5

CHAPTER 9

St. Paul, Minnesota
Monday, August 17
1925

Dawn was a faint pearly pink in the east when Lefty emerged from the Macklin mansion's garage. He glanced swiftly around. Not much risk anyone would catch him this early. Even if someone came outside, the garage, a converted carriage house, was out of sight behind a stand of trees. Lefty started up the hill to the sniper's nest where he'd left his Gladstone bag.

Now came the tricky part.

It wasn't processing the nitroglycerin - although that was tricky enough. Waiting around, knowing what could happen if something went wrong while old, deteriorating dynamite sweated droplets into a yellow pool like dog piss, could make a man's nerves go twitchy. Just ask One-Eye Pete, the old miner who'd taught him how to do it.

Transferring the destabilized fluid into a vial small enough to attach unnoticed to a vehicle was no walk in the park, but wasn't so bad if you kept the stuff cool and didn't shake it or for God's sake drop it.

Even planting it nice and snug against the gasoline tank of Humphrey's sweet little Rolls Royce Landau Coupe wasn't difficult. Lefty could attach explosive devices to motorcars in his sleep.

No, the tricky part was creating a bomb he could detonate at the exact moment his target came within range, without having to close an electrical circuit to trigger it. It was the only way to insure an innocent by-stander wasn't hurt. Lefty was a man of few principles, but this one was set in concrete.

Those electro-whatsits waves Tesla always talked about would maybe someday turn all sorts of things off or on without a connecting wire, but right now the technology didn't exist. So, Lefty thought, you make do with what you got: electro-whatsits waves, egg shell thin glass, and highly volatile nitro.

Make do and wait for the target to drive off as he did every weekday morning. He should be leaving for the bank any minute now. Lefty made two last-minute adjustments to the device he'd…borrowed. Chances were good Tesla never even missed it. It never worked the way the inventor intended and Tesla probably would have given it to him if he'd asked. All things considered, it was better old Nik-o never knew what happened to it.

A low, tooth-vibrating hum silenced birds and started neighborhood dogs howling.

"Uh-oh," Lefty muttered. He hadn't anticipated stool-pigeon mutts.

The back door opened. A man carrying a briefcase clumped down the porch steps, pausing half-way as if wondering what had riled the dogs. After a moment, he continued down the path to the garage.

Lefty couldn't imagine what the gal had ever seen in the gaunt, stooped figure to make her marry him. Dollar signs, he supposed. Every woman he'd ever met was a gold-digger in one respect or another.

Humphrey started the Coupe, let it idle a few minutes to warm up, then backed the vehicle from the garage. Lefty turned a dial. The hum grew louder. Lefty's fillings resonated painfully with the oscillations.

The blast sent a mushroom-shaped fireball thirty feet in the air. The Coupe leaped upward also, then shattered into a rain of red-hot shrapnel. Anything more combustible than iron was incinerated before it touched the ground. Humphrey's body came down in three charred chunks as the aroma of roasted meat filled the air.

"Ho-o-oly Moses!" Lefty whispered. That last batch of nitro had some kick.

A door slammed. A woman screamed. With practiced movements Lefty shut down the device and crammed it into the Gladstone. One by one the dogs stopped howling. Lefty picked up his bag and sauntered down the hill, his mission completed. Damn shame about the Coupe, though.

… … … … … …

The Gustav sisters still kept to the kitchen at breakfast, well away from the dining table. For two days Christopher and Chance had endured the cold scrutiny of Mrs. Gustav and the curious glances other boarders shot their way.

'Still kind of chilly, isn't it?' Chance sent as they left the table. 'Maybe you shouldn't have said "floozy".'

'I think it was "whore house" that got me in trouble. I'm wishin' I'd thought of it weeks ago. I can't remember ever enjoying me meals as much as I have the last couple days with no girlies hoverin' over me.' Christopher sent Chance the mental equivalent of a grin. 'You know, 'tis almost like having a brother come stay with me.'

'I never had one,' Chance sent. 'At least, not that I know of.' He was going to miss Christopher when - if - they found a way to separate. They really needed to work on that.

They had just returned to the office when Lefty entered, as was his custom, without knocking. He carried a rolled newspaper, which he unfurled with a flourish.

BANKER KILLED IN MYSTERY EXPLOSION the headline read.

Chance and Christopher had already seen the story at breakfast, in two other twin cities' newspapers, but glanced at this later edition to see if anything new had been printed.

'I'd lay odds,' Chance sent as they scanned the article, 'our friend here had a hand in this.'

'No bet. Just the same, we'll not be squealin' on him. That's not how things're done here. Besides, if Lefty didn't pick him off, it was someone else who owed Hogan a favor. Now we owe him one, whoever it was. Althea's out of danger.'

Chance felt relief flooding Christopher's thoughts. That, and something else he could only define as warm and fuzzy. It made him think of Katherine.

"Thought that might interest one or the other of you," Lefty said.

They had taken Lefty into their confidence and told him about the two personas residing in Christopher's body. Several minutes passed before he had stopped laughing.

"You're serious, bub?"

"As a heart attack," Chance said.

"Like…Siamese twins? Only instead of two bodies hooked together, you were born with two minds? Sounds like a carnival act. Can you read each other's minds?"

"We weren't born this way," Christopher told him. "It just happened a few nights go."

"And it's not really mind-reading," Chance added. "It's more like using a two-way radio."

Lefty snagged Christopher's attention with a complicated description of his next project for improving the Model T, leaving Chance able to move their body unhindered about the office. Something had been nagging him, something he'd noticed, something important he couldn't quite put his finger on.

He paused beside the bookcase. Yeah. Something there. The morning he 'arrived', he'd noticed the variety of reading material Christopher had accumulated. They might not be blood kin, but they shared the same love of books. Something he'd seen shelved here had inserted itself into his subconscious, and was digging and scratching to reach the surface.

Christopher had divided his collection into fiction, non-fiction, and magazines. In the fiction section Chance found Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence next to a copy of Tom Swift and his Airship in a full color dust jacket. Moving on to non-fiction, he found bound years of "Engineering & Mining Journal". Several loose issues of "American Motorist". Mathematics texts. The Model T Ford Car, Its Construction, Operation and Repair by Victor Wilfred Page rubbed covers with Wings of War, an Account of the Important Contribution of the United States to Aircraft Invention, Engineering, Development and Production during the World War. The title was almost too long to fit on the cover of the book.

"This is some collection," Chance said. "Have you read them all?"

"Not even well started," Christopher said. "So many books, so little time"

Lefty looked so perplexed by this spoken exchange, both men had to laugh.

Then Chance spotted a small dark volume half hidden among the other, larger books: The Inventions and Writings of Nikola Tesla, compiled by Thomas Commerford Martin. This was it! The publication date was 1894, more than thirty years ago, but Tesla, the man who discovered and developed alternating current, was alive and well in 1925.

Chance thought he knew just about all there was to know about Tesla, thanks to Baptist's fascination with watches. He owned one which once belonged to the inventor, and never missed an opportunity to lecture enthusiastically on Tesla's accomplishments. A contemporary and rival of Thomas Edison, for a time Tesla was considered a genius. Later on, when his experiments veered into the realm of time travel, people forgot how much he had contributed, and called him a crack-pot. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, many of Tesla's theories and inventions related to "normal" science were being reexamined with eyes newly opened by technology and materials unavailable in the first half of the twentieth. The man's amazing gifts were not just acknowledged, but his inventions being put into operation.

"What do you know about Nikola Tesla," he asked Christopher.

"The inventor? Just what I've read in magazines. He's always publishing one article or another, telling all the other scientists how wrong they are about everything. If you ask me, he's crazy."

"Crazy like a fox," Chance said. "The man is so far beyond his time, it's mind-boggling."

"Mind what?"

"Bog - Never mind. It means incredible. Look, do you have any idea how we might contact him? If anyone can find a way to separate us, it's him."

"Not the foggiest."

"I do," Lefty said. "I know him."

"You do? How'd you happen to meet him?" Chance asked.

"Easy. Back when I was with Rickenbacker - "

"Rickenbacker? Eddie Rickenbacker? You know him, too?"

"Yeah, I know Eddie Rickenbacker, too. I worked for him."

Chance took a very firm grip on his incredulity. It didn't seem possible two such important historic figures could be connected to this one small man standing not two feet away.

"I told you - or maybe it was the other one of you." Lefty's voice dripped with the same skepticism Chance had just managed to throttle back. "Like I said, back when I was with Rickenbacker, Tesla was working with Budd's Manufacturing Company out in New Kensington. They mostly were working on auto bodies, but Tesla thought he could come up with a new type of motor, a gasoline turbine. Eddie sent me out to see if we could incorporate it into his automobiles."

"And could you?" Chance asked. He had no idea the World War One flying ace and famed racecar driver was also involved in automobile manufacturing.

"Nah. Should've worked, but it didn't. Maybe someday…." Lefty sighed and looked wistful. "Should've seen some of the stuff Tesla did do. He showed me a gadget he invented that generated radio waves. They're like sound waves, only…different. He put a water glass on a rock and we backed off maybe a hundred yards. Turned that thing on and ka-pow! Water glass shattered like someone picked it off with a Tommy gun. And you know Tommy guns ain't worth shit over fifty yards. He says the invention will bring world peace one day, if he can get Uncle Sam to buy it."

"Or world destruction," Christopher said, his voice very soft. "Chance…is that going to happen?"

"It's come close," Chance said. "But not so far. Listen, Lefty, is there any way you can contact Tesla, arrange a meeting with him?"