’t belong.”

Harlan spoke up. “Are you planning to join?”

Ford shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a mule-headed son of a bitch, that’s why.” Couzens accordioned the newspaper between his short thick paws.

“I am a mule-headed S.O.B.,” Ford agreed. “But that’s not why.”

“Well, then, suppose you tell us.”

A joyless smile tugged out the corners of the motorman’s thin mouth. “Because I tried, when I first heard about it. They won’t have me.”

Two days after the advertisement appeared, another ran in its place:

To Dealers, Importers, Agents, and Users of our Gasoline Automobiles

We will protect you against any prosecution for alleged infringement of patents.

We are pioneers of the
Gasoline Automobile.
Our Mr. Ford also built the famous “999” Automobile which was driven by Barney Oldfield in New York this year, a mile in 55
⁴
/
₅
seconds, on a circular track, which is the world record.

Mr. Ford driving his own machine beat Mr. Winton at Grosse Pointe track in 1901. We have always been winners.

Playing Couzens’ part now, carrying the newspaper containing the advertisement rolled up in one fist, Harlan had sought out Ford in his booth at the Pontchartrain bar, where the automobile man was drinking a glass of mineral water opposite John and Horace Dodge. The redheaded brothers were drinking gin.

Harlan slid in beside Ford. “Do we have the resources to indemnify all our agents and customers?”

“Of course not. It won’t come to that.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“The A.L.A.M. is out to get to me. They don’t care who buys a Ford. They’re just trying to scare away business.”

“Then you think they’re no threat?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Let ’em sue!” John Dodge banged the table with his glass, slopping out some of its contents.

Ford smiled his tight smile. “I imagine they’ll do just that, with or without your permission.”

“When do you expect to be served?” Harlan asked.

“I’m surprised I haven’t been already. I expect my advertisement is being read by their lawyers right now.”

“Let ’em!” John repeated. “Horace and I have a load of money invested that says the company will do good. We ain’t backed a losing horse yet.”

Horace, quieter (and possibly not yet as inebriated), grinned. “I thought the whole point of this was to put all the horses out to pasture.”

“They can’t win, can they?” Harlan pressed.

“Maybe, maybe not. Commodore Whitney’s heading them up. He knows most of the judges.”

“Then we’ll win on appeal?”

“We’ll win in the end. Roosevelt don’t hold with trusts. At the rate he’s appointing judges—”

“Federal judges?” Harlan broke in. “You think it will get that far?”

“I was referring to justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The suit was not filed, although the threat of it hung above the plant on Mack Avenue like a guillotine blade for all to see. Infringement of patent was the charge discussed in the press. Henry Leland, Ransom E. Olds, and the makers of the Franklin, the Pierce, and the Locomobile joined the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, paying hefty fees for the privilege of making motorcars powered by gasoline. Entrepreneurs hoping to enter the field sent in money so they could show their licenses to potential backers. Ford stood alone. A lawyer representing the patent holders, granting a newspaper interview in his book-lined, cigar-smelling office overlooking New York’s Fifth Avenue, put the alliance’s philosophy into one succinct sentence: “When you buy a Ford, you buy a lawsuit.” Sales fell off. Rows of new Model Cs stood unadmired on the grounds of dealerships, where salesmen who had been all week visiting the homes of farmers and businessmen only to come potting back in their sample vehicles without a sale sat working newspaper puzzles and making appointments for job interviews at Oldsmobile and Cadillac.

Parochial Windsor, a reflection in a delayed mirror of Detroit before the stove and shipbuilding industries came along to stretch its arms toward the sky, hunkered under a coat of flinty snow. Its docks and wooden warehouses were gaunt shadows amid white swirls whipped up from the surface of frozen Lake St. Clair. Record low temperatures even for Michigan, even for January, had constructed a thick shelf of ice as gray as iron and nearly as hard across the top of the watery international boundary. It was deceptive. The swift current of the Detroit River through the middle of the lake had hollowed it out from beneath. The mantel, two feet thick at the outer edges, thinned to six inches toward the center where the lake was deepest. There the half-buried remains of Indian dugouts, French bateaux, and American freighters rotted on the bottom, awaiting fresh arrivals. A cobwebby pattern of fine cracks intersected the surface, weaving a kind of reverse net to entrap the oblivious and foolhardy by the very nature of its weakness. Harlan Crownover, whose ears burned in the cold and whose feet had turned to sadirons in his uninsulated boots, thought of the black cold beneath the ice and knew again his childhood terror of the dark in his old tower bedroom on Jefferson.

“I don’t like the look of those fissures.” Bundled in a navy peacoat with a fleece-lined leather helmet strapped under his chin, goggles on his forehead, Ford spoke through his teeth, barely loud enough for Harlan to hear. He might have been talking to himself.

“Do you think it will hold?”

“I’m less concerned about that than I am about maintaining control. At a hundred miles per hour it’ll be like driving over a cheese grater.”

“Maybe we should postpone the race until Oldfield’s available.”

“Barney’s chances wouldn’t be any better. I’m the one who taught him to drive. Anyway, he’d refuse. He’s smarter than I am.” Ford’s grin was a rictus.

It was a small group gathered on the snowy bank. Aside from a handful of curious spectators, stamping their feet and pounding their arms to assist circulation, it included Ford’s wife, Clara, a stately chestnut-haired woman wrapped in inexpensive furs, standing still as a piling in the bitter wind; Edsel, their eleven-year-old son, jumping up and down in a combination of nervous excitement and an effort to keep from freezing; Ed Huff, a Ford Motor Company employee and Ford’s copilot, whose nickname, Spider, seemed appropriate to his hunched posture and curious habit of shifting his weight rhythmically from one foot to the other in his impatience to start; and C. H. Wills, impervious to the cold as he bent over the motorcar’s engine, tightening plugs, testing petcocks, and inspecting wires for signs of corrosion.

The motorcar itself, dubbed the Arrow, was a twin of the fabled 999, which Barney Oldfield had piloted to a winning five miles in five minutes and twenty-eight seconds in the Challenge Cup, and set a world’s record a few weeks later when he drove a mile in 1:01. It was essentially an engine on wheels. The manifold, exposed to the elements, straddled a pair of steel rails behind a radiator shaped like a whiskey flask. The seat and T-shaped tiller appeared to have been added at the last minute. The vehicle was twice as long as Ford’s little runabout and built closer to the ground; but the lake was much bigger, and the descent to the bottom was the same for everyone.

The race this time, as advertised by Alexander Malcolmson, was against not another vehicle, but the clock. Sporting reporters from the local newspapers were expected to chronicle the attempt to break Ford’s own record for the mile. At length they arrived en masse on foot from the nearest streetcar stop, cheerfully profane men in long coats and hard derbies, smelling of gin and spitting tobacco at random targets in the snow. They were plainly grateful for the outing, which freed them from the overheated barns of their offices where they chucked balls of paper at distant wastebaskets and tried to fill their columns with stale speculations about off-season baseball trades during the long dormancy between football and spring training. Behind them hobbled an unkempt photographer with his box camera and tripod on one shoulder and carrying a cumbersome valise the size of a child’s doll trunk. He spent some time finding a level section of bank upon which to set up his equipment, then began fiddling with his glass plates, cursing when one dropped from his stiff fingers and shattered on the frozen ground, and pausing every few minutes to improve his circulation with the help of a hammered silver flask. A reporter Harlan recognized from the
Evening News
made his way among the journalists, collecting bets on the race’s outcome and recording them on a square of folded newsprint. The gentlemen of the Fourth Estate had been known to place wagers on everything from the Boxer Rebellion in China to the verdict in the trial of the assassin of King Umberto of Italy.