Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (17 page)

“Is this a joke?” one young man asked, looking ready to hit Mr. Clark with his fist.

Sidney Clark thought the elevator would never come. “I’m going to speak to Ex-Pest—to the Board—”

“The nerve of them!” cried a woman. “Getting us out and then back to
this
!”

Mr. Clark darted into the elevator and jabbed the button for ground floor, then realized that a man and woman with suitcases were also in the elevator, and a second later noticed two rectangular objects, which he now knew were cockroach egg sacs, on the elevator floor.

“Mr. Clark, what
is
going on?” asked the woman. “Absolutely huge roaches all over the building! My husband and I are going to stay with friends tonight.”

“And nice of them to take us in,” her husband added. He was elderly, as was his wife. “They’ll want to fumigate
us,
I’d imagine.”

Mr. Clark couldn’t recollect their name. “We’re speaking with the exterminating people now, sir.”

Ground floor. Mr. Clark remembered his manners, helped the woman with her suitcase, and let the two precede him. The lobby was chock-a-block with people, suitcases, even a few trunks, and everyone seemed to be talking at once.

“. . .
finished!
” said an angry female voice.

“No way! Ha-ha-ha! . . . Want to share a taxi?”

“. . . like the ones in
my
apartment! My Dobermann’s afraid of them!”

Mr. Clark made his way to the reception desk, where he found Ricky with his back against the desk, besieged by questioners.

“. . . everything under control, I swear,” Ricky was saying. “Naturally just a few—very few of the biggest survived.” Ricky was hooted down, and he wiped his sweating forehead with his arm. He had pushed back his head covering, and he looked like an outer-space traveler in green instead of white.

It did not escape Sidney Clark that the people in the lobby were laughing at Ricky’s efficient-looking uniform and at his efforts to explain the presence of giant cockroaches as a “normal development.”

“The weaker strains
have
been exterminated—by us,” Ricky was saying to people around him. “All we need is a different agent to kill what’s here now.”

Ricky was clinging to his job, Mr. Clark realized, doing his best to save the Jade Towers too.

“These cockroaches belong in the
zoo
!” yelled a man. “Behind bars!”

A lot of people laughed.

“I think this place is on
fire
!” This from a woman who had just rushed into the lobby. “The roof! Go out and look!”

“Now we’ve had it!” said a man.

Sidney Clark heard the dreaded moan of a fire engine’s siren, close, he realized, or he wouldn’t have heard it through the din in the lobby. “
Ricky!
” he yelled. “What’s happening on the roof ?”

“Nothing!” Ricky replied, with a tired wave of his hand. “We got water up there. Sure, we’re torchin’ ’em as they come.”

“What do you mean ‘as they come’?” asked a man.

“They’re climbin’ up, sure. Layin’ faster than normal, and we’ve gotta torch the egg cases too, natch.” Ricky rested an elbow on the reception desk top in an attitude of self-assurance, but his words provoked jeers from the listeners.

People were departing via the glass doors, and others, struggling with luggage and coats over their arms, poured out of the elevators. Strangers, Sidney Clark saw to his alarm, were coming in from the street. Strangers meant theft to Sidney Clark.

“Michael!” Mr. Clark called sharply to a doorman. “Who’re these boys coming in?”

“They say they’ve got appointments. They give names,” Michael replied.

“Keep them out!” said Mr. Clark. “Repeat
out
!”

The switchboard girls were overbusy as were the doormen, trying to cope with calls for taxis, maybe complaints too. But no, the complaint stage was past, Mr. Clark realized. He was witnessing a mass exodus.

“Madeleine!” Sidney Clark called. “Have you tried to reach Cushings?”

“Yes, sir, two hours ago. Mr. Cushings won’t come.”

It was like the captain abandoning his ship. Was he supposed to be the captain now? “Did Paul come back?”

“No, sir,” said Madeleine hastily, and turned back to her buzzing board.

A bell clanged outside, and Mr. Clark saw a fire engine at the curb. Was the place really on fire?

“Oh!—Watch out!” With these words, a woman instantly cleared a space around her. “Eeek!—My
God
!”

“Step on it, my brave fellows! Ha-ha-ha!”

Mr. Clark knew that it must be a huge roach which was walking toward the door, judging from the swath in the downward-looking crowd. The doormen looked down too, and not one of the four big men made an effort to kill it.

Two firemen who hurried in, heading for the elevators, raised a cynical cheer from the changing and mostly merry people in the lobby. Television people were here! One came in on a rolling ladder, filming from a height.

“Here’s one! Get this one!” A woman pointed to a wall near her.

Mr. Clark realized that the strangers he had seen barging in were the TV crew—or some of them were—because now they were hitching up their lights to the electric outlets in the lobby, and without so much as a by your leave. He made a dash for the door, curious about the fire situation on the roof. He found the sidewalk crowded, cops and firemen urging the crowd back from the doorway.

“Is there a fire?” Mr. Clark asked a cop.

“No, false alarm,” the cop replied. “Smoke up there and someone turned on an alarm.
Roach
smoke!” The cop was smiling.

People stared at the fire engine, stared up and pointed. The sidewalk bore great black crumbs of cockroach carcasses, and some people looked up warily and dusted their shoulders, yet lingered, fascinated.

“Disgusting!” said a woman, moving on.

“Look!” a small boy cried, pointing. “
Jeepers!
”

A big cockroach was crossing the sidewalk toward the street, rather slowly, and Mr. Clark saw that it was in the process of laying an egg, and consequently looked nearly twice as long as any he had seen so far, Women shrieked. Men said things like, “Amazing!—But it’s really a cockroach, I can see that!”

The fire engine pulled away, and taxis at once took its place at the curb. TV cameras ground, filming the notables and the not so notable who were trickling out of the Jade Towers with their luggage.

“Do you intend to sue, Miss Dulcey?” a man asked.

“Don’t know yet,” replied Miss Dulcey with a smile, following Michael who was carrying her suitcases to a cab.

It seemed that no one was staying in the Jade Towers overnight. It was past 9 p.m., Sidney Clark saw to his surprise. The TV crews were gathering their long cables. Some of the Ex-Pest men, looking exhausted, straggled into the lobby in quest of Ricky.

Ricky was standing near the reception desk, talking to a TV man. “We’re going to clear it up. Maybe not tonight . . .”

Another shift of switchboard girls had come on, and all three were talking. People were inquiring about the safety of their furniture and possessions, Mr. Clark gathered.

“Our doormen will be on duty as usual,” one girl said to someone.

“Paul, go get us something to eat, would you?” Ricky said to one of his men. “I can’t leave.”

“There’s the Jade Cup,” said Mr. Clark. “Eggs and hamburgers—”

“Jade Cup’s been closed since this morning,” an Ex-Pest man interrupted. “You should’ve seen the roaches in there! The big ones came down, y’see, and made for that kitchen. The lady manager—Well, the waitresses all quit this morning.”

“Just because the roaches became immune to Ex-Pest Unique,” Ricky said to Sidney Clark. “Now when we—”

“I’m
sick
of it! You’ve failed in your work and you’ve cost me my job!” Mr. Clark said, because the TV man had departed.

“Want to see what we’re up against?” Ricky said. “Show him, Joey! Any corridor. Try the second.”

Joey and, reluctantly, Sidney Clark, climbed the service stairs to the second floor. Mr. Clark saw roaches going up and down these stairs, maybe thirty of them, of all sizes. Ricky came with them, and he still had the energy to stamp on a few, cursing as he did so, but he was choosing the smaller, or younger insects, Mr. Clark noticed.

Ricky pulled aside a stone cigarette ash receptacle, which stood beside the elevators. “See this?” One egg sac and two cockroaches were revealed, in what Mr. Clark took to be a mating position. “And it’s the goddam egg bags everywhere,
hidden
under everything. Under the carpets—Who’s going to find all these—ever?” asked Ricky rhetorically. “In closet corners, in some little crack in a bookcase—It’s hopeless.”

“Then what’s to be done?” asked Sidney Clark, who still had a feeling that something could be done, even if it took time. “Develop a new insecticide?”

“By the time we develop it—this place—” He waved a hand. “Torch it, that’s my advice.”

The building? Sidney Clark was horrified. “I’m going out to get something to eat. I missed lunch and I’m bushed.”

They all went down, and found that Paul and another man had returned with containers of coffee and bags full of sandwiches. Mr. Clark was invited to join them, and they ate at low tables in the lobby, of which there were quite enough for the thirty-odd men.

Ricky looked better after a couple of sandwiches and a container of coffee, but he was still saying quietly to Sidney Clark, “Torch it, you’ll see. It’s a loss, okay, but there’s insurance, isn’t there? This is an Act of God thing, no? These cockroaches?”

The words haunted Sidney Clark that night as he fitfully slept.
Act of God.
Cockroaches! Cushings’s silence was ominous. Was he planning to torch the Jade Towers? When would he himself get notice that he was jobless?

A weary Sidney Clark was on duty at 9 the next morning, and the Jade Towers was again busy, with removal men now, and instead of taxis at the curb, there was a row of vans. Muscular shirtsleeved men stood around the lobby, waiting their turn to pull up their vans at one of the two larger doors in front and in back. The disorder that they presented illustrated the collapse of everything, it seemed to Sidney Clark. The three switchboard girls looked as if they hadn’t slept much either, and there was something desperate in the courtesy with which they spoke to every caller. A couple of newspapers on the reception desk, the
Times
and the
Daily News,
had pictures of a cockroach said to be five and three-quarter inches long, which had been photographed at the Jade Towers.

Dollies with crates and cardboard boxes of household goods, with chairs and upended sofas, standing lamps, tables and desks and carpets, rolled all day toward the front or the back doors, and men shouted to one another, directing the pushers to wait or come ahead. They were going to work all night, one man told Sidney Clark, because the tenants were in a hurry to get their things out and into storage.

By noon, the switchboard girl Madeleine was in tears. “Mr. Clark, they’re all sueing! We had at least fifteen calls this morning—and some people wanted to speak to you. We didn’t pass them on to you. We said—said the desk officer was somewhere else at the moment.”

Sidney Clark was touched. “That’s kind of you, Madeleine. Go and get some lunch somewhere.”

There followed a week of further disgrace for the Jade Towers, of jokes in the newspapers, and comments from people who had been tenants, some grim, others the “I surrender graciously to the super-roach” kind of thing.

The Jade Towers was not put to the torch by hired torchers, as many predicted. Lawsuits from apartment owners and lease-holders bankrupted the Jade Towers owners, in spite of the Board of Management’s winning its suit against Ex-Pest, which had bankrupted Ex-Pest. Many were the damage claims for cockroach-chewed carpets, upholstery and books, and to lesser extent clothing.

Only days after Ex-Pest had quit the scene, tacitly acknowledging the victory of the larger cockroaches, the Jade Towers stood empty, save for shifts of armed guards on duty day and night inside the front and back doors. New Yorkers and out-of-towners still gazed up at the tall building, but with a different kind of wonder now: it was a ghost building, inhabited by such large insects that people were afraid to live there.

Ideas still came: seal the whole building and smoke the insects to death. Make the Jade Towers start repaying for itself by opening a “Cellophane Bar” on the ground floor. An architect’s plan was drawn up for this, the cellophane walls of the bar-with-piano would be taped to the floor and ceiling, ventilation assured by in and out fans, no food would be served, lest it attract roaches. But this never got off the ground, because there was too much negativity in the air: some cockroaches would still be walking around on the ground floor, wouldn’t they? Patrons of the Cellophane Bar would soon stop thinking this was amusing.

Sidney Clark lost his job, along with the rest of the personnel, and received not a bad reference letter from the Board, though it was not a very good one. So he still had hopes of another, similar job. All New York knew of the travail that the Jade Towers staff had gone through in its efforts to conquer the cockroaches.