“Do you carry a union card, friend?” Barnes said gently.
“So what are you?” Connors said. “An NLRB inspector? Yes, I carry a union card. I’m no scab.” He pulled out his wallet and waved it. If it contained a card, it could not be seen. “Satisfied?” Connors put the wallet away again.
Shannon’s temper was rising fast. “Let him go.”
Still Barnes hesitated. As he testified later, he had had no reason for the hesitation, merely a feeling, and actions based on feelings are always suspect.
“Well?” Connors said. “Make up your goddam mind. Just standing here, I’m already costing the boss—”
Shannon said, “Beat it.” There was a vein throbbing in the side of his neck. He looked at his partner. “We don’t have any orders to keep people out, Frank. Let the son of a bitch go. Maybe he’ll electrocute himself.”
That was the way they remembered it, and told it later.
Months in advance the date for the dedication ceremonies had been set. It has always been so, and there is no other way, because building-completion dates are elastic; and the invited guests for the ceremonies were coming from Washington and from state capitals, from City Hall, from the UN, from head offices of radio and TV networks and worldwide wire services; those who wanted to appear and be seen, and those who would rather have stayed away but had been caught by the inexorability of an early invitation.
In Nat Wilson’s office, facing the walls covered with thumbtacked drawings of the great building, Will Giddings said, “There are fifty things I want cleaned up. A hundred.”
“So do I,” Nat said. Simple truth. You live with a job for a matter of years, and, as with an artist completing his master work, you see here and there little touches you would like time to make. But there was no time today.
“And, goddammit,” Giddings said, “I don’t want stuffed shirts wandering around like a flock of goddam tourists.” He paused. “We aren’t ready. You know it. I know it.”
When the opening-night curtain goes up, Nat thought, is there always this lament? Where had that thought come from? “We aren’t ready,” he said. “Agreed. So?” He was the younger man, architect-engineer, middle-sized, solid, rarely excitable.
“The hundred and twenty-fifth floor,” Giddings said, “just under the mast. Drinks, backslapping, congratulations, and a view of how many hundreds of square miles of water and country, and it can’t be postponed because the characters who are coming are so goddam important, senators, congressmen, the governor, the mayor, UN types, movie stars, that kind of crap?”
“That kind of crap,” Nat said.
Giddings was a big man, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, filling that ancient position of clerk of the works, owner’s representative on the job. He was in his early forties. Somewhere, probably in the back of a forgotten drawer, he had an engineering degree, and now and again over their years on the job Nat had seen him, slide-rule in hand, doing his paperwork, but he always seemed more in character in his hard hat, riding an open hoist or walking a steel girder or prowling tunnels and subbasements to see that the job was done right. “I don’t drink cocktails,” he said, “and I don’t eat little things with toothpicks in them. Maybe you do.” There was tension in him plain to see.
“Beside the point,” Nat said. “Grover Frazee set the day. Your boss.”
Giddings sat down at last. He stretched out his legs, but there was no relaxation in the movement. “My boss,” he said, and nodded. “We have to have businessmen, but we don’t have to like them.” He was studying Nat. “You must have been still wet behind the ears when you started, on this job—how long ago? Seven years?”
“Close enough,” Nat said. Back at the start of preliminary design, the conceptual thinking, he following but also flying along with Ben Caldwell’s soaring visions. He could not resist glancing out the window at the distant Tower itself, clean and pure and beautiful against the sky: the result of those years of work. “So?”
“My building, sonny, goddammit,” Giddings said. “Oh, it’s part yours too, but I watched the start of excavation that went down eighty feet to bedrock, and I watched them top out the steel fifteen hundred and twenty-seven feet above grade, and I know every grillage, every column, every truss, every spandrel beam as well as I’d know my own kids if I’d ever had any.”
There was nothing that required comment. Nat was silent.
“You’re a self-contained son of a bitch,” Giddings said. “Is it a case of still waters running deep? Never mind.” His eyes went briefly to the distant tower. “I lost some friends too. On any big job you always do.” He looked back at Nat. “Remember Pete Janowski?”
Nat shook his head faintly.
“Walked out into air sixty-five floors up and splattered himself on a concrete ramp down in the batheub.”
“That one,” Nat said, remembering.
“Big Polack,” Giddings said, “a good man, never seemed to hurry, but he got the job done the right way, the safe way, and that was what shook me. When you can’t put a cause to it, that’s when you worry.”
There was something in Giddings’s voice, his manner—uptight was the word. Nat said slowly, “Are you making a point?”
It was as if he had not spoken. “Usually,” Giddings said, “you can figure out why a man does something. I read where somebody robs a bank, and I think, ‘The poor silly bastard wanted the money, maybe had to have it, and couldn’t see any other way.’ That’s not an excuse, but it is some kind of explanation.” He paused only briefly. “Take a look at these.”
He took a manila envelope from the inside pocket of his corduroy jacket, tossed it on the desk, and then sat expressionless while he watched Nat pick the envelope up, open it, and spill its contents onto the blotter. Folded papers, the crisp paper of Xerox reproduction, covered with lines and figures and neat engineering lettering.
Nat looked up.
“Take a good look,” Giddings said.
One by one Nat studied the papers. At last he looked up. “Design-change authorization,” he said. His voice was quiet and he hoped that his face showed nothing. “My signature on all of them.” Surprisingly his voice held steady. “All electrical changes. Not my bailiwick.”
Giddings said, “But nobody would question your signature. Caldwell Associates, Supervising Architects—you’re their man on the job, you say something’s okay, that’s the way it is.” He heaved himself out of his chair, walked two paces, and went back to drop into the chair again. He watched Nat and waited.
Nat still held one of the change orders. His hands were steady; the paper did not even tremble, but it was as if his mind had gone numb. “Were these changes made?”
“I don’t know. I never saw those before last night.”
“How did you miss them?”
“I can’t be every place at once,” Giddings said, “any more than you can. I have records, work signed off as done according to spec. Where there are deviations from original specifications I have legitimate approvals.” He paused. “But I don’t have those or any others like them, and I’d have raised hell if I’d seen them.”
“So would I,” Nat said. The office was still.
Giddings said at last. “That means what?’
“Not my signatures,” Nat said. “I don’t know who signed them or why, but I didn’t.”
Giddings got out of his chair again, walked to the windows, and stood looking downtown at the jagged skyline dominated by the Tower. “I figured you’d say that.” Nat’s faint smile was crooked, unamused. “Of course.” After the initial shock, your mind begins to work again, clearly, logically as it has been trained—like a bloody little computer, he thought. “If I had signed those changes, naturally I’d deny it, at first anyway. I didn’t sign them, so I deny it too, but for a different reason. Either way my answer has to be the same, doesn’t it?”