There was hammering at the fire door on the far side of the room. The governor waited while the fire commissioner hurried to it, wrenched at the knob, and pushed the door wide. Firemen Denis Howard and Lou Storr lurched through.
Each carried a halligan tool, a long heavy bar hooked at one end, canted at the other. Their masks hung around their necks. In each face there was a bone-weariness plain to see. Their legs trembled as they walked forward in answer to the governor’s beckoning gesture.
“Close that door,” the governor said. Then, to the two firemen, “We thank you for coming.”
Lou Storr opened his mouth, and closed it again carefully.
Denis Howard said, “Nothing at all, Governor. Just a stroll up a few stairs.” He waved his hand in a grand gesture. “‘Theirs not to question why.’”
A male voice said, “Can we use the stairs? If we can, let’s get at it.”
There was silence. Howard, no longer grandstanding, looked at the governor, question plain.
“Tell them,” the governor said.
Howard took his time. “You can use them,” he said at last. “But you won’t reach the bottom or anywhere near the bottom.” He held out his hand. It trembled. “See that? There used to be hair.” He ran his hand wearily over his face. “And I used to have eyebrows too, so I did.” He nodded then. “You can use the stairs. You might even be alive all the way down to the hundredth floor—if you run fast enough.”
The room was still.
“I promised you both a drink,” the governor said. He looked at a nearby waiter: “See that they have them. Then bring them into the office.” He looked around at his audience. “It is not good,” he said. “But neither is it hopeless. We are exploring every possibility. I can’t tell you more than that.”
Cary Wycoff raised his voice. “What I want to know,” he said, “no, correct that: what I demand to know is how did all this happen? Who is responsible?”
The governor waited motionless on the chair while the low murmur of agreement ran its course. Then, in the silence, “I suggest, Cary, that you appoint a Congressional committee to look into the matter. I will be happy to tell it all I know.” He stepped down from the chair, offered Beth his arm, and walked neither slow nor fast back to the office.
Inside he dropped into the desk chair. “I think of myself,” he said, “as a fairly patient man and a reasonable one. I even consider myself compassionate.” He looked up at Beth and smiled without amusement. “Right now,” he said, “I would cheerfully strangle Cary Wycoff. And my one great hope is that I will live long enough to spit on Paul Norris’s grave.” He paused. “If those sentiments are ignoble, then so am I.”
Beth said, “If Mr. Norris had not stolen the elevator—” She left the sentence unfinished.
“True,” the governor said. “None of you would have reached the bottom alive. And so I am glad it happened the way it did. But that changes nothing.”
“I understand, Bent.”
He caught her hand and pressed it to his cheek. “Little men,” he said, “in scribes’ caps and long pointed slippers. They write in the big book and then pull strings to see that everything works out as they have planned it.” He shook his head. “I wonder sometimes if their motives aren’t basically malicious. Do you believe in an afterlife, my dear?”
“I think so.”
“I’ve never found it necessary,” the governor said. “I’ve never found it necessary to believe in a deity either.” He paused. “But I have gone through the motions of worship just as I have gone through the other forms of conventional behavior. And for the same reason: because it was expected of me. I wonder how many others do the same, but won’t admit it.” He paused. “If I could pray and mean it, I would pray to believe that you and I will meet again somewhere.”
“We will, Bent.”
“Beside a celestial trout stream? I think that would be my choice. Just in time for the evening rise.” He dropped Beth’s hand and sat up straight as the two firemen and the fire commissioner appeared in the doorway. “Come in,” the governor said. “Sit down. Let’s consider possibilities”—he paused—“as gloomy as some of them may be.”
23
5:40P.M.-5:56P.M.
It was almost schizophrenia that had overtaken her, Patty thought, because one part of her mind had retreated into its own secret place to mourn; while the rest of her mind insisted on concentrating on the here and now, the tension that filled the trailer.
After talking to Ben Caldwell, Nat had walked back from the telephone to stand near Patty and stare unseeing out at the plaza and the tormented building. He said slowly, “The way they used to design them, the big buildings, they were so fire-resistant that the city actually reduced fire department coverage in high-rise areas.” He turned then to look at Patty. “Did you know that?”
Patty made herself smile and shake her head.
“Thick walls,” Nat said, “thick floors, windows that opened—you could get in and out. A fire could be contained. Now—” He shook his head. “Core construction is more economical: you can concentrate elevators, escalators, pipes, ducts, wiring, all the unproductive items, in a central shaft. That leaves more rental space. But when a fire breaks out, a big one like this—” He shook his head again.
“That blowtorch effect you talked about on the phone?” Patty said. “Like a chimney?”
One of the battalion chiefs standing nearby said, “Times, on a fire like this, temperatures in the core can be so high that firemen can only work for five minutes at a time, maybe less.” He looked at Nat. “Blowtorch, you call it. More like a blast furnace.” He pointed up toward the building’s top. “If we get anybody out of there alive, it’s going to be a bloody miracle.”
Brown’s voice angry on the telephone said, “Yes, goddammit, we want them in here! On the double! You think this is some kind of charade?” He slammed down the telephone and waved his bony fists in helpless rage. “The cops couldn’t see what the Coast Guard had to do with a fire in a building. Seemed screwy to them, they said, so they took their time and then decided to check before they let them through the lines.” He was glaring at Nat. “Do you think it’ll work? Do you? That breeches buoy idea?”
Nat raised his hands and let them fall in a gesture of disclaimer. “Do you have any better ideas?”
“Those choppers,” Brown said. “They’re still sailing around, not doing a damn bit of good. That was your idea too.”
“So was the elevator,” Nat said, “and it could have killed fifty people instead of one.” It would be a long time, if ever, before he forgot that.
Once in his fire-jumping days he had been dropped into an area where a forest fire, wind-driven, had altered direction without warning and trapped nineteen men in a fatal pocket. Their bodies lay stiffly in the fetal position, curled like snails, burned almost beyond recognition. That was a thing you remembered too. “What else can we do but try everything we can think of?” Nat said. “Because if we don’t—” He spread his hands.
There was silence.
“Let’s look at the possibilities,” Nat said. “You can’t reach them with anything. And they can’t get down by themselves. Even if they had ropes, what good would they do? Middle-aged men and women trying to rappel fifteen hundred feet?” His voice was low-pitched, almost savage.
“Can the choppers do anything?” he said then. “The answer is no, not by themselves. You might be able to break some windows up there and transfer an acrobat to a ladder swinging from one of the choppers, but none of those people who went up there to drink champagne could make it. So what is left? That’s the answer to your question. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego made it in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, but it isn’t going to happen here.”
“Okay,” Brown said, calmer now. “Don’t get in an uproar. We’ll see what the Coast Guard has to say.”
“If it doesn’t work,” Nat said, “it doesn’t work.” He stared out the window again.
Patty touched his arm.
“Is all this really Paul’s doing?” Her voice was quiet. “Daddy said he wasn’t sure and wouldn’t badmouth a man until he was.”
The envelope of change-order copies was still in his pocket. Nat took it out, shook the orders free on the drafting board. He watched Patty pick them up one by one, glance at them, drop them as if they were unclean. She said at last, “I’m not an engineer, but I do know a little.” She was watching Nat’s face. “Your name on all of these, but you didn’t sign them, did you?”
“How do you know that?”
“Not your style,” Patty said. “And don’t ask me how I know, but I do.” She looked down at the papers. “One of Paul’s tricks, imitating handwriting. I used to think it was amusing.” She paused. “Now,” she said, “I think it’s merely childish. And vicious.” She was silent for a time. “Tell me,” she said then, “what is the name for a woman who turns against her husband?”
“Admirable.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
Small and indomitable, Nat thought, willing to face facts squarely even when they hurt. How would Zib react in a similar situation? Probably just pretend that it was all a mistake that had never happened and walk away. But not this one. “You have my word for it,” Nat said.
“Now,” a new voice said from the trailer doorway, “what seems to be the trouble and what do you think we can do about it?”
He was a big man, broad, solid, massively calm—Chief Petty Officer Oliver, United States Coast Guard. He listened quietly while Nat explained, and together they went out of the trailer to stare up at the tops of the buildings—the square flat-topped north tower of the Trade Center and the World Tower itself, its shining spire almost touching the sky.
The chief looked around the plaza at the crowds, the sooty lakes, the writhing hoses and shouting firemen. “Quite a circus,” he said, and squinted aloft again, measuring distances with his eye, his face expressionless. He looked at last at Nat, and slowly shook his head. “It can’t be done,” he said.
“You’ve got guns,” Nat said, “and line—what you call a messenger line, no?”
“We’ve got it all,” the chief said.
“And the distance, man, isn’t all that great.” Nat’s voice was urgent, almost angry. “So it takes half a dozen tries. One line into that Tower Room is all you need, isn’t it? We’ll have the whole bank of windows on that side broken out. You’ll have a target the size of a barn. You—”
“Down here on the ground,” the chief said, “the wind is calm, or near enough. Up there—how high?”
“Fifteen hundred feet.” The anger was suddenly gone. “I see what you mean.”
“Blowing merry hell,” the chief said. “It usually is aloft. See that smoke, how it lays out straight? That’s what we’d have to shoot a line into—” He paused. “And there’s no way we can get it there. Not at that distance.”
Another bad idea, Nat thought, and blamed himself that he had not yet come up with a good one. Maybe there were no good ideas, but that in no way altered the fact of failure. Bitter thought.
“But,” the chief said, “we’ll give it a try.” He paused. “We’ll do the best we can—even if it isn’t good enough.”
For the first time on this disastrous day, Nat thought, he felt the first faint glimmering of hope. It was hard to keep triumph out of his voice. “We’ll give you firemen and cops,” he said, “anybody you need to go up on the Trade Center roof with you and help you do your thing. I’ll see that the windows in the Tower Room are broken out and men are standing by to catch a line if you get it across.” His thoughts were flowing now. “My boss, the boss architect, is up there. He’ll find structure strong enough to fasten the breeches buoy line to and handle any strain. Then—”
“We’ll try,” the chief said. “That’s all I can promise.” He smiled suddenly. “But it’ll be the damndest gut-busting try you ever saw.” The smile spread. “And who knows?” He gestured back into the trailer. “Get your people lined up.”
The governor took the call and promptly sent for Ben Caldwell and the fire commissioner to hear the situation report.
“A Coast Guard crew,” Nat’s voice said, “is going to the roof of the north tower of the Trade Center. They’ll try shooting a messenger line over to you—”
Caldwell interrupted. “That means breaking out windows on that side.” He nodded.
“All of them,” Nat said. “Every one. Give them as big a target as you can.” He paused. “We’re having the plaza on that side cleared of everybody. That heavy falling glass can kill.”
“We’ll start on the windows when you give the word,” Caldwell said. He hesitated. “It’s a long way, Nat, from that tower roof.”
“We’ll try. That’s all we can do.” And then, rather than dwell on possible failure, hurrying on, “As I understand it, the gun shoots a weighted projectile carrying a light messenger line. When you get the line, you haul it in on signal, and they’ll have secured the heavier line to it. Two lines, actually: the heavy one to carry the load of the breeches buoy, and the smaller line that pulls the breeches buoy across to you and then back down to the tower roof.” He paused.
“Understood,” Caldwell said. He wore a faint smile.
“You’re probably way ahead of me,” Nat said, “but I’ll go through it all anyway.” Pause. “Make the heavy line fast to structure that will take a hell of a load, not just to a table or a chair.” Another pause. “And I’d suggest that where the line goes through the window frame you make damn sure all the glass is gone. We don’t want the line to be cut or frayed.” Another voice spoke unintelligibly in the background. “Wait a moment—”
In the silence the governor said, “Your man, Ben—”
“The best,” Caldwell said. “If it can be done, he’ll figure out the way and see to it.”
“They’ve cleared the plaza on that side,” Nat’s voice came again into the speaker phone. “You can start on the windows.”
Caldwell looked at the fire commissioner. The commissioner nodded and made a circle of thumb and forefinger. He hurried out of the office.
Nat’s voice said in a different note, “I don’t know how many are hearing this—” He hesitated.
The governor said quickly, “This is Armitage. You can say whatever you want to say.”
“Okay,” Nat said. His voice was solemn. “It’s just this. We don’t want to get your hopes too high because it may not work.”
“Understood,” the governor said.
“But,” Nat said, “if it doesn’t work—” He paused. “Then, goddammit, we’ll think of something else. That’s a promise.” Another pause. “All for now.” He clicked off.
The office was still. Ben Caldwell, smiling faintly, almost apologetically, looked at the governor and Beth. “I’ve found,” he said, “that Nat Wilson’s promises can be depended on.” The smile spread. “I find myself clinging to that thought.”
“We all are,” the governor said. “We can build buildings like this and invent governments and machines and set up systems that can’t fail, but when it comes right down to it, there is no substitute for a man you can depend on.” He paused. “Or a woman.” He smiled then. “That sounds corny, doesn’t it? But it wouldn’t be corny if it weren’t a basic truth.”
From the big room came the sound of breaking glass and a growing murmur of voices.
The governor heaved himself out of his chair. “Show time,” he said. “Let’s bring everybody up to date.”
Nat turned away from the phone and walked the length of the trailer to stand again beside Patty. “Big talk,” he said. His smile was deprecatory. “But I couldn’t just leave them—dangling.”
“You’ll think of something.”
And what did a man say to that? He began to gather the change-order copies, stuff them back into the envelope. “We’ll want the originals of these,” he said. “If we can find them.”
Patty said automatically, “Paul’s office files.”
; Nat thought about it. He nodded. “You’re probably right. We’ll have them picked up. I’ll talk to Brown.” He was gone only a few moments, and then, compulsively, he was back to stand once more beside this small bright creature who did not know how to give up.
“How do you explain Paul?” Patty said. The feeling of schizophrenia was very strong: in its secret place that one part of her mind wept quietly; here her attention was on reality, life. “I mean,” she said, “I know these things happen. But Paul?”
Nat had never considered himself knowledgeable about people, but he understood now that Patty’s need was for someone to listen, occasionally to talk, but above all to try to understand. “You know him better than I do, Patty.”
“Do I?” Patty was silent for a few moments. “I’m his wife. We’ve made love together, laughed together, had our arguments, our hopes, our triumphs, our sadnesses—” She shook her head. “But know him? I don’t think I do. I’m—lacking.”
“Maybe,” Nat said slowly, “there isn’t very much there to know.”
Patty’s glance was shrewd. “You never thought so, did you?”
“He and I are entirely different. I’m a country boy.”
“That’s a pose.”
Nat smiled faintly. “Maybe partly. But down deep it isn’t. I can’t explain—”
“Try.”
Nat lifted his hands and let them fall. “I don’t see things the way—city people do. Oh, I’m not trying to make myself out as a hayseed gaping at the tall buildings—”
Patty’s smile was wry. “In Brooks Brothers clothes? Even dirty as they are? Hardly.”
“But,” Nat said, “an air-conditioned duplex apartment overlooking the East River, a house in Westchester or Fairfield, a yacht on the Sound or a membership in the Racquet Club—these aren’t living, to me; they’re ridiculous attempts to make an artificial existence merely bearable.” He smiled sheepishly. “That makes me sound like a bush-league Thoreau, doesn’t it?”
The Tower Page 21