His heart raced as he stepped into the basement of the New Yorker Hotel. He was somewhere new to him, something that didn’t happen often. He wanted to walk upstairs to the main lobby, take an elevator to the thirty-third (red, red) floor, and check out the room where his non-ancestor had died. He could eat at one of the hotel’s restaurants and have something unexpected. He could look out the windows from a distance and see new sights. He could do all those things, but first he was going to scour the south basement to find the clues Nikola Tesla had left.
This room wasn’t the south basement, so he hurried through it and into an empty corridor, shining his flashlight ahead. The lights were off, and he didn’t dare switch them on. Based on the dust on the floor, it didn’t look as if anyone had come this way in a long time, but he wasn’t taking any chances of being caught.
He found the south basement undetected, but the door was locked. He didn’t have the key for it — this was private property and not in any way related to the tunnel system. He had no access, no right to be here at all.
For a fleeting second, he regretted not being able to pick locks. Marty from the circus had tried to teach him, but he had never been able to get the hang of it. A shame Marty wasn’t here right now. The lock didn’t look complicated, and Marty would probably have opened it in a couple of minutes.
Joe peered through the dusty window set into the door. Inside the room various unidentifiable lumps looked like furniture covered with dusty sheets. A row of steel columns ran along the side. It looked as if no one had been in here in years.
What was he supposed to do now? Even if he could get inside, it didn’t seem likely that anything Nikola Tesla had left could still be around. Hundreds of people had probably tramped through this room, emptying it and filling it over the seventy years (slate, black) since Nikola Tesla’s death.
Joe pulled his phone out of its Faraday pouch and checked his GPS app.
40 45 10 73 59 38
He was in the right spot, and he was in front of the southernmost basement. He slipped his phone back into its pouch.
Nothing else for it — he had to get inside to look. He glanced up and down the empty hallway to be sure he and Edison were alone. He thought he saw a flash of movement behind them. He stared down the tunnel for several tense breaths, but nothing moved. It must have been a trick of the light.
“Back,” he told Edison. The dog moved back a few steps. “Farther.”
Edison gave him a dubious look, but he backed off. Whatever Joe was up to, he didn’t approve. Well, neither did Joe, but he didn’t see a way around it.
He broke the window with the butt of his flashlight. He carefully knocked the glass out of the frame, then reached his hand through the opening and unlocked the door from the inside. The bottom of the door scraped across broken glass as it opened.
“Stay,” he told Edison.
He swept the larger pieces of glass off to the side with his shoe, then took a dusty sheet off a nearby wardrobe. He folded the sheet into fourths and laid it on top of the smaller glass shards. That should keep Edison from cutting his paws. He swung the light back and forth, checking for pieces of glass on the floor. Not satisfied, he reached over and flicked the light switch.
Bluish fluorescent light flooded the room. A high-pitched whining accompanied it. Not everyone could hear faulty fluorescent light bulbs, but he could. Not really a good thing.
In the bright light, it was clear that he’d covered up all the glass.
“All right, boy,” he called. “But watch your step.”
Edison walked gingerly, as if he had understood Joe’s words. They were so attuned that he never really knew whether the dog recognized his commands or read his body language.
Joe wandered between wardrobes, desks, and tables. The furniture had been lined up in rows. The pieces had probably been expensive once, but when he looked under the covers, he saw burn marks, water stains, and missing legs. One table held a dusty wooden tool caddy. The furniture had probably been sent down here to be repaired long ago, but no one had ever gotten around to it.
Had these pieces been down here since Nikola Tesla’s time? No way of knowing. Based on the style, it could have come from his era, but it was unlikely the inventor would have hidden anything in it. Furniture could be moved or sold at any time. Even if Nikola had assumed his pigeon keeper would build the little man and understand his clues, he had to have known it might take time, perhaps years.
So, that left the floors, walls, and ceiling. He traced the cobwebbed rafters, looked down at the concrete floor, and over at the dirty gray walls. A lot to search.
He also had the number three (red) to contend with. The automaton had written a three (red) after the words south basement. He still didn’t know what the three meant.
He shimmied between furniture as he slowly paced the length of the room, shining his light on the dusty floor. Everywhere he looked was solid concrete. Nikola Tesla would have had to cut a hole in it with a saw — not easy to do undetected and hard to hide after.
Edison sneezed.
“Sorry about all the dust,” Joe said.
He looked up. Nikola could have tucked something up in the steel beams that ran the length of the ceiling, but that was always risky — the ceiling might be enclosed one day, a lot of them were. If so, the object might have been found in the construction process. Still, he filed the ceiling away as a possible hiding place, but he couldn’t look there now without a ladder. That left the walls.
The number three (red) flashed through his head. It wouldn’t have been easy to design the automaton to write. Every stroke required gears and actuators to turn exactly so. Nikola Tesla had given him a location in New York (the New Yorker Hotel), the room in the hotel (south basement), and the number three (red). Each designation was more precise than the last. That number had to mean something, and it probably meant something specific in the context of this particular room.
Nikola Tesla had been obsessed with the number three (red). In Joe’s research, he had discovered that Nikola often walked around a block three times before entering a building, that he ate his meals in a number of bites divisible by three, that he had to have eighteen (cyan, purple — an ugly color combination) napkins, and that he liked to stay in rooms divisible by three. At the New Yorker Hotel his room was on the thirty-third floor (red, red) and the room number was twenty-seven (blue, slate): both divisible by three (red).
Nikola Tesla hadn’t chosen the first numbers the automaton had written — they were the location of the hotel. But the last number might have been his to choose.
Joe turned in a very slow circle, counting things. Colors flashed through his head. His eyes stopped on the metal columns near the wall. Those were load-bearing. No one would ever remove them, not while the building was standing. They were the perfect place to hide something.
He counted forward from the door to the third column, then hurried through the stacks of furniture to reach it. Excitement bubbled in him, and he laughed. The sound was loud in the empty room, and he stopped immediately. He was supposed to be in stealth mode, but he still couldn’t suppress his excitement. If he found whatever might be hidden here, he would have solved a decades-old puzzle built by one of the most famous scientists and inventors in the world.
The third column didn’t seem to have any secrets. Looking for something attached to it or near it, he pored over every inch of its surface, from the point where it sprouted out of the dusty floor to the point where it disappeared into the cobwebbed ceiling. Nothing.
He counted columns from the back of the room and went to the third one. If that didn’t work, he was going to have to rethink his strategy. He started at the top and slowly worked his way down the steel, examining every fleck of peeling paint, every rivet. Maybe there was nothing there.