I already bought those. I need managerial talent; I need somebody to help me run the show. I hand-picked you and I hand-trained you during the last two years. You’re the man I want-you’re the only man I’ve had time enough to teach. That was probably a mistake” Barton turned back to the window. Opportunity …
again. New title, new salary, success with a capital “S” because if Leroux had figured it right, in a few years National Curtainwall would be one of the largest developers in the country. But opportunity had come when he didn’t want it, when he had already made up his mind as to what he was going to do. Leroux kept opening doors for him that he didn’t want to walk through.
“The concept isn’t quite as narrow as you might think,” Leroux continued persuasively. “The Glass House is only one example; there’ll be other … models, if you like.”
The snowflakes were getting finer, Barton thought idly, and coming -down with greater force.. The wind must really be howling around the building.
“It’s a big job,” Leroux added, irritated. “Maybe you’re not a big enough man for it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Wyn, cut it out-I’m not twenty-one years old.
I didn’t say I wouldn’t take it. I want time to think it over.” Jenny would be delighted, he thought bitterly.
Suddenly Quinn was at their elbow, saying softly: “Your table’s ready now-would you follow me, please?”
She was pleasant but decidedly formal, probably because of the presence of Leroux, Barton thought.
They followed her into the dining room where Thelma and Jenny were already seated. Barton gave his drink order-black coffee and preferably immediately-and squeezed Jenny’s hand. She was unresponsive and distant, a slim, dark-haired girl in her middle twenties whose classic beauty was marred only by a too-thin nose. At one time, Barton thought morosely, she was full of life, relaxed and outgoing. That had been one of the things that had attracted him to her; in so many ways she had been like Quinn, only a younger version. Tonight, as usual lately, she was withdrawn and remote; she wouldn’t have ten words to say throughout the entire meal.
He turned his attention to Thelma Leroux. The enigma in Leroux’s life, he thought. A woman he would probably never quite understand, but one whom he instinctively respected. Younger than Leroux, though perhaps not by much. Like Wyndom, she was from North Carolina and still possessed a lingering trace of southern accent and charm. A naturally warm, self-confident woman who had somehow endowed matronhood with sensuality. She was slightly chubby-just enough to prevent the crepe from forming under her throat-with pale, smooth skin and frost-tinged hair. And despite her sophistication, there was still an earthiness about her. She could probably mingle with construction foremen as easily as with dowagers and still be herself, he thought.
“You know,” Thelma said, “as long as the building’s been open, I’ve never eaten here.”
“That’s Wyn’s fault,” Barton said. “He should have taken you here long before now. Curtainwall could even pick up the tab as a business expense.”
“Like hell it could,” Leroux interrupted. “The IRS watches us like a hawk.”
“It’s a beautiful place, Craig, and the service seems delightful, too.” Thelma’s eyes sparkled with a hint of mischief. “The hostess seemed to know you. Is she somebody out of your past?”
Barton smiled. “Quinn’s an old friend I once dated a long time ago-before I met Jenny.”
“How long before, Craig?” Jenny’s voice was small and stiff and there was sudden silence at the table.
“As a matter of fact,” Barton said curtly, “just before I met you.
You and she were much alike-I told you about Quinn.”
“She seems older than I had expected,” Jenny said coolly.
“More mature,” Barton corrected shortly. Irritated, he whipped his place napkin off the table, his elbow knocking over the carafe of water in the process. It shattered on the floor and he swore softly to himself, almost not hearing Thelma’s quiet “There’s no damage, Craig-the waitress shouldn’t have left it so near the edge.” Quinn was already sending over a bus boy with a small broom and several napkins to soak up the water.
Barton turned to the table behind him at which a middle-aged, rather stout woman and an elderly, dapper man were sitting. “I’m sorry if you were splashed, I’ll make good the cleaning….
“No, no, I wouldn’t think of it,” the woman said, smiling. “It’s only water. Mein lieber Gott-think how wet we would be if we were outside! Isn’t that right, Harlee?”
“Quite right, my dear. Don’t trouble yourself ‘ sir, it’s trilling, I assure you.” He was brushing at some spots on his suit and there was a tone in his voice that made Barton wonder if his response would have been the same if his wife hadn’t spoken up first.
He turned back to the table. It was going to be a long night, he thought, and Jenny had apparently made up her mind to make it even longer.
“It must have been rough flying weather today,” Thelma was saying, spreading a thin oil of conversation over the troubled waters. “Or does the weather bother you when you fly? I know it would me, particularly if I had to leave San Francisco to come here.”
Barton couldn’t help smiling. Thelma.into the breach, he thought.
He envied Leroux.
CHAPTER 20
Time was running out and Jesus was beginning to feel panicky. He had followed his mother from office to office as she methodically emptied wastebaskets into the large canvas bag in the frame she wheeled behind her, begging and pleading for money. Her answer had always been a mumbled “no.” He was angry one minute and sobbing the next and then he started to get increasingly mean. He was already very close to the time when Spinner had planned on meeting him. Twenty minutes more and Spinner would have left; he had other appointments. Besides, Spinner had been nervous ever since his last bust; if Jesus stood him up, he might get suspicious and Turn Jesus off completely. After all, he had a record and Spinner might think the cops were using him to entrap dealers….
Jesus felt the sweat dampen his armpits and ooze over his forehead.
Spinner would think that, in fact it would be the first thing that Spinner would think. Jesus was constantly fighting nausea now and instinctively knew the cramps were only minutes away.
“Mama, you’ve got to help me!”
She shook her head. “No. You help yourself.”
“You want I should do something terrible?” The top of his upper lip was soaked and he was beginning to shake.
“I have no money,” she said stoically, tugging at her cart.
“Mama, I got to meet this man, I got to have the money. You don’t know what it’s like. If I don’t make this connection, it could kill me.”
Her eyes suddenly flicked at him. “Connection?”
He licked his lips, then ripped at the buttons on his sleeves and pushed the cuffs up over his knobby elbows.
He held out his arms with the veins showing. “You see these, Mama?”
he asked thickly. “They’re tracks. From needles. I’m hooked, Mama; I’m hooked on heroin. I need a fix. You know what I mean? I need a fix, Mama; if I don’t get it, it could kill me.”
““Kill you? You kill yourself.”
He grabbed her shoulders then, his thin fingers digging into her flesh. She winced with pain and pulled free.
“Maybe you kill me instead,” she said angrily. “Is that what you want to do; kill me, maybe? You want twenty dollars. I don’t have twenty dollars. Ask as much as you like, I don’t have it.”
She was lying, he thought, she had to have it. “You don’t care what happens to me!” he yelled angrily. “Maybe you want me to go out and rip off some mark in an alley, is that what you want? A brick in a sock and there he is and all I have to do is go through his pockets.
Or maybe I hit him too hard and he never wakes up. You never think I hurt anybody, Mama? You never think I hide in an alley and wait for somebody to go by? You don’t know
me, Mama, you never knew me!” - She emptied a basket into the cart, followed it with the contents of several ashtrays, and wiped them out with a damp rag.
“Turn yourself in,” she grunted. “Maybe that can help you.” He didn’t see the tears that were forming at the corners of her eyes.
“Mama,” he said slowly, the strength draining out of him as he felt the nausea build again, “I don’t need to ask you. I can go down on the street and get money. I can sell myself, Mama; I can let old men use me like a girl.” His voice was almost a sob now. “They pay me, Mama; Ira good at it. I don’t want to, but I got to.”
Her back was to him and the tears stood on her cheeks like raindrops.
“So you’re a girl,” she said. “You’re not a man.” Her voice was close to breaking, but he didn’t notice.
The nausea passed and he came around the desk and pushed her back against it. “Maybe I should report you to welfare, Mama,” he hissed.
“You’re living with Martinez, only you ain’t married to him. I turn you in and they take you off the lists; they don’t know about your job here. You want me to do that? I will, Mama; T swear to God I will!
They’ll throw you out of that dump you live in and you ain’t ever going to find another place that cheap to stay!”
“Jesus!” For a moment her emotions showed and then they were washed away in silent tears. “I have another floor to clean tonight.
Maria didn’t come to work.” She huddled inside her uniform.
“Leave me alone, Jesus, just leave me alone. I got to do my job.”
He leaned over and swept a desk clean of its files and letter trays and telephone, sending them clattering to the floor. “Why should I care about your goddamned job?
What’s it mean to me?” He suddenly struck a match and held it over the canvas bag in the waste cart, filled with the scrap paper from a dozen offices. “Your goddamned job … I’ll burn down your goddamned job! You want to see me do it? I will, Mama, you know I will!” She was now thoroughly frightened and reached for a phone on another desk to call security. Jesus batted it out of her hands, his eyes wild. “Mama, I want money, you understand me? I want it now!”
. He could feel the weakness start again and he began to gag. “I know you’ve got money, Mama,” he said faintly.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see her clutch almost automatically at her pocket. “I knew it, goddamnit!” he shouted. He came slowly around the desk, holding out his hand. “Gimme the wallet or I’ll break your fucking arm!”
She tried to run, to reach another phone, and he pounced on her, knocking her against the desk and pulling the phone out of the floor connection. Then she was running for the office door. He tripped her, grabbing at her smock. She held her hands over , the pocket containing her wallet but his fingers were already there, pulling, tearing.
“Please, Jesus, por Dios!”
“Speak English, Mama,” he sneered. The next instant he had torn the wallet from her pocket and was leafing through the contents. Oh, Christ, sixteen bucks … Maybe Spinner would consider it on account, maybe half a bag would get’him through. He pushed past her and had just opened the door to the hall when the first of the cramps hit him and he abruptly doubled up, gasping for breath and gagging at the same time. He sagged against the door frame, fighting for strength.
Albina was running toward him now, her face wet with tears but an angry look.in her eyes. Jesus turned his back to her to fend her off and then she had seized the wallet and money from his hand and he was too feeble to resist.
“Mama, don’t …”
She was running for the elevator bank and he started after her, a little of his strength returning. She pressed the call button, then glanced at him coming toward her and changed her mind and ran for the stairwell door. He caught her when she was half through, grabbing her wrist to twist the cash out of her hand. They were making too much noise, he thought, and if that fat faggot Douglas had called security, the guards would be on them any minute.
His mother had started to cry for help and he clamped a hand on her mouth and at the same time tried to pull the money out of her hand.
She fell backward, pulling him with her, and they tumbled through the open door onto the landing. The door started to swing inexorably shut and Jesus leaped for it, shouting, “Catch it!” His fingers scrabbled at the edge of the metal and then he heard the lock click into place.
“Goddamnit, see what you’ve done!” Jesus snarled, whirling en his mother. “We’re trapped!” She huddled, sobbing, on the landing, her back to the wall, clutching the wallet to her breast and trying to stuff the crumpled bills back into it. For a moment they stood glaring at each other and then Jesus felt something else suddenly grip his stomach. It wasn’t nausea … it was the smell of smoke. He turned to look down the stairwell.
The air in the well below was already hazy with it.
In the machinery room at the top of the Glass House and in the subbasement, the whine of the smoke sensors has stopped and the glow of the heat indicators has faded.
The electrical connections -to the instruments have been burned through, the sensors themselves twisted or melted lumps of metal.
Griff Edwards waddles back to his desk, spreads out his paper, and tries to think of a two-letter word that is a composing room term; he is uncertain whether the last letter is an “n” or an “m.” Since the panel trouble light isn’t working, he does not realize the futility of his vigil.
A number of floors above, the beast is feeding hungrily and raging around the confines of the room. It is now brilliantly lit-a storage room filled with rows of shelves and lockers holding drums and bottles of solvents and waxes, half-open cartons of toweling and toilet paper.
The majority of these have started to char, ready to add more fuel to the flames surrounding them.
Most of the bottles on the shelves above the burning mats have burst in the intense heat, dribbling their contents over the mats below.
Close by, a locker suddenly bursts open as a five-gallon drum inside explodes A few feet away, the flames are clawing at several fifty-gallon drums resting on their sides in a metal rack. The drums contain a stripping solvent, trichloroethylene, for removing old, wax from tile floors. The stenciled letters on the lower drum have begun to fade into the surrounding char as the paint on the drum blisters.
The solvent inside begins to vaporize, building up pressure to the point where the ends of the drum are bulging with a terrible pregnancy.
The walls of the room, except for the one that doubles as the wall of the utility core, are of dry-wall plaster. The paper surfacing of the wall panels has already charred and the plaster in the paper-plaster’sandwich is steaming, breaking down under the heat and buckling from the internal pressures of carbon dioxide being driven from the plaster itself. Overhead, the perforated acoustical tile has buckled and torn loose from the ceiling. Under ordinary circumstances, the tile is relatively fire resistant but the tile itself is now charring and disintegrating as its binder decomposes under the intense heat. On the floor below, the asphalt tile, protected somewhat by its heat absorbing contact with the concrete floor, is nevertheless, melting on the surface and in many places, bulging. Where the tile bulges and curls away from the floor, it melts, slumps, and begins to burn with a smoky flame. Near the ceiling, a stringer holding a fifteen-foot fluorescent light fixture gives way and the fixture, still suspended from the other stringer, falls, smashing into the surface of melted tile.
The pressure in the nearby drum of trichloroethylene has finally become too great and the spigot shoots across the room, propelled by the internal pressure. A moment later, the drum erupts. At normal temperatures “trichlor” is not flammable, but in this heat the liquid spatters over the room, vaporizes, and ignites,. The other drums have sprung leaks rather than exploding, and the superheated liquids flood across the floor to join the fiery deluge.
The beast is now raging in its prison, plucking at the concrete ceiling ove
rhead, pushing the walls, clawing at the metal door, twisting and warping it but momentarily unable to burst it from its hinges. The liquids on the floor push toward the crack at the bottom of The door and a blazing finger thrusts underneath and finds fresh tile and paint just beyond. Another finger follows and instantly the blazing flood is seeping underneath the metal panel.
The beast has learned cunning.
CHAPTER 21
Credits, debentures, unpaid bills, canceled orders …
the whole sordid history of a business failure-it was like walking onto a battlefield after the war was over but the corpses had yet to be buried. Still, somebody had to do it, Douglas thought, and Larry had no head for figures.
He could add a column six different times and come up with six different answers. Not that he wasn’t bright, but his knack for business lay more in public relations and sales.
Douglas leaned back in his chair and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. For a moment his mind wandered back ten. years to when he had met Larry at a football game in Oakland. Douglas had been working for another decorating firm then and the local client had invited him to the game. Larry had some sort of butt job in the front office of the Forty-Niners and the client-what had been his name, anyway?-had introduced them during half time, probably intentionally matchmaking.
He and Larry had liked each other instantly. It had been an odd sort of courtship, with no apologies offered and none expected. When it came to love, whatever they had been looking for, they found in each other. Larry’s career depended very much on his being circumspect and yet, with Ian, he had seemed to grow almost overnight into a fully functioning human being with no hang-ups and few regrets. Two weeks later, Douglas had returned home, but they continued to correspond and then one morning Douglas had received a telegram from Larry asking Ian to meet him at the airport. Larry had never returned home.
But all of that was over now. Douglas suddenly snapped his pencil and threw the pieces against the wall in sudden decision. He may have grown too old for Larry, who now had other interests, but he couldn’t continue to drift, couldn’t continue to be weak and indecisive about both. Larry and the business. He couldn’t continue to live as a weakling.
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