“It’s only,” Shannon said smiling to himself, “that you are against kings and queens and such, and I glory in them. Think how it would be if there were only little gray people, no giants to dream and to do, no great tales to remember, no grand buildings like this one that even shut out the sun. What about that, Frank?”
“Maybe better.”
“You,” Shannon said, “have seen the insides of too
many books, and in them too many confused ideas.” His gesture took in the entire shining building. “How would you like to have had a hand in building this? A great gleaming tower reaching to the sky, and your name on the bronze plate to say forever that you were a part of it? How about that?”
“‘General Contractor,’” Barnes read, “‘Bertrand McGraw and Company.’” He was smiling again, this time with open amusement. “The Irish do get around, don’t they? Do you suppose McGraw worked his way up from hod carrier honestly?”
“Did you work your way up from slave honestly, you black rascal?”
“Yassuh. boss.” They smiled at each other.
“I have met Bert McGraw,” Shannon said, “and a fine gentleman he is. On Saint Pat’s Day on Fifth Avenue—”
“Playing his pipes, no doubt.”
“Skirling,” Shannon said. “You skirl pipes. You play pianos and fiddles and other lesser instruments.” He paused. “Ben McGraw will be here this afternoon. In his place I would be too, to take my share of the glory.”
“I think I’d go somewhere and hide,” Barnes said. He paused. “I’d be afraid of hubris.”
“You and your big words.”
“A challenge to the gods,” Barnes said, “and the feeling that they might lower the boom. The same thing that makes you knock on wood when you talk of something good that’s* going to happen.”
For a moment Shannon was thoughtful. Then he smiled. “Like I said, Frank, the insides of too many books. What could your gods possibly do to this lovely structure?”
The building is alive, John Connors thought, its presence is almost palpable. His footsteps echoed in the empty hallway, and corridors, and only black closed doors stared at him as he passed; but through the air-conditioning ducts he could hear the building’s respiration, and deep in its core he could feel the life force throbbing, and he wondered if in its heart of hearts the living building was afraid. Of him? Why not? It was a pleasant concept; it lifted his spirits. He was only a tiny speck against the immensity of the structure, but the power was his, and he savored the knowledge as he walked, toolbox in hand, hearing the echoes of his own footsteps and the turbulence of his thoughts.
Nat walked the thirty blocks from the Caldwell offices to the World Tower building, in the exercise finding some relief from anger and stress.
“I guess some men play games for the same reason,” he had told Zib once, “to get their minds off a problem and let it chum around down in the subconscious. I walk instead. I’m not anti-game. It’s just that when I was growing up, we did other things. We fished, we hunted, we packed into the mountains on foot or on horseback; in the winter we skied and snowshoed.” The sense of not belonging here in the East still made itself felt. “A primitive life,” he said. “All the things you had, I hadn’t. I’m not a very good swimmer. I don’t know a thing about sailing. No golf, no tennis.”
And Zib had said, “Maybe those things were important to me once, but they aren’t now. I married you for other reasons. Maybe because I was sick and tired of the prep-school stereotypes I grew up with.” She smiled suddenly, devastatingly. “Or maybe it was because you didn’t try to get me into bed on our first date.”
“Backward of me. Would you have gone?”
“Possibly. No, probably. I found you attractive.”
“I found you stunning and a little frightening, so very sure of yourself here in-your own surroundings.”
True then, still true after almost three years of marriage. He walked steadily, pausing only for traffic. He disliked the city, but it was where, as they said, the action was; and if the dirt and the noise and the crowding, the snarling, snapping attitudes, the unhappy faces were all around, why, so were the ferment and the excitement, the satisfaction of finding and being able to talk with your peers.
But most important, there was Ben Caldwell with his artist’s eye and his infinite attention to detail which some called genius. The seven years spent under that man made up for anything else.
Oh, one day Nat would leave the city; that knowledge was sure and deep. Back to the big country where he belonged. And when that time came, he wondered, would Zib go with him or choose to stay behind in her own familiar scene? Hard to tell, and not pleasant to contemplate.
There were police scattered in the Tower Plaza. Nat looked at them with surprise, which was foolish, he told himself, because of course in the city, where bombing threats and violence are not unknown, there would be cops to handle an event such as the Tower opening. It just went to show that he didn’t think.
There was a black cop near the door, listening to a big uniformed Irishman. The black cop looked at Nat and smiled politely. “Can we help you, sir?”
Nat took out the badge he wore on the job. “Architect,” he said. “Caldwell Associates.” He nodded at the bronze plaque beside the doorway. “Just going in to have a look around.”
The black cop was smiling no longer. “Is anything wrong?” His dark eyes were quick on the badge, and he added, looking up again. “Mr. Wilson?” He studied Nat’s face.
“Routine,” Nat said, and thought, for God’s sake, that he sounded like nothing so much as a character straight out of Dragnet.
“It was right then that I really began to wonder,” Patrolman Barnes said later, “but it was still only a kind of hunch that maybe we ought to have stopped that fellow with the toolbox. And you know what a stink that kind of unauthorized action can cause. The Department exceeding its authority, throwing its weight around at innocent citizens, that kind of thing.” Pause. “Still, I should have followed that hunch.”
Now he said, “If there is anything wrong, Mr. Wilson—I mean, if there’s anything we can do—”
“What he means,” the Irish cop said, “is that we aim to please, we boys in blue. Never let it be said that we refused to rescue a drowning man or help an old lady to cross the street. Be our guest,” the big Irish cop said, and went on with what he was saying, which had to do with off-track betting—if you were a betting man, that was.
I am not a betting man, Nat thought as he walked inside. Another lack, he supposed, because Zib loved the horses and a point-spread bet on football games and things like tailgate picnics up at West Point before the game at Michie Stadium. I am a dull boy, Nat told himself.
Inside the concourse he hesitated. He had no real destination. Coming to the building where he had spent almost every working day during the last five days was an automatic act, arising from the kind of impulse that forces you to see for yourself the empty stall after you have been told that the horse is missing—not that there was really anything he could do until work crews were on the job again and specific change authorizations could be checked out by tearing into the structure to see what changes, if any, had actually been made.
But he was here, and the same impulse was still at work, and he walked the empty concourse around the core of the building to the banks of elevators and pushed the button for a fourteenth-floor local.