Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 24

It was dark and cold, and as Mike Burke walked back to the Esplanade, the snow was sifting down like flour out of the sky. The streetlights swarmed with snowflakes. Coming toward him, a woman in a long red coat walked with quick little steps, hunched against the cold.

The woman made him think of Kate and he found himself wishing that his wife was beside him. When the weather was like this, he’d put his arm around her, and pull her into the shelter of his shoulder. He could almost feel the warmth and weight of her. If she were here now, he would take her to one of the restaurants on the river, where they’d watch the light on the water, and drink red wine.

Snap out of it.

He turned the corner, and there was the Esplanade. He headed straight for the bar. Now that it was nighttime, half the little tables were occupied, with each one sporting a candle in a red glass. A brace of microphones on a tiny stage threatened live entertainment. He’d read in the guidebook that one of the musical specialties of Belgrade was a hybrid of techno and Serbian folk music called turbofolk.

The bar itself was more like a voodoo altar. A long blue mirror strung with Christmas lights looked down on dusty bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka. Plastic cacti glowed green amid miniature Chinese lanterns, pink flamingos, paper angels, and bobbleheads of Marilyn, Jesus, and Elvis. A woman filled four mugs of beer, then turned to him with an inquiring look.

“I’m looking for Tooti,” Burke said, barely believing the words.

The woman behind the bar was forty, or maybe even fifty, with thinning hair and an unhealthy pallor. “You found her.”

“There was an American who stayed at the Esplanade in January. The desk clerk thought you might have seen him. About my age.”

She arched a plucked eyebrow.

“He wore a hat,” Burke added. “When I saw him, he was wearing a fedora, or whatever they’re called.”

She smiled. “He’s gay, this guy?”

Burke shook his head. “No. I mean, I don’t know.”

Her lips came together in a pout. “Then what do you care?”

He thought about lying, but the effort was almost too much. So what he said was: “It’s kind of complicated, but… my name’s Burke. I’ve come a really long way. Y’know?”

She looked at him for a moment, and then she nodded, as if deciding something. When she smiled, Burke realized that she must have been a very pretty girl. “His name was Frank.”

Burke lit up with surprise. “You remember him!”

“We don’t get so many Americans,” she explained. “Mostly, they go to the Intercon.”

“You want a drink?” Burke asked. He put a thousand-dinar note on the table. She poured herself a tumbler of Johnny Walker Black. Took a sip and frowned. “You’re not a cop?”

Burke shook his head.

“You don’t look like a cop.”

“What’s a cop look like?” he asked.

“Big muscles and little piggy eyes.” She leaned on the bar. “Last week, two guys come from the RDB. They ask about this ‘Frank’ guy.”

“RDB?”

She rolled her eyes. “State Security.”

“So what did they say?” Burke asked.

“Who cares? No one tells them anything.”

“Why not?”

“These same pricks are here two months ago. Arrest nice girls.” She paused. “Okay,” she admitted, “maybe they do prostitution. But no trouble, ever. Good tips, too.” She looked Burke in the eyes. “You tip?”

Burke nodded. “Oh, yeah. I’m always tipping.”

“Good! Because here, most people don’t tip. I blame communism.”

Burke nodded in sympathy. Tossed another thousand dinars on the bar.

“Anyway,” Tooti said, “nobody tells these cops nothing.”

“Y’know, your English is really good…”

“I’m in Chicago for twenty years. West side.”

“Really?! And then… what? You came back.”

“My mother was sick, so…” She threw back her scotch, as if it were a shot of tequila.

“She get better?” Burke asked. “I mean, is she all right?”

Tooti tilted her head and smiled, surprised that he’d asked. “Yeah,” she said. “She’s fine now. They cut it out.” She paused. “Look, I don’t mind telling you about this Frank of yours, but don’t get excited. I don’t know much.”

“You know his name. You call him Frank.”

She shook her head. “He called himself Frank. He’s coming in, has a couple of beers. He’s not so friendly.”

“So what did you talk about?” Burke asked.

“I said, ‘Hi. I’m Tooti.’ And he said, ‘Frank.’”

“That’s it?”

Tooti nodded. The dinars vanished.

Burke felt as if he’d been had. “He talk to anyone else?”

Tooti shook her head. “No. And it’s too bad. Good-looking boy like that. Some people flirt with him – girls, boys – he’s not so interested.” She thought for a moment. “Most of the time, he’s writing.”

“Writing?”

“He has notebook,” she explained. “Sometimes, he sits where you are, and I look. He’s writing letters.” She frowned. “But not Aunt Mary ‘letters.’ Letters and numbers.”

“You mean, like-”

“Algebra. I think maybe he’s a student.” She tapped her glass with a finger and looked at Burke with an inquiring expression. He nodded and she poured herself another drink.

“He never talked about himself?”

She shook her head. “One time, he danced.”

“Danced?” Burke asked.

Tooti nodded. “This night, the band takes break. Not too much business. But Frank, he is getting loaded. So… he dances.”

“By himself?”

Tooti laughed. “Yeah! And this dance, it’s not the Twist, y’know? I mean, it’s not like any dance you’ve ever seen! This guy Frank, he’s kind of humming. Turning around. It’s like he’s floating. Very graceful, but… Anyway, he dances for a long time – five, ten minutes. After a while, the band stood there, watching him. Me, too.”

She looked at Burke. His expression told her that he didn’t know what to make of the story. She shrugged. “Anyway, when he stopped dancing, he gave me a big tip. Said he was going away.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No.” She tipped her glass back and downed the rest of her drink.

Burke turned to go.

“Oh,” she said. “Wait. One more thing. He spoke Serb.”

“No shit…”

“The night he was drunk. His accent was terrible. I asked him if he was with NATO – sometimes, the soldiers pick it up. He just shook his head. So I thought, maybe he has relatives here. But no. He said he learned it from books.”

“In school?”

Tooti shook her head. “No. He said he taught himself.”

Burke thanked her again and went up to his room, where he looked out the window at the snow. It was coming down harder now, turning headlights into opalescent beams as the cars crossed the city’s bridges.

He lay in bed, watching the lights of cars slide up the wall and across the ceiling. It was all so weird. Nikola Tesla and Ayn Rand, talking Serb and crazy dancing.

With a sigh, he rolled over and closed his eyes. Beyond the window, a car was stuck in the snow, spinning its wheels. Tell me about it, he thought.

Seeing Burke in the lobby the next morning, the desk clerk nodded toward the doorman, a little guy in a magenta uniform with gold braid and epaulets.

Burke walked up to him. “Ivo?”

The doorman turned, surprised that Burke knew his name. “Yes?”

“Mr. Milic said I should talk to you.”

“Yes?”

Burke gave a little wave to the desk clerk, who returned the gesture with a smile. “Yeah, he said you might be able to help me. I’m looking for a friend.” Burke handed him a folded ten-euro note. “An American guy. Stayed here a while ago. About my age. Black hair.”

“This is Frank.” Ivo buried the ten euros in his pocket.

“Right! Frank. You know what happened to him? You know where he went?”

“Sure, he goes to airport. Bye bye.” Ivo held the door open for an elderly woman in a fur coat. Touched his hat, and smiled.

“Before that,” Burke said.

“You mean here? In Beograd?”

Burke nodded.

Ivo shrugged. “Every morning, I find a cab for him. He goes same place.”

“Where’s that?” Burke asked.

Ivo shivered. Then he stamped his feet in the cold, and looked away in the direction of the river.

Burke reached deeply into his pocket, and came up with a handful of dinars. “It’s all there is,” he said, and tucked the money into the doorman’s coat.

“He goes to the Tesla Museum,” Ivo told him. “More than this, I don’t know.”

Burke paid the entrance fee to the pale man at the ticket desk, and grabbed one of the English-language brochures. He was about to tell the pale man that it wasn’t really the collection he wanted to see, but then decided it might put him in a better light to take a turn around the place.

So he spent half an hour wandering around the museum, and the truth was, he could have spent hours. Knowing what he did about Tesla, the displays – working models, photographs, correspondence, patents and drawings, even the personal effects – were fascinating. The inventor really had been a genius. It was hard to believe his name wasn’t a household word.

Eventually, Burke got back to the pale man at the desk. “Someone said there was a symposium here. A while ago.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone I could talk to about that?”

“Yes,” the pale man said in a whisper. After carefully moving the hands on a cardboard clock to indicate that he’d return in five minutes, he led Burke up the stairs and down a corridor to a small office.

“Here is Dragoslav Novakovic,” he announced, nodding to a man behind a desk. “He is director.”

Novakovic looked up.

“This gentleman is interested in symposium,” the pale man said. With a courtly bow, he stepped back, turned on his heel, and withdrew.

Novakovic gestured to a wingback chair that had seen better days. He was a tall man with a carefully trimmed Vandyke beard, horn-rimmed spectacles, and graying sideburns. “Please,” he said, exposing a gold-toothed grin. “I am Drago.”

“Mike Burke.” They shook hands, and Burke sat down. Behind the desk, a computer clicked and whirred.

“I’m defragging the hard drive,” Novakovic told him, with a gesture toward the clicking CPU. “This piece of shit – you’ll forgive me – he’s on his last leg.”

Burke smiled in a polite and understanding way, but the truth was he was nervous. He hadn’t thought ahead about what he was going to say. And this was d’Anconia’s turf. They spoke his language, and he spoke theirs. He’d even given a speech.

Novakovic saved him. “So! you’re interested in the symposium…”

“Yeah, well… yeah!”

“We have abstracts, of course, but I’m afraid they’re what you call ‘sold out’! Even my copy, he is sold out. But no worries. We have more coming, two weeks’ time.”

“Great.”

“I can send you a copy. But we have expenses.” He gave Burke a regretful smile. “I think it’s four hundred dinars – with postage – unless you wish express mailing. This is one hundred eighty dinars more.”

“By all means, send it express,” Burke said and, reaching into his pocket, removed a business card from his wallet. Pushing the card across the desk, he counted out the money and tried to think of a way to jumpstart the conversation.

Novakovic saved him again. “So how did you learn about the maestro?”

Burke blinked. “Well…,” he said. And then it came to him in a rush of inspiration. “I was flying to London, and I got to talking with the guy next to me – an American, like me. Turns out, he was on his way to Belgrade. Said he had to give a speech. I told him I was coming to Belgrade in a month or so, and he said, well, in that case, I should visit the Tesla Museum.” Burke laughed. “I said, ‘Who’s Tesla?’ And this guy, he couldn’t believe it. ‘The greatest inventor in history,’ he said. ‘That’s what my speech is about – there’s a symposium,’ he said, ‘and I’m speaking at it.’”

Novakovic nodded contentedly.

“Anyway,” Burke continued, “this guy fills me in about Tesla and-”

“Now you’re hooked!” Novakovic declared.

“Exactly! I am totally hooked.”

“And here you are!” Novakovic announced. “That’s wonderful!”

“The thing is,” Burke went on, “I was hoping to get in touch with him again, but… I lost his card.”

Novakovic winced in sympathy, then brightened. “But this is easy,” he said. “We have only a few Americans giving speeches, so…” He glanced at the monitor on his desk. “If you don’t mind – I think it’s almost done. Then I get list of participants.”

“That would be great,” Burke replied.

Novakovic put his fingers together in a sort of steeple. “So, what brings you here to Belgrade?”

“Oh,” Burke said. “That!” He paused. “I’m a photographer. I’m taking some pictures for Travel and Leisure.”

“Here? In Beograd?” Novakovic asked.

Burke nodded. “They’re calling it ‘the New Prague.’”

Novakovic chuckled. “Two years ago, Budapest was ‘the new Prague.’ Now, is our turn. Next year” – his hands flew into the air – “Skopje! After that, who knows – Tbilsi!” The Serb giggled merrily.

“It’s a beautiful city,” Burke said, running out of conversation.

“Yes, I think – ahhhhh! Now we cook with gasoline! I have liftoff.” The museum’s director hunched over the keyboard to his computer, and began to type. “I get participant list. We find your friend.” After a moment, he hit Return and the printer spewed out a list of speakers. Novakovic took a pen, and put a check beside half a dozen names. “These are the Americans,” he said, and handed the list to Burke.

Johnson

Dobkin

Wilson

Para

Federman

Schrager

Burke studied the names for a moment, then laid the page on the desk. Shrugged.

“You don’t recognize?” Novakovic asked.

“No,” he said. “One or two of them sound familiar, but… this was a young guy.”

It was Novakovic’s turn to shrug. “Dobkin and Schrager, they’re old men. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him, and he wagged his forefinger back and forth. “I don’t give up!” He got to his feet, and crossed the room. Opening the door, he stuck his head into the hallway, and rattled off an order in a language Burke didn’t understand. Then he came back to his desk, and sat down with a smile. “This is what I am all about – to put together a Teslan from here and a Teslan from there. This is our mission – a part of our mission – at the International Tesla Society.” Once again, he folded his fingers into a steeple, and sat back in his chair.

A minute ticked by, and then there was a knock on the door. A young woman came in with a manila envelope. Handing the envelope to Novakovic, she smiled at Burke and left the room.

The museum director reached into the envelope, and extracted a handful of black-and-white photographs. “This is banquet, I don’t know if your friend comes, but…” He pushed the pictures across the desk.

Burke studied half a dozen pictures before he found what he was looking for: d’Anconia, standing with a drink in his hand, in earnest conversation with half a dozen others.

“There he is!” Burke said, pointing to the handsome face of the man who had stood in his office in Dublin.

Novakovic leaned over for a look. “Which one? Him? But that’s Jack! Jack Wilson!”

“Right!” Burke said. “Jack Wilson.”

“I can tell you, it was such pleasure to meet him. We’re in correspondence for years. And, finally, this year I meet. It’s like seeing old friend.”

“That’s great,” Burke told him, “but… do you know how I can get in touch with him?”

“Of course!” the museum director told him. “Everything is on computer.” He tapped a few keys, and scowled. “Telephone number, I’m sorry, I don’t have. But e-mail, yes! Address, yes!” He shook his head, chuckling. “Jack Wilson!” The printer clacked and whirred and a moment later, Novakovic handed the printout to Burke.

Jack Wilson

P.O. Box 2000

White Deer, PA 17887

j_p482wl@midpa.net

“This is current?” Burke asked.

“Yes, of course! Is always same address. We are exchanging letters for years.”

“You think he’s in Pennsylvania now?”

Novakovic shrugged. “Yes, maybe. But from here, from Beograd, he goes to Lake Bled.”

“Is that around here?”

“No, no. It’s in Slovenia. Bew-ti-ful place. Mountains, lake, the old hotels.” He bunched his fingers together and kissed them. “Tito had villa there.”

“And you think maybe Wilson’s still there?”

Novakovic made a face. “No no no! He goes to see the notebooks. A few days, a week. Not months.”

“Notebooks?”

“Very special,” Novakovic said. “All of Tesla’s writings – the ones we know – we have them here. In museum. But not Top Secret writings. Your FBI takes these. Long time ago. Sends them on train to Los Alamos. Where they make bombs, you know? But Luka Ceplak, he has his father’s notebooks. Every day, his father is writing. ‘The maestro did this, the maestro did that’ – for thirty years. I have seen them with my own eyes. And sometimes, Tesla himself makes notes on page. This is what Jack Wilson goes to see.”

Burke nodded, but he must have looked puzzled because Novakovic continued. “Luka’s father, Yuri Ceplak, was lab assistant who worked with Tesla in New York, then in Colorado Springs, and then again in New York. He writes hundreds of notebooks! And now they are Luka’s. But will he give them to us? No! He’s stubborn old man. And lonely. Having notebooks, people come to see him. Sometimes, they bring presents.”

“Like what?”

“Vodka.” Novakovic frowned. “You know, your FBI, they lie about the maestro. They are saying he did not keep records, that he works in his head, that he makes no models, no step-by-step. So this is…” he smiled, rolling his hand through the air, searching for the word. “Bullshit.”

Burke laughed. “But this guy, Ceplak-”

“Yuri sees the war coming, and he comes home.”

“You’re talking about the Second World War.”

“Yes, of course. This war. Yuri brings notebooks home. War ends. And we have cold war. Notebooks are going nowhere during cold war.”

“They just stayed with his son,” Burke said.

“No, Luka goes to Australia. Notebooks stay here. Luka’s a physicist at university – in Perth, I think. He comes home only when his father dies. Sixty, sixty-five. Like that.”

“And after that?”

“He’s teaching in Zagreb. But that was long time ago. I don’t think he teaches now for ten years. So maybe we have different story.”

“What do you mean?” Burke asked.

“I’m hoping Luka will let us have the notebooks. I ask Jack Wilson to speak with him of this, but… I think Luka enjoys too much the visits he gets. People come to see notebooks, they take him to lunch, they say, ‘Luka this, Luka that… ’” The curator made a what-can-you-do gesture with his hands.

When Burke asked, Novakovic looked up the particulars for Luka Ceplak, and wrote them on the same sheet of paper with Jack Wilson’s address.

“This is so nice of you,” Burke said, as he got to his feet.

“No problem. You want me to send the abstract on Wilson’s speech? You’ll see, it’s very very interesting.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, I think so,” Novakovic told him. “But, I have to say, I don’t approve. And I don’t think the maestro would approve, either. Tesla, he was heartsick about Tunguska, so… all this talk about weapons? No. I don’t think so.”

Burke frowned. What’s a “Tunguska”? he wondered. “Is that what his speech was about?”

Novakovic nodded. “Yes. He’s talking about Tesla Cannon.” Seeing Burke’s puzzlement, Novakovic smiled. “Is particle-beam weapon. You know” – he made a gesture, his fists coming together and then exploding outward – “Pffft… gone!”

“Really?”

“Yes! Jack’s paper corrects maestro’s eigenvectors to get more accurate focus.”

Burke didn’t know what the museum director was talking about. The whole thing got wilder and wilder. Tesla Cannons? Why not? Beam me up, Scotty. He thanked Novakovic for his help, and made his way downstairs and out to the street. The main thing was, he had what he’d come for: d’Anconia’s name and address. He’d give the information to Kovalenko, and that would be the end of it.

His elation faded at the Internet cafe around the corner from his hotel. An e-mail that he sent to Wilson, with “Tesla” in the subject line, was bounced back almost as soon as he sent it. He checked the address that Novakovic had given him, but there was no mistake. And no Wilson.

Google wasn’t a big help, either. The search engine generated twenty million hits for “Jack Wilson,” which, Burke realized, was entirely predictable. Even so… He went through the first few tiers, and saw that most of the hits concerned a Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop, a fishing lure artisan in Montana, and some Indian who’d died in the thirties. He sighed.

He’d go through them all if he had to, but it didn’t seem a promising path. He clicked on “Advanced Search” and Googled “Jack Wilson” and “Nikola Tesla.” That took him to the page he’d already seen the day before, the list of presenters at the Tesla Symposium, 2005: “J. Wilson/ Stanford University/‘The Tunguska Incident: Calculating Vector Drag in Scalar Pair-Coupling.’” Tunguska.

Bingo!

Burke stared at the screen. Stanford.

If that was legit, knowing Wilson’s alma mater should be useful. There had to be databases you could get to – or at least his sister could. (Meg was a genius at data mining.) Stanford alumni groups, enrollment and graduation records, library cards – maybe even a published master’s or doctoral thesis if Wilson had been a master’s or doctoral candidate. And he must have been. Vector drag? Scalar pair-coupling? I oughta get a Nobel just for typing them, Burke thought.

His sister, Meg, worked for an environmental law group in Charlottesville, and she really knew her way around the Internet. Their dad, amazed by what his daughter could find out about something – or someone – joked that if Meg ever went over to the dark side, she’d make a great identity thief. Cool, she said. I want to be Moby.

But trying to find Jack Wilson via Stanford would take a while, even for Meg. Burke didn’t know when, or even if, Wilson had actually gone there. Or if he’d graduated. Or what his degree was in – if he had one. Physics? Math? Engineering? Science fiction? Stanford was a big place. “Wilson” was not “Heimerdinger.”

He remembered the three-by-five card that the desk clerk had given him. Taking it from his pocket, he found two numbers. There was no reverse lookup on the Internet that gave you international numbers. But he Googled “386 country code” and saw that Wilson’s first call had been to Slovenia. That was probably Luka Ceplak’s number at Lake Bled. The second call had gone to the Ukraine.

His next stop was anywho.com. When the site came up, he put “Jack Wilson” and “White Deer” in the slots and… nothing. He tried “John Wilson.” And again, nothing. The e-mail address had been a phony, and the street address wasn’t any better.

Burke was beginning to get a sinking feeling. Maybe “Jack Wilson” was an alias, too. Maybe “Jack Wilson” was a character in The Fountainhead – in which case, he could forget reopening Aherne & Associates. He tried again, using “Wilson” by itself. Maybe the guy has parents there, he thought. Or a wife, or a cousin – This time, he got a hit. Erica Wilson. Must be a small town, he thought. Only one Wilson.

So he checked. And, in fact, White Deer had a population of 362. What were the odds that White Deer’s only Wilsons, Jack and Erica, were related?

It cost a dollar a minute to make a telephone call from the Esplanade, so Burke bought a phone card at a kiosk near the river. He stood in a Plexiglas bubble that didn’t do much to inhibit the cold wind, and tried to figure out how the hell you made an international call. The Cyrillic lettering was not a big help. It took him four tries to get the call through and by that time, his hands had turned to stone.

“Hel-looooo,” crooned the voice that answered. An old woman, Burke guessed, from the timbre of her voice.

“Hi!” Burke shouted. “I’m trying to reach Jack!”

“‘Jack’? I think you have the wrong number!”

“Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait!” Burke pleaded. “I’m in a phone booth in Belgrade.”

“Lucky you. I love Maine!”

Burke took a deep breath. “Look,” he said, “I’m trying to get in touch with a man named Jack Wilson. I got your name off the Internet. You were the only ‘Wilson’ in White Deer, so… you know anyone named Jack Wilson?”

“There was a Hazel Wilson on Elm, but she’s dead, four years. Maybe five.”

“I’ve got an address,” Burke told her.

“Well, that’s the ticket!”

“Maybe not. It’s just a post office box.”

“Oh.” There was something cautionary about the way she said it.

“Excuse me?” Burke said.

“Let me guess… is that Box two thousand?”

Burke fumbled open the sheet of paper that Novakovic had given him. “As a matter of fact-”

“Well, that’s your problem right there. If it’s Box two thousand, that’s the prison. All the inmates get their mail there.”

Burke didn’t know what to say. “It’s a prison?”

“They call it a federal correctional institution. Most of us, though, we just call it Allenwood.”