Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  But, of course, Florida is not earthquake country.

  He kept wondering about the underground pilings, and finally he checked and found out that the piling contractor on the job had been Romez Foundations. He found out they were down on Riley Key, putting in pilings. In dark pants and white shirt, wearing an aluminum hard hat and carrying a clipboard, Gus Garver went onto the job and roamed, unimpeded. Once he was asked what he wanted, and he said he was with the State Bureau of Regulatory Services, and was told that if he wanted anything, just ask.

  The equipment looked overworked and undermaintained. The crew was slow and slovenly. Gus tasted the water they were using. It was salty, brackish. He was there an hour. He saw two interrupted pours. In each case the reason was the same. The auger evidently bit into some underground cavity in the underlying limestone, and then the pour used more yards of concrete than was immediately available. So they stopped and, after ten minutes, resumed pouring into the same auger hole, brought it up to the surface form, shoved in the reinforcing bars and poured the cap.

  Checking the foundation work stimulated his curiosity about how these narrow islands so close offshore had been formed. He made his guess and proved it correct at the Athens Public Library. A very long time ago Florida had been under the sea. As the seas receded and the land rose, great rivers had come roaring off the mainland into the Gulf of Mexico, fed by continuing cloudbursts. When the seas retreated farther and the rivers shrank, these offshore islands appeared, composed of the materials the rivers had carried down to the sea and deposited in their delta areas. Thus they were quite unlike the true Florida keys, from Key Largo down to Key West, a long huge dead reef, composed of the googols of skeletal remains of tiny dead sea creatures.

  Googol was one of the words which pleased him. It was easier than trying to say the figure one followed by one hundred zeros. And it pleased him to be right about the geological history of these false keys, which were alluvial deposits, long windrows of marl, of shell washed down the rivers and deposited and compacted over the centuries, slowly acquiring the living plants and the top-soil and the white ribbons of seaward beach.

  It accounted for the narrowness of the bays which separated these islands from the Florida west coast mainland, and their similarities in structure, elevation and flora.

  At night, alone in Apartment 1-C, in the dark bedroom silence, Gus Garver could feel the tangible weight of the six stories over him. And he could see, quite vividly and specifically, one of the underground pilings at the Riley Key project where the pour had been interrupted. During the ten-minute wait, there had been water seepage from the rough sides of the augered hole, bringing down with it bits of shell and marl and soil to form a thin layer atop the wet concrete. The new pour had not displaced this debris. It remained, like a form of insulation, weakening the bond between the two pours, creating the future fracture line, the place where it would go in the event lateral stress was ever placed upon it.

  Wouldn’t have to be lateral, he thought. Assume the mix was heavy and during the ten-minute wait it set up at a fifteen-degree tilt from the horizontal. Then, if the native materials in the side wall are soft enough, sufficient vertical stress could force slippage. On the other hand, during the ten-minute wait, a couple of bushels of dry shell could have tumbled onto the old pour and there could be no damn bond at all between the bottom of the piling and the top of the piling. And they wouldn’t know it.

  Okay, smart-ass engineer, how would you handle it if you had to pour right in that spot, and for some reason you ran out of grout? Hmmm. Pull the auger and the pressure pipe and shine a good light down the hole and make visual inspection. Drop a length of number-six reinforcing bar down and see how much sticks up out of the first pour. Ideal would be a twelve-foot length, with six in and six up. Drop about five of them, and on the new pour make it a little wetter, less aggregate, so the bar would help make a solid joint. They might end up too close together or too close to the exterior of the piling, but it was a lot better answer than nothing at all.

  Thinking of the bars made him think of all the reinforcing steel in the building around him, under him and over him. All the marginal bars with their dowels and splices, the deformed bars and the melded wire fabric, all the supports and spacers and mesh.

  He made a mental list of the things which could go wrong with all the reinforcing steel. Too long a wait—over an hour—before the tension reinforcing of the pilings. Steel with grease on it, or too much rust, or with mill scale on it. Bad welds. Too few dowels from footings to walls. Undersized bars. Brittle tie wire. Unstaggered splices in adjoining bars. Bending and field cutting of bars around openings and sleeves. Fast sloppy pours that left voids under and around the reinforcing, or knocked the bars off the chairs, unnoticed.

  No, this was not earthquake country, but it was waterfront, and this was a low island indeed, and there was a great warm shallow sea out there, where the big storms come a-roving in season.

  At night he began to think of structure in relation to the sea and the tides, and he began to think of Sam Harrison, who, as a green tough kid, had worked for him not too many years ago. They come on the job and you size them up. There are three kinds. The first kind can’t hack it, for all the reasons known to man, and so you ease them out before they kill themselves or, worse, kill somebody else who is worth their wages. The second type you look for, because you can keep them a long time. They are competent, loyal, diligent and quite happy to have somebody else take the career risks and the money risks. Sam Harrison was of the third variety. At first you think they belong in number-two class. But then you slowly learn that they are doing just a little bit more than you asked for, and doing it a little better than you thought possible. Then, feet on solid ground, they start coming to you with innovative ways of doing things more easily and quickly, and some you approve and some you don’t. Then you know what you have on your hands. So you make an extra effort to keep them on the team as long as you can, knowing you are going to lose them. The Sam Harrisons always get restive. They have to run their own store. It is the only way for them. So, when the highway and the bridges were finished in the Peruvian mountains, Sam went his own way.

  Sam had gone to follow his own most intense area of interest, man’s efforts to tame the sea. In lonely places when work is done there is time for talk. Sam had said that you can’t tame it, you can’t overwhelm it by force. You have to comprehend the way the sea uses its power, and use its own strength to make it defeat itself. Gus had heard later how Sam Harrison, in his first job, had devised a new kind of dog-bone groin which, laid in rail-fence fashion and laced with cable, had rebuilt a Spanish beach without causing the usual deep erosion down-current from the groin.

  This was the sort of problem Sam Harrison would like to tackle. Relate the remaining safety factor in the construction of Golden Sands to the possible and probable impact of hurricane tides this far from the actual beach front of Fiddler Key, and recommend measures to be taken. It would be no great feat finding him. But paying his fee would be. There are too few Sam Harrisons in the world at any one time, and they are in demand.

  And so, thinking again about his list of defects, he drifted into sleep, where he stood on the lip of a deep river gorge in Peru watching his survey crew work out the precise dimensions of the span he had calculated from the aerials.…

  3

  MARTIN LISS STOOD on the blue pile carpeting by the big corner windows of his office on the mainland, in downtown Athens, and looked out across the roofs of smaller buildings toward the bay and toward the caramel and vanilla buildings along the beach front of Fiddler Key. It was a clear hot windy day, a breeze off the Gulf blowing the usual smutch inland. The big windows were tinted blue-gray. The north bridge over to Fiddler Key was open to let a small sailboat through, the stacked traffic glittering in the mid-morning sunlight. He could see the red markers of the Intracoastal Waterway spaced down the middle of broad Palm Bay, and he wondered how long it would be before he could get t
he LissLess III out of freshwater storage and go cruising.

  He was a short plump man in his forty-third year. The lifts in his shoes brought him up to five foot six and a fraction. He was deeply, permanently tan. The entire front half of his head was bald. From that midpoint the hair was combed straight back, falling in dark ringlets over his collar. He wore a small goatee, black salted with gray, squared off. He had a third wife he mistrusted and two grown children he despised.

  For a week he had experienced that familiar hollow breathless feeling which meant it was decision time. It was the high-roller feeling. After a series of straight passes, do you drag down, or do you try to make just one more pass?

  From his windows on the twelfth floor of the Athens Bank and Trust Company, he could see the jungle-green fourteen acres of the Silverthorn tract on the bay side of Fiddler Key, with the familiar shape of Golden Sands just beyond it. Beyond Golden Sands, across Beach Drive, rose the higher towers of Azure Breeze and the Surf Club. Martin Liss did not see only the fourteen raw uncleared acres. His mind superimposed upon it the architect’s rendering of the Harbour Pointe Club with its 168 units, tennis courts, pools, yacht basin and clubhouse.

  The concept represented thirteen months of planning, negotiating and spending. Twenty-eight thousand for an option on the land, not recoverable no matter what, against the price of $1.28 million. One hundred thousand spent on architectural fees, legal fees and other service fees. Allocation to payroll and personal expenses of the Harbour Pointe Club project, say fifty thousand.

  Now it could be started. No more roadblocks. Corps of Engineer approval, approvals from four departments of the State of Florida, from three regional commissions, from five Palm County governmental bodies, and even from the Fiddler Key Association. The contractors were lined up. An $11-million line of credit was all established. The feasibility study indicated that, after sellout, there would be a $2.8-million net before taxes. Or fold the whole tent right now and swallow the loss of the out-of-pocket hundred and seventy-eight thousand. It would be a legitimate business loss for the Marliss Corporation.

  Arguments in favor of folding it: Seventy-five thousand unsold condominium units in Florida, either completed or being constructed. Brutal interest rates. Fantastic prices for materials. A whole world on the slide into depression. And right now you could cash in for how much? Three and a half mil? Cashing in is the wrong term, being as how most of it is already in Treasury notes. So right now, dummy, you could put it into those municipals that are guaranteed by the Fed and paying like six and a half almost tax free, make it a net two hundred thou tax free. Rent a damn palace at Acapulco. The best booze and the best broads. Big staff. Keep house parties going for weeks at a time.

  And never have this feeling in the gut again? Never feel the queasy flutter of risk-taking, of high rolling, of doing things they said you’d never pull off?

  Arguments in favor of going ahead: When things look the blackest, then is the time to make your move, because you get the jump on the ones holding back. The politicians can’t risk big unemployment. They’ll goose the economy. The government protects industrial pensions. Social Security will keep going up. They have to come to Florida. Where else can they go? They’ll keep coming down and all you are betting, Marty, is that one hundred and sixty-eight of them will be able to spring for an average eighty-thousand-dollar apartment, sixty for the cheapest, a hundred for the tops. They’ll be on the water with an easement to the beach. They’ll keep coming until there’s no more water to drink or air to breathe, and that is a long time off. Like five years? And I can be in and out in two—if I decide to go ahead. Jesus Christ, it is scary.

  Miss Drusilla Bryne tapped upon his door and came in, a tall slender handsome girl, a blue-eyed brunette with delicate features and a strong Dublin accent. “It’s the ones from Golden Sands, darlin’. Maggie says they’re in reception a bit early.”

  “The who?”

  “The delegation. Four, not five, so one is missing. And one is a Mr. McGinnity, their president.”

  He frowned. “Oh, shit! I forgot. Would you get me my confidential file on Golden Sands?”

  “There on the corner of your desk where I put it not an hour ago, love.”

  “So what are the rest of the instructions?”

  She laughed. “Oh, to tape it, in case there’s any threats at all. And to stay at my desk and watch the little box, so if the blue light comes on I can come in and tell you you have something important to do. And … hmmm … tell Lew to stand by in case you should call him in for some legal matter.”

  “Almost perfect. The only other thing is give them the coffee routine, the first-class version.”

  “They’re all that important now?”

  “No. But they are going to be very pissed. Benji’s arithmetic was way off.”

  “You’ll tell me when to go bring them?”

  “It’ll be about five minutes.”

  She went out and he opened the folder. Two left unsold: 5-A at seventy-two five, and 6-E at seventy-five. And they had been transferred from the Marliss Corporation to Investment Equities, Inc., for a total of a hundred and ten thousand, severing the last direct connection between Golden Sands and Martin Liss. No, not quite the last direct connection to be severed. That severance happened early last month, in early April when they held the meeting of all the owners in the communal dayroom on the first floor at Golden Sands. Up until the meeting, the officers and directors of the Golden Sands Association had been Martin Liss, president; Lew Traff, vice-president; Benjie Wannover, treasurer; Drusilla Bryne, secretary; and Cole Kimber, director at large.

  It made for a cozy relationship, to have a board composed of the developer; his secretary; his attorney, Lew Traff; his accountant, Benjamin Wannover; and the contractor who had built the place, Cole Kimber. It was the same team he had fielded on his other condominium projects on Fiddler Key: Captiva House, Azure Breeze and the Surf Club.

  During the period they had held office, better than a year, they had operated the association according to the provisions of the Declaration of Condominium, as drawn up by Lew Traff. They had made the contracts, set up the Association obligations, devised the rules for the owners, amending the Declaration of Condominium whenever useful or convenient.

  Prior to the April meeting, they had appointed a nominating committee, and at the meeting the owners accepted the resignations of the original five directors and voted the five new ones into office.

  The names of the new directors were in his confidential folder. They were all retired. He remembered the meeting. Three of the ablest owners, when approached by the committee prior to the meeting, had refused to serve, saying they had had enough of responsibility before retirement. And that, Martin knew, was a mistake. If the Association was well run, it would be a good place to live. If the new officers were not qualified, it would go downhill quickly. They all had a substantial investment to protect.

  He ran quickly through the names, trying to remember the faces. He had attended many of these meetings. Except for variations in size, they were all about the same. He had written the prior occupations opposite the names. McGinnity, VP and sales manager of an industrial belt company in Pennsylvania. Forrester, partner in a Cleveland ad agency. David Dow, CPA from Indianapolis. Wasniak, plant manager from Youngstown. Garver, civil engineer from Baltimore.

  Very probably he would remember the faces when they walked in. He wondered how ugly they would come on, and how well organized they would be. They had come to let off steam. And that was all it would be. Steam. Hot wet air.

  He leaned to the intercom and said, “Okay, Dru.”

  “Lew won’t be available. He’d already left for the airport. He’s meeting that man who’s coming about the claim.”

  “It’s okay. I probably won’t need him.”

  He got up and opened his office door and stood in the doorway. Soon he saw Drusilla leading the four grim-faced men through her office. She was smiling back over her shoulder, c
hattering about how lovely it was indeed to see them again.

  McGinnity had to be the big broad one with the red face, potato nose and shaven skull. So greet him warmly by name, shake his hand long enough to identify Wasniak as the one with the shoulders and the hair dyed rusty brown. Take a chance that Dow is the one with the glasses. Right! So the lanky and consumptive-looking one is either Forrester or Garver. Had to be Forrester. So look around and say, “Where is Mr. Garver? He couldn’t make it?”

  McGinnity was put off balance by the cordiality, trying to smile and trying not to smile. “Gus may be along later. He hasn’t been … very active. Because his wife is so sick.”

  “Come on in, gentlemen. Miss Bryne, I think we would all like coffee. Come on in. Let’s sit over here.”

  One corner of the large office was furnished like the corner of a lounge in a men’s club—with a couch and three leather chairs arranged around a big slate coffee table. Martin Liss maneuvered himself onto the couch with McGinnity beside him and the CPA at his right. It broke up their formation. Forrester unzipped a leather portfolio and took a sheaf of papers out of it. He put the portfolio on the coffee table and placed the papers on top of it, saying, “We have been over the—”

  “On my bathroom radio this morning I heard on the local news there’s some red tide off the south end of the key,” Martin said. “Can you notice anything where you are?”

  Wasniak shrugged and said, “I jog every morning right about dawn to an hour after. This morning I got the old tickle in the throat and I didn’t know what it was, and then I said oh-oh and I started looking for dead fish. In six miles, three down the beach and three back, I counted seven dead fish, not big, dead a long time, they looked.”

  Liss shook his head. “It’s a terrible thing. I hope we’re not in for a summer of it. Important scientists are working on it, but they seem to come up empty. Ah, our coffee wagon, gentlemen.”