The Tower Read online

  The Tower

  _______

  Richard Martin Stern

  garrett county digital new orleans

  THE TOWER

  COPYRIGHT © 1973 BY RICHARD MARTIN STERN

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  ISBN: 978-1-891053-96-2

  The Tower was a main selection of the Playboy Book Club

  Garrett County Press Digital

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  www.gcpress.com

  For D.A.S., with love.

  THE TOWER

  “It is the world’s tallest structure, and the most modern, an enduring tribute to man’s ingenuity, skill, and vision. It is a triumph of imagination.”

  —GROVER FRAZEE at the World Tower dedication ceremonies.

  “A monument to Mammon, product of man’s insatiable ego, an affront to the gods. That so much treasure should have been poured into the construction of this — this monstrosity while poverty, yes, and even hunger still stalk the land, is an abomination! There will be inevitable Divine retribution!”

  —THE REVEREND JOE WILLIE THOMAS in a press interview.

  “Eyewitness accounts and expert testimony are at such variance that it is difficult, if not impossible, to know where the truth concerning this disaster may be found.”

  —OFFICIAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF INQUIRY.

  For one hundred and twenty-five floors, from street level to Tower Room, the building rose tall and clean and shining. Above the Tower Room the radio and television spire thrust sharply against the sky.

  By comparison with the twin masses of the nearby Trade Center, the building appeared slim, almost delicate, a thing of fragile-seeming grace and beauty. But eight subbasements beneath the street level its roots were anchored deep in the bedrock of the island; and its core and external skeleton, cunningly contrived, had the strength of laminated spring steel.

  When fully occupied, the building would house some fifteen thousand people in its offices and studios and shops; in addition it would accommodate twenty-five thousand visitors a day.

  Through its telephone, radio, and television systems operating at ground level, broadcasting through the atmosphere or via satellite, its sphere of communication was, quite simply, the earth.

  It could even communicate with itself, floor to floor, subbasement to gleaming tower.

  Level by level it had risen, a marvel for all to see.

  The great cranes hoisted steel into position and held it while the bedlam clamor of rivet guns gave proof that it was being secured; then, their work at one level completed, the cranes, like sentient monsters, hoisted each other to new positions to repeat the process.

  As the structure grew, its arteries, veins, nerves, and muscles were woven into the whole: miles of wiring, piping, utility ducting; cables and conduits; heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning ducts, intakes, and outlets—and always, always the monitoring systems and devices to oversee and control the building’s internal environment, its health, its life.

  Sensors to relay information on temperature, humidity, air flow and content; computers to assimilate the data, evaluate them, issue essential instructions for continuation or change.

  Are the upper ten floors, still exposed to the setting sun’s heat, warmer than optimum? Increase their flow of cool conditioned air.

  Are the first ten floors above street level now cooling too rapidly in the dusk? Reduce their air-conditioning flow, and, as necessary, feed in heated air.

  The building breathed, manipulated its internal systems, slept only as the human body sleeps: heart, lungs, cleansing organs functioning on automatic control, encephalic waves pulsing ceaselessly.

  Dull silver was the building’s basic color—anodized aluminum curtain panels covering the structural steel; the whole pierced by tens of thousands of green-tinted tempered-glass windows.

  It stood in a plaza of its own, by its height dominating the downtown area. At its base three-story arches enclosed a perimeter arcade. Great doors led into the two-story concourse, to the elevators in the core structure, the stairs and escalators and shops in the lobbies themselves.

  Men had envisioned it, conceived it, and constructed it, sometimes almost lovingly, sometimes with near hatred, because, like all great projects, the building had early on developed a character of its own, and no man intimately associated with it could escape involvement.

  There is, it seems, a feedback. What man creates with his hands or his mind becomes a part of himself. And there, on this morning, the building stood, its uppermost tip catching the first rays of sunrise while the rest of the city still slept in shadow; and the thousands of men who had had a part in the building’s design and construction were going to remember this day forever.

  Part I

  1

  9A.M.-9:33A.M.

  The police barricades had been stacked in the Tower Plaza since dawn that Friday morning. Now city employees were setting them out in neat straight lines. As yet no crowd had gathered.

  The sky was clear, blue, limitless. A gentle harbor breeze swept the plaza, salt-smelling, fresh. The plaza flags rippled. Two on-duty patrolmen—more would be arriving during the next hour—stood by the arcade.

  “At least,” Patrolman Shannon was saying, “we’ve nothing political to cope with today, thank God for that. A political rally—” He shook his head. “The way some people in this country get stirred up over politics is a sin and a shame and a waste.” He glanced upward at the towering, gleaming building. “It reaches almost to Heaven,” he said. “Way above men’s little squabbles.”

  Patrolman Barnes said, “Dig the uninvolved man.” Patrolman Barnes was black. “To hear him tell it, all Irishmen are peaceable, loving, patient, unexcitable, kind, considerate, and totally nonviolent.” Barnes had his master’s degree in sociology, was already marked down for promotion to sergeant, and had his sights set on a captaincy at least. He grinned at Shannon. “Those love-ins they stage over in Londonderry, friend, are not what you might call church socials.”

  “Only when provoked,” Shannon said. He allowed himself a faint answering smile. “But I’m not saying that sometimes the provocation doesn’t have to be looked for. Sometimes it hides, like a mouse in a hole.” The smile disappeared as a man approached. “And where do you think you’re going?”

  It was established later that the man’s name was John Connors. He carried a toolbox. In testimony Barnes and Shannon agreed that he had worn work clothes and a shiny aluminum hard hat and the kind of arrogance a skilled workman is tempted to show toward those who ask silly questions.

  “Where does it look like I’m going? Inside.” Connors paused. His smile pitied them. “Unless you’re going to try to keep me out?” There was challenge in the question.

  “There’s no work today,” Barnes said.

  “I know it.”

  “Then?”

  Connors sighed. “Where I ought to be is home. In bed. A day off for everybody while they make speeches here and go upstairs to drink champagne. Instead, here I am because the boss called me and told me to haul my ass down to the job.”

  “To do what?” This was still Barnes.

  “I’m an electrician,” Connors said. “Would you understand what I’m supposed to do if I told you?”

  Probably not, Barnes thought. But that was not the governing factor. The trouble was orders, or lack of them.

  “You and Shannon,” the duty sergeant had said, “get on down there and keep an eye on things. They’ll be setting up the lines and we don’t expect any trouble, but—” The sergeant had shrugged with a you-know-how-it-is expression.

  And they did
know how it was these days: every gathering seemed to generate its own unrest. All right, they would keep an eye on things, but that scarcely included keeping a workman away from his work.

  “Do you carry a union card, friend?” Barnes said gently.

  “So what are you?” Connors said. “An NLRB inspector? Yes, I carry a union card. I’m no scab.” He pulled out his wallet and waved it. If it contained a card, it could not be seen. “Satisfied?” Connors put the wallet away again.

  Shannon’s temper was rising fast. “Let him go.”

  Still Barnes hesitated. As he testified later, he had had no reason for the hesitation, merely a feeling, and actions based on feelings are always suspect.

  “Well?” Connors said. “Make up your goddam mind. Just standing here, I’m already costing the boss—”

  Shannon said, “Beat it.” There was a vein throbbing in the side of his neck. He looked at his partner. “We don’t have any orders to keep people out, Frank. Let the son of a bitch go. Maybe he’ll electrocute himself.”

  That was the way they remembered it, and told it later.

  Months in advance the date for the dedication ceremonies had been set. It has always been so, and there is no other way, because building-completion dates are elastic; and the invited guests for the ceremonies were coming from Washington and from state capitals, from City Hall, from the UN, from head offices of radio and TV networks and worldwide wire services; those who wanted to appear and be seen, and those who would rather have stayed away but had been caught by the inexorability of an early invitation.

  In Nat Wilson’s office, facing the walls covered with thumbtacked drawings of the great building, Will Giddings said, “There are fifty things I want cleaned up. A hundred.”

  “So do I,” Nat said. Simple truth. You live with a job for a matter of years, and, as with an artist completing his master work, you see here and there little touches you would like time to make. But there was no time today.

  “And, goddammit,” Giddings said, “I don’t want stuffed shirts wandering around like a flock of goddam tourists.” He paused. “We aren’t ready. You know it. I know it.”

  When the opening-night curtain goes up, Nat thought, is there always this lament? Where had that thought come from? “We aren’t ready,” he said. “Agreed. So?” He was the younger man, architect-engineer, middle-sized, solid, rarely excitable.

  “The hundred and twenty-fifth floor,” Giddings said, “just under the mast. Drinks, backslapping, congratulations, and a view of how many hundreds of square miles of water and country, and it can’t be postponed because the characters who are coming are so goddam important, senators, congressmen, the governor, the mayor, UN types, movie stars, that kind of crap?”

  “That kind of crap,” Nat said.

  Giddings was a big man, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, filling that ancient position of clerk of the works, owner’s representative on the job. He was in his early forties. Somewhere, probably in the back of a forgotten drawer, he had an engineering degree, and now and again over their years on the job Nat had seen him, slide-rule in hand, doing his paperwork, but he always seemed more in character in his hard hat, riding an open hoist or walking a steel girder or prowling tunnels and subbasements to see that the job was done right. “I don’t drink cocktails,” he said, “and I don’t eat little things with toothpicks in them. Maybe you do.” There was tension in him plain to see.

  “Beside the point,” Nat said. “Grover Frazee set the day. Your boss.”

  Giddings sat down at last. He stretched out his legs, but there was no relaxation in the movement. “My boss,” he said, and nodded. “We have to have businessmen, but we don’t have to like them.” He was studying Nat. “You must have been still wet behind the ears when you started on this job—how long ago? Seven years?”

  “Close enough,” Nat said. Back at the start of preliminary design, the conceptual thinking, he following but also flying right along with Ben Caldwell’s soaring visions. He could not resist glancing out the window at the distant Tower itself, clean and pure and beautiful against the sky: the result of those years of work. “So?”

  “My building, sonny, goddammit,” Giddings said. “Oh, it’s part yours too, but I watched the start of excavation that went down eighty feet to bedrock, and I watched them top out the steel fifteen hundred and twenty-seven feet above grade, and I know every grillage, every column, every truss, every spandrel beam as well as I’d know my own kids if I’d ever had any.”

  There was nothing that required comment. Nat was silent.

  “You’re a self-contained son of a bitch,” Giddings said. “Is it a case of still waters running deep? Never mind.” His eyes went briefly to the distant tower. “I lost some friends too. On any big job you always do.” He looked back at Nat. “Remember Pete Janowski?”

  Nat shook his head faintly.

  “Walked out into air sixty-five floors up and splattered himself on a concrete ramp down in the bathtub.”

  “That one,” Nat said, remembering.

  “Big Polack,” Giddings said, “a good man, never seemed to hurry, but he got the job done the right way, the safe way, and that was what shook me. When you can’t put a cause to it, that’s when you worry.”

  There was something in Giddings’s voice, his manner—uptight was the word. Nat said slowly, “Are you making a point?”

  It was as if he had not spoken. “Usually,” Giddings said, “you can figure out why a man does something. I read where somebody robs a bank, and I think, ‘The poor silly bastard wanted the money, maybe had to have it, and couldn’t see any other way.’ That’s not an excuse, but it is some kind of explanation.” He paused only briefly. “Take a look at these.”

  He took a manila envelope from the inside pocket of his corduroy jacket, tossed it on the desk, and then sat expressionless while he watched Nat pick the envelope up, open it, and spill its contents onto the blotter. Folded papers, the crisp paper of Xerox reproduction, covered with lines and figures and neat engineering lettering.

  Nat looked up.

  “Take a good look,” Giddings said.

  One by one Nat studied the papers. At last he looked up. “Design-change authorizations,” he said. His voice was quiet and he hoped that his face showed nothing. “My signature on all of them.” Surprisingly his voice held steady. “All electrical changes. Not my bailiwick.”

  Giddings said, “But nobody would question your signature. Caldwell Associates, Supervising Architects—you’re their man on the job, you say something’s okay, that’s the way it is.” He heaved himself out of his chair, walked two paces, and went back to drop into the chair again. He watched Nat and waited.

  Nat still held one of the change orders. His hands were steady; the paper did not even tremble, but it was as if his mind had gone numb. “Were these changes made?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw those before last night.”

  “How did you miss them?”

  “I can’t be every place at once,” Giddings said, “any more than you can. I have records, work signed off as done according to spec. Where there are deviations from original specifications I have legitimate approvals.” He paused. “But I don’t have those or any others like them, and I’d have raised hell if I’d seen them.”

  “So would I,” Nat said. The office was still.

  Giddings said at last, “That means what?”

  “Not my signatures,” Nat said. “I don’t know who signed them or why, but I didn’t.”

  Giddings got out of his chair again, walked to the windows, and stood looking downtown at the jagged skyline dominated by the Tower. “I figured you’d say that.”

  Nat’s faint smile was crooked, unamused. “Of course.” After the initial shock, your mind begins to work again, clearly, logically as it has been trained—like a bloody little computer, he thought. “If I had signed those changes, naturally I’d deny it, at first anyway. I didn’t sign them, so I deny it too, but for a different reason. Either
way my answer has to be the same, doesn’t it?”

  Giddings had turned back to face the desk. “Logical bastard, aren’t you?”

  Behind the shock now came the beginnings of anger. “I’ll carry it further,” Nat said. “Why would I have signed them? What reason would I have had?”

  “I don’t know. That,” Giddings said, “is why I’m not beating the truth out of you right here and now.”

  “Don’t even try,” Nat said. His voice was quiet. With a steady hand he picked up one of the papers, looked at it, dropped it again on the pile.

  Giddings said in a new, quieter voice, “What kind of rot have we got buried in the walls of my building? How many corners did we cut without knowing it? How deep does it go?”

  Nat’s hands rested flat on the desktop. “I don’t know the answer,” he said, “but I think we’d better try to find it.”

  Giddings took his time, his eyes steady on Nat’s face. “You try your way,” he said at last. “I’ll try mine.” He indicated the papers. “Keep those. I had copies made.” He paused. “Your boss already has a set, in case you were wondering whether to plug him in.” He walked to the door and stopped there, his hand on the knob. “If I find out those are your signatures,” he said, “I’ll be coming after you.” He walked out.

  Nat stayed where he was and looked again at the papers, poked them idly with one forefinger. The signatures were plain enough: N H Wilson. Nathan Hale: the names had been his father’s idea. The original Nathan Hale was hanged. And from the looks of things somebody was trying to hang this one too. Well, if they thought he was going to walk meekly up the gallows steps, they were mistaken.

  He picked up his phone and called Jennie at the switchboard. “Give me Mr. Caldwell’s office, honey.” And to Mollie Wu, Caldwell’s secretary, “Nat here, Mollie. I have to see the boss. It’s urgent.”