The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 12

The sleet had changed to a wet, driving snow and just outside the window, a watery ice formed on the ledge.

Barton stared out the glass for a moment longer, then shivered and turned away, flicking off the yammering from the small television set.

It was close to seven-thirty and the bar of the Promenade Room would be a better place to reflect upon his sins than his darkened office.

He straightened his tie and slipped into his suit coat.

The lights in the architectural division were now out; Moore had gone home for the evening, probably still hurt by his attitude. He’d call him tomorrow, Barton thought; if they had the time, he and Jenny might even drop out and see how Beth was coming along. He took the elevator to the sky lobby, nodded briefly to Jernigan, who, seemed as if something was bothering him and he didn’t want to talk, and changed over to the residential elevator up to the Promenade Room. A few moments later he stepped out into the foyer of the restaurant, alive with the soft murmur of diners and the clink of silver and glassware As always, the setting and the view were breathtaking.

The room was candle-lit, the dancing flames playing over the polished black marble floor. The tables were set with damask n and on each there was a vase with a single red rose. The walls were of a smoke-colored glass, allowing a darkened view of the promenade outside and beyond that, the lights of the city itself.

“Craig.” He have known the voice anywhere. He turned, almost indecently glad to see her.”

“Quinn! How long have you been working here?”

Her light blue eyes looked up from under long lashes in a familiar, almost puckish glance. “You helped me get the job, you ought to know.

Three months, all of them good ones.”

“I knew you were working here, of course, but”-he shrugged helplessly-“it slipped my mind or I would have come up earlier.”

The candlelight from the foyer seemed to flicker in her eyes.

“Forgotten me already, Craig? Fine thing!” She waved at the crowded dining room behind her. “If you’re going to be in town long, drop up some weekend afternoon-it’s slow then. And by all means bring Jenny, I’m dying to meet her.” There was no jealousy in Quinn, Barton thought, despite the fact that he had broken off with her when he met Jenny. Quinn and he had had something of an understanding and the breakup had been very close to a jilting. “Two years is quite long enough to keep her hidden, Craig.”

She hesitated a Moment, then asked seriously “How are things, really?

I hear rumors; I won’t deny I’ve always kept track.““Things could be better,” he said frankly. “Maybe it’s something everybody has to go through. I’m a lot older and-“

“d Jenny has to grow up, that it?”

He smiled. “I guess. How about yourself?”

Her laugh was throaty, almost a whiskey laugh. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine, Craig. His name’s Leslie, he’s an architect-I seem to be consistent-and sometime within the next month I suspect he’ll try to convince me to marry him.”

“Do you love him’?”

“If he tries to convince me he’ll be shocked at how quickly he’ll win the argument!” She squeezed his arm.

“Come back on the weekend and bring Jenny. Incidentally, your table won’t be ready until eight, but I assume you know that. Showdown at the O.K. corral, right?” She laughed. “Don’t look so shocked, the walls have ears’ ” She picked up several menus from a nearby foyer table and swirled toward a couple waiting impatiently at the dining room entrance. If Jenny had half her poise, half her maturity, Barton thought … But the comparison wasn’t fair; Quinn had almost ten years on Jenny and you learned a lot about humility in ten years.

The right-hand quarter of the dining room was devoted to the bar, separated from the main room by a wall of the smoke-colored glass faced with a row of tall, potted ferns-It was a shadowy alcove of small booths and a mahogany bar with swivel chairs upholstered in rich, black leather. He had just started to, slide into one when a voice from one of the darker booths said quietly, “Care to join me, Craig?”

“I’d be delighted, Wyndom.”

Leroux was standing up when he came over, a tall, lean aristocrat with high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and a faint bluish gray to his sideburns. Barton had never known Leroux’s age but guessed that the man was in his middle fifties, maybe sixty; not past his prime but well within it, a man whose finely hewn features and deep-set eyes radiated an enormous sense of physical power.

Caesar, Barton thought, the noblest Roman of them all.

Leroux should have gone into politics rather than business; he had the sort of face that was made to be stamped on a coin. Barton shook the proffered hand and sat down. “Where are Jenny and Thelma?”

“They’re getting a view of the city from the promenade.” Barton glanced at the darkened walk just beyond the restaurant. walls. A hundred feet away-, two women were silhouetted against the night sky, gazing down at, the lights of the city far below.

Leroux motioned to a waiter. “The usual scotch with a twist?”

“That’ll be fine.” Barton’ guessed that Leroux kept a Farley file on his top employees and refreshed his memory at regular intervals as to what they preferred to eat and drink. He’d see what happened when they ordered dinner.

Leroux had relaxed in the back of the booth, his face -almost lost in the shadows. “Sorry to have called you back so suddenly, Craig; I realize what an inconvenience it must have been.”

“some,” Barton admitted. “We were about to go before the Board of Supervisors with the proposal and I had to ask for a delay in the hearings; it will be another two weeks now.”

“That shouldn’t be fatal. How does it look?”

Barton hesitated. “The Citizens’ Committee is pretty strong when it comes to height limitations along the waterfront.”

“The popular feeling?”

“That they have a point.”

“Your feelings?”

“I don’t think they matter,” Barton said slowly.

Leroux hunched forward over the table and Barton sensed an annoyed hostility behind the outer show of geniality. “They do. Let’s say I’m curious.”

Barton took a breath. “I think they’ve got a point, too.

The buildings are too large for the site. They’ll block the view of the bay from quite a large section of the city. I don’t think we’ll get the project past the Supervisors, but I think we’ll make a lot of enemies if we try.”

There was a long silence. “If you didn’t believe in the project,” Leroux asked finally, “why did you agree to work on it?”

Barton felt like a small boy being reprimanded by his father. “It was my job; it was what you’ had hired me for. Once I got into it, things didn’t look the same. Regardless of my personal feelings, I don’t think my efforts suffered any.”

“You don’t? But you’ve just told me you don’t expect success.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

Leroux thought about it for a moment, then dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “It’ll have to go to accounting and they’ll figure out the ratio of lower income against lower capital investment. I can’t do it in my head. So we don’t build as high, it was worth the attempt.”

He took a sip of his drink. “You’re a good friend of this division chief 11 in the Fire Department, Mario Infantino, aren’t you?

Right down to it, Barton thought. The real reason why he had been called in. “I’m a friend of his, I don’t know how good. We were in the same reserve unit when I lived here; we’ve sat in the same fire code meetings together.

That’s about it.”

“You don’t know a newscaster named Quantrell?”

Leroux’s eyes were very cold.

“I’ve never met the man, I’ve never even watched his show until tonight.”

Leroux laughed shortly. “What did you think of it?”

“I think he’s a muckraker. And I think somebody’s been feeding him inside information.”

“That’s right. Somebody is.”

“And you think it’s me.”

“I didn’t say that. I suppose it’s a possibility.”

The drink was helping, Barton thought. He signaled for another.

“You gave me a good job, Wyn; you gave me opportunity. In retrospect, I’m not so.sure I should have taken the job, but at the time I appreciated it. And you think I would repay you by acting the informer?”

“Why not? It happens every day. Few businesses operate on gratitude and those that do don’t operate very long.”

“I don’t.have the motivation,” Barton said dryly. “And furthermore, I don’t have the information. I never worked with the construction team-you pulled me off and sent me to Boston, remember?

If I had been here, they sure as hell wouldn’t have used synthetics for the cladding around the elevator banks. I assume you knew about that.”

“Why ask me? It sounds like a cost factor; accounting handles that.”

He changed the subject. “Why should Infantino have a knife out for us? If he’s such a good friend of yours, why is he stabbing you in the back-which is what he’s doing when he teams up with Quantrell.”

Barton could feel the anger start to build. That was fine, he thought, let it. “You’re being a little paranoid, Wyndom. Who told you that Infantino had teamed up with Quantrell? I know him well enough to know that he wouldn’t do that; he wouldn’t sell out.”

In the darkened alcove, Leroux’s face almost looked satanic.

“Anybody will sell out if the price is right. All you have to know is the price-and it isn’t always money.”

The situation had rattled Leroux, Barton thought, more than he had figured it could have r should have. “All right, how bad is it?”

Leroux twirled his empty glass in his hand. “If it were just the Glass House, we could probably ride it out. But newscasters in other cities have picked up the Quantrell broadcasts; they think we’re vulnerable, that Quantrell wouldn’t be saying what he is unless he actually had something. Now it’s monkey see, monkey do. We’re under attack in half a dozen cities where we have major projects building or on the boards. In some areas, the pressure has been enough for the city to launch an investigation. Usually we’re suspected of circumventing local building codes or we’re accused of shoddy workmanship. Here, the leasing of the Glass House has come to a halt-in fact, we’re starting to lose tenants.

You want to read the balance sheets? You’re welcome to; they’ll provide you with quite an education.”

“Why me, Wyn?” Barton asked at last. “I come into town and everybody knows that I’m the guy under suspicion. They wouldn’t think that if you didn’t think that.”

“Circumstantial,” Leroux admitted. “If you didn’t know And you wanted the information, you still had access to it. Id say that you don’t show good judgment in your choice of friends.”

Three drinks down and he had come to a conclusion, Barton thought.

It was one that he had been a long time arriving at but now that he was there, he wasn’t sorry.

“Wyn,” he said slowly, “I’ve got a few things to admit but they’re not what you think. First of all, I’m tired of this discussion. I personally think you’re tired and upset, otherwise you would have thought all this out before sending for me. Second, I’ve been too goddamned busy to run around feeding information to Fire Department division chiefs or rating-happy TV reporters. You can believe me or not on that score; I don’t give a damn.

And, finally, I guess I’m tired of my job. You did me a favor in giving it to me and now I’m doing myself a favor in giving it back to you. I don’t like the political in-fighting in a corporation. And now, through ‘no fault of my own, I find myself in the middle of it.

I’m not a politician or a CPA or a public relations man; I’m an architect and it occurs to me that you’re never going to use me as one.

From what I saw of Joe Moore’s latest assignment, you’re not in the market for architects anyway. So my recommendation to you is that you go out and hire yourself that politician and that CPA and that PR man-I’ve just resigned all three posts.”

Barton drained his glass and stood up, a trace unsteady. “That’s all I’ve got to say. To be honest, I thought that when it came down to it all I would say was ‘I quit.” I guess we’re never too old to surprise, ourselves.”

Leroux was smiling. “Sit down, Craig, before you fall down. You might as well have dinner-you could use it -and the food here is good.

Besides, don’t forget that you didn’t come alone, though perhaps you would just as soon.” His smile faded. “I believe you … I believed you before you got here. Frankly, I can’t do without you.

Maybe that’s what hurts. That and the fact that after twenty years in the business, your blood gets replaced by computer read-out sheets from accounting. Business is a game, Craig, and it’s not how you play it, it’s whether you win or lose.”

Barton sat down. The charming self-pity of one of the most powerful men he knew. I need you, son, was what Leroux was saying and he could feel himself responding.

It was that-and what he knew Jenny would say if she thought the whole trip had been for-the purpose of turning in his resignation.

She’d never understand, he thought, not in a million years.

“About Quantrell,” Leroux continued. “I’ve taken steps to muzzle him that I think will be effective.”

Barton leaned back in the booth and sighed. Here went the old ball game but there were some questions that he had to ask, too; answers that he needed to have.

“Do you want to muzzle him because he’s wrong-or because he’s right?”

Leroux looked at him with a friendly openness, the tension of the earlier conversation’gone. “You want my frank opinion of his charges?”

“If you want to discuss them.”

Leroux smiled. “I’ll be delighted to, Craig-I was hoping you would ask me.”