Nat nodded. “Long speech. Chief.”
“Yeah. I don’t ordinarily use that many words.”
“But I couldn’t agree with you more.”
“We’ll get along,” the chief said. “You just pass me the word if there’s trouble.”
Nat laid the walkie-talkie down on the desk. He said nothing.
“So you two are in agreement,” Patty said. She paused. “You knew you would be, didn’t you?”
“Simmer down,” Nat said. He could even smile and mean it. “What do you think Bert would have said?” Patty opened her mouth and then closed it again in silence. Slowly she nodded. “Probabh the same.” Capitulation. “But I don’t have to like it.” Defiance flaring again.
“No,” Nat said, “you don’t.” He pushed away from the desk and walked once more to the doorway to look out over the plaza.
It was a dismal, depressing scene. Thunderheads to the west had obscured the sun; the light in the plaza was smoky gray, the air soot-filled, acrid.
Firemen swarmed in the plaza—like scurrying ants in slow motion, Nat thought—and the perimeter of the area was an almost solid mass of fire equipment parked cheek-by-jowl, engines and pumps throbbing.
The entire plaza floor was a lake now. Cascades of water poured back out of the building, down the concourse steps—like spawning ladders for salmon.
A fireman lurched from the concourse, stumbled down the steps, and fell face down, his arms and legs moving weakly.
Two ambulance attendants rushed up with a stretcher, loaded him on, and bore him off.
Nat’s eyes followed the stretcher to a nearby ambulance where three other firemen were standing, sucking oxygen from rubber masks.
Police manned the barricades. Nat could make out Barnes, the black cop, and, yes, there was his partner, the big Irishman, white bandage plain on his cheek.
Behind the barricades the crowds were orderly and strangely quiet, as if at last the enormity of the tragedy had reached them. In the crowd an arm was raised, pointing upward. Other arms followed. Without turning to look, Nat guessed that the breeches buoy was making yet another trip, one more person swinging to safety.
He felt no sense of triumph. That was long gone. Instead he blamed himself that this was all that they could do and it was not enough. What was it he had cold Patty about the thinking in certain parts of the Middle East? That man was supposed to try for perfection, but he wasn’t ever supposed to reach it? But that didn’t make the fact of even partial failure any the more palatable.
He was not a religious man, but sometimes there were events—those nineteen bodies curled like snails in the smoking burned-over mountain clearing came to mind—that seemed to demonstrate a flaw, point a direction, and by the depth of their tragedy simply force a man to reexamine many tenets and thoughts he had long taken for granted. Too long.
If one result of all of these reexaminations was constant, even inevitable, it was determination that could be expressed in two words: never again.
Never again a Titanic blundering in the ice lanes.
Never again a Hindenburg filled with explosive hydrogen gas.
Never again if good men could prevent it a Hamburg firestorm, a Nagasaki, a Hiroshima.
Never again a fire like this in a building this size—
Correction: Never again a building this size. Didn’t that make more sense?
Bigness for bigness* sake was never a solution. Remember that.
“I will,” Nat said silently. “By God, I will!”
He heard a telephone ring in the trailer, and he waited for it to be answered. Patty’s voice said. “Yes. He’s here.” And then, expressionless, “Nat.”
She was holding the instrument out to him. “Zib,” she said, and that was all.
Zib had left the magazine at the usual time, taxied home, and hurried into a scented bath. Luxuriating in the suds, feeling the tensions flow away, she told herself that everything was going to be all right. After that talk with Cathy she felt like a different person, able to see herself more clearly, and wasn’t that the name of the game—know thyself?
And she had turned her back on Paul Simmons, hadn’t she? Nat must have seen that from her telephone call telling him that Paul was not coming down to the building. It was a sharp cutting of the last ties, wasn’t it? The symbolism was inescapable. And at heart Nat was a lamb. He hadn’t really meant those harsh things he had said to her. He couldn’t have. Nobody could. Not to her.
She sank deep in the tub, closed her eyes, and stroked one smooth sudsy shoulder and arm with her hand. What was that commercial on TV? “If he doesn’t feel the difference, he has no feeling.” That applied to all of her, didn’t it?
Of course Nat would be tired when he got home. But not too tired. She had always had the power to arouse him. That was one thing the Women’s Lib fanatics tended to forget, possibly because some of them, but not all, were rather unattractive pieces of sexual merchandise, and any subtle advances they might make would tend to be—what were that judge’s marvelous words when he passed Ulysses as salable?—“emetic rather than aphrodisiac.”
Zib’s own qualifications in that direction were impeccable—as she well knew. And, given that headstart, in the constant underlying sexual struggle between herself and a man, any man, there simply was no contest.
Men flattered themselves that they were dominant, waving their muscles and all that jazz. In many cultures, as Zib had learned in an anthropology course, polygamy was the norm. Polyandry, on the other hand, was rarely practiced. And that merely demonstrated how out of joint man’s thinking was, because one woman could satisfy a dozen men, could she not? And a mere man was hard put to satisfy one woman. But, as the British said, there it was: man’s thinking callused over by the ages.
She stroked her shoulder and arm again and decided that there was something to this bath-oil bit: her skin did feel smooth, soft, exciting to the touch. She stroked her breasts gently. Better and better. But, “Easy, girl,” she said aloud, “save it all for Nat. Don’t waste it now.” She got out of her bath, dried herself, and applied scent sparingly to throat, breasts, and belly. Then she put on the lightweight full-length white robe Nat liked especially, and the heeled mules he had given her, and went into the living room to put music on the record player. It was then that she decided to call the trailer office.
On the phone, “Hello,” Nat said. And what had she thought to say anyway? “Hi.” And she added inanely, “I’m home.”
Nat heard the music in the background: “Scheherazade,” the violin voice just beginning its theme, Scheherazade herself beguiling the sultan. Balls. “I guessed that.”
“Darling, how is it going? I mean—”
“Great. Just great.” Through the open doorway Nat looked again at the crowded plaza. He raised one hand to wipe wearily at his forehead and saw the grime from the subbasement on his palm.
Oh, he had known dirt before right here on the job, and he and Zib had even laughed together about the way he sometimes looked when he came home at night.
But this was different, as different as night from day, death from life. This was—
Zib said, “I—tried to watch on television. I—couldn’t.” She paused. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”
“Understatement.” Nat paused. “Did you want something?”
The hesitation in her voice was un-Ziblike. “Not really. I came home and—” She stopped. Her voice now was uncertain. “Will you be coming home?” She could not bring herself to add the single word: ever.