On a cold fall day a freak wind whipped through the huge empty space where the plaza would be, picked up a loose piece of corrugation, and scaled it as a boy might scale a flattened tin can. A workman named Bowers saw it coming, tried too late to duck, and was almost but not quite decapitated.
The front tire of a partially off-loaded truck standing perfectly still suddenly blew out with sufficient force to shift the untied load of pipe, burying three men in a tangle of assorted fractures.
On another cold fall day a fire started in a subbasement, spread through piled lumber, and trapped two men in a tunnel. They were rescued alive—just.
Paul Simmons was standing outside the building, talking with one of his foremen, when Pete Janowski walked off the steel at floor 65. The Doppler effect accentuated the man’s screams until they ended abruptly with a sickening thunk that Paul, not ten feet away, would never forget. He tried not to look, found it impossible, and promptly vomited on his own feet.
Was that the beginning of the end?
“These thing happen,” McGraw had said that night at the small house in Queens, Paul and Patty there for dinner. “I don’t like them a goddam bit better than you do, but they happen.”
“It seems to me,” Paul said, “that there are too many of them that’s all. I’ve been waiting ten days for transformers. Today we found them. Do you know where? Three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, don’t ask me why, and nobody even bothered to ask what they were doing there.” Men standing idle, because each day the transformers had been promised; labor costs mounting. “We order cable. It’s the wrong size. We check out an elevator installation, and the motor won’t start or the doors won’t open, because they weren’t set right on the tracks. My top cable-splicer got tangled with his power lawn-mower at home, for God’s sake, and cut off three toes.”
“You sound like it’s getting to you,” McGraw said. His eyes were steady on Paul’s face.
Paul made himself slow down. “It is,” he said, “and it isn’t.” The actor’s confident smile. “But you’ll have to admit, there have been a lot of strange ones on this job.”
“I’ll admit it, boy. But I won’t let it grind me under either.”
“It’s almost,” Paul said, “as if this were wartime with sabotage going on.”
McGraw looked at him sideways. “You think that, do you?”
“Not really.”
“It has happened,” McGraw said. “I’ve known of it. And not in wartime either.” He shook his head. “But not this time.” He studied Paul carefully. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
Paul shook his head. He hoped his smile looked confident.
Because,” McGraw said, “if there is something on your mind, now, not later, is the time to bring it out.”
“Nothing to confess,” Paul said.
McGraw took his time. “You’re part of the family, boy, and kin have always had meaning to me. But we’re in business, a hard business, and we have a contract, you and I, and I’ll have to hold you to it. You know that.”
“I never thought otherwise.” The hell you didn’t. But the actor’s smile never faltered.
Patty had sensed that there were troubles, but she was unable to bring them to the surface. They were driving home from a Westchester dinner party one evening. “You and Carl Ross,” she said to Paul, “seemed to be having a little problem.” Their raised voices had dominated the evening.
“Carl,” Paul said, “is pure unadulterated Westchester horse’s ass.”
In a way it was amusing, Patty thought, and tried to ignore the deep bitterness in his voice. “Pure Westchester,” she said, “from Des Moines, Iowa.”
“Everybody here comes from somewhere else. There’s nothing new about that. Either they come from Des Moines, like Carl, or from South Carolina, like Pete Granger, or from some Western mountaintop, like that cowboy Nat Wilson—” Paul’s voice stopped and they drove in silence.
Patty said, “What has Nat done? I’ve always thought he was a good ‘man. Daddy thinks so.”
“That whole goddam Ben Caldwell office walks on water. It’s one of the requirements for employment.” Patty giggled. Keep it light, she told herself, but lightness was not easy these days. “If they get their socks wet, they’re out? What about hitting a stray ripple?”
Paul’s thoughts were already back on Carl Ross. “He,” he said, “is one of those oh-by-the-way-today-I-heard-a-rumor boys. And the rumors are always vicious.”
Patty said in a puzzled voice, “Nat?”
“What about Nat?” Paul’s voice was sharp, defensive. Oh God, Patty thought, are we this far apart? “I didn’t know who you were talking about. Or is it whom? Who hears rumors?”
“Carl Ross, goddamm it. Nat doesn’t hear rumors. Not ever. All he ever sees is what’s under his nose, on paper, or built from drawings. He—”
“I always thought you liked him,” Patty said. “And Zib.”
There was a long silence. The night countryside swept past, a blur in the darkness. “People change,” Paul said at last.
It was a temptation to point out that clichés had not always been Paul’s stock in trade. Patty stifled the temptation. “So they do.” She paused. “Nat has changed? Zib?” And then, answering at least one of her own questions: “I don’t quite hold with the Women’s Lib bit Zib considers so sacred these days. Of course, she has the figure for no bra, I’ll give her that. But so do I, for that matter, and I don’t choose to go around bouncing.”
“Zib’s all right.” There was finality in the statement. It hung shimmering in the near-darkness.
In Patty’s mind there was first stillness, then doubt, then sudden immediate conviction, almost a feeling of deja vu a sense of I-have-been-here-before-but-only-in-bad-dreams; and finally, self-accusation, the charge of blindness, blame that she had not understood before that she had already joined the ranks of women with philandering husbands. Oh God, she thought, how—how dismal! But where was the deep hurt that should have been? Later, she thought, when I am alone and have time to absorb the enormity. Now she said, calmly enough, “So the change must be Nat.”
“Yes.” Merely that.
“In what way?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not, darling?”
The temper of the evening revealed itself. “Goddammit, why the inquisition? If I don’t like the cowboy son of a bitch, do I have to give a bill of particulars to back it up?” She had her own temper too. “What have you done to him,” she said, “to make you dislike him so?”
“And what does that mean?” Paul paused. “Psychological reasoning from you?”
“You don’t dislike anybody quite as much,” Patty said, “as somebody you’ve done the dirty to.”
“One of Bert’s maxims, I suppose.”
“I doubt if Daddy has ever done the dirty to anybody.” Patty’s tone was reasonable, but there was no mistaking her conviction. “He’s beaten men into the ground. He’s outdrunk them, outworked them, outfought them, yes, and outthought them. But it’s always been right out in the open. He’s never sneaked behind another man’s back.”
“Are you saying I have? Is that what all this is about?” Patty took her time. She said at last in her calm voice, “Have you, darling? Is that where all the heat comes from?”
In the semidarkness of the automobile Paul’s face was only a blur, all expression concealed. When he spoke at last, his voice was calmer. “Just how did we get into this anyway? I had a hassle with Carl Ross—”