Thunder City

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Why can’t you drive it yourself?”

  “You won’t need a cornfield with the steering wheel I designed,” Wills said.

  Ford said, “Just shorten the wheelbase. I can use the material you’re wasting to build another car.” To Malcolmson: “I’m a little too old to go haring off across the countryside in a speedster.”

  “I never knew you to back away from a challenge for fear of your skin,” said the coal merchant.

  Henry Ford’s deep-set eyes retreated farther into their sockets. “I’ll race the blasted thing.”

  “A logo is a trademark,” Wills persisted. “You put it on the front of the radiator to tell the world the automobile is a Ford. I’ve always admired the F in your signature. This is it, isn’t it?” Producing a yellow pencil from a row of them sticking up out of the watch pocket of his vest, the designer bent over the blueprint and wrote out the capital with a curlicue on top.

  Ford stared at it for a long time. The corners of his lips tugged out in a constipated smile. “It’s a good thing I don’t have any money. You could forge my signature on a check and clean me out.”

  Wills added the remaining three letters of Ford’s name in simple script. The logo was legible and distinctive.

  “I like it,” Ford said. “Now all we need is an automobile to stick on the back.”

  Further conversation broke off as a pair of extraordinary figures strode in from the loading dock, bellowing loud enough to drown out the din of automobile construction. Outfitted identically in boaters and red-and-white-striped blazers over white flannels, the hefty newcomers put Harlan in mind of a pair of hot-air balloons broken away from the fairgrounds. He wondered if they were a vaudeville act out drumming up interest in the bill at the Lyceum Theater until he recognized the round, congested faces of the Dodge brothers, John and Horace. Both sported beer stains on their shirts. The smells of sweat and stale alcohol preceded them like a hot wind.

  “What the hell is that fellow Ford doing with our dainty little engines?” John shouted to no one in particular. “We didn’t sell them to him to go banging on ’em with hammers and shit.”

  Horace, not quite as loud—the way a clanging fire bell was not as loud as a steam whistle—agreed. “I think we ought to take ’em back and sell ’em to William Jennings Bryan. We’ll tell him they’re made of silver.”

  Both men guffawed, far beyond the boundaries of the joke. They were obviously drunk and in a bullying mood. To be in such a condition at that hour suggested that they had been at it all night. Harlan, intrigued despite himself to see how Ford’s very different character would handle them, braced himself for anything. Even the burly Dodges were no match for the laborers present; but would Ford’s people act fast enough to spare their lanky employer a blow from a hamlike fist? Then there was the fact that the brothers seldom ventured out unarmed. Harlan was not so curious he wanted to see his investment go up in gunsmoke.

  Ford put his hands in his pockets. “What brings you boys out so early? I heard you never rolled out of bed before noon on a Monday after a holiday.”

  “We ain’t been to bed since before the Fourth,” said John, struggling to keep his body from pitching forward when his feet stopped moving. “Anyway, we didn’t want to miss the ball game. Yeager’s pitching against the Orioles. We got a hundred bucks on a shutout.”

  “You’re early. The game isn’t till afternoon.”

  Horace said, “John figured we ought to come see what you’re doing to the good name of Dodge. Also we want to buy back an engine.”

  “What for?”

  “We’re getting into boating,” John said. “Pete Studer’s building a racing yacht for Olds. We want one too, only we want a good engine.”

  “What’s wrong with the ones at your plant?”

  Horace said, “We want your plugs. You know all about racing, so we figure your equipment’ll give us a leg up on Olds. We’re looking to make forty miles an hour on Lake St. Clair.”

  C. H. Wills, the engineer, laughed shortly, a dry cough. “You’d be lucky to find an automobile that will go that fast, let alone a boat. It can’t be done.”

  But Ford took a hand out of one of his pockets and rubbed his chin. “Forty, you say?”

  “Damn right.” Horace belched, and Harlan backed away a step. “We got the best machine shop in the country. We won’t settle for anything less than the fastest boat.”

  “Take your pick,” Ford said. “I won’t accept a cent for it.”

  Malcolmson, Scottish to his soles, made a hoarse noise without any amusement in it. “Henry, I must say I’m glad to see you’re so comfortable with my money you’re willing to throw it away.”

  “Not a cent,” Ford repeated. “Just don’t be stingy about telling people where you got the plugs. Mention Ford when you win your first race.”

  “What if we lose?” Horace sounded sober suddenly. Harlan wondered, not for the first time, if there wasn’t some method to the brothers’ buffoonery.

  “No Ford machine ever lost a race.”

  “You’re out of your element, Mr. Ford,” Wills said. “A lake isn’t a road. The best automobile engine in the world can’t compete with the second-best boat engine. The engineering’s different.”

  “Tell John and Horace all about it. You’re helping them build it.”

  Wills’s forehead creased. “Don’t I get a choice?”

  “You know you want to do it. I’m just saving time.” Ford looked at Malcolmson. “Are you happy, Aleck? There are two races for you.”

  Malcolmson looked at Couzens. The latter’s bulldog face was blank for a moment. Then he nodded. The coal merchant nodded in his turn at Ford. “It’s all right if you don’t place first. Just don’t come in last.”

  Ford was unsmiling. “If I don’t do the one I’ll do the other. That’s how it’s been since I left the farm.”

  chapter nine

  The Man Who Invented the Automobile

  ABNER CROWNOVER II LOATHED the theater. He found the seats tortuously uncomfortable both to his own unpadded frame and his wife’s lumbago, despised the chattering legions of society who filed in during the overture to make sure they were seen in their shirtboards and sparklers, squirmed before the overripe emoting onstage, and hated the interminable wait in the grotesque lobby while his carriage was brought around for the trip home; which was the time when every bore he had ever met during his dealings in Detroit saw fit to approach him and discuss Washington, business, the morass in South Africa, and everything else under the sun except the play they had just seen. But he never hated it quite so much as when he made out the check each spring to reserve his season box at the Lyceum. His signature was an angry slash like a saber wound.

  It was important to the continued well-being of Crownover Coaches that its owner be seen in public, particularly at such self-indulgent spectacles as concerts and the theater; in the past his absence might suggest that the company was in trouble and required his presence around the clock, but since his fiftieth birthday it could as well be construed as evidence of illness. Either situation made stockholders equally nervous and caused customers to look to competitors for large orders that might be delayed by uncertainty at Crownover. Abner Ill’s inability to guide the company decisively was well known throughout the industry, and there was little confidence that Edward possessed the vision and fortitude necessary to succeed his father effectively. In weak moments, when he allowed himself to contemplate a rosy impossibility, Abner II wished he had a son who combined his own intelligence with Abner III’s loyalty, Edward’s attention to detail, and Harlan’s constancy to his principles, however crackbrained. He had long since decided that he could never retire. It occurred to him more and more of late that he must never die, lest the firm to which he had sacrificed his youth and his happiness follow him into the grave. Now, sunk back into the springy plush of the Crownover Caruso opera coach, he looked up at the 150-foot towers supporting powerful arc lights that sprayed their illumination mainly in
to outer space. They were a civic improvement intended to celebrate the ascendancy of electric light over the gas lamps that lined the streets only two decades ago, but the fixtures were placed so high their halos extended no lower than the lofty roofs of the Majestic and Hammond buildings. He identified with the preposterous installations, things wasting their energy against a vast darkness.

  No conversation passed between him and Edith during the trip from the house on Jefferson to the theater on Randolph Street. They seldom spoke these days except to exchange necessary information. Even small talk had become too much of a burden between two people who in the end had proven to have nothing in common beyond their children. The children themselves, disappointments to their father, had in fact driven the wedge so deep their parents no longer stirred themselves to peer across it. Abner blamed Edith for the way his offspring had turned out. It was not that he saw anything radically wrong with the manner in which she had reared them (although he suspected she had not disciplined them often enough or severely enough when they were small, undermining the example he had attempted to set); he had concluded that her aristocratic blood, which he had thought to be an asset, was too anemic to offset the weakness in his own, exemplified by the wrongheadedness of Abner I. And so the responsibility lay with him, the second Abner, who would have done better to wed himself to the milk-fed daughter of some obstinate rich German farmer from the wilderness north of Michigan Avenue. Whenever he came to that juncture in his reverie, his rancor receded, and he remembered something of the tenderness he had felt during his courtship, without precisely feeling it. It was the ghost of an emotion long dead, arrived too late and in a form too insubstantial to join the parallel courses their lives had taken, headed inexorably in the same direction without intersecting.

  When they entered their box, he was aware of heads turning their way from the orchestra, saw the glint of opera glasses trained upon Edith’s pearls and the rapidly wasting face of America’s Coach King. There was a time when he had enjoyed the attention, accepting it as approbation of his early success, like the huzzah of the people on the pavement when a native conqueror appeared on the balcony, but of late he knew they were merely measuring the evidence of his physical deterioration against the standard of the young genius of local legend. Had he seen the future, he would have purchased every copy of that damned book and burned it, or sued its author, whom he had never met, when it was still in galleys. No mortal man could be expected to compete with his own shade, pressed like a blossom between yellowing pages. He held Edith’s chair and sat down quickly as soon as she was seated.

  The play was dreary, a faded tenth carbon of a farce that had been derivative when it premiered on Broadway, performed by a stock company whose male lead could not have obtained a nonspeaking role as a servant in the original production. The ingenue was too old by ten years and too hefty by twenty pounds for her part, the visiting English duchess dropped her g’s like a scullery maid from Columbus, and the antagonist, an oily Spaniard with Louis-Napoleon imperials who had successfully passed himself off as an international banker in order to cheat the daughters of society out of their dowries, would have been arrested on sight as a suspicious person by the dullest of Irish policemen pounding a beat on East Lafayette. Abner excused himself during the second act, an annoying symphony of shrill voices and slamming doors, to purchase an orange juice from the concession in the lobby. Behind him the quilted double doors drifted shut against a wave of hysterical laughter from the audience. He wondered sourly if these were the same fools who bought the vehicles he built, and if it mattered whether he paneled them with the finest mahogany or that warped offal those charlatans in Nicaragua had tried to palm off on him last spring.

  The orange juice had been an excuse; it was the worst thing he could pour into his tender stomach. But because he hated to lie, even to Edith, he purchased a glass, intending to stand around holding it for the satisfaction of ushers before returning to the purgatory of the auditorium. He might as well have drunk it for all the good abstaining did his ulcerated tissue. When he turned, James Aloysius Dolan was lighting a cigar in front of the door to the gentlemen’s lounge.

  The big Irishman wore evening dress, the tails of which alone contained enough material to make a full coat for a man of Abner’s narrow build, with diamond studs in his starched shirtfront and a brilliant as large as a marble on the ring finger of his left hand. Abner, who detested diamonds on a man, particularly when that man happened to be Jim Dolan, thought of a fat crow with a glittering morsel in its beak. There was no escape. He cursed his timing. Even a dismal play was preferable to his present company.

  Puffing up a thick blue fog, Dolan deposited the match in a bowl of white sand on a plaster pedestal and came his way, swaying from side to side like a frigate under full sail. He smelled of good whiskey; Abner suspected he was carrying a flask. He himself had not touched alcohol in ten years. The fumes alone were enough to pucker his insides.

  “What a pleasure, Mr. Crownover. I haven’t seen you since Bill Maybury cut the ribbon on the County Building.”

  “Dolan.” Abner didn’t offer his hand, and was satisfied to note that it did not seem to be expected.

  “Noisy sort of a play.”

  “Yes.”

  Dolan smiled behind his whiskers. “I’m getting on. Time was when I could empty a keg and then sit through nine innings at Bennett without getting up once to drain the pickle.”

  Abner made no response. The big man’s shanty Irish past to the contrary, he had spent enough time in society to know when he was being vulgar. For some reason he was taking pains to point up the difference in their stations.

  “Charlotte’s determined to win me over to the legitimate theater,” Dolan went on. “The Temple’s where I go to enjoy myself. I saw Eva Tanguay dance last year. One of these times she’s going to bust a seam.”

  A fresh burst of laughter came from the other side of the wall.

  “Is your wife with you?” Abner asked.

  “No. One of the children is ill.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Too much spun sugar on Independence Day, I suspect. How are your sons?”

  “They’re well. Edward’s wife may be expecting.”

  “Congratulations. I hope it’s a grandson.”

  “I haven’t given it much thought. Edith is hoping for a girl. She misses having a daughter.” His stomach twisted as soon as he said it. The infernal man’s obsequiousness had put him on his guard, causing him in the process to drop an older one he had taken for granted. He hadn’t spoken of Katherine in years.

  Fortunately, Dolan appeared to miss the reference. “I saw Harlan a few months ago. A strapping young man.”

  “I heard you met.”

  “He’s quite taken with automobiles.” The Irishman drew on his cigar, watching Abner.

  “He’s young.”

  “He’s about the age you were when you assumed control of Crownover, isn’t he?”

  Now they were coming to it. Abner fenced.

  “Not quite. Anyway, times were different.”

  “Noisy things, automobiles.” It was the same tone in which he had dismissed the noisy play. “I can’t remember the last time I spent an entire Sunday without one of them bucketing down my street, stinking and scaring the horses. Did you know thirty-eight companies began producing motorcars last year?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that thirty of them had already closed their doors.”

  “That would still leave eight, more than there were two years ago all told. Strick tells me another forty-seven are expected to enter the market this year. If this keeps up, you and I will be wading arse-deep in the blasted machines come election time.”

  “If you mentioned those statistics to Harlan, I shouldn’t wonder that he’s enamored.” He wasn’t sure he’d succeeded in keeping the irritation from his voice.

  “I did not, and would not have had I been aware of them then.
I’m not in the business of encouraging young men into foolish enterprise. There are as many spiritualists in Detroit as automobile manufacturers, and more opening up in storefronts all the time, offering to put gullible old women in touch with their departed husbands as easily as ringing up Central. No one I know in the mortuary business feels threatened. That’s because they recognize the difference between a genuine movement and a fancy of the season.”

  “I agree.” Why, then, were they having this conversation?

  He’d forgotten for the moment Dolan was a politico, and more than usually adept at reading minds. “Your son has invested five thousand dollars in Henry Ford’s latest motorcar venture. He borrowed it from Sal Borneo. Do you know the name?”

  “I do not. And I’d be interested in learning where you obtain your information.”

  “I’d be interested in learning where you plan to build your next plant, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Sal Borneo is a Black Hander, a wop hooligan. He does favors for people, that’s his business. He never says no.”

  “In that case, people must be asking him for favors all the time.”

  “You’d think so, only they don’t. They have to be willing to pay the price.”

  “A favor you have to pay for is no favor.”

  “Now you understand. The man came here twenty years ago with no English and nothing in his pockets. Now he hands out wads of gelt right and left without asking for collateral. Does that tell you anything?”

  “At the moment I’m more interested in hearing what it tells you.”

  “Borneo isn’t interested in money. It’s just a tool, like the pool cue he used to bash in people’s heads with. He doesn’t care any more about automobiles than you or I do. If he gave Harlan money, it means he wants Crownover Coaches.”

  Abner sipped from his glass for the first time. The acid burned his stomach, preventing him from laughing in Dolan’s face. The man’s oafishness made it possible to forget what a dangerous enemy he could be when sufficiently offended. “If that’s his purpose, he’ll have to aim higher than Harlan. My son has no control over the business.”