The original architect-what was his name, Barton? He had been shipped East before construction had ever begun and the last Shevelson had heard, was working out of San Francisco. The architect who had acted as site supervisor had since died; probably gone to his glory cursing himself for being too weak to stand up to Leroux.
The man had been an ass kisser from the start.
The Fire Department? They’d probably have some diagrams of the location of stairwells and standpipes but they’d hardly know where the bodies were buried.
He made;up his mind then and hurried to the closet and grabbed his coat and gloves, making sure the car keys were in his pocket. Crappy weather. Take him half hour to get there on the freeway, if he was lucky.
“Where the hell you going, Will?”
“To the Glass House, where do you-think?”
“After what the prick did to you, you’d help him out?”
Shevelson half smiled. “She’s more mine than his, Marty.” He was almost out the front door when he remembered and ran back to his study to grab a roll of blueprints from off a bookshelf.
Hodgehead was shaking his head. “WHAT, they must have a set of the prints down there; you’re acting stupid.”
“You think so? Quantrell said the fire was on the seventeenth floor.
By now it’s probably on the eighteenth as well, and that’s the headquarters of Curtainwall. They probably can’t get at their own set of prints. Sure, they can get the originals from Wexler and Haines-and ten to one they bear as much resemblance to the final set as a car just off the showroom floor has to the same model in a demolition derby.”
He buttoned his coat and pulled the collar up around-+is neck.
“Marty, I’m probably the only person in the whole goddamned city who has a set of the actual working plans. And Leroux’s going to pay through the nose for them.”
Fifteen minutes later he rounded a corner of the freeway, fighting to keep his car from skidding off the icy curve. It was hard to tell because of the driving snow, but far ahead in the distance he thought he could make out a faint orange glow on the horizon.
CHAPTER 29
There had to be another bottle around, Bigelow thought; he was sure there was one left over from the staff meeting the week before which had been half meeting and half party. He pawed through the desk drawers in the outer office, then stood up and tried to focus on the room.
Damned room didn’t want to stand still, kept circling around him….
He clutched at the edge of a swivel chair, closed his eyes hard, then suddenly opened them very wide. The metal edge of the chair was cold against his naked belly and even that helped some. God, he was smashed! He had started drinking early so he would have the courage to go ahead and break off with Deirdre that night. By the time she got there, he was already half a bottle down.
Deirdre had promptly joined in so she could forget it all, and between them the drinking had gained a momentum all its own.
Damnit, he knew there was a bottle out here someplace! If the room would only settle down…. Of course, how could he have been so dumb!
The little cabinet beneath the bookshelves that they had stocked with plastic cups and a few bottles of mix and a small styrofoam ice bucket for the occasional office party. It had to be down there.
He weaved over to the bookcase, clung to the shelves a moment for support, then knelt by the cabinet doors and yanked them open.
Success! He chortled to himself.
Any time anybody could hide a bottle on a Bigelow, that ,would be the day. He pulled it out. Goddamn, only half full. Somebody had been tapping it. He thought for a moment of Krost, then shrugged.
Hell, no, that lush had access to better sources for booze than Motivational Displays. He stood up, clutching the bottle in his hand, then suddenly remembered the office party and squinted at the label.
Bourbon, and cheap bourbon at that. They had drunk all the good stuff at the meeting and made the mistake of sending out the office boy to pick up a bottle in the building’s liquor store.
Bigelow hiccuped once and started for the storeroom leading back to the executive suite. It only proved once again that you shouldn’t send a boy to do a man’s job, he thought. Funny. But both he and Deirdre were too far gone for quality to matter.
A splinter in the wooden storeroom floor made him yelp and also partly sobered him. He clung to the horns of a polystyrene reindeer for partial support while he stood on one leg and tried to pull the splinter out of the sole of his foot. He ought to have worn his shoes; it had been a dumb thing not to. He managed to focus his eyes and pulled the splinter out. A tiny drop of blood followed it and sobered him even more. He was so drunk, he hadn’t felt it go in that deep.
Had to be careful. Get too drunk and he wouldn’t be able to get it up and that wouldn’t do, at least not with Deirdre.
She’d never let him forget it. Not that he was ever going to see her again anyway….
He had forgotten to Turn off the light in the outer office.
He started to Turn back, then thought: What the hell?
He’d do it later. If he went back now he’d probably pick up another splinter. He threaded his way through the displays and suddenly caught himself thinking that the damned elves and Santa Clauses were a lot of polyester voyeurs. He imagined them looking at him and snickering and he felt his face Turn red. It wasn’t what you had; it was what you did with it, he reminded himself-then wished, absurdly, that he had slipped into his trousers before going to the outer office in search of another bottle.
He was almost to the door of the executive suite when he heard the sirens. They kept coming closer and then stopped and he wondered idly if he could see the blaze from the windows. They could Turn off the lights and watch it like watching a fire on the hearth-only their hearth would be twenty-one floors up.
He felt the bottle begin to slip and clutched it against his sweaty chest. Then he was in the suite and had placed the bottle safely on the bar, next to his trophy. He patted it briefly: It was the only trophy he had ever won in his whole life, awarded to him two years ago for having created “The Most Outstanding Display” at the Small Engines and Motors Show. He stood back a few feet and stared at it affectionately, then made a slight adjustment to the cant of his hat he had dropped on top. Nice trophy.
He felt drunkenly sentimental. It was a big mother, he thought, over three feet tall. Win a small one and you had to buy a display case and a small spotlight and …
“You just gonna stan’ there or you gonna pour me a drink?”
Deirdre was sitting on the edge of the now unfolded couch, a sheet wrapped around her. She had turned on the TV set against the wall a few feet away and was staring at it intently. Bigelow glanced at the screen. Old movie, probably one of Deirdre’s favorites. She could drive anybody nuts with trivia when it came to the oldtimers.
“Jus’ hold your horses, Deedee, and I’ll pour you two.”
He splashed three inches of bourbon over an ice cube in the bottom of her glass and handed it to her. She took it absently, still staring at the screen.
“That good?” Bigelow asked. It was an old Busby Berkeley clinker with hundreds of chorus girls looking very 1930ish. What was it?
“When a Broadway baby says goodnight …” No, that had been from a song in it, Lullaby of-* “The news a minute ago,” Deirdre said.
“They cut into the film. Something about a fire.” Her words were slurred and Bigelow had trouble making them out. “I didn’t get it all.
You know, that guy on K.Y.S. A real bastard, I can tell by his eyes. .
. .”
She sipped at her drink and murmured, “Thanks,” and then, “Something about a fire.” She frowned again and Bigelow sensed that she was going to go through the whole bit all over. She must be like that when she was learning lines, he thought.
He leaned past her and flicked off the set.
“What the hell did you do. that for?” She said it with all the hu
ffiness of the local drunk in the corner bar and for a moment Bigelow caught a clear image of what she might be lilt in the near future. The tiny lines were already forming around her neck and eyes. The elasticity was going from her upper arms and the flesh was dimpling Portion of lyrics from “Lullaby of Broadway,” music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin. Copyright 1935, M. Witmark & Sons. Copyright renewed. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Music.
just below her buttocks. He had been right, something deep within him whispered; it had been’time to drop her.
And then he was gulping his own drink, letting the warmth fill his body and chase away his more sober thoughts. He turned out the room light so only the lights on the small Christmas tree were burning.
What was the song in Finian’s Rainbow? “If I’m not with the girl that I love, I love the girl I’m with.”* Something like that. He reached for Deirdre in the dusk and she turned and cuddled closer to him. The sheet was no longer wrapped around her. He buried his face in her neck, blowing lightly against her skin.
The phone rang.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Bigelow sat bolt upright and grabbed the phone off the end table, shoving it beneath a pillow behind him so the ringing seemed distant and far away. One damned interruption after another, he thought.
Who the hell could be calling tonight? Wrong number, probably.
He turned back to Deirdre, who was open and waiting for him.
Even while reaching for her, he was dimly aware that for some strange reason his eyes were beginning to water.
He automatically closed them. Making love was one of The few activities for which human beings needed no sight, he thought. He was unaware of the slight haze of smoke that was starting to drift out of the suite’s ventilation grill high on the wall and was promptly lost in the dusk of the room.
Behind him, smothered by the pillow, the telephone continued its futile ringing.
Portion of lyrics from “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love,” music by Burton Lane, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg. Copyright ) 1946 by Chappell & Co Inc. Copyright renewed. Used by permission of Chappell & Co Inc.
CHAPTER 30
Lex Hughes was having trouble with the new electronic calculator.
The keys on the machine were much smaller than those on the old Monroe adding machine that it had replaced and he was always accidentally punching two keys at once. It must have been something like that which had thrown the totals off by a hundred dollars. A simple mechanical slip, but it had taken the better part of an hour to find the error.
It was the sort of thing that was always happening to him, Lex Hughes thought. The story of his life.
He leaned back and sighed. He was very tired, too tired even to feel the usual despair that frequently overwhelmed him when he was working in the office alone at night. For a moment he wished he hadn’t let Carolyn go-she was good at finding errors quickly.
It was more than the sense of physical fatigue that he felt; it was the realization that he was devoting his life’s work to the handling of other people’s money. It was routine; it was drudgery; it was dull-and it was something more than that. it you’re so Smart why aren’t you rich? But he would never be rich, he would never even be comfortably well off. He would slowly inch his way up the promotional ladder and by the time he reached the lower executive ranks, there would then be the final banquet and the equivalent of a gold watch.
The perfunctory handshake and the unspoken wish that he clean out his desk as soon as possible for his replacement, who would be young and clear of eye and champing at the bit in the outer office. Then a dull retirement and the losing battle against the actuarial charts-accompanied in his golden years by a shrew of a wife who would devote her remaining days to making his life miserable for not having filled hers with charm and excitement and the pleasure of possessions.
In her own way, she would finally find a fulfillment that would always escape him.
If he were suddenly granted three wishes, he thought, the first would be that he could be a small boy once again, so he could cry without being thought unmanly.
He got up from his desk and carried the last of the ledgers and his calculation sheets into the vault. He wouldn’t take anything home tonight; for once the weekend would be strictly for rest. On the way out of the vault, he stopped and glanced back briefly. The money drawers were like a magnet for him. How many answers to life’s problems lay within those deceptively plain metal drawers… . And then, suddenly feeling guilty, he looked up at the Eye, certain that it was reading his thoughts. The red light glowed as the camera slowly panned toward him. Thou Seest Me, he thought again. The camera was full on him now and he imagined that he was looking through the lens into unplumbed distances. The sensation gave him a feeling of vertigo.
He hated heights and looking into the camera was almost the same as staring down the entire eighteen floors into the security room.
He wondered if anybody was looking back.
At that instant, the red light winked out.
His breath seemed to freeze in his throat. I No, it couldn’t be so.
Lights did burn out. It was only the light. On Monday, they’d send someone up to replace the bulb, and the camera would follow him again with its implacable red eye.
Only … the camera wasn’t scanning. At the same instant the red light had winked out, the motor driving the camera stopped and the lens poised motionless, leering directly at him. Now there was no sense of staring down great heights. Intuition whispered that the Eye was dead, that its lens had filmed over and the monitoring screen eighteen floors below had faded into a dull gray, as if a heavy shade had been pulled over the Credit Union area.
He could feel the sweat begin to form under his arms.
The room was now completely silent, the barely audible whir of the camera’s scanning motor stilled. There was only the sound of his own breathing, of the heavy pounding of his heart … and of distant sirens.
Fire engines, he thought, distracted. And they must be very near if he could hear them in the almost soundproof offices.
Suddenly suspicious, he scurried around the rail and ran down the aisle between the rows of desks to the hall door. Once there, he paused for a second in indecision, looking back at the dead camera. It hadn’t moved an inch.
He turned back to the door, opened it, and peered out into the hall.
Nothing, he thought, feeling vaguely disappointed. And then something caught in his throat and nose; the faint, acrid smell of fire. He squinted down the hall at the elevator bank. Lazy tendrils of smoke were floating out of the shafts, bluing the air in the corridor.
More smoke was drifting from an air-conditioning duct a few feet farther down.
For the first time he was aware of how close the air in the office had become. Somewhere down below someone had turned off the ventilating fans. There was a fire in the building, he thought slowly.
How major a fire, he didn’t know. But it had knocked out the camera coaxial and, in effect, drawn a curtain between him and the rest of the world.
He slammed the door and leaned against it, his heart racing. Cut off from the world, cut off from the all-seeing Eye. He ran back to the Credit Union area, feeling the first stirrings of panic. He’d have to get out, but first he’d have to shut the vault doors. They were fireproof and it would have to get awfully hot to damage the contents, but he had read about money being charred within a safe. It could happen. He mopped the perspiration from his forehead and glanced up again at the dead camera.
It was up to him; it was his responsibility. The money and the records must be kept safe. It was too bad that the Eye couldn’t see how seriously he took his responsibilities, how dependable a man he was in his position.
“You could never find anybody better,” he said quietly, not even realizing he was saying it aloud. “No one better,” he repeated as though to reassure himself.
The camera said nothing, its dead Eye staring at empty space.
He looked bac
k somberly at the Eye, feeling that if he had been wearing his hat, he should take it off. It was his duty to take the money to a safe place; it was, his responsibility.
And then, suddenly, he had another thought. A terrible, frightening thought. What if a distant God had taken pity on him and had given him this one final chance to escape the prison of his life?
But God doesn’t work that way, he thought.
Doesn’t He? an inner voice asked. Hughes hesitated a moment, then slowly reached for his brief case. He undid the clasp and upended it, letting the few papers within fall to the floor. He couldn’t turn his back on this opportunity, he thought, his mind suddenly cold and crystal clear. It was his last chance, the risk was worth it. The deposits were insured. He would be injuring nobody.
He shouldered the vault door all the way open, for one of the few times in his life feeling strong and in complete command of his actions. For the first time in years, he didn’t feel obligated to consider the wishes of somebody else ahead of his own. He was Numero Uno, he thought.
This time he came first, this time his life was the most important.
He clutched his empty brief case and started to walk into the vault, glancing up briefly at the dead camera overhead. A wild elation filled him. “Thou Seest Me Nail” he shouted in triumph.
It felt remarkably good.
CHAPTER 31
Within minutes after Jernigan got the warning call from Garfunkel, the sky lobby started to fill with people. Some of the tenants were dressed for the street, others were in pajamas and slippers with an overcoat hastily thrown over their shoulders. A few were hysterical and Jernigan sensed panic in the air. Faint wisps of smoke were already seeping into the lobby from the elevator shafts. He wondered if the fire below was worse than Garfunkel admitted.
He debated for a moment trying to convince residents to return to their apartments and follow the instructions printed on the door plaques. He decided that if he tried, he would have the makings of a riot. It would be the smartest thing to do, but the people in the lobby weren’t exactly in the mood for wisdom.
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