The Tower

by Richard Martin Stern

  He found nothing; he had expected no more. His visit to each ship’s engine-room area was merely a gesture, automatic as a householder’s stroll in his patio each night. The floors between were empty and echoing; they smelled faintly of the newness of their materials—tile, wall paint, varnished wood door surfaces—as a new car driven from the showroom smelled of its new-car odor.

  As he rose within the building, local elevator after local elevator, the city’s skyline began to drop beneath him until on the hundred-and-twenty-third floor he could look down on even the flat tops of the twin Trade Center towers nearby.

  He went on, stepping out at last into the Tower Room on the top floor, just beneath the communications mast. The elevator doors closed and immediately he heard the whir of the high-speed cables as the elevator began to drop. He frowned at the lighted DOWN arrow, puzzled. Summoned by whom? he wondered, and found no answer.

  He watched the red light and listened to the cable’s whir as he tried to estimate how many floors the elevator dropped before the cable was silent. Ten? Fifteen? Impossible to tell.

  He listened as the cable sound resumed. This time there was a long period of waiting before the cable was again silent. All the way to the concourse? So? Forget it, he told himself again, and turned away.

  The view from this top floor was unobstructed. There lay the harbor, the Narrows Bridge, the shining ocean beyond. Nat thought of what Ben Caldwell had told him: the first piece of America an incoming ship sees is the shining communications mast directly above this floor. He could understand the sea captain’s thinking that had jumped immediately to the ancient Pharos, for a thousand years guiding ships into the Nile.

  Northward the city lay in its even rectangular pattern of streets and avenues, the midtown towers from this distance and height looking like building blocks in someone’s table-top model. Unreal, even after all this time of familiarity.

  He turned from the windows as the faint sound of an elevator started up again. This time the green light over the doors was on. He watched it and waited, wondering at his sudden sense of tension.

  The cable sound stopped. The green light went out. The doors opened and Giddings stepped out. Behind him the doors closed quietly, but no light went on. “I wondered if I’d find you here,” Giddings said.

  “And why not?”

  Giddings shrugged. He looked around the Tower Room. Tables were already set out along one core wall. Trays of canapés, bottles, glasses, bowls of nuts and chips, all of the paraphernalia of the standard cocktail party would be along shortly, together with waiters and bartenders, maids to empty ashtrays and take away dirty glasses while the talk went on and on and on. Giddings looked again at Nat. “Looking for something?” Giddings said.

  “Are you?”

  “Look, sonny—” Giddings began.

  Nat shook his head. “Not that way. If you want to ask a question, ask it. If you want to say something, say it. I’ve just decided that after five years, I don’t much like you, Will. I don’t think I ever did.”

  “And now,” Giddings said, “since I waved the change authorizations at you, you’ve found a reason, is that it?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “And if it is?”

  “Then screw you,” Nat said.

  Giddings’s expression turned reflective. “Not very elegant language for an architect,” he said. His voice was mild.

  The moment of conflict was past. But, Nat thought, it would return; it was inevitable. “I wasn’t always an architect.” Horse wrangler, paratrooper, fire jumper, student. In the meantime, “You just came up from the concourse?”

  Giddings took his time. “Why?”

  “Were you up in the building before?”

  “I said why.”

  “Because somebody was.” All along it had puzzled him; now he brought it out in the open for examination. “I heard elevators,” Nat said. He paused. “Cops all over the plaza. Did they stop you?”

  Giddings was frowning now. “They did.”

  “They stopped me too.” Not strictly true, but there had been that conversation.

  “And you’re asking who else is in the building,” Giddings said, “and why?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe,” Giddings said slowly, “you made it up. Maybe there isn’t—”

  Giddings stopped and turned, and both men looked at the red light that had come on over the elevator doors; both heard the sound of the elevator moving. They looked at each other.

  “I don’t make things up,” Nat said.

  “This time,” Giddings said, “I believe you.”

  “Remember it next time too.”

  All the way down to the empty concourse and out into the plaza. Nat found the same black cop with his big Irish mate. Giddings stood by watching, listening. “He and I,” Nat said, pointing at Giddings. “Anyone else go in while you’ve been here?”

  Barnes, the black cop, said, “Why do you ask, Mr. Wilson?”

  Shannon, the Irishman, said, “Big building. Other doors.” He shrugged. “Maintenance men, other poor working stiffs.”

  Nat said, “Did anyone go in?”

  “One man,” Barnes said. “An electrician. He said there was a trouble call.”

  “Who made it?” This was Giddings.

  “I thought of that,” Barnes said. He hesitated. “Maybe a little too late.” He paused. “Is it important, Mr. Wilson?”

  “I don’t know.” Simple truth. He was conscious again of the change-order copies in his pocket and he knew that it was the fact of their existence that was making him jumpy. But there could be no connection between them and whoever had gone into the building because the change orders applied only to work in progress, and work was finished, or near enough. “He’s riding the elevators,” he said.

  Shannon’s face opened in a huge grin. “Now where’s the harm in that, will you tell me? A man gets the yearning to ride an elevator, does the sky fall like Chicken Little said?” The brogue was heavy.

  Giddings said, “An electrician. What was he carrying? Anything?”

  Barnes said, “A toolbox.”

  Shannon said, “Oh, no, Frank, you forget. It was a bright shiny atomic bomb.” He spread his hands to show its size. “Green it was on the one side and purple on the other with sparks shooting out, lovely to see—”

  “Easy, Mike,” Barnes said. He spoke to Nat. “Just a toolbox. And he was wearing his hard hat.”

  “Has he come out?”

  “If he has,” Barnes said, “it was by a different door.” He hesitated. “And they are locked. Right, Mr. Wilson?”

  “If they aren’t,” Giddings said, “they damn well ought to be.” He looked at Nat. “We’d best check.”

  The doors around the great building were locked. Nat said, “No watchmen? No security people?”

  “On any ordinary day,” Giddings said, “by now this place would be crawling with work crews. As you damn well know. And anybody who didn’t belong in the building—”

  “I wonder,” Nat said. At least he was thinking again. “I never thought of it before, but in something as big as this, with as many people milling around—” He shook his head. “Fish in the sea, inconspicuous.” He was silent for a few moments, staring up at the arched vaulting of the concourse. “It never even occurred to me,” he said at last, looking again at Giddings. “Don’t you see it?”

  Giddings shook his head slowly. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  Nat said slowly, “We design a building to be open, for people to come and go easily.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Nat said, “by its very nature it is—vulnerable.”

  “To what?”

  Nat lifted his hands and let them fall. “Anything. Anybody.”

  3

  11:10A.M.-12:14 A.M

  For John Connors riding the silent elevators was an interesting, even pleasurable business; slick smooth-functioning machinery had always fascinated him
. And if anybody was looking for him, as sooner or later they would be, riding the elevators and sending empty cars up and down the multiple shafts was probably the best way to confuse a search.

  He was familiar with the building by day—ordinary workday, that was. What he had not realized was what the building would be like empty and echoing, just himself and the living, breathing structure.

  It was like a cathedral when nobody else was there—only more so. He tried to think of an analogy. Imagine an empty Yankee Stadium, he told himself.

  Hearing only his own footsteps echoing in a corridor, looking out of the rows of windows, the world beneath him, and seeing only the immensity of the sky, thinking that he had one chance and only one to do what had to be done, was like being on his knees in prayer, just himself in His presence, and echoing through his mind the hush and the expectation of something great about to happen.

  Something he had heard once, perhaps at a rally, he didn’t really remember, but the statement had stuck in his mind: “A few determined men changing the course of great events.” He liked that. It had a grand ring. Determined men. Heroes. Like hijacking a plane and getting clean away. Like terrorizing the entire Olympic Village. A few determined men. Or one man alone. They listen to you then. Trudging along corridors with his toolbox, riding the elevators—it was almost like being inside an immense funhouse.

  Electricity, of course, was the key here. Electricity seemed to be the key to everything these days. Connors remembered that grid blackout a few years back, and how everything, but everything, had come to a full stop and some people had even thought the end of the world had come. Not everybody, of course, because nine months later almost to the day there had been that crush in the city’s maternity hospitals to testify that some had spent the darkened hours profitably. But at first there had been near-panic, and that was the thought to cling to.

  He was no electrical engineer nor even an experienced electrician, despite what he had told that black cop, but he had worked in the building and he knew in a general way how the power distribution was handled. On each of those electrical-mechanical floors was what is called a splicing chamber, and whenever he could, Connors had spent a little time watching the subcontractor’s men at work, peeling back the steel-wire armor encasing the electrical cables and then peeling back the vinyl jacket under that, and finally getting to the heart of the matter, the big inside wires that actually carried the current.

  He knew that through step-down transformers each mechanical-electrical floor furnished usable electrical power for a vertical section of the building, and that each also passed along in original strength to the next higher mechanical-electrical floor the electricity coming in from the substation outside the building. He didn’t know what the strength of that primary current was, but it had to be high, maybe as much as five hundred volts, because why, otherwise, would they bother to step it down?

  His first thought had been to attack the electrical installation that serviced the upper stories of the building, thereby isolating the Tower Room, where the reception was to be held. He had in his toolbox an eighteen-inch wrecking bar and some stolen plastic explosive, and with them, he figured, he could stir up a considerable fuss and send sparks flying all over the place just like the Fourth of July.

  But the more he thought about it, the more he wondered why he limited his efforts to the top floors. Why not attack the basic installation down in the bowels of the building where the power cables led directly in from the substation? Why bunt, when a triple would clear the bases? It was an appealing thought.

  In the meantime, all he had to do was stay out of sight, and that ought to be easy. But just in case luck played him foul, it would be well to be prepared.

  He opened the toolbox and took out the wrecking bar, hooked at one end, splayed and canted at the other. It was a weapon a man could use, and he had no qualms about using it if necessary.

  They were setting up the low platform for the ceremony in the plaza when Nat and Giddings came out of the building. Giddings looked at it with distaste. “Speeches,” he said. “The governor congratulating the mayor and the mayor congratulating Grover Frazee and one of the senators saying what a great thing the building is for humanity—” He stopped.

  “Maybe it is, at that,” Nat said. He was thinking again of Ben Caldwell’s reference to the Pharos. “A world communications center—”

  “That’s crap and you know it. It’s just another big goddam building and we already have too many of them.”

  It was a love-hate relationship Giddings had with the building he had helped create, Nat thought. Well, as far as that went, he vacillated himself between pride and admiration on the one hand and on the other a resentment that the inanimate structure had long ago taken on a personality of its own, dominating all who served it. “You stay here and swear at it,” he said.

  “And where are you going?”

  The friction between them was threatening to break out into open hostility. Well, let it, if that was what had to be, but Nat would not precipitate it. “Where somebody ought to have gone earlier,” he said. “To see Joe Lewis about these changes.” He walked off across the plaza, unpinning his badge as he went.

  This time, in the interest of speed, he took a subway uptown to Grand Central, walking only the two blocks back along Park to the Architects Building, and rode the elevator to the tenth floor, where the sign on the glass door read: JOSEPH LEWIS, ELECTRICAL ENGINEER. The offices and drafting rooms occupied almost the entire floor.

  Joe Lewis was in shirtsleeves in his big cluttered office. He was a small man, quick, sharp, direct. “If it’s a new project,” he said, “tell Ben I’m up to my ass in work for the next six months. If he can wait—”

  Nat tossed the manila envelope on the desk. He watched Joe look at it, pick it up, and empty the change-order copies onto his blotter. One by one he read them swiftly, dropped them as if they were live things. He looked at Nat at last, anger plain. “You issued these? Who in hell gave you the right?”

  “I never saw them before this morning.”

  “That’s your signature.”

  Nat shook his head. “My name, but somebody else wrote it.” Like a word too often repeated, the truth was beginning to lose its meaning. I’ll end up not believing it myself, he thought.

  “Then who?” Joe said.

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  Joe tapped the papers with his finger. “Were these changes actually made?”

  “We’ll have to see.” It was a conversation without point so far, but the groundwork had to be established.

  “And what do you want from me? I gave you the drawings, the whole electrical design. If the job was done according to them, and not these—”

  “Nobody’s blaming you.” At the moment, Nat thought, but nobody is really in the clear yet. “What I want from you is an order of priority. Which of these do we look at—”

  “All of them. Every single goddam one, even if you have to tear the building apart. I’m going to insist on it. Damn it, man, the electrical design of that building is in my name.”

  “And ours. I realize it.” Why couldn’t intelligent people see what was right in front of them? “But which do we look into first? And second? And so on? You’re the expert. Give us a list in order of importance and we’ll get McGraw’s people on it.”

  Lewis sat down abruptly. “McGraw,” he said. “Bert wouldn’t have anything to do with this.” He shook his head. “Impossible. You try cutting corners on a Bert McGraw job, fishing for kickbacks, bribing inspectors—and you get your head handed to you on a platter.”

  Nat sat down too. “I had heard that, but I had no way of knowing whether it was true.” It could put a different light on matters.

  “Next to building highways,” Lewis said, calmer now, “there is probably more room for hanky-panky in the big-building construction business than any other. The rackets boys have moved in and out for years. Longer. Usually, but not always, public buildings.
Over in Jersey—” He shook his head. “Certain Jersey counties, I wouldn’t take an electrical-engineering job if it had diamonds hanging on it. Over here is better. Most times. Far as I know, the fast-buck boys only tried once on a McGraw job.” He smiled. It was a bitter smile, strangely contented.

  So Joe Lewis was one of those to whom the job was sacred, Nat thought, one of the good ones. He said, “What happened?”

  “They sent around some persuaders,” Lewis said. “All McGraw said was that he wouldn’t deal with small fry. The big boy or nobody.” He paused. “It was a big building, lots of money that might be plucked, and maybe only a beginning, so the top boy came himself.” He paused again. “McGraw took him up where they could talk in private—up as far as the steel had gone, forty, forty-five floors, nobody around, and the street a long, long way down. ‘Now, you son of a bitch,’ McGraw said after the rackets bum had had a good look and hadn’t liked what he saw, ‘do you want to ride back down in the hoist and walk away and never come back, or do you want to go down the fast way, right off this steel, right now, and they pick you up off the street with blotting paper? Make up your goddam mind.’” Lewis paused a third time. “They never bothered him again. Some men you can’t push, you know it, and it isn’t worthwhile even to try.”

  Food for thought. Nat sat quiet for a little time, setting what he knew of Bert McGraw against the tale he had just heard. It fit. There was in the old man an instant willingness to shoot the works, roll the dice for whatever was on the table. It showed, unmistakable. The racketeer may have been as close to death on other occasions, but Nat was willing to bet never as openly. Leave McGraw out of the puzzle.

  “Have you ever worked before with Paul Simmons?” he said.

  “Ever since he married McGraw’s daughter and McGraw set him up.”

  “Is that how it was? I never knew.”

  “Paul’s a bright boy.” Lewis stared thoughtfully at the change orders. “You think he might have issued these? Put your name on them?” Slowly he shook his head. “It doesn’t figure. Sooner or later these would turn up, as they have, and then everybody asks, ‘Who benefits?’ The electrical subcontractor is the obvious man: he gets his bid price for doing substandard work, money in his pocket. But it’s too obvious, too easy. And why does he need it anyway? He’s got a going business and Bert McGraw as a father-in-law, and an obvious Ivy League pedigree, so there was probably money to begin with. Why mess with something like this?”