Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (14 page)

In the next days, the President cluck-clucked over the White House mishap, which had cost nearly five hundred lives. The President somberly stated that the government would do all in its power to house those homeless and “mentally challenged” individuals, but that it was up to their families and their communities to lend a hand too. “There but for the grace of God go I—and you and you,” the President intoned with sad and thoughtful mien.

The left-wing press suggested that the right-wing government was delighted at having eliminated half a thousand of what it considered undesirables, and to have terrorized thousands more. A story about the President hiding in a vault in the White House basement was bandied about, some swearing it was true, but unlike the people-walking-on-all-fours story, no one had photographed the President in the vault, so it became a joke that just might be true.

“I bet a couple of thousand got killed,” said a Washington, DC resident. “I heard a lot of machinegun fire. No mistake!”

Fred Wechsler, the raper, saw some of the Washington, DC uproar on the TV in his motel room in Florida, and shook his head. Those people just didn’t know how to live, hadn’t adjusted to freedom. Fred had raped a girl of about thirteen that day. Now he was eating a sandwich in comfort and security, he had a roof over his head and a car. He recalled some of his friends in the Illinois prison where he had spent thirteen years, one called Willy Armstrong, in for breaking and entering, a nice fellow but simple-minded, easily led astray, and Fred wondered if Willy had been dumb enough to go to that phony picnic on the White House lawn and get shot?

Trouble at the Jade Towers

“Live—in luxury and security at the Jade Towers,” said the discreet advertisements for the posh eighty-eight-story apartment building on Lexington Avenue in the 1970s. The stone-floored lobby, the elevators and the corridors were all of the same light green, the most restful of colors. The entrance doors of bullet-proof glass could be opened only by doormen who stood between the first pair of glass doors and the second which gave on to the lobby. On the ground floor, there was a small beauty parlor and a barber shop, a florist’s, a coffee shop, a cozy piano bar, a tiny but elegant delicatessen, and an automatized post office, all for resident patronage. Philodendrons and rubber plants almost hid the entrances to these little service spots. On the eighty-seventh floor, below the penthouse apartments, was a heated swimming pool lined with jade-colored tiles. On the roof, twin towers with domed tops of light green hue suggested ageing copper, yet unmistakably marked the Jade Towers, which rapidly became the finest place to live, if you could afford it.

And people came, signed leases or bought apartments. Would-be buyers and renters were screened, and a famous female pop singer and an Atlantic City casino owner got turned away, facts which were reported in
People
magazine and gossip columns of some New York newspapers.

Near the end of the Jade Towers’ first five months, the management was able to boast that there had been no house robbery, no mugging, no violence of any kind on its premises, and the building was now ninety-five percent occupied.

Sidney Clark, the day-shift manager at the reception desk, was quite surprised one morning, when a tenant in apartment 3 M telephoned down to complain about cockroaches in her kitchen. She had seen two, she said.

“We just moved in yesterday, and I haven’t even bought a loaf of bread as yet,” the woman said. “I did bring in some tonic water and a container of milk this morning, but they’re not even opened.”

“We’ll look into it at once, Mrs. Fenton, and I
am
sorry,” said Mr. Clark.

“Finlay. I’m shocked, because everything’s so new and clean in the building.”

The desk manager smiled. “Yes, Mrs. Finlay, and we’ll keep it that way. I’ll report this to our exterminator, and he’ll look in some time today, certainly tomorrow. We’ll telephone you first and won’t enter the apartment unless you’re there.”

Sidney Clark had a second cockroach complaint an hour later from a couple on the tenth floor. He had already called up Ex-Pest, the exterminating firm with which the Jade Towers had contracted, Ex-Pest was coming that afternoon, and he made a note of the tenth-floor apartment. Then he decided to visit the Jade Cup, the coffee shop in one of the two side galleries on the ground floor. Its jade floor and counter looked shiny and clean, with not a crumb in sight. He told the woman manager about the two cockroach complaints, and asked to have a look at the kitchen. The kitchen looked as clean as the counter and tables, apart from the slight disorder normal for kitchens. Mr. Clark stared at the wrapped and unwrapped loaves of bread, at the danish pastries.

“Odd to have two complaints in one day,” he said to the manageress who had accompanied him.

“Oh, cockroaches,” the middle-aged woman replied, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Can’t do much about ’em, you know, even in the best of buildings. Wherever there’s people and water, let alone kitchens, there’s roaches no matter how clean you are.”

Mr. Clark gave her a grim smile. “Well, not in the Jade Towers, Miss—”

“Mrs. Donleavy”

“Mrs. Donleavy. The Jade Towers has got to be perfect and stay perfect, because we’ve filled this building on a promise of perfection. So I’ll expect you to keep your end up by seeing that the Jade Cup is immaculate.”

“Do you see anything wrong now, sir?—And I haven’t seen a cockroach down here, not one,” said Mrs. Donleavy.

“Let me know right away if you do,” said Mr. Clark, departing.

Two Ex-Pest men came around 4 that afternoon, and visited the two apartments from which there had been complaints. Ex-Pest reported to Mr. Clark an hour or so later that they hadn’t seen any cockroaches in the two kitchens in question, but that they had fumigated both kitchens, and advised the tenants to keep the kitchen doors closed for an hour.

“We’re using a new agent, Ex-Pest Unique, practically odorless. Our own labs made it and we’ve got a patent on it. Here—I’ll leave you this.” With a smile, the reddish-haired Ex-Pest man, in dark green cap and work uniform, laid a brochure on the chest-high reception desk top, and gave it a slap.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Clark, annoyed that the Ex-Pest men had entered the lobby from the rear service elevator, each with Ex-Pest embroidered in white on the left pocket of his dark green shirt. “Would you leave by the back entrance, please?”

“Oh, sure,” said the smiling man, with a cheery wave.

A couple in rather fancy dress were entering the lobby at that moment. Mr. Clark knew that Hiram Zilling, a wealthy Texan, was giving a cocktail party starting at 6 p.m. in his penthouse apartment. Mr. Clark directed the couple to the proper elevator, an express for the penthouses.

In the next days, Mr. Clark was the recipient of a few compliments, which he courteously acknowledged and promised to pass on to “the management.” The swimming pool was a great success, eliciting some verbal and one written word of praise. It had a raised and sloping middle section, where bathers could lie and “sun” at any time during the day or night under invisible sunlamps which directed their tanning rays downward. This feature was listed among the Jade Towers’ many “time-savers” in its advertisements, along with the day and night post office with photocopying machines and computers that gave information on air transport including prices, and enabled people to buy tickets with credit cards.

Mr. Clark, after ten days, thought the cockroaches a thing of the past, when he suddenly had three complaints in one day. These were from apartments on floors seven, eight and fourteen, which was actually thirteen, Mr. Clark always recalled, rather to his annoyance, because he disliked cluttering his brain with unimportant side-thoughts. Again he telephoned Ex-Pest.

On this visit, the Ex-Pest men were noticed, or the tenants with cockroaches had told other tenants about their problem, Mr. Clark never learned which, and it didn’t much matter. One man and two women rang Mr. Clark to ask him to ask the exterminator men to come to their apartments.

Mr. Clark and the reddish-haired Ex-Pest man had a talk in the service passage at the back of the lobby before the Ex-Pest men departed.

“If you ask me, the cockroaches are all over the building and it’s just a question of time—”

“All over it? Don’t be silly! This building’s hardly six months old! The start of occupancy was less than six months ago.” Naturally, Ex-Pest was trying to drum up a big contract for extensive fumigating, Mr. Clark thought.

“All right, sir, you just wait. You’ll see.”

“What were you proposing?” asked Mr. Clark. “Or going to propose?”

“Total,” said the Ex-Pest man. “Total once and for all with our new Ex-Pest Unique. Let’s say these cockroaches got here in the building material—”

“New building material?”

“All right, the old stuff was lying around on the ground before this Jade Towers was built, right? Old wood and stuff from the former building. Don’t ask me how, but I know roaches! You had a couple hundred men bringing lunch-boxes here, construction guys.” The Ex-Pest man shook his head. “If you want to go through with it, just give us a call, sir. Otherwise, you’re going to have trouble. These fancy people won’t put up with cockroaches—like the rest of us in our humble abodes, eh?” With a broad grin, he waved good-bye.

Mr. Clark was shocked, debated telling the jade Towers’ Board of Management, and decided not to for the moment. As the Ex-Pest man said, the Jade Towers people were a fancy lot, and maybe exaggerating. Cockroaches simply couldn’t be well-established in the jade Towers, with nests where their eggs had hatched for generations. Sidney Clark associated roaches with old tenement buildings, filthy dumb-waiter shafts down which people dropped garbage in paper bags, buildings with cracks. There were no cracks in the Jade Towers.

“Hey, look at this, Sidney!” said Bernard Newman, a Broadway theater owner and a tenant of the Jade Towers. He had plopped an afternoon tabloid down on the reception desk top, and was pointing to an item in heavy black type. “Cockroaches yet!” Bernard Newman grinned.

Sidney Clark read the lines in the “Town Talk” column, which alternated its paragraphs in normal and dark type. It said:

The much touted and poofed jade Towers on Lex has just received a custard pie in its face. Certain well-known tenants, who shall be nameless because they want it that way, are bruiting it about in supper-clubs that their expensive digs are plagued with cockroaches—even as yours and mine. One beautifully clad young lady said she was thinking of breaking her lease and clearing out.

Mr. Clark shook his head as if he had not heard of roaches in the Jade Towers. “Have you seen any roaches in your apartment, Mr. Newman?”

“No, but a woman asked me that same question yesterday in the elevator. She’s seen a couple and was amazed. Lives on a floor way up, she said, maybe a penthouse, I forgot. Crazy, isn’t it?” With a friendly smile, Mr. Newman picked up his newspaper and strolled off toward the elevators.

At that moment, William C. Fordham, a Wall Street broker, was sitting in the sun in shorts on his penthouse terrace, working from home as usual with computer and telephone on either side of him. He and his girlfriend Phyllis, like most of the tenants in the jade Towers, hadn’t seen a cockroach in their apartment, and hadn’t heard a word about cockroaches in the building.

Later that day, when Mr. Clark was about to quit his post because the evening desk manager, Paul Vinson, had arrived, a man and woman approached the desk, accompanied by one of the doormen.

“These people are asking about rentals, sir,” said the doorman.

“Good evening,” said Mr. Clark. “For the two of you? . . . One-or two-bedroom?”

“One,” said the woman, “with a view east if possible.—Is it true that the Jade Towers has a roach problem just now?”

Mr. Clark shook his head slowly. “No, madam. No.”

“That’s what we read in the
Post
today. And we heard it from someone yesterday—a friend we told we were going to ask about an apartment here.”

“A new building like this?” Mr. Clark smiled. “I think it’s a rumor put out—maybe to be funny.”

“But you’ve heard about it too,” said the man.

“No. No, I have not,” replied Mr. Clark, beginning to think this couple might be journalists snooping. “Would you like to see our one-bedroom apartments? There’re only two left, I believe.”

There was not a cockroach to be seen in either of the one-bedroom apartments that Mr. Clark showed Mr. and Mrs. Ellis, and they took the first one.

Nine days had gone by without a cockroach complaint, when Bertrand Cushings, head of the Board of Management of the Jade Towers, paid a surprise visit. Mr. Clark had seen him only twice before, and had received a firm handshake from him, when he had been taken on as one of the three desk managers. Now Mr. Cushings was accompanied by a somber-faced man whose name Mr. Clark didn’t get. The message Mr. Cushings delivered in Mr. Clark’s office behind the reception desk was that several tenants, more than twenty, in fact, had got together and engaged a lawyer and threatened to break their leases unless something was done about the cockroaches in the Jade Towers.

“You seem to be unaware of all this,” said Mr. Cushings.