The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 6

It had started out as a bad night for Michael Krost ‘the moment he had come on duty. He was in the maintenance locker room changing into his uniform when Malcolm Donaldson, the night maintenance supervisor, stormed in, spotting his brown paper bag before he had had a chance to slip it under the bench or hide it in the locker itself.

, “What’s that you’ve got there, Krost-come on, let’s see it.”

Krost tried to slip it behind him but the short, burly Scotsman had bounded around the bench and grabbed it. “Open up the bag, Mike, or I’ll take it away from you and open it up myself!” Krost reluctantly revealed the contents of the bag and for a moment Donaldson was ominously quiet. “Four star. Your drinking taste is improving, Krost, or maybe you got a raise I didn’t know about-and which you damned well didn’t deserve!”

“I was taking it home to Daisy as a gift,” Krost had said sullenly.

The thin wreath of reddish white hair that encircled Donaldson’s thinning hair bristled as if it had become electrified. “A little gift for the little woman,” he said sarcastically. “You sure it wasn’t a gift for yourself, to be presented, say, sometime between ten o’clock and midnight? What do you take me for, man? Do I look that much the idiot? You better thank your blessed saints the seal isn’t broken or I would have your job and I’d have it now, be damned how friendly you are with Leroux!” He thrust the bottle back in the bag and handed it to Krost who clutched at it nervously. “It was going to be a gift, I swear it, Mr. Donaldson.” He licked his lips. “You know I wouldn’t “I know you wouldn’t what?” Donaldson roared. “Drink on the job? If there’s anything I know you would do, it’s that! Well, I’ll let you off easy.

Just get it out of the building. Give it to,some poor deserving soul on the street there must be a lot of them out there in this weather and I’ll forget I ever saw it. Otherwise, you go on report and this time I’ll make it stick if I have to put my own job on the line!”

Donaldson fumbled in his locker for his small brown bottle of ulcer medicine and Krost edged away, hastily buttoning his shirt.

Donaldson erupted again, misinterpreting the movement. “Don’t dump it now, you ninny!

Wait until I get through talking.” He took a swallow of thick liquid from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

A few moments later he seemed calmer. “We’re shorthanded, in case you haven’t heard.

yet, so you’ll be working the floors from seventeen through twenty-five. You, ride herd on those women of yours and I don’t want to hear any more complaints from tenants about wastebaskets not being emptied or bottles left in the hall, like last weekend. How many of your young ladies showed up tonight?”

Krost smiled weakly, trying to please. “Pretty many all of them, Mr. Donaldson. I’ve got a pretty good crew, they don’t often miss, no sir.” He was already making up his mind where he would hide the bottle.

“‘Pretty many all of them, Mr. Donaldson,”’ Donaldson mimicked.

“How the hell many is ‘pretty many,’ Krost?”

“All but two,” Krost said, now surly. “We can get along.”

“Counting the other crews, that mean’s we’re down about 15 percent throughout the building,” Donaldson complained, more to himself than to Krost. “Christ, you can’t depend on anybody these days.” He took another gulp from the bottle and turned back to Krost. “I want your floors spotless when the tenants come back on Monday, you understand me? Last week everybody and their kid brother was on my tail and, so help me, if it happens this time, it’s not going to be my fault.”

He turned back to his locker to change and Krost watched him out of the corner of his eye. Donaldson was showing his age and with his guts acting up-well, he might have to go on the early retirement list.

All he had to do was wait, K.Krost thought Donaldson’s formerly brilliant red hair had receded to a fringe of dirty pink and his eyes seemed weaker and more watery every day, isolated in a pale face that more and more resembled a piece of paper that somebody had crumpled and then tried to smooth out.

I could have had your job, Krost thought to himself.

All I had to do was ask Leroux and it would’ve been you playing nursemaid to a bunch of old women who can’t speak English instead of me. But when we came over from the Meltom Building, I played nice guy and let you have it.

Donaldson was tying his laces, puffing while he did so.

“Don’t go doing one of your fancy disappearing acts tonight, Krost; stick around where I can get hold of,you.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Donaldson,” Krost said. “Just give me a ring and I’ll come a-running.”

Donaldson looked at him contemptuously. “How the hell can you be an Uncle Tom when you’re white? Go to work, Krost-and get rid of that bottle!”

Krost scurried out, making a mental note to avoid Donaldson for the rest of the evening. There was an easy way to do it, since Donaldson seldom checked the Apex Printers’ utility room on the twenty-fifth floor. He had hidden there from the maintenance super on more than one occasion when he had wanted a little time to himself or a chance to catch a nap.

He paused at the escalator and glanced back. Donaldson was standing in the door of the maintenance locker room, hands, on hips, glaring at him. Sonuvabitch, Krost thought, I really ought to fix his wagon. The right word to Leroux … And then he decided it was better not to push things. Leroux might remember the two formal complaints that Donaldson had already lodged with Captain Harriman about Krost drinking on the job. There was no need to remind Leroux of those, no need to give him a chance to put two and two together. No sir, no need for that at all.

But there was no need to get rid of his bottle, either-at least not the way Donaldson intended. He crossed over to the elevator bank in the main lobby and caught a car going up. A few minutes later, the bottle was safe and sound in one of his numerous hiding spots around the building and he was back in the lobby, buying a copy of the evening paper. The women would be on duty now, he thought; he’d checked them early so he could have time off later on. Despite the extra floors, it shouldn’t be too hard a night.

There was an elevator going up and he made dash for it. Douglas, the fag decorator, and one of Leroux’s bright boys, an architect named Barton, were on it. He buttered Barton up for a minute-never know when that might come in handy-then got off on twenty, automatically checking the doors of the offices along the corridor to make sure they were locked. The cleaning women had keys, but it was good insurance to be able to say that somebody had forgotten to lock up, just in case anything was ever missing. He stopped for a moment to talk to Albina Obligado, who was vacuuming the north corridor. She was a small, olive-skinned woman who understood practically no English and perhaps because of it rarely if ever knew just where Krost stood in the managerial hierarchy, aside from the fact that he was very important.

Krost ordinarily didn’t care for Puerto Ricans but Albina was, obviously, different. She was deferential, looked at the floor when she spoke to him, and hadn’t missed a day in the six months that she had worked at the Glass House.

“You let Dolores do the south corridor,” he told her, automatically raising his voice. “You understand? Dolores does the south corridor.”

He’d have to spread the help around tonight.

Albina nodded without looking up and nervously tugged the vacuum cleaner a few feet farther down the hall. “I understand, yes sir, I understand.”

Krost turned back to the elevators and for a, moment considered going up to the sky lobby and talking with Jernigan-he wasn’t too bright but not a bad sort, for a colored man-then changed his mind. He could also go to his own official cubbyhole on the twenty-first floor and wait for Donaldson to check him out. But the “office” was bare and uncomfortable, outfitted with a desk, a phone, a tablet, and overhead fluorescents so bright they gave him a headache. Or he could look up the bottle -no, that was for later on, to welcome in the holidays in the right way! Which left the twenty-fifth floor and the Apex Printers’ utility room, a nice, cozy place to relax on a night when the city was being coated with freezing sleet.

Well, why not? Besides, if he remembered correctly, he had left it stocked from a previous visit and there was no sense in letting that stock go to waste, no sir!

He caught the elevator up to twenty-five and looked up and down the hall when he got off to make sure that Donaldson wasn’t around.

You could never tell … When he got to the entrance of the utility room, Krost checked the corridor again to make sure Donaldson hadn’t materialized out of thin air to keep an eye,on him, then quickly opened the door and entered, closing it behind him even before his hand had reached the light switch.

The room itself was small, perhaps 12 by 18, part of it taken up by a small locker containing toilet and cleaning supplies, and the rest of it by a battered desk and easy chair, a small skid of printing paper, packages of mimeo and reproduction bond, and drums of inks and thinners. Somebody had used one of the drums recently and failed to close the spring-loaded valve tightly. Krost grabbed a rag from under the sink and wiped up the spill; the rag came away black and greasy. He wrinkled his nose. Better have Albina or one of the other cleaning women in here later in the evening. He tossed the rag into a nearby metal container, almost full to the brim with other such rags. Have to clean that out, too; the super was touchy about solvent rags.

Krost inspected the cleanup with satisfaction, then went to the door, took a ‘final look outside, closed and locked it. He walked -back to the locker and opened it. The top shelf was lined with rolls of toilet paper which Krost kept constantly replenished so the owners of Apex would never have to fish around in the back looking for a final roll. Now he carefully took two rolls from the front and reached in back and pulled out a mug, a small immersion heater, a jar of instant coffee, and a bottle of powdered cream substitute. A good cup of coffee on a night like tonight would go just right, he thought.

He placed them on the chipped, porcelain-topped metal table next to the slop sink, then filled the mug with water and stuck in the aluminum-coil immersion heater, plugging it into the electrical outlet midway up the wall. He unscrewed the top of the coffee jar, then realized he hadn’t taken the spoon out with the rest of the fixings.

He went back to the locker and, standing on tiptoe, felt around behind the rolls of tissue.

He found the spoon and then his hands brushed against another bottle.

He fought with his conscience for a moment and gracefully lost.

It was a cold night outside and a bitch of a night inside and a man could use a little something to warm his guts.

He pulled out the spoon, along with a Windex bottle.

The contents of the bottle were a light brown, rather than the usual blue. If Donaldson ever found it and went to the trouble of smelling the contents, Krost thought, it would be all over but the firing-unless he figured an employee of Apex owned it. At any rate, there was no disguising the aroma of good brandy. A few days before, he’d helped himself from the bar in Consolidated Distributors on the twenty-second floor; it was good aromatic Portugese brandy that danced smoothly over the tongue and seemed to vanish before it ever reached the throat.

He unscrewed the cap, sniffed appreciatively, then upended the bottle and let a few drops dribble into his mouth. Man, that was fine stuff!

He smacked his lips and set the bottle down beside the coffee cup.

Already the water in it was showing a swirling motion around the aluminum coil.

Krost rubbed his hands together, realized he still had some grease on them from his cleanup around the solvent can, and walked over to the sink to wash. His hands were wet and soapy when the phone on the wall beside the door rang. Damn, he thought, no paper towels. He dried his hands on his blue chinos while the phone continued to ring. Finally, he took it off the cradle, automatically said, “Krost here,” and not until then realized he had made a tactical blunder.- Donaldson’s voice was enough to blister the paint right off the wall.

“What the hell are you doing up there, Krost? Running off a winter seed catalog? I spend half my goddamned time trying to track you down!”

“I was checking supplies, Mr. Donaldson,” Krost said lamely.

“Since when are Apex supplies any of your business?”

“They asked me to some night trailed off. .

“You want me to check that, Krost?” Donaldson asked coldly.

“Finding you makes me feel like a rat catcher-one with lots of experience. Damn it, I told you to stick around where I could get hold of you!”

“Is something wrong, Mr. Donaldson?” Krost was oozing contrition.

“If there’s anything you want me to do…

Donaldson cut him short. “Yeah, for once there’s something you can do. Go down to Motivational Displays on twenty-one.”

“But they’re all gone for the weekend!” Krost bleated.

“Bigelow, their v.p just called from their executive suites. You know where that is?”

“The little apartment with kitchenette at the opposite Krost’s voice end of their offices?” He remembered it well; the bar there was usually well stocked.

“The refrigerator’s out of order and Bigelow’s entertaining a client.”

Krost was offended. “They want a refrigerator fixed at this time of night?”

“Don’t ask questions, just go down there and fix that box. Then get back to me-I want to know where yore going to be goofing off next.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Donaldson.” Krost hung up. Screw you, Mac, you’re not going to pin me down that easy.

Next time when the phone rang, he wouldn’t bother answering. Let Donaldson try and chase him down; he didn’t know all the hidey holes.

He finished wiping his hands on his pants and flicked off the light switch, then locked the door after him’. He idly wondered who the hell Bigelow could be entertaining at this time of night.

So much money, Lex Hughes thought-more money than the Credit Union had had in its vault for as long as he could remember. Not enough to make a man independently wealthy but thirty thousand dollars was still nothing to sneeze at. He made a final entry in the ledger before him, then his pudgy fingers gathered up a number of larger bills and with a lover’s touch added them to the stack before him. He wet his thumb, jogged the stack so the bills were even at the short edge and flicked his thumb slowly across them, counting as he went. Another thousand.

He wrapped a paper band tightly around the bundle and laid it gently in the nearby tray. It was the Christmas Club that accounted for the additional funds, he thought. Next week the accounts would mature and -there would be numerous withdrawals for holiday gift buying.

“How’re you doing, Lex?”

“It’s going to be a long night, Carolyn.” He grouped another stack of bills in front of him and started counting, then suddenly glanced up at the camera overhead. The Eye was what they called it in the Credit Union, the all-seeing, ubiquitous Eye that constantly scanned the railed enclosure and the open vault behind it He had been down in the security monitoring room once and Garfunkel had shown him the small television screen that was tied into the Credit Union camera, as well as the indicator for the small impulse sensor that registered the body heat of anybody near the camera itself. It had given him an eerie feeling and now whenever he saw the camera approaching him on scan, its small red “on” light glowing, he felt queasy inside, as if the camera could read his thoughts.

Once, when he had been a child, they had a kitchen calendar showing a huge, disembodied eye floating in clouds and underneath the legend “Thou God, Thou Seest Me.” His mother had been a strong fundamentalist and her firm belief in a personal God who was aware of your every action had obsessed him since childhood.

Occasionally, he would remember the calendar and as the camera sweep approached him, he would think: Thou Seest Me.

“Lex, do you have the credit vouchers from the Fifth Street operation?”

Hughes started guiltily, he had,momentarily forgotten that she had been working in the vault behind him. “Just a minute,” he mumbled, “they’re here someplace.” He searched his desk and handed them to her.

At twenty-eight, Carolyn Oakes somehow seemed a decade older, he thought with a trace of pity. It wasn’t that she had aged prematurely; it was more her manner and the way she dressed-low-heeled, “sensible” shoes, her carefully brushed brown hair gathered at the back, an almost total lack of make-up. She was actually rather attractive, Hughes thought, but she rarely dated and seemed to have given up on the constant quest for a husband that motivated so many of the girls who worked in the Credit Union. One thing he had to give her-she was dependable and had a precise, mathematical mind that was ideal for the job she held.

She leaned against his desk and kicked off a shoe so she could massage her instep. “God, what a day-I’d like to go home and soak in the tub half the night after we wind up this mess.” He continued banding the money in front of him, his fingers doing it almost automatically. “So why don’t you?”

“I’ve made plans for the weekend. My sister is picking me up tonight and we’re going upstate to spend the weekend with my uncle. I wish now I hadn’t promised.”

“Better give her a call,” Hughes said after a moment’s thought.

“What with the early payday because of Thanksgiving and the Christmas Club money, we’ll be here another two hours at least.”

She slipped her shoe back on and started going over the ledgers at a nearby desk. “The foremen aren’t exactly underpaid, are they?”

Hughes was silent for a moment while he counted, then banded another bundle. “They sure as hell aren’t.”, They had a lot more to show for their years of work than he did, he thought. After twenty years he was fifteen hundred in debt and had a wife who couldn’t resist a bargain and a son who was a dummy and wasn’t even making it in the local junior college…. Any union man on a construction job took home twice what he did. He knew, he saw their paychecks when they cashed them at the Union. Granted that envy was not a Christian trait, nevertheless it … just … wasn’t… fair.

The phone on Carolyn’s desk rang and she answered, then turned to Hughes, her hand covering the mouthpiece. “It’s your wife.”

“Do you mind, Carolyn? I’ll only be a minute.”

“I’ve got some entries to make in the vault anyway,’ Carolyn said.

Hughes leaned over and took the phone. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I know it’s the holidays but I just can’t walk away from the job.” He listened in silence for a second more, then said, “I’ll make it home as soon as I can,” and hung up. He didn’t have much to show for his home life, either, he thought. You made a mistake when you were young and the sap was’rising and you spent the rest of your life regretting it.

There was a brief time, after he had graduated from college, when he had tried his hand at acting in New York. If he had only been able to give it another six months … But he hadn’t and that had been that.

It actually hurt to see a play now, particularly if it was a revival and he knew some of the lines. He’d sit in the audience and mumble them to himself, anticipating the actors on stage. He’d sold out his hopes, he thought, for a woman who didn’t love him and whose only ambition in life was to spend the type of money he could never hope to make. Who was it who said we all lead lives of quiet desperation?

He opened his bottom desk drawer and ran his fingers over the travel folders he kept there, his mind’s eye visualizing the exotic countries they described. Japan, Greece, the Near East …

“Why don’t you go someday?” Carolyn asked gently, coming up behind him.

“Yeah, sure, someday. You know, I saw a little of Japan when I was in the service. Not much of it-when you’re in the Army, somehow you never really see much of the country you’re stationed in. A friend of mine who was in the Navy said the only thing he ever saw overseas were the little steak-and-egg restaurants around fleet landing that catered to the sailors.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “You ever been overseas, Carolyn? Ever been to England or Germany or Greece?”

She nodded, feeling oddly sorry for him. “I belong to a tour group and every summer we go someplace. Last year it was Greece and I saw Athens and Piraeus, the Acropolis, that sort of thing. You ought to join one-it’s cheaper than flying from here to the Coast.” - He took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and kneaded the bridge of his nose for a moment. “You know, I think I could really use about two months on the Italian Riviera.

By myself.” He sighed. “I suppose that surprises you?”

She shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t say it does. Except that the Italian Riviera suffers from a lot of pollution now and the Mediterranean isn’t quite as blue as it looks in the travel folders.”

She was sorry she had mentioned it when she saw the look on his face.

“The Adriatic coast is the place where everybody goes now,” she continued, trying to make it up to him. “It’s less expensive and even more beautiful-it’s not as commercial, not as touristy.”

“The Adriatic? I’ll have to look into that. Someday, maybe . .

.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed, then asked: “Have you got all the vouchers entered?”

“Yes.” She glanced at her watch. “I better call my sister.”

“Carolyn…” Hughes hesitated a moment. “Look, why don’t you go ahead and take off? I can finish up here alone.”

She shook her head. “You know the regulations. Got to have a watcher to watch the watcher.”

“Afraid I’ll grab the money and run off to the Adriatic ;coast?”

He laughed. “Not that it isn’t a thought.”

“No, of course not.” She knew her face was slightly red. “But I’m in charge of the vault and if anyone found out…”

“Don’t sweat it, I’ll cover for you.” She still hesitated.

“Go ahead, Carolyn, get out of here-there’s not that much left to do anyway.”

She reached for her coat which was draped over a desk chair and said, “You sure you don’t need me?”

“Of course I need you but why spoil both our evenings?

Besides, the weather’s getting bad and if you wait any longer, you won’t be able to go at all. The guys in the architects’ division left an hour ago.”

“Thanks a lot, Lex.” She paused at the door. ‘Anybody ever tell you that you’re a very nice man? Thanks again.”

He touched an imaginary cap with his forefinger and said, “My pleasure.” She had talked about the trip all last week and had mentioned several times that the son of her uncle’s best friend was also visiting and that her uncle had wanted her to meet him. She had made fun of the idea she had no hopes, none at all, but then, who knew?

She deserved a last chance. Besides, his evening was nothing to look forward to even if he went home.

With good luck, Hughes thought, Carolyn would do better with her uncle’s visitor than he had done with Maggie. Maggie. How had it all happened, anyway? The year in New York, the chance with the show-for peanuts, of course, but a chance nonetheless. And then Maggie had told him she was pregnant. One could barely live on an Equity salary in those days; it was absolutely impossible for two. So he had done the decent thing and married her-abortion was out-and got himself a clerk’s job, the type of work he had done ever since. And Maggie hadn’t changed. Still giddy, with a vivacity that was charming in a girl of twenty and appalling in a woman of forty, and an absolute conviction that clothes made ‘the woman-if the price was high and the labels right.

He finished the last entry and began to run the totals.

When he was through, he picked up the tray of money to take it to the vault. So much money, he thought again, more than thirty thousand dollars-a lot more, closer to forty. And there was more money in the vault, plus negotiable securities and bonds that some of the officers kept there. If he were a dishonest man, now was his chance. And that was the irony of it all, he thought. He couldn’t be a thief if his life-depended on it, his early training had laced him into a moral straitjacket.

Hadn’t it?

He glanced up at the camera eye scanning him. Of course it had.

Thou Seest Me.

The spark has grown stronger now, fanned by the faint breeze from the ventilator. It glows brightly, like a firefly in the evening shadows. The strand of frayed cotton, slowly eaten by the spark, feathers into a light gray ash that falls as dust to the floor below.

The spark has nibbled its way two inches up the wispy hair of cotton to two threads, the warp and woof of the fabric above it. The new supply of food is too much for the spark and it slowly starts to darken, dying of indigestion. The threads at the juncture point blacken, pulling heat away from the sparkles now too weak to burn past the slight pressure point where the two strands of cotton meet.

It dims some more; the beast is dying before it’s ever really had a chance to live.

The temperature in the room has continued to drop and somewhere in the depths, of the wall, near the ceiling, two dissimilar metals of different coefficients of expansion twist in a common embrace, reaching out in their struggle to touch a cadmium nickel contact. A brief electrical flash marks the tripping of a relay many floors below and a fan deep in the bowels of the building slowly sobs to life. Overhead in the room,.warm air abruptly floods from the ventilator grill. The sudden displacement of air in the darkened room blows away the smothering layer of combustion products and fresh oxygen swirls around the fading spark. It flares under the sudden gust of air and leaps the juncture of the two threads. In the next instant, the juncture separates and two sparks glow in the darkness where only one had glowed before.

The flow of warm air from the ventilator grill in the ceiling grows stronger. The sparks grow brighter.

The infant beast now has two arms.