Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

I had always been an inventor in New York, but curiosity alone had guided me through the early years: I pursued my flights of fancy and we waited for the telegrams from captains of industry. Now I was more cunning. I knew the places Pash wished to infiltrate, so I imagined what they wanted, and then I built it.

Sometimes I needed help. I went with Pash to a machinist’s shop in Boston. I handed the man twenty pages of plans. “Make this,” I said. We took the streetcar across town, to a professor’s basement office. “Let’s talk about the telegraph,” I said. I spent six days at the university library, digging through books. Sometimes an idea is like glimpsing a person before she disappears around a corner. You must still learn her full figure. I had no facility with written English but there is a universality to numbers, diagrams, formulas. When I did not understand the text I called a lecturer, a Nobel laureate. I had spent almost a decade in the United States, collecting brilliant men’s business cards, tossing them on my desks. The Romanian cleaners had arranged them in a shoebox, alphabetically. When I wanted to know about the railway, I called a senior engineer at Union Pacific. When I wanted to know about aeroplanes, I called MIT’s dean of aeronautics. When I wanted to know about the underlying mechanics of the universe, I called Albert Einstein. I called Griffiths from Douglas Aircraft and Lieutenant Groves from the navy.

I sat with Pash in restaurants, opening the molten cheese on French onion soup. “It’s a sure thing,” I said.

Pash batted away a neighbour’s cigarette smoke. “I’ve heard that before.”

After that first night, he never discussed his years away. He was concerned with the present, he said. But I counted his changes. A tan around the neck and at the wrists. Buttons, not cufflinks, at the sleeve. He was gaunter, a little too thin for that great old suit. Yet there weren’t any ghosts in his eyes. His hands were steady. His briefcase, clean and unbattered, held the same amount of papers.

I had continued to meet with Karl and Karl, every two weeks, at the little diner. “Tell the men at Mud Tony’s anything they want to know,” Pash said. He had bigger fish to fry than the ones sizzling in L’Aujourd’hui’s kitchen. He was hunting whale. So I sat with the Karls in our customary stall, sipping customary spirits. Despite my protestations, they believed they needed vodka to keep my tongue loose. Yet the other Lev, my bald-headed adversary, did not reappear. I asked Pash if he knew him — described his face, his clothing, the way he carried himself.

“No Lev I know,” Pash said.

“Is he called something else?”

Pash changed the subject. Professionally speaking, he and the Karls were distant cousins. “They’re parentheses,” he told me, “irrelevant.” Yet within these parentheses, I had knocked a man down and seen the blood run out of his head. I hadn’t told anyone. Neither the Karls nor Pash. It haunted me and yet I did not air my actions. A private killing, an exchange between two men, high on the eighth floor.

I did not know who exactly gave Pash his orders, only that with him I could do anything. I didn’t need to be afraid. When I complained that the other operatives got me drunk, that I left my meetings feeling sickly, strings cut, he brought me a pound of butter.

“Eat this,” he said, “before.”

“Eat this how?”

“With a spoon. Or a knife.”

I took out a teaspoon. “All of it?”

“It is the antidote to vodka,” Pash said. “A trade secret.”

Every two weeks, I ate a pound of butter. I drank and stared Karl and Karl full in their eyes and felt like my own man.

After a month we went back to Boston, back to the machinist’s shop. He showed us the things his crew had made for us: two heavy archways, almost as wide as the garage, packed with electrical components. I walked around them with voltmeters, checking the circuits.

“What they do?” asked one of the men, thin as a pair of long-necked pliers.

“Metal detector,” I said.

“What for?”

Pash handed the boss a banker’s cheque. “Gangsters.”

We loaded the metal detectors into a truck and brought them back to New York, installing them in a warehouse near the Curtiss airfield. We hired actors: men in grey suits and fedoras, packing unloaded heat. We hired catering: rib-eye steaks and layer cake, wardens’ food. The officials from Alcatraz came in black limousines. They had sinewy faces and unforgiving handshakes. They grazed the table of red meat and angel food.

“Behold!” I said, as if they did not know what they had come to see. The arches sat like ancient monoliths. The men from Alcatraz had crossed ten states to examine these inventions, to gauge their utility for the country’s first super-prison. Now they folded their arms. Pash signalled the actors, our fake gangsters, to walk through the portals. They strutted and sneaked. They couldn’t help it — this was their best gig in weeks. Some of them carried no weapons and passed harmlessly through the gates. But the ones with bulges in their suit jackets, secrets tucked behind belt buckles, set off alarms. Their gunmetal tickled the electromagnetic fields.

The wardens wanted to try. They handed me their belts, their watches, their eyeglasses. “Wedding rings, gentlemen,” I said, offering my cupped palm. Like obedient school children, they gave up their treasures. Off they went, through the arches, without a sound. I nodded to Pash, who followed.

With him, the alarm went off. He did not smirk. He said: “So you see.”

“We see,” replied the men from San Francisco, eyeing him.

Their decision came by telegram, a week later. Alcatraz would have Theremin’s magic metal detectors. An arch at the cell house, an arch at the dock, an arch outside the dining hall and another straddling the labourers’ main access path. We went back to the machinist’s shop and this time we paid in advance.

Even as this was happening, we met with the air force, with Boeing, modelling new versions of my altimeter. Their decision came by telegram. The U.S. Army Air Corps would have Theremin’s magic aeroplane dial. We met with fire departments about fire alarms, railroad officials about railroad signalling, telegraph bigwigs about my ideas for intercity typewriters. I called up the office of Henry Ford, told them that their cars could have automatic indicators for dwindling batteries, engines needing oil. I had plans for naval signalling, wireless microphones, policemen’s private radio sets. As I sketched science, Pash pushed paper, and everyone invited the Russians into their drawing rooms.

FROM THE SKY, CALIFORNIA made me think of a vast, intricate map. A map at seventy percent scale, and me high above it, holding binoculars. It was my first flight and I felt a combination of terror and elation. The reason for the elation was obvious: seventeen thousand pounds of metal, lifted into the air, the earth-bound gone flying. I have rarely felt more alive than in that dizzy moment when the aeroplane’s wheels left the ground, as if the aluminum craft had simply been picked up. But I was also filled with an engineer’s trepidation. Here was a device of great intricacy, a thousand screws, and any number could be loose. In the great fraternity of engineers the shameful central secret is this: we err. We botch and fumble. These words seem funny, harmless, but our failures are not always trifling. There are mistakes we never forgive.

My aeroplane flew from New York to San Francisco and did not crash. I landed and staggered from the genius machine and there was a man with a sign, THEREMIN. “Welcome to California,” he said. He handed me an orange. As I took the gift I was caught by an unexpected memory: the clear, clear gaze of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (may his memory be illuminated), on the day that we met. I cradled the orange in my right hand. My mission continued.