Ричард Стерн - The Tower

“I didn’t know. I’m at fault, along with Caldwell’s people—Nat Wilson in particular—and Bert McGraw. We’re all responsible.”

Frazee turned back to the room. “And now what?”

“We check out each one of these to see if the changes were actually made and what effect there might be.”

“What kind of effect?”

Giddings shook his head. “I won’t even guess. It could be trivial. It could be serious. And that’s why I’m here.” Frazee walked back to his desk and sat down. “You want what?”

“To call off that nonsense this afternoon up in the Tower Room.” A big man, serious, forceful. “I don’t want people up there.”

“Why?”

“Goddammit,” Giddings said, “do I have to spell it out? The building isn’t finished. Now we know, or at least have reason to believe, that there may be electrical flaws in what is done. We don’t know how serious the flaws are, and until we do know it doesn’t make sense to have an indoor garden party, for God’s sake, when right in the middle of it—”

“The lights might go out?” Frazee said. “Something like that?”

Giddings studied the backs of his hands while he calmed himself. He looked up at last and nodded. “Something like that,” he said.

“But you can’t be sure, can you?”

He was no match for Frazee at this kind of thing, Giddings told himself. He was no fluent, smooth business type; he was an engineer, and at the moment, with those pieces of paper lying on Frazee’s desk, he was almost prepared to admit that he wasn’t even a very good, that was to say careful, engineer. “I can’t be sure,” he said. “That’s why I want time.”

Frazee was thinking of Governor Armitage. “You’re the man in charge,” the governor had said, “which means you get the brickbats as well as the bouquets.” True enough, but why not duck and let someone else take the brickbats?

“I don’t see how we can call off the arrangements, Will,” Frazee said. He smiled.

“Why the hell not?”

Frazee’s manner was patient. “Invitations went out months ago and were accepted by people who might now otherwise be in Moscow or London or Paris or Peking or Washington. They have put themselves to some trouble to appear here for what amounts”—Frazee’s smile spread—“to a launching, Will. When a ship is launched, it is not complete either: months of work remain. But the launching ceremony is a gala occasion, set far in advance, and one simply does not call off that kind of affair at the last moment.”

“Goddammit,” Giddings said, “you can’t equate a striped-pants cookie-push with the kind of trouble we might have, can’t you see that?”

Frazee sat quiet, contemplative. He said at last, “I can’t see it, Will. What kind of trouble concerns you so much?”

Giddings lifted his big hands and let them fall. “That’s the hell of it. I don’t know.” Giddings was thinking now of Bert McGraw’s theory that some buildings were accursed, and while he didn’t believe it for a moment, he had known jobs on which nothing ever seemed to go right, and try as you could, you could find no solid explanation. Then there was that one other thing today, only a little time ago: “Somebody’s running around inside the building, and I don’t like that either.”

Frazee frowned. “Who?”

“I don’t know, and we’ll play hell finding out without a floor-to-floor search with an army.”

Frazee smiled. “Ridiculous. Why is the man even important?”

Giddings said, “Look, there are too many things I don’t know, and that is just the goddam trouble. I’m responsible to you for that building. I’ve lived with it and sweated over it—”

“No one could have done more, Will.”

“But,” Giddings said, “things got by me and by everybody else too, and now all I’m asking is time to find out how serious those things are. Is that too much to ask?” Frazee picked up a gold pencil and studied it thoughtfully. Suppose things did happen during the reception in the Tower Room? What if there were some kind of electrical failure, what harm? Would it not, by showing up flaws within the building, in a sense take the monkey off his back, give him more time to find tenants, by following the governor’s cut-rate suggestions if no other way; in a sense, by shifting blame to McGraw and Caldwell, contractor and supervising architect, would he not place himself in the position of saying that circumstances beyond his control delayed the rush to occupy the splendid facilities of the brand-new World Tower communications center?

Giddings said, “At least you’re thinking about it. That’s something.”

Frazee put down the pencil. “But I’m afraid that’s all it is, Will.” He paused. “We cannot cancel the arrangements. I’m sorry you don’t see that, but you’ll have to take my word for it. We cannot make the building a laughingstock right at the beginning.”

Giddings sighed and stood up. He had, really, expected no more. “You’re the boss. I hope to hell you’re right and I’m wrong, seeing things, shadows, thinking about a big Polack who walked off a steel beam for no reason at all—no, he doesn’t have a goddam thing to do with this, it’s just the kind of thing that sticks in my mind and I don’t know why.” He walked to the door and paused there, his hand on the knob. “I think I’m going over to Charlie’s Bar on Third Avenue. I think I’m going to get drunk.” He walked out.

Frazee sat on at his desk, motionless, thoughtful. His own thinking was sound, he was convinced, but another opinion was frequently a good idea. He picked up the phone and said to Letitia, “Get me Ben Caldwell, please.” The telephone buzzed. Frazee picked it up and spoke his name. Ben Caldwell’s quiet voice said, “Something on your mind, Grover?”

The papers were strewn on the desk in front of him. “These—things,” Frazee said. “I don’t even know what to call them—papers changing design—you know about them?”

“I know about them.”

“Your man seems to have signed them.”

“He says no. For the moment I believe him.”

“Are they important, Ben?”

There was no hesitation. “We will have to see.”

No trace of anxiety, Frazee thought, and found relief in the concept. “Will Giddings wants me to call off today’s opening.”

Caldwell was silent.

Frazee, frowning, said, “What do you think?”

“About what?” This was the unworldly side of Caldwell.

“Should I call off the opening?”

“Public relations is not my line, Grover.” There was a hint of asperity in the quiet voice.

“No,” Frazee said. “Of course not.”

There was a short silence. “Was that all?” Caldwell said.

“That was all.” Frazee hung up and reflected that of all the men he knew, the governor included, only Caldwell had the power to bring back boyhood memories of leaving the headmaster’s study after an unpleasant interview.

Well, one thing was settled: there was no need to change plans for the afternoon.

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.