Summary

One of Tesla's housekeepers tells the story of the inventor and his "wife," a pigeon, in Chapter 5. Tesla lived in the Hotel New Yorker. He was famous for his inventions, including alternating current electricity, but had little money. All those years spent inventing were for the technology; he did not care about money. The housekeeper worked at the Hotel New Yorker and met Tesla in his 80s.

The narrator had a friend named Pia who was also a housekeeper at the hotel. Pia loved Tesla. She said he let companies and contemporaries steal his ideas and they got rich from them. Pia said that important people occasionally visited the man. One day, Pia said, Tesla told her he was inventing a death beam for the government. She said that while the United States was fighting the Germans, the FBI and war...