The Player

by Brad Parks

  “Sorry,” he said, then raised his voice slightly: “Come in.”

  It was Miss Fenstermacher. “I’m very sorry, Mr. McAlister,” she said. “But this needs your signature ASAP.”

  Vaughn acted like he was annoyed by the intrusion, but I suspected he had told Miss Fenstermacher to interrupt, just so I wouldn’t forget how Very Important he was.

  He took a cursory glance at the document, then signed it with a big, bold “Vaughn McAlister.” The “V” looked like a checkmark. The “M” looked like a bird about to take flight. The rest of it was just squiggles.

  “Thank you, Marcia,” he said. She smiled gratefully, then departed.

  We were interrupted long enough that Vaughn was able to resume the conversation at a spot of his choosing, which, as it turned out, was in a soliloquy. “You may not know this, but my great-grandparents actually lived here in Newark. They came on the boat from Ireland and lived in the North Ward. So this city is really in the McAlister bloodlines and we want to see it thrive again. McAlister Arms is going to be a model for what we can do all over Newark. And the best thing is, it’s really going to benefit everyone. We’ve got subsidized housing for low- and middle-income families mixed in with market-rate units. People from all walks of life will be able to live there.”

  Ah. So the crown jewel was also going to be capable of social transformation. It was nice to know his hyperbole had lofty goals as well. Now it was time to set the bait a little.

  “Wow,” I said, trying to sound gee-whizzish. “I was going to speculate whether McAlister Arms would be another South Ward Industrial Park—you know, something that doesn’t live up to its hype. But it sounds like you guys have thought of everything.”

  “McAlister Arms is going to completely revitalize this part of Newark,” he said. “And it’s going to be good for the city’s coffers, too. The city was willing to give us a ten-year tax abatement, but we insisted on only making it five. This is going to be a real ratables boon, and that’s only going to help the city in the long run—more taxes means better schools, better police coverage, a better city.”

  “And this thing is really going to happen?” I asked. “You’ve got all the approvals and financing you need?”

  He assured me he did, telling me in detail about how they were just finishing grading the property and were already moving materials on-site, and no one would be doing that if they didn’t have the project green-lighted. I had already known that—after all, I had seen all the construction trucks the day before—but I wanted to make him feel like the interview was going well, like I was the skeptic who had now been won over.

  I was really just setting him up for this question, which was meant to sound like a throwaway: “I don’t even want to know what you must be doing to get that site ready for construction. I know there used to be a bunch of factories down there. They must have left all kinds of awful stuff behind, huh?”

  I was hoping he would give me some kind of lead for what might be making these people sick. Something like, Oh, yeah, we found a big pool of hexavalent chromium just yesterday. Or, Yes, they used to make lead paint on that site.

  Instead, he just said, “Oh, well, that’s all been cleaned up already.”

  “It has? Because I heard there were some people getting sick down there. A whole group of folks from the neighborhood, actually,” I said, again as an aside.

  He absorbed this information, which didn’t seem to cause a single hair on his perfect head to move askance.

  “Well, they’re not getting sick due to anything coming from us. Our remediation process was overseen by a Licensed Site Remediation Professional in strict accordance with state Department of Environmental Protection standards. It didn’t even cost us or the city anything. The DEP has grants for brownfields redevelopment. For a private developer, the money can be a bit hard to get. But we had the city working with us. The DEP just loves public-private partnerships. They gave us six million dollars to clean up the site. That was done a while ago. We got it certified and everything.”

  I kept smiling like this was just more good news. But I was really a bit disappointed. If the remediation had been done a while ago, it meant McAlister Arms wasn’t the culprit. After all, I had gotten sick the night before. It had to be a pollutant that was still active in some way.

  I asked a few more questions about the development, mainly to keep my cover, then made a hasty departure. Vaughn was as charming upon exit as he was upon entrance. And he said that if I ever wanted to talk again, he would be happy to do so—assuming, of course, he could ever find the time.

  * * *

  It was just my luck that when I left the offices of McAlister Properties, it was three forty-five—which is known for, among other things, being close to four o’clock. And four o’clock, in Newark, meant Professor Rice’s teatime.

  Dr. Charles Rice was a history professor at Rutgers-Newark and was a much-loved institution in the city. Through some forty years at the university, he had perfected the art of pedantry—right down to the thick glasses and tweed jackets—and he delighted in the traditions and conventions of academia. He treated intellectual squabbles as if they just might lead to the Third World War if the wrong ideas prevailed, and he was known to weigh tenure proceedings with roughly the same seriousness as juries are instructed to consider death-penalty trials.

  But he remained on enough of a corresponding basis with the outside world that those of us who lived there could still talk to him. He was eminently quotable, a man who spoke not in clipped phrases or short sentences but in full, eloquent paragraphs. And he was an absolute font of information on Newark. For time-strapped reporters who lacked the patience or expertise for serious scholarly research—self, meet self—Professor Rice was a one-stop shop for all things Newark history. If anyone would know what factory had once been down in that part of Newark, and how it might still be poisoning people now, it would be Professor Rice.

  And, at four o’clock every day, he opened his humble office on the third floor of a growing-shabby university building to anyone who felt like visiting and served tea. It was his ode to eighteenth-century French salons, and he viewed it as a time for the intelligentsia of Newark to gather and discuss the important matters of the day.

  Sadly, since the intelligentsia of Newark number about twelve—and most of them are busy at four o’clock—this often translated into Professor Rice sitting alone in his office, guzzling a pot of tea by himself. So he appeared to be delighted when I knocked lightly on his open door and said, “Anyone home?”

  “Carter, my friend, how are you?” he said warmly.

  “I’m doing fine, Professor, it’s good to see you again.”

  We hugged—Professor Rice is a sixty-something-year-old African American man and an unrepentant hugger—and he pointed to one of the chairs in his office. It was a subtle thing, but his desk was shoved up against the wall, meaning you were never on the other side of a slab of wood from Dr. Rice. The chairs and sofas in his office, including his own, were roughly in a circle around the edges of the room. It was one small way he made his space more inviting for conversation.

  “I’m so glad you came by,” he said. “There’s a book I’ve been wanting to give you.”

  Professor Rice was always giving me things to read. They were usually pretty good—if you didn’t mind half-page footnotes—and they always had titles with colons in them. True to form, he handed me a book that would have made a fine doorstop, entitled Marginal Color: Deconstructing Ethnicity, Race, and Class among Creoles and Non-Creoles in a Post-Revolutionary Pre-Antebellum Southeastern Louisiana Parish.

  “It kept me up all night,” he said earnestly.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll try not to read it when I have any early-morning meetings.”

  “So what can I do for the Eagle-Examiner this afternoon?”

  “Well, as usual, Professor, I’m hoping you can give me a quick history lesson,” I said, taking out my phone and hauling up Edna Foster’
s address on Google Maps. “Can you tell me what kind of manufacturing used to happen in this neighborhood?”

  I handed the professor my phone. He moved it around until he found the sweet spot in his bifocals, then considered it for a moment or two. He went to a larger map of Newark mounted on his wall and traced his fingers to the address I had given him. It was a modern map, complete with highways and the airport, but Professor Rice had a way of seeing through decades into what the city used to look like. It was actually somewhat uncanny.

  From his wall map he went to one of his bookshelves and knelt down to the bottom level. He pulled out a platter-size, four-inch-thick book and hefted it onto a small coffee table with considerable effort.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The 1925 tax assessment of Newark,” he said. “They had an extra copy at the Register of Deeds and Mortgages and they were going to throw it out. Can you imagine? Thank goodness someone had the foresight to ask me if I wanted it. Let me tell you, fella, I jumped on it. If you want a snapshot of Newark at its heyday, 1925 is about as good a year as any. The globalization that took the city’s factory jobs away hadn’t commenced, so all of the industry is still there. A few of the more prominent citizens had started moving out to the suburbs, but the outflow was really just a trickle. It was a good time for Newark.”

  Without so much as glancing at the index, he opened the enormous book to somewhere in the middle. He flipped two pages and studied it for another moment or two.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “I thought so.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Dentures.”

  “Dentures?”

  “Yes, come here,” he said, patting a spot next to him on the couch. I joined him and he pointed to a piece of the map that was now within the McAlister Arms site.

  “This was home to a company called K and J Manufacturing,” he said. “This would have been a brick building several stories high which employed several hundred people. It was one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of dentures.”

  “Huh,” was all I could say.

  “My friend, if I may ask, why are you curious about this?”

  With any other source, I might or might not have said anything. But while Dr. Rice might be given to the usual academic gossip—like which assistant professors were sleeping and/or trying to sleep with which postdoctoral fellows—he knew when to be discreet with information. So I told him about the illness I was hunting and my suspicion that some long-ago industrial pollutant was the cause.

  “Well, in that case, dentures are a good choice,” Professor Rice said.

  “Yeah, I guess they must have been made of, what, plastic or something?”

  “Not in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my friend. No, no. Back then, they were made of vulcanized rubber.”

  “You mean, like, tires?”

  “Well, yes and no. The vulcanization process is part of making tires. But it also had many other industrial applications, including dentures.”

  “Think there’s some byproduct of the vulcanization process that might be capable of making people sick a century later?” I asked.

  Professor Rice struck an appropriately contemplative pose. “Well, chemistry isn’t my area. But if I’ve learned nothing else about the kind of manufacturing that used to take place in Newark, it’s that it’s almost always unhealthy to someone somehow. You know what resource I refer to in matters such as these?”

  Professor Rice was a scholar’s scholar, so I was thinking it had to be some weighty academic publication. Something like, say, the International Journal of Super-Smart Stuff Quarterly Review.

  “I couldn’t even guess,” I said.

  “Wikipedia,” he said, turning to his computer. “Let’s see…”

  He typed for a moment, then started muttering to himself, “Sulfur … that would smell awful, but I’m not sure it has any health effects like the ones you describe. Zinc oxide … I think that’s part of most suntan lotions, so I doubt that’s the culprit. Stearic acid? That sounds bad.”

  “Yeah, except I think it’s found in just about every shampoo ever made, so that’s not it.”

  “Then how about this: thiocarbanilide,” he said, chewing over each syllable.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I guess it was used starting in the early twentieth century as an accelerant in the vulcanization process.”

  “Is it harmful? Anything with that many syllables has to be bad for you, right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s see … Wikipedia mentions something about a lethal dose … huh … oh my.”

  He cleared his throat and started reading from another document: “‘May cause ataxia, analgesia, convulsions, and respiratory distress, including cyanosis.’”

  I had pulled out my notebook and was writing it down. “Ataxia, analgesia … None of this sounds very healthy, but do you know what they are?”

  “Not at all, my friend,” he admitted. “Oh, wait, look at this: ‘Severe overexposure may result in death.’”

  “Oh, I think I know what that is,” I said. “I’m no doctor, so this is an unschooled opinion. But death … that’s not a good thing, is it?”

  “Definitely not,” he confirmed. “Not good at all.”

  * * *

  My parting gift from the good professor’s office was a book called New Jersey Makes: A Non-Marxian Sociohistory of Neo-Industrial Pre-Postmodern Manufacturing in the Garden State. It made the doorstop of a book he had given me earlier look like a mere pamphlet. From a quick glance at the introduction, which was filled with prose as dense as it was impenetrable, it struck me as something that should have been regulated by the Food and Drug Administration as a sleeping aid.

  But it did contain a chapter about K&J Manufacturing, which told the story of a son of Norwegian immigrants who rose from humble origins to become one of the most prominent men in New Jersey.

  Klaus Josef Jorgensen had been the founder of K&J Manufacturing in the 1880s and perfected the process by which vulcanized dentures were manufactured. He eventually passed the business onto Klaus Josef Jorgensen, Jr., who turned K&J into a national denture powerhouse that supplied a significant portion of early-twentieth-century America’s fake teeth—and compiled a significant fortune in the process.

  Klaus Josef Jorgensen III took that fortune and diversified it, getting out of business—by then, dentures were starting to be made of different materials—and investing heavily in railroads, textiles, and other businesses that may have seemed like good bets in the midtwentieth century but were actually soon to go into significant decline. In the book, this was treated as more or less the end of the K&J Manufacturing story, except for one footnote.

  It pertained to Klaus Josef Jorgensen IV, who recognized his father’s blunder of being too backward-thinking. So, when he took over the family business in the mid-1960s, he again repositioned K&J to harness a technology that he was convinced was going to revolutionize the way data was collected and stored, leading to a flowering of information-sharing the likes of which the world had never seen. Yes, his vision was for K&J to be a global leader in the manufacture and supply of microfilm.

  “By the year 2000, every American family will have a microfilm reader in its living room,” Klaus IV confidently predicted in one document cited. “And microfilm will have replaced letter-writing as the preferred method of private communication among the middle and upper classes. The market for microfilm will be limited only by our capacity to produce it.”

  There was no mention in the book about how this bold prophecy had turned out. All there was, at the end of the chapter, was a picture of the Jorgensen family’s Madison, New Jersey estate, shot from Route 124.

  I recognized the part of Route 124 where the picture had been taken—it was a bend in the road just as you got out of Madison proper, on your way to Morristown. I didn’t recognize the house itself. For as many times as I had driven that road—Route 124 used to be part of my be
at when I worked in one of the Eagle-Examiner’s suburban bureaus—I was quite sure I had never seen anything like the stately mansion portrayed in the photograph. It looked like something that had been built by one of the Vanderbilts, all limestone and marble and Gilded Era opulence.

  I was sitting in my car as I finished up my assigned reading and I made the snap decision to visit the mansion. Perhaps some member of the Jorgensen clan was living there and could tell me whether K&J Manufacturing was still alive in some form—and whether it might be willing to take responsibility for the medical costs and cleanup of the poisonous legacy it had left in Newark.

  If not, then K&J Manufacturing and its heirs would still fill an important role in my article. Just as every good story needs a victim, which Edna Foster had so unfortunately become, it also needs a villain. And I didn’t mind admitting that it would serve my purposes quite well if the villain happened to be some spoiled, wealthy, aloof lockjaw who couldn’t bother to spit the silver spoon out of his mouth long enough to give me more than a hasty “no comment” when I knocked on his door.

  I was still daydreaming about that scenario when I cleared the last of the lights in Madison and reached the spot on Route 124 where the picture had been taken. I understood immediately why I had never seen any palatial homes there: the property was overgrown with a dense forest of trees and shrubs, all of which were badly in need of trimming.

  I turned into the front entrance, past a magnificent stone entryway and a wrought-iron gate that appeared to have been secured into the open position by a thicket of vines and brambles. I slowed so I could make out the tarnished brass nameplate on the gate. The place was named “Masticatoria.”

  Mastica … as in “masticate”? Someone in the Jorgensen family had apparently taken the dentures thing a little too seriously.

  The driveway spiraled up and to the right. It had once been paved but was now just a crumbling patchwork of moss and broken chunks of asphalt. The landscaping continued to look as if it was being tended to by a manservant who was allergic to clippers. And trimming. And mowing. And weeding. And … work in general.