Following the arm of the U in the direction of the river, I came at length to a series of cubbyholes cut into the interior wall. Their walls were made of that grainy glass used for shower doors; I could see light and movement through them but couldn’t distinguish shapes. I knocked at the middle door. When no one answered I turned the knob and went in.
I entered a time warp, a long narrow room whose furnishings apparently hadn’t changed since the building had gone up thirty-five years ago. Olive-drab filing cabinets and gun-metal desks lined the wall across from the doors. Fluorescent lights hung from an old acoustic-tile ceiling. The outer doors all opened into the room, but two had been blocked shut by filing cabinets.
Four middle-aged women in purple smocks sat at the row of desks. They were working on vast bales of paper with Sisyphus-like doggedness, making entries, shifting invoices, using old-fashioned adding machines with experienced stubby fingers. Two were smoking. The smell of cigarettes mingled with the darkroom chemical scent in acrid harmony.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I was trying to find the personnel office.”
The woman nearest the door turned heavy, uninterested eyes to me. “They’re not hiring.” She went back to her papers.
“I’m not looking for a job,” I said patiently, “I just want to talk to the personnel manager.”
All four of them looked up at that, weighing my suit, my relative youth, trying to decide if I was OSHA or EPA, state or federal. The woman who’d spoken jerked her faded brown hair toward a door facing the one I’d entered by.
“Across the plant,” she said laconically.
“Can I get there from inside or should I go around?”
One of the smokers reluctantly put down her cigarette and got up. “I’ll take her,” she said hoarsely.
The others looked at the old-fashioned electric clock over their desks. “You going on break then?” a flabby woman in the back asked.
My guide shrugged. “Might as well.”
The others looked chagrined: she’d been faster than they to think how to squeeze five extra minutes from the system. One of them pushed her chair back in a hopeful way, but the first speaker said sternly, “One’s enough to go,” and the would-be rebel scooted back to her station.
My guide took me out the far door. Beyond it lay the inferno I’d been expecting when I first entered the plant. We were in a dimly lit room that stretched the length of the building. Stainless-steel pipes ran along the ceiling and at intervals below, so that you felt suspended in a steel maze that had flipped up on its side. Steam hissed from the overhead pipes in little puffs, filling the maze with vapor. Large red “No Smoking” signs hung every thirty feet along the walls. Enormous cauldrons were hooked to the pipes at intervals, huge vats designed for a coven of giant witches. The white-suited figures tending the place might have been their familiars.
Although the air in here actually smelled better than it did outside, a number of the workers wore respirators. I wondered about the majority who didn’t, as well as how smart it was for my guide and me to be taking the shortcut through the plant. I tried asking her over the hissing and clatter of the pipes, but she apparently had decided I must be an OSHA spy or something and refused to answer. When an overhead valve let out a belch so loud that I jumped, she gave a small smile but said nothing.
Skirting the maze expertly, she led me to a door diagonally across the plant from the one we’d entered by. We were in another narrow cinder-block hallway, this one forming the base of the U. She took me down it, turning left to follow the second arm toward the river. Halfway along, she stopped at a door labeled “Canteen-Employees Only.”
“Mr. Joiner’s on down there-third door on your right. Door marked ‘Administration.’”
“Well, thanks for your help,” I said, but she had already disappeared into the canteen.
The door marked “Administration” was also made of grainy glass but the rooms beyond it looked a little classier than the Tartarus where I’d visited the four clerks. Carpeting, not linoleum, covered the concrete floor. Wallboard ceiling and wall covering created an illusion of an intimate space within the cinder-block tunnel.
A woman in street clothes sat behind a desk with a modern phone bank and a not-so-modern electric typewriter. Like the clerks I’d stumbled on, she was middle-aged. But her skin was firm under a generous layer of makeup, and she’d dressed with care, if not style, in a crisp pink shirtwaist with large plastic pearls at her neck and clipped to her ears.
“You need something, honey?” she asked.
“I’d like to see Mr. Joiner. I don’t have an appointment, but it shouldn’t take more than five minutes.” I dug in my handbag for a business card and handed it to her.
She gave a little laugh, “Ooh, honey, don’t expect me to pronounce that one.”
This wasn’t a Loop office where receptionists give you a KGB-style interrogation before grudgingly agreeing to find out if Mr. So-and-so can see you. She picked up a phone and told Mr. Joiner there was a girl out here asking for him. She gave another little laugh and said she didn’t know and hung up.
“He’s back there,” she said brightly, pointing over her shoulder. “Middle door.”
Three little offices were carved into the wall behind her, each about eight feet square. The door to the first one was open and I glanced in curiously. No one was there, but an array of papers and a wall covered with production charts showed it was a working office. A little sign next to the open middle door announced it was home to “Gary Joiner, Accounting, Safety, and Personnel.” I knocked briefly and went in.
Joiner was a young man, maybe thirty years old, with sandy hair cut so short it merged with his pink skin. He was frowning over a stack of ledger printouts but looked up when I came in. His face was blotchy and he smiled at me with worried, innocent eyes.
“Thanks for taking the time to see me,” I said briskly, shaking his hand. I explained who I was. “For personal reasons-nothing to do with Xerxes-I’m trying to find two men who worked here in the early sixties.”
I pulled a slip of paper with Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro’s names on it from my purse and handed it to him. I had a story about why I wanted to find them, something dull about being witnesses to an accident, but I didn’t want to volunteer a reason unless he asked for it. Unlike Goebbels’s belief in the big lie, I believe in the dull lie-make your story boring enough and no one will question it.
Joiner studied the paper. “I don’t think those guys work here. We only employ a hundred and twenty people, so I’d know their names. But I’ve only been here two years, so if they go back to the sixties…”
He turned to a filing cabinet and riffled through some files. I was struck suddenly by the absence of any computer terminals, either here or elsewhere in the plant. Most personnel or accounting officers would be able to look up employees on a screen.
“Nope. Of course, you can see we barely have room for current files.” He swept an arm in an arc that knocked part of the ledger sheets to the floor. He blushed vividly as he bent to pick them up. “If someone leaves or retires or whatever and we don’t have activity on them-you know, like an ongoing comp claim-we ship the files out to our warehouse in Stickney. Want me to check for you?”
“That’d be great.” I got up. “When can I call back? Monday too soon?”
He assured me Monday would be fine-he lived out west and could stop off at the warehouse on his way home tonight. He conscientiously scribbled a note in his pocket diary, inserting the scrap of paper with the names on it. By the time I left the room he had already returned to his printouts.