The Tower Read online

  “I was just going to call you.” Mollie’s voice held nothing. “He’s expecting you.”

  Caldwell’s office was the corner room, immense, impressive. Caldwell himself was a small man, slight, with slicked-down sparse gray hair, pale-blue eyes, and small, almost dainty hands. He was neat, quiet, precise, and in matters having to do with art, engineering, or architecture implacable. He was standing at the windows, facing the downtown skyline, when Nat knocked and came in. “Sit down,” Caldwell said and remained at the windows, motionless, silent.

  Nat sat down and waited.

  “The great lighthouse at Alexandria, the Pharos,” Caldwell said. “For almost a thousand years it guided ships into the Nile.” He turned then to face the office. Backlighted by the windows, he was merely a shape, small against the immensity of the sky. “I met the captain of the France one day a few weeks ago,” he said. “He told me that the first bit of America they see on their westward crossing is the top of that tower building we designed and supervised during construction. He called it the modern Pharos.” Caldwell walked to his desk and sat down. His face now was clearly visible, expressionless. On the blotter in front of him Xerox copies were strewn. “What have we done to it, Nat?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Caldwell indicated the papers. “You have seen these?”

  “Yes, sir. And I’ve talked to Giddings.” Pause. “Correction: I’ve listened to Giddings.” Another pause. “For the record, those are not my signatures. I wouldn’t have messed with electrical changes without Lewis’s approval.” Joseph Lewis & Co., Electrical Engineers. Nat had the absurd feeling that he was talking to himself.

  “‘Wouldn’t have,’” Caldwell said, “is a meaningless phrase in this context. Theoretically, nobody would have made changes without Lewis’s approval. But somebody wrote those change authorizations, and on the face of it, it was with the authority of this office as supervising architects.” Clear, logical, precise.

  “Yes, sir.” Like a small boy in the principal’s office, but what else was there to say? The anger was banked now, a strong, steady force. “But why my name?” Nat said.

  Caldwell studied him quietly. “Explain that question.”

  “Why not Lewis’s or one of his people’s? It would be more logical, less open to question.”

  “According to Will Giddings,” Caldwell said, “there was no question. These”—he pushed at the pile of copies—“did not come to light until now.”

  “Then,” Nat said, “we don’t even know that the actual changes were made, because if they were, a change authorization would have had to be shown—”

  “‘Would have,’” Caldwell said, “‘wouldn’t have.’ I repeat: the phrases are meaningless.” He was silent for a few moments, thoughtful. “I agree,” he said at last, “we don’t know that the changes were actually made. Neither do we know how serious they might be.” He was watching Nat’s face. “We would do well to find out, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yes, sir.” Nat paused. “And there are other things to find out, too.”

  “Such as?”

  “Why these change authorizations were written in the first place. Why my name was put on them. Who—”

  “Those are questions that can wait,” Caldwell said. “I appreciate your personal concern, but I don’t share it. My concern is for the building and the integrity of this architectural firm.” He paused. “Is that understood?”

  It was almost like a chanted response: “Yes, sir,” Nat said.

  He walked out of the great office and past Mollie Wu’s desk. Mollie watched him, tiny, pretty as a doll, bright and quick. “Problems, friend?”

  “Problems,” Nat said. “In batches.” The implications were beginning to appear now, the almost endless possible permutations and combinations that could arise from deviations from the impeccably considered and intricately woven electrical design. “And at the moment,” he said, “I don’t know where to begin solving them.” Simple truth.

  “The longest journey begins with but a single step,” Mollie said, “and whether that’s Confucius or Chairman Mao, I haven’t the foggiest notion, but I offer it for what it’s worth.”

  Nat walked back to his own office and sat down to stare at the drawings thumbtacked to the wall and at the heap of design-change-authorization copies lying on his desk. The two formed an explosive mixture, and whether he had signed the changes or not was unimportant. What was important was that they had been issued and perhaps followed, corners cut, as Giddings had said, where no corners ought to have been cut, substitutions made where no substitutions ought to have been allowed. Why?

  Wrong question, he told himself. Right now his concern was properly with effect, not cause. And there was only one place where the effects could be discovered, and that was not here at his desk.

  He gathered the change-order copies, stuffed them into the manila envelope, and tucked the envelope in his pocket. Out at the reception desk he paused only long enough to tell Jennie where he was going. “To the Tower, honey. I doubt if you’ll be able to reach me. I’ll call in.”

  2

  10:05A.M.-10:53A.M

  The sun was high enough now to penetrate the cluster of downtown buildings and reach the floor of the Tower Plaza where the police barricades were in place, breaking the area into two great halves separated at the center by a passageway from the temporary platform against the arcade to the street.

  “Where the VIPs will get out of their cars,” Patrolman Shannon said, “and smile at the little people and walk like kings and queens to the platform—”

  “Where the speeches will all be the same,” Barnes said. “They will praise motherhood, the United States of America, and man’s unquenchable spirit. One or two of the pols will slip in a little pitch for votes—” He stopped. His smile was apologetic.

  “It’s only,” Shannon said smiling himself, “that you are against kings and queens and such, and I glory in them. Think how it would be if there were only little gray people, no giants to dream and to do, no great tales to remember, no grand buildings like this one that even shut out the sun. What about that, Frank?”

  “Maybe better.”

  “You,” Shannon said, “have seen the insides of too many books, and in them too many confused ideas.” His gesture took in the entire shining building. “How would you like to have had a hand in building this? A great gleaming tower reaching to the sky, and your name on the bronze plate to say forever that you were a part of it? How about that?”

  “‘General Contractor,’” Barnes read, “‘Bertrand McGraw and Company.’” He was smiling again, this time with open amusement. “The Irish do get around, don’t they? Do you suppose McGraw worked his way up from hod carrier honestly?”

  “Did you work your way up from slave honestly, you black rascal?”

  “Yassuh, boss.” They smiled at each other.

  “I have met Bert McGraw,” Shannon said, “and a fine gentleman he is. On Saint Pat’s Day on Fifth Avenue—”

  “Playing his pipes, no doubt.”

  “Skirling,” Shannon said. “You skirl pipes. You play pianos and fiddles and other lesser instruments.” He paused. “Bert McGraw will be here this afternoon. In his place I would be too, to take my share of the glory.”

  “I think I’d go somewhere and hide,” Barnes said. He paused. “I’d be afraid of hubris.”

  “You and your big words.”

  “A challenge to the gods,” Barnes said, “and the feeling that they might lower the boom. The same thing that makes you knock on wood when you talk of something good that’s going to happen.”

  For a moment Shannon was thoughtful. Then he smiled. “Like I said, Frank, the insides of too many books. What could your gods possibly do to this lovely structure?”

  The building is alive, John Connors thought, its presence is almost palpable. His footsteps echoed in the empty hallways and corridors, and only blank closed doors stared at him as he passed; but through the air-condi
tioning ducts he could hear the building’s respiration, and deep in its core he could feel the life force throbbing, and he wondered if in its heart of hearts the living building was afraid.

  Of him? Why not? It was a pleasant concept; it lifted his spirits. He was only a tiny speck against the immensity of the structure, but the power was his, and he savored the knowledge as he walked, toolbox in hand, hearing the echoes of his own footsteps and the turbulence of his thoughts.

  Nat walked the thirty blocks from the Caldwell offices to the World Tower building, in the exercise finding some relief from anger and stress.

  “I guess some men play games for the same reason,” he had told Zib once, “to get their minds off a problem and let it churn around down in the subconscious. I walk instead. I’m not anti-game. It’s just that when I was growing up, we did other things. We fished, we hunted, we packed into the mountains on foot or on horseback; in the winter we skied and snowshoed.” The sense of not belonging here in the East still made itself felt. “A primitive life,” he said. “All the things you had, I hadn’t. I’m not a very good swimmer. I don’t know a thing about sailing. No golf, no tennis.”

  And Zib had said, “Maybe those things were important to me once, but they aren’t now. I married you for other reasons. Maybe because I was sick and tired of the prep-school stereotypes I grew up with.” She smiled suddenly, devastatingly. “Or maybe it was because you didn’t try to get me into bed on our first date.”

  “Backward of me. Would you have gone?”

  “Possibly. No, probably. I found you attractive.”

  “I found you stunning and a little frightening, so very sure of yourself here in your own surroundings.”

  True then, still true after almost three years of marriage.

  He walked steadily, pausing only for traffic. He disliked the city, but it was where, as they said, the action was; and if the dirt and the noise and the crowding, the snarling, snapping attitudes, the unhappy faces were all around, why, so were the ferment and the excitement, the satisfaction of finding and being able to talk with your peers.

  But most important, there was Ben Caldwell with his artist’s eye and his infinite attention to detail which some called genius. The seven years spent under that man made up for anything else.

  Oh, one day Nat would leave the city; that knowledge was sure and deep. Back to the big country where he belonged. And when that time came, he wondered, would Zib go with him or choose to stay behind in her own familiar scene? Hard to tell, and not pleasant to contemplate.

  There were police scattered in the Tower Plaza. Nat looked at them with surprise, which was foolish, he told himself, because of course in the city, where bombing threats and violence are not unknown, there would be cops to handle an event such as the Tower opening. It just went to show that he didn’t think.

  There was a black cop near the door, listening to a big uniformed Irishman. The black cop looked at Nat and smiled politely. “Can we help you, sir?”

  Nat took out the badge he wore on the job. “Architect,” he said. “Caldwell Associates.” He nodded at the bronze plaque beside the doorway. “Just going in to have a look around.”

  The black cop was smiling no longer. “Is anything wrong?” His dark eyes were quick on the badge, and he added, looking up again, “Mr. Wilson?” He studied Nat’s face.

  “Routine,” Nat said, and thought, for God’s sake, that he sounded like nothing so much as a character straight out of Dragnet.

  “It was right then that I really began to wonder,” Patrolman Barnes said later, “but it was still only a kind of hunch that maybe we ought to have stopped that fellow with the toolbox. And you know what a stink that kind of unauthorized action can cause. The Department exceeding its authority, throwing its weight around at innocent citizens, that kind of thing.” Pause. “Still, I should have followed the hunch.”

  Now he said, “If there is anything wrong, Mr. Wilson—I mean, if there’s anything we can do—”

  “What he means,” the Irish cop said, “is that we aim to please, we boys in blue. Never let it be said that we refused to rescue a drowning man or help an old lady to cross the street. Be our guest,” the big Irish cop said, and went on with what he was saying, which had to do with off-track betting—if you were a betting man, that was.

  I am not a betting man, Nat thought as he walked inside. Another lack, he supposed, because Zib loved the horses and a point-spread bet on football games and things like tailgate picnics up at West Point before the game at Michie Stadium. I am a dull boy, Nat told himself.

  Inside the concourse he hesitated. He had no real destination. Coming to the building where he had spent almost every working day during the last five years was an automatic act, arising from the kind of impulse that forces you to see for yourself the empty stall after you have been told that the horse is missing—not that there was really anything he could do until work crews were on the job again and specific change authorizations could be checked out by tearing into the structure to see what changes, if any, had actually been made.

  But he was here, and the same impulse was still at work, and he walked the empty concourse around the core of the building to the banks of elevators and pushed the button for a fourteenth-floor local.

  He heard the soft whir of the high-speed cable as the elevator began to move. Simultaneously the fourteenth-floor light showed on the indicator panel and floor by floor began to drop. Nat stepped inside as the doors opened, and there, his finger poised over the button, he stood motionless.

  Faintly, within the hollow core of the building that housed the multiple elevator shafts, he could hear another cable whirring, an elevator rising or dropping at its swift pace.

  The doors of his elevator closed automatically, and he was in total darkness. He found the light switch on the panel, turned it on, and stood for a few moments listening. The whirring of the cable continued to echo softly within the building’s core. And then it stopped and there was silence.

  All you can do is guess, he told himself; it could be anybody, and he could be on any floor between here and the mast, a hundred and twenty-five floors up. So? You are jumpy, Nathan Hale; those fake change authorizations have unstrung you. Forget it, he told himself. He pushed the button and the elevator began to rise smoothly.

  He left the elevator on the eighth floor, and walked back down a single flight of stairs to the second of the building’s five mechanical-electrical floors.

  It was here, as below ground, and on the forty-fifth, eighty-fifth, and one-hundred-twenty-third floors, that even an unknowledgeable stranger would begin to comprehend some of the building’s vastness and complexity.

  Here the cables thick as a man’s leg brought up from the bowels of the building primary power from the nearby Con Edison substation, fourteen thousand volts—far above electrocution strength.

  And here the brooding transformers stepped down the voltage to usable levels for the heating, cooling, breathing, and electric-service needs of each of the building’s vertical sections.

  The odor of the walled-off floor area was the odor of a ship’s engine room: of heated metal and oil, of rubber and paint, of filtered air and wiring insulation and softly whirring machinery obeying the master, electricity.

  Electricity made no sound—although transformers themselves gave off a faint hum—and it could not be seen. But it was the raw stuff of power; even more, of life itself for the building.

  Without electricity the great structure for all its cunning complexity was merely a lump, a dead thing composed of hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and concrete, of tempered-glass windows and aluminum column covers, of cables and ducting and wiring and mechanisms complicated beyond belief—useless.

  Without electrical power the building was without heat, light, ventilation, operable elevators or escalators, computer monitors and their overseeing controls.

  Without electrical power the building was blind and deaf, unable to speak or even to breathe—a d
ead city within a city, a monument to man’s ingenuity, vanity, intelligence, and doubtful wisdom; a Great Pyramid, a Stonehenge, or an Angkor Wat, a curiosity, an anachronism.

  Nat stared at the main electrical cable neatly spliced to give off its enormous power here and yet carry that same power, undiminished, to the next higher mechanical floor, and so on to the building’s top. Here was the building’s life center exposed—open-heart surgery came to mind.

  He was conscious of the envelope with the bogus change authorizations in his pocket, and again his anger was steady and deep, pushing at his thoughts.

  He could understand Giddings’s controlled rage because its roots were in him too, and for the same reason: a job of work was a sacred thing.

  Oh, many people, perhaps most people these days, didn’t see it that way—Zib for one—but what those people thought in this area was unimportant.

  To those who conceived and built the enduring structures—buildings, bridges, aqueducts, dams, nuclear power plants, massive stadia—the form was not important; to them the work was its own reward and it was not to be flawed, profaned by carelessness or, worse, by intent. It was to be as nearly perfect as man could make it or it was not a finished job, and what ought to have been a source of pride became instead a matter of shame.

  Thinking of this now, for the first time even in his thoughts Nat let the anger loose. “Some son of a bitch,” he said slowly, quietly to the great spliced cable and the brooding transformers, “has messed with this job, and whether what he did is serious or not, we’ll have to find out, and we will. And we’ll find him too, and hang him up by his balls.”

  Talking to inanimate things was silly, of course. Talking to trees and birds and chattering squirrels or soaring hawks was silly too, and he had done that most of his life. So I’m silly, Nat thought as he walked back to the stairs; but somehow, the promise given, he felt a little better. He took the elevator to the next mechanical-electrical floor.