Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 23

Burke felt like a terrorist as he handed his virginal Irish passport to the man behind the glass. The Immigrations officer leafed through its pages with unconcealed boredom, then pushed it back without bothering to stamp it. With an airy gesture, he waved Burke on his way and nodded to the next person in line.

Burke felt the thrill that little boys feel when they’ve gotten away with something, especially when the getting away defeats the machinations of a martinet like Kovalenko. Through the wonders of dual citizenship, Burke was able to travel with impunity, a citizen of Ireland and the European Union.

Erin go bragh, he thought as he went outside to the taxi queue in front of the terminal. Soon, he was bouncing along in the back of a Zastava cab. The outskirts of the Serbian capital were like those of any other European city, an uneasy conglomeration of warehouses and farms, office buildings and apartment blocks. Heading downtown, Burke was impressed by an efflorescence of graffiti, the unfamiliar Cyrillic tags bristling with swastikas and crosshairs.

The city itself was a surprise. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find – surly Serbs moving amid the ruins of NATO bombings, perhaps.

Instead, he found a graceful city at the juncture of two rivers, the Sava and the Danube. There was snow on the ground, but the fresh green of spring adorned the trees. The cabdriver apologized for the weather.

“Freak weather, this spring. Very cold. Now I am asking, where is global warming when you need it?”

The riverfront was lined with floating bars and restaurants, the populace seemed well dressed and prosperous, the streets were clean. The taxi chuffed past graceful and beautiful buildings from another era.

And then there was the Esplanade.

Boxy and utilitarian, the hotel was a concrete cube entirely devoid of architectural flourish or embellishment. As without, so within: Burke’s room was a clean cell, redolent of some Serbian PineSol.

Why did d’Anconia decide to stay at this place? According to Kovalenko he had three or four million dollars coming in. You’d think he’d be ready to splurge.

Or maybe not. He hadn’t seemed like someone who was used to having money. He dressed well, but the clothes looked new, and Burke got the impression that he was playing a role. He was definitely rough around the edges, staring at Burke’s ruined ear and commenting on it. So maybe he was used to places like this.

The front desk was manned by Vuk Milic, a man of about Burke’s own age. With his suit, tie, oiled hair, and earnest expression, Milic was someone Burke might have encountered at the desk of a Comfort Inn outside D.C. His English was good, if accented.

When he was talking about room rates and checkout times, Milic was fluent and almost chatty. When the conversation turned to one of the hotel’s previous guests, a man named d’Anconia, Milic frowned. “The particulars of guests cannot be discussed,” he said, tapping his fingers on the desk. “This is not a possibility.”

Burke folded a twenty-euro note and slid it across the desk so that it came to rest in front of the desk clerk. Milic regarded the bill with a cold eye. “You would like me to change this?”

Burke shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t need any change.”

The bill vanished.

Milic began to type. After a moment, he flashed a smile, and said, “Gaspodin d’Anconia has been here from twenty-four January to second February.”

“‘Gaspodin’?” Burke asked.

“‘Mister.’” Milic returned his eyes to the monitor. “He rents two films for TV: La Genou de Claire, and Sorority Whores.”

“Hunh…”

The desk clerk was unstoppable. “Three times, he eats in restaurant, each time fish. Makes two telephone calls, long distance. One-two-three, five times he has drinks in bar. Always beer.

Burke stared, dumbfounded. What if he’d given the guy a hundred? Admittedly, none of the information was useful, but… “Who’d he call?”

Milic peered closely at the monitor. After a moment, he scribbled some numbers onto a three-by-five card, and handed the card to Burke.

“That’s it,” Milic said. “There’s nothing else.”

Burke believed him. He turned to go, then turned back again. “You know why he was in Belgrade? I mean, was he on business or-”

“He is here for Tesla,” Milic told him.

Burke frowned. “What’s Tesla?” He seemed to recall, there was a rock band, but…

The desk clerk was looking almost hurt. “Nikola Tesla,” he said. “The inventor. He is Serb.”

Jackpot, Burke thought. “So he was meeting this inventor?”

Milic snorted in derision, and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Tesla is dead, maybe fifty years.”

“Oh,” Burke said, the enthusiasm draining from his voice.

“Your friend-”

Burke started to correct him, but thought better of it.

“-he’s here for meetings. I don’t know the word in English. But many people come…”

“So, it’s like a symposium,” Burke suggested.

The desk clerk shrugged. Then he cocked his head and peered at Burke. “You don’t know Tesla?”

Burke looked apologetic. “I forgot,” he offered.

Milic couldn’t believe it. “But this is the most famous Serb of all time! He is more famous than-” he looked up, as if searching the ceiling for the names of celebrated Serbs. Finally, he grinned. “More famous than Vlade Divac!”

“Really!”

“Yes! Is true. He’s inventing electricity!”

“I thought that was Edison,” Burke suggested.

The desk clerk scoffed. “This is what you Americans say. But Tesla, he invents one kind of electricity, Edison invents the other, not-so-good kind. Then, Tesla is inventing many, many things. Twentieth century! This is his invention.”

Burke laughed.

The desk clerk scowled. “Your friend, he knows about Tesla.”

“Does he?” Burke asked.

“Yes, he gives speech! At the symphony.”

Burke didn’t know what he meant. Then he understood. “Symposium.”

“Yes! First, he studies at the Institute-”

“What institute?”

“Am I talking to wall?” Milic demanded, as if Burke were a student with attention deficit disorder. “Tesla Institute! After this, he goes to symphony, and gives speech!”

They were interrupted. First one guest, then another, came to request their keys. No card keys here. These were in the old European style, big keys attached to metal eggs so heavy that only the rare guest would be tempted to take his key along.

“So this symposium,” Burke asked. “Where was it?”

But the spell was broken. Either the twenty euros had been used up, or Milic had decided that he’d said enough. He averted his eyes and began stacking some papers into a little pile. “More, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe in the cafe, someone knows.” He shrugged. “Also there is the possibility of Ivo.”

“What’s Ivo?”

“Doorman. He is back tomorrow.”

The bar was empty except for two women perched on stools at a tall table. A girl with spiky hair and bad skin stood behind the counter, rinsing glasses. She did not remember anyone named d’Anconia or, for that matter, an American by any other name. “I’m here in the day,” she told Burke. “Tooti, she’s coming at seven. You could try her.”

Burke said he would, then asked if there was an Internet cafe in the neighborhood.

She lit a cigarette and gave him directions.

The Web was fantastic. He’d arrived at the Sava Cafe with nothing more than a name. And now, barely an hour later, he knew enough about Nikola Tesla – thanks to Google and the Wikipedia – to pass a third-grade Serbian science class.

A Serb born in Croatia, Tesla was a prodigious inventor, responsible (as the desk clerk had claimed) for alternating current, the Tesla coil, and scores of other devices. His patents numbered in the hundreds, and he was obviously something of a cult figure – and not just in Serbia. Tesla enthusiasts considered it a travesty that he had not been awarded the Nobel Prize, calling him “the Leonardo of the twentieth century.”

After moving to the United States and working with Edison, Tesla became a rival to the American when he invented and championed alternating current, rather than the direct current that Edison favored. With the backing of the Westinghouse Corporation, Edison mounted a propaganda campaign to make alternating current appear dangerous. Dogs and cats, and even an elephant, were electrocuted onstage to make the point, while Edison asked men in the audience if they wanted their wives to risk their lives every time they plugged in the iron.

Edison’s argument was false. Not only was Tesla’s alternating current safer than Edison’s direct current, it was more efficient and easier to deliver. Eventually, and with the backing of J. P. Morgan, the nineteenth century’s quintessential robber baron, Tesla’s technology won out.

It was the Serb who lit up the towns around Niagara Falls, and who won the contract to illuminate the “White City” at the Chicago World’s Fair.

In his heyday, Tesla lived in New York and was considered a trophy guest at the lavish gatherings of the gilded age. He partied with the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, and the Rockefellers, and hosted them and their guests in his Manhattan laboratory. A close friend of Mark Twain’s, he astonished the writer and his friends with demonstrations worthy of Dr. Frankenstein. While Twain and other guests watched in amazement, Tesla would stand on an improvised platform, wreathed in lightning. He’d pace the lab with tubes of light that seemed to have no power source, while juggling balls of fire that left no marks on his clothes or skin. Where Edison was a chubby plodder, who wore his wife’s smocks while he worked, Tesla was elegant and thin, a six-foot-six genius who performed his experiments in waistcoat and tails.

As quirky as he was brilliant, the inventor lived at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he dined alone each night in the Palm Room. There, he engaged in a ritual that involved a stack of linen napkins, with which he wiped clean every piece of cutlery, china, and glass on the table. That done, he could not eat until he’d calculated the cubic capacity of each vessel and, by extension, the volume of food before him.

It occurred to Burke that the Serb was a classic victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

And hypersensitive, as well. According to Tesla’s biographers, the inventor had almost supernaturally acute hearing. He could hear a watch ticking several rooms away, and could sense a thunderstorm in another state. Acutely sensitive to pressure, he could not walk into a cave, through a tunnel, or under a bridge without suffering.

He was so plagued by the city’s vibrations, by the passing of trucks and the rumble of trains, that the legs of his table in the Palm Room, like those in his laboratory, had to be sheathed in rubber. Sunlight pressed down upon him, and his vision was disturbed by flashes of light and auras that no one else saw. He counted every step he took, organizing the world around him in multiples of the number nine. He had a violent hatred of pearl earrings, and was horrified by the prospect of touching another person’s hair. But…

It was Tesla, rather than Marconi, who first patented a method for wireless broadcasting, and it was Tesla who harnessed the power of Niagara Falls. He worked for years on ways of transmitting energy wirelessly across great distances, and claimed that he could capture electricity – free energy – from “standing waves” at the earth’s core.

He died in 1943, while the Second World War was at fever pitch in Europe. At the time, he was living in reduced circumstances at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. According to reports, two FBI agents and a nurse were present at his death. When the inventor’s relatives came to the hotel, they found that his safe had been drilled and his papers removed. Soon afterward, the Custodian of Alien Property seized virtually all of Tesla’s papers, though the Custodian’s jurisdiction was questionable since Tesla had been an American citizen for decades. Those papers, which required a boxcar to transport, remained in limbo until the end of the war, when the American government uncovered Nazi documents in the course of an intelligence operation, code-named Paper-clip. The Nazi papers showed that German scientists and weapons designers had been developing new and frightening weapons based on Teslan principles and inventions. In 1945, Tesla’s papers were officially classified Top Secret and taken to Los Alamos.

Eight years later, a nephew of Tesla’s succeeded in gaining the release of some one hundred fifty thousand documents, and this trove became the founding archive of the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.

But the bulk of Tesla’s papers (including most of the scientific notebooks, research papers, and experimental notes) remain classified to this day. Since Tesla was such a cult figure, many researchers had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for documents concerning the inventor and his work. All had been rebuffed. On one website, a scientist wrote that while working at Los Alamos, he was permitted to view diagrams and papers concerning the hydrogen bomb, but not a page of Tesla’s work.

What could this scientist, who died more than sixty years ago, have to do with a bank account in the Channel Islands? For all Burke knew, Tesla was just a hobby, an interest of d’Anconia’s that was relevant to nothing and to no one. D’Anconia might just as easily have been interested in orchids. Or UFOs. Or Civil War reenactments.

Only he wasn’t. He was interested in Tesla.

Burke decided to take a break. Got to his feet and stretched. A girl with multiple piercings and blue streaks in her hair brought him a coffee that was strong and sweet. A pair of Israeli backpackers sat down at the terminal next to his.

Returning to his chair, he typed: “Tesla Symposium Belgrade 2005.” Twenty-three hits, most of them in a language he didn’t recognize. (Presumably Serbian.) But there were a couple in English.

The first was the home page for the Museum of Nikola Tesla, which contained a link to the symposium’s site. He wrote down the museum’s address, 51 Proleterskih brigada Street, then took the online tour, which guided him from room to room through the museum. Along with Tesla’s ashes, personal effects, and correspondence, there were many photographs, original patents, and models of his inventions. The museum also housed the Tesla archives, which included the documents his nephew had obtained from the U.S. government.

He returned to the Google list and clicked on the site “2006 Tesla Symposium, Belgrade,” which included details of the program. He scanned through, looking for d’Anconia’s name.

And so on. Looking through the list, the vocabulary alone drove home just how far out of his depth Burke was. Nucleons, flux intensity, Fourier frequencies, “magnetostatic scalar potential.”

And no “Francisco d’Anconia.”

He didn’t get it. He could hear the desk clerk’s voice, indignant that Burke had never heard of Tesla. But d’Anconia had. “Your friend – he gives speech! At the symphony.”

Then Burke had one of those realizations that begins with duhhh. He wasn’t looking for “d’Anconia.” He was looking for the man who had used that name as an alias, a joke, or an homage. If the guy he wanted to find had given a speech at the symposium, then he was one of the scientists listed in the program.

Burke sat back and sighed. Geomagnetic decay? Scalar weapons? This was not at all what he had in mind when he came to Belgrade, tracking “Francisco d’Anconia.”

He printed a copy of the symposium’s program, logged out, paid for the time he’d used, and began walking back to the Esplanade.

He was trying to get his head around it.

One point he had to give to Kovalenko: Some of Aherne’s clients were a little dodgy. He was pretty sure one guy was running an online poker game. That was illegal in the States but not in Europe. He suspected that another client was bootlegging Microsoft DVDs. And there were dozens of customers engaged in “creative” accounting where taxes were concerned.

D’Anconia didn’t fit in with that crowd. In fact, Kovalenko had all but called him a terrorist.

But if d’Anconia was one of the scientists on the list, well, it just didn’t make sense to Burke. In his view, terrorists don’t think about things like “vector drag,” and they don’t present papers at symposia.

They just don’t.