The last speech in the World Tower Plaza had just ended, and the television cameras followed the celebrities down from the platform and through the concourse doors.
“Going up to the Tower Room,” the inspector said, “to drink bubbly and eat little things on toothpicks.” There was angry envy in his voice. “You see that one? That’s Senator Jake Peters, friend of the people. Hah! He’s been lining his pockets down in Washington for thirty years, more.”
“Clara Hess is on the Family Fun Show today,” his wife said. “She really turns me on. I saw her one day last week, Tuesday, no, maybe Wednesday it was. Laugh? I thought I’d die. She was doing that, you know, Women’s Lib thing, really putting them down.”
“And that one,” the inspector said, “he’s Governor Bent Armitage, a bag of wind if I ever saw one. And, look, there’s pretty boy, Mayor Bob Ramsay, the All-American jerk. Why don’t they have the guys there who built the building? Tell me that.”
“What she said,” his wife said, “was that it hadn’t ought to be history, it ought to be her story—do you get it? Oh, she was sharp, real quick, you never know what she’s going to say next.”
“There’s Ben Caldwell,” the inspector said. “When he comes around you’re supposed to genuflect, you know, like in church. Well, goddammit, he puts his pants on same as me, one leg at a time, and I’ll bet he’s crooked as a corkscrew too. He’d have to be to get where he is. They all have to be. Nobody’s that good and everybody’s got his hand out.”
“You’d like Clara Hess,” his wife said, “you really would.”
“Just who the hell is Clara Hess?” Rhetorical question. The inspector finished his beer. “How about another brew?”
“You know where it is.”
“I got the last one.”
“You did not. And you haven’t even been listening to me or you’d know who Clara Hess is.”
“Oh Christ, all right,” the inspector said. He got out of his chair with effort and walked toward the kitchen.
“Don’t touch that picture,” he said, “I got a right to look at a building I built with my own hands.”
“You didn’t build it. You just watched.”
“Same thing, ain’t it? Who else makes sure they do it right?”
Or wrong, but those were the thoughts you kept submerged. Sometimes, usually at night, they surfaced, and those stupid childhood fears about God and Right and Wrong, like that, came out to torment you, but you were a grown man now, goddammit, and able to make decisions for yourself, and that childhood stuff was a lot of crap.
If there was one thing the inspector had learned, it was that there were only two kinds of guys in this world—takers and losers—and the inspector had made up his mind a long time ago which category he preferred.
The thing was that if you looked hard any place, any place, you saw that some guys had it and some, most, didn’t. In the Army, when he wasn’t much more than a kid, he learned how it worked. Some guys were always on KP or sent out on patrol, like that, always on somebody’s shit list, born losers. And other guys always slept in nice warm barracks at headquarters and pulled jobs like company clerk where nobody shot at you. What do you want to be, a dead hero?
Building inspector now, same goddam thing. Some guys spent their lives doing just what the book said. And then what? A pension that wouldn’t cover your ass, let alone give you the things everybody had a right to, didn’t all those crooked politicians running for office say so?
So what if you let some subcontractor cut a corner here and a corner there, and you pick up a little extra for it? Who’s hurt? And who’s to know? That was the important question, because everybody had his angle, and anybody who told you different was either a fool or a liar, but the guys who made it were the guys who didn’t get caught, and the others, the ones who did take a fall, they were the losers. Simple.as that.
The inspector had opened a beer and was standing beside the oversize refrigerator-freezer drinking it. Funny, just looking at the Tower on the tube started up the thoughts.
Well, that job was finished now, but not really forgotten. A sizable piece of the inspector’s life had been spent on that job.
“Harry!” His wife’s voice from the living room. “Where’s my beer?”
“Shut up,” Harry said. “I’m thinking.”
From any job you remembered some things, maybe one winter a whole series of days cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, maybe an accident like that big Polack falling off a beam and splattering himself all over the ground, or that kid killed on the subway on the way home from the job. You remembered, all right, and sometimes you thought about how and why things happened.
That Polack, for instance, Harry had always thought somebody pushed him; he was a big tough bastard and Harry liked to think that in this world that kind of self-reliant competent jerk always got what was coming to him.
That kid killed in the subway, now, that was something else, although the kid was a pain in the ass with his bellyaching about the change orders that kept coming through, and maybe if he’d lived, somebody would have listened to him and taken him seriously. Come to think of it, somebody was maybe pretty lucky the kid had been killed when he was. Harry had never seen it that way before.
Somebody. Not Harry. Harry had the signed change order to show if anybody ever asked why one of the safety circuits had been completely eliminated, and for all Harry knew, and never asked, the change order was for real at that. Harry didn’t ask questions. Only fools stick their necks out.
But maybe somebody was real lucky the kid had fallen under the IRT express. Fallen? Harry had seen on TV how easy it was for somebody at rush hour to get a push at the wrong time, and who was to know? Maybe somebody wasn’t lucky; maybe somebody was getting sensible, shutting up a kid who might cause trouble. Human nature being what it was, Harry wouldn’t doubt for a minute that somebody might take that way to protect himself.
“Harry! Come here! There’s something funny!”
Harry sighed and walked out of the kitchen. “I told you not to touch that picture. If your goddam Clara Hess is so great—” He stopped and stared at the massive television set.
The camera had zoomed in on the smoke plume high up in the building, and the announcer’s voice was saying, “We don’t know what it is, folks, but we’ve sent a reporter off to—here he is. George, what’s going on? Is that smoke normal?”
In the living room Harry said, “Hell, no, it isn’t normal. Something’s burning somewhere and they’d damn well better find out where and do something about it.” He sat down but did not push his recliner back. “What the hell goes on?”
“It looks like you didn’t build it very good,” his wife said.
“That’ll be enough from you.”
“If I see smoke coming out of my oven,” his wife said, “I figure I’ve goofed on the cake. Where’s the difference?”
“Goddammit, will you shut up!”
In silence they watched the fire engines arrive, the hoses snake across the plaza, smoke pour out the concourse doors.
Unseen George, breathless, came back to the microphone again. “The fire is on the fourth floor. We’ve just had a report. There are indications that the fire may have been set.”
Funny, the inspector thought, how all of a sudden his breathing was easier. A torch job, huh? Nothing at all to do with the kind of work buried in the walls; nothing at all to do with him. He leaned back in the reclining chair and had a long pull at his beer. He was smiling now.
“Torch jobs can be tough,” he said. His tone was knowledgeable, his approach judicious. “But, hell, the way that building’s designed, they’ll have it out before Willie Mays could put one in the bleachers. They got automatic sprinklers and fire doors, and the air-conditioning takes the smoke away—” He shrugged. “Cinch,” he said.