The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 27

Joe pulled Edison to the side of the tunnel and covered the dog’s ears. A subway train rattled by. Stripes of light from its silver cars passed over their faces. Then the train was gone, its red taillights fading into the tunnel’s darkness.

“That’s the last train for a while, buddy,” Joe said.

Edison wagged his tail. He didn’t worry about the trains. He was used to them.

Joe directed his flashlight at the rough stone ceiling. He was right under the diner next to the New Yorker Hotel, a restaurant called, as whimsy would have it, the Tick Tock Diner. He’d seen pictures online, and it was housed in a silver train car. He would feel at home there, but he could never visit.

Before they left the house, he’d pulled up the original blueprints for the New Yorker Hotel. It had been built in 1930 with coal-fired steam boilers and generators. Ironically, it ran on direct current — Edison’s invention instead of Tesla’s — and it had once boasted the largest private power plant in the United States. The building hadn’t been modernized to use alternating current until the late 1960s.

In Nikola Tesla’s time, the basement had been divided into four (green) large rooms — the east and west basements held the boilers and power plant that kept the hotel running. The north basement had stored coal. The south basement, by far the smallest, had held food and restaurant supplies. It wouldn’t have been easy for the inventor to come down and hide something without being observed, but he might have done it. Nikola Tesla had certainly managed far more impossible feats than that.

Joe’d found blueprints for renovations, too. The hotel had changed hands several times over the years and been renovated again and again, but he was hoping the basements and the steam tunnels that once brought heat into the building had been left untouched. If he was unlucky, the steam tunnels had been walled off. If he was lucky, they were still in use or had been closed off with airtight metal doors installed and certified by the city. Due to a Byzantine system of rules and regulations put in place to ensure fires were properly contained, those doors were everywhere in the tunnels.

He moved his headlamp around to find the entrance to the steam tunnel he’d seen on his maps. He had official modern maps, but much more useful was his growing collection of old ones. He had found or bought maps from the many different companies that had run subways, sewage lines, steam tunnels, electrical access, and all the other business the city kept buried beneath its feet. He’d been working off and on for months to consolidate his maps into a single real-time map that would tell him exactly where he could and couldn’t go in the hundred-plus miles of subterranean New York, but he felt as if he had scarcely begun.

According to his map, the tunnel in front of him ran only a couple of yards. Branching off the side was a door labeled Steam Operations. Bingo.

He lifted the heavy key ring attached to his belt. Golden light from his headlamp shone on dozens of keys. The original Mr. Gallo had been very clever when he wrote the contract guaranteeing him perpetual free access to everything under Manhattan, and he and his descendants had accumulated a lot of keys in the last century. Those keys were now in Joe’s hands.

He had long since organized them alphabetically by the kind of doors they opened. His fingers brushed through them until he got to the ones that opened steam tunnels. He pulled out a skeleton key with a square head and a long shank, a Con Edison master key for the branch of its company called Steam Operations. Con Edison had delivered steam to Manhattan since the tunnels were built. Its system had over one hundred miles of mains and service pipes and three thousand manholes, and the company still serviced some of New York’s most famous addresses, from the United Nations buildings to the Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With his keys, Joe had access to all of them — part of the reason he’d had to undergo such an extensive security screening before he moved into his underground house. He could break into a lot of basements.

He tapped the key thoughtfully. This particular Con Edison key had to be at least fifty years old. He suspected this was one of the last existing keys that would fit this lock. Not the very last key, of course. Even though it had been expressly forbidden, he’d had all the keys copied. He’d given the spare keys to Mr. Rossi to deposit in a safety deposit box. He believed in making backups.

He took a can of WD-40 (green, black) out of his backpack. He carried his most essential exploring gear — WD-40 (green, black), duct tape, dog treats, protein bars, a glow-in-the-dark tennis ball for games of fetch, water, maps, spare batteries for his headlamp, a Con Edison vest he’d stolen from the basement of the morgue, a change of clothes in case he fell in sewage, and a flashlight stun gun. He’d had to use every one of those items, although he didn’t like to think about it.

Zipped into the front pocket of his backpack was a new passenger — Nikola Tesla’s automaton. He felt the little guy ought to see where he’d led Joe. He’d waited long enough.

A couple of squirts on the hinges, in the keyhole, and on the key itself did the trick. The old tumblers turned over quietly, and he opened the heavy door. Back when this was made, things were built to last. Planned obsolescence had yet to become a watchword.

His headlamp revealed another tunnel, smaller than the last, so narrow he could reach his hands out and touch both sides, and so low the top nearly brushed the top of his head. The sides were painted white, but the bases of the walls had a gray patina of mold that he could smell from where he was standing.

The pipes that ran down the side of the tunnel were cold. Rust lay in drifts underneath them. They probably hadn’t been used in years, and they’d probably never been used in July. According to his map, they led straight toward the New Yorker Hotel.

Edison stayed right against Joe’s leg. He didn’t blame him. Not so long ago, the dog had been shot in a steam tunnel that looked much like this one.

He ran his hand down Edison’s back slowly, again and again, until he felt the dog relax. “It’s OK, boy. We’re safe in here. Nobody around.”

Edison cocked his head. He closed his eyes, as if listening hard. Apparently he was satisfied with what he heard, because he opened his eyes and wagged his tail.

Joe was pretty sure they were safe, too. During their long trek through the tunnels, he had neither seen nor heard anyone. He’d waited in alcoves and peeked out, looking for the telltale glow of a flashlight. He’d doubled back a few times, once going through a long, dark tunnel by feel, to make sure they weren’t being followed. Whoever had staked out the clock wasn’t behind them. He hoped.

He took off his headlamp and used the stun gun flashlight to light his way, in case he needed to use it as a weapon. He swept the light from side to side, illuminating nothing but peeling paint, rusty pipes, and mold. There weren’t even any rat droppings.

After another look around, he motioned for Edison to go first, then entered the tunnel after him. He carefully locked the door behind him. If anyone was following him, they wouldn’t get through that door.

Hopefully.