The governor was of two minds, but as usual his practical side prevailed. There was nothing that said that he, governor of the state, must check in with the city’s mayor when he came to visit. On the other hand, why raise hackles, unnecessarily? And Bob Ramsay’s hackles were notoriously easy to raise. “I’m still at the Harvard Club,” the governor said on the phone to the mayor. “Is that turf neutral enough for a Yale man? If it is, come up. I’ll buy you a drink. “We can go over to Grover Frazee’s hoedown together.”
Mayor Bob Ramsay was fifty-seven years old, in splendid physical shape, in his second term as mayor of the great city and loving ever minute of it. In the mayor’s lexicon the word challenge was set in capital letters.
Deep in a leather chair in a comer of the club lounge, a snifter of cognac at his elbow, “What are you going to talk about?” the governor said. “Brotherhood of man as symbolized by the World Tower?”
It was a favorite theme of Ramsay’s. But Bent Armitage had a way of souring even the most lofty thoughts, and the theme immediately lost its savor. The mayor sipped his black coffee. “I haven’t thought much about it,” he said. It was a mistake.
The governor’s grin appeared. “That’s crap, and you know it, son. Like Mark Twain, you spend a great deal of time preparing your impromptu remarks. We all do. Why not admit it?”
“What I intended to convey,” the mayor said stiffly, “is that I haven’t yet decided exactly what remarks are called for.”
The governor switched the subject smoothly. “What do you think of the building?”
Ramsay sipped his coffee again while he examined the question for booby traps. “I think we are all agreed,” he said, “that it is a lovely structure, one of Ben Caldwell’s best, if not his crowning achievement.”
“I’ll go along with that,” the governor said.
“And it brings additional space—”
“—which the city needs like a broken head.”
Ramsay finished his coffee deliberately. He set the cup down. “Not fair and not true. What the city needs is all the fine facilities it can have—and this is one—together with the kind of aid that every large city in this country must have or perish.” It was a matter of faith with him. He looked at the governor in challenge.
“Maybe,” the governor said. He looked at his watch. “We have a little time. Let’s kick it around a bit. Suppose I offer the idea that cities of over-a-million population are as out of date as the dinosaur? What do you say to that?” The mayor breathed hard and said nothing.
“I’m serious,” the governor said. “What about an abundance of one-hundred-thousand-population cities, each containing all the necessary services and surrounded by the necessary industries and enterprises to provide employment, but without the helpless slums and the gigantic welfare rolls and the crime problems that come out of them? Would you go along with that concept?”
“And you,” the mayor said, “are the one who is always accusing me of seeing visions, looking for pie in the sky.”
“A little different,” the governor said. “You’re looking for manna to keep your pet dinosaur alive. I’m looking for a new kind of livestock we can live with.” He paused and grinned. “That’s a piss-poor analogy, but maybe you’ll see what I mean. Call it a modern-day version of Jefferson’s ideal bucolic civilization, to replace the monster-city environment we’ve created in which nobody’s happy.” He paused again. “Except maybe Bob Ramsay.” The mayor had been doing his arithmetic. “We would have to break this metropolitan area up into a hundred and thirty separate cities, each going its own way—”
“Independent as hogs on ice,” the governor said. He nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with tug-and-haul. That’s what it takes to hammer out policy.”
“I rarely know,” the mayor said, “whether you are serious or your tongue is pushing hard at your cheek. Do you know yourself?”
Again that grin, directed inward at the governor’s own foibles. “This time,” he said, “I am perfectly serious. Your city is breaking up anyway, new poverty is moving in and solid middle-class support moving out. In not too long you’ll have left only people living in penthouses and riding in limousines, and people living in slums mugging each other in the streets and subways.” The governor paused, unsmiling. “Can you deny it?”
The mayor could not. “But you make it sound hopeless, and it isn’t. Give us back some of the taxes the state takes from us, the federal government takes from us, and—”
“And,” the governor said, “you’ll provide more low-income housing, more welfare, more indigent hospital care, more slum schools.” He paused for emphasis. “And you’ll simply attract more people who need those things. So you’ll be digging your hole deeper and compounding your problems, and that means you’ll need more police to cope, and firemen, and courts, and, inevitably, more low-income housing, more welfare, more indigent hospital care, more slum schools—ad infinitum.” He paused again. “You’re beyond the point where you can even hope to catch up.”
The mayor was silent, depressed.
“What I’m saying,” the governor said, “is that our brand-new shining beautiful World Tower isn’t a sign of progress at all; it’s a sign of retrogression, just another dinosaur stable.” He finished his cognac and sighed. “So let’s go down to it and tell everybody that the building we dedicate today is a symbol of the future, man’s hope, the greatest thing that has come along since the wheel.” He stood up wearily. “What the hell else can we say?”
8
Assistant Fire Commissioner Timothy O’Reilly Brown was tall, redheaded, and intense, with a low boiling point. He did not know Nat, but he knew Ben Caldwell by soaring reputation, and if there was anyone in the entire city who did not know of the World Tower building, Tim Brown had no idea who it might be, so he was not on entirely unknown ground. Nevertheless, “What you’re telling me.” he told Nat now, “is a purely internal matter. I’ve no desire to mix into it. You and Bert McGraw and the owners can straighten it out between you.”
“You know better than I do, of course,” Nat said, “but aren’t fire regulations sometimes relaxed or maybe overlooked when a special event has to go through on schedule?” He was being as tactful as he knew how. It was uphill work.
“No.”
“Never?”
“You heard me.”
Tact be damned. “That,” Nat said, “is horseshit, and you know it. Most firemen, fire inspectors, are honest, just as most cops and building inspectors and most contractors are honest and most mistakes that are made are honest mistakes.” He paused. “But some aren’t, and you know that too.”
Tim Brown said, “The door is right behind you. I don’t know what kind of shenanigans you’re trying to pull, but I’m not even going to listen to the pitch. Out.” Nat made no move. “Suppose,” he said, “just suppose—”
“I said out!”
“I don’t think you’re big enough to put me out,” Nat said, “and think of the stink there’d be if you tried and something did happen at the Tower building.” He paused. “It would look like Assistant Commissioner Brown had his fingers into something, wouldn’t it? Or don’t you even care about that?”
Tim Brown had half-risen in his chair. He sat down now. The nightmare of every public official, of course, was the possibility of merely being accused of misprision whether innocent or not. He hesitated.
“I’m not accusing anybody,” Nat said. “I’m not hankering for a slander suit. But what I am saying is that apparently changes in electrical design have been made, and maybe those changes reduce or even eliminate the designed safety factors, and if certain leniencies in fire regulations were allowed in order not to stop this scheduled opening, then if anything were to happen in that building, there might be hell to pay and no pitch hot.” He leaned back in his chair. “I may be jumping at shadows. I hope I am. Then you can call me a fool and I’ll apologize for taking up your time.”