The Memorial Hall Murder (22 page)

The Buildings and Grounds Department for the North Yard was at the end of a side lane next to the Engineering Sciences Laboratory. Forty-two Oxford Street looked like a train going around the bend. It had once been a cyclotron, that was the reason. They had fired atomic particles around a curving track, splitting atoms into pieces, until the project ran out of federal money. So now the big magnets had moved out and Donald Maderna had moved in.

Maderna's phone was ringing when Homer walked into his office. He picked it up and waved Homer to a chair. “North Area Maintenance Office,” he said. “Oh, yes, the clock. You mean the four clock faces on the tower of Memorial Hall. Yes, I know, we've had a number of complaints that the clock is now too fast. I've sent somebody over there to shut it off. We thought we had it fixed the first time. We must have had a hundred calls the first day. Everybody was ten minutes late to class. We had to get this expert back again, the specialist who got the thing running in the first place. He travels all over the country, you see, adjusting big public clocks. Only he got the thing going a little fast this time, so now we've got to get hold of him again to slow it down. Don't worry. We'll attend to it.” Donald Maderna put the phone down and turned to Homer.

“The clocks aren't running right?” said Homer. “The clocks on the tower of Memorial Hall?”

“Oh, it's just a matter of getting the fine tuning straightened out, so to speak. A big clock like that, if the compensation is off a little bit, the whole city of Cambridge is five minutes early or late. Oh, I'm sorry.” His phone was ringing again.

Homer got up and crossed the room to look at the charts on the wall, while Mr. Maderna talked to a representative of the Cambridge Exterminating Company. “It's cockroaches this time. Cockroaches in Richards Hall.”

Mr. Maderna's charts were fascinating. The names of the seventy-five buildings in his domain ran up and down the left side of the chart and the fifty-two weeks of the year ran from left to right across the top. Mystic symbols were written in the squares of the chart to show what needed to be done to each of the buildings and on what particular date. Another wall was covered with a job order board. There were rows and rows of wooden pegs hung with green slips of paper under the headings
PLUMBER REFRIG STEAM ELECT LIGHT GLASS MASON KEY CARP ROOF MILL.

“My God, Donald,” said Homer, when Maderna at last put down the phone, “this is a big operation you run here. I mean, you're a sort of four-star general with armies of colonels and captains and privates defending the health and physical well being of Harvard University, keeping the whole place running smoothly, right? How many people are there in Buildings and Grounds, all told?”

“You mean altogether? The whole university? Oh, there must be, oh, maybe as many as fifteen hundred people, if you include the Business School and the Med School. Now, what can I do for you, Homer?”

“Well, I just wondered if you've got some plans and layouts of Memorial Hall here that I could see. And I'd like to know if anybody has been using them lately.”

“Why, certainly. I've got them right here.” Donald Maderna rose from his chair and pulled open a file drawer in a cabinet beside his desk. It was a wide cabinet with shallow drawers. “This drawer is all Memorial Hall. Nobody's been looking at them, not so far as I know. Here, we can spread them out on the table. Which plans are you most interested in?”

Homer lifted the corners of the big sheets. He didn't know what he needed. He was greedy and wanted to see them all. The topmost plans showed elevations of the new tower roof by the firm of Bastille and Neiley, with diagrams of the four clock faces and the clock works and circuit diagrams of the wiring and a cross section showing the system of fire protection in the tower. Below the plans for the tower roof the big sheets of paper went back in time, growing older as Homer groped lower and lower down.
Putnam and Oriswold, alterations to the basement of Memorial Hall, 1946.
That was for the Psychology Department. Professor Skinner had put his pigeons in Skinner Boxes in the basement of Memorial Hall.
Densmore and LeClear, proposed addition for serving room and kitchen, 1905-6. Van Brunt and Ware, plans and elevations for Alumni Hall, Harvard University, 1871-8.
That was the beginning. Van Brunt and Ware had designed the original building. He had come to the bottom of the pile.

Homer pulled a chair up to the cabinet and pored over the thick sheaf of plans, riffling through them from bottom to top, and top to bottom, while Donald Maderna answered his telephone and responded to the beeper attached to his belt, keeping his finger on the pulse of life in the North Yard, making sure that keys turned smoothly in the locks of doors, that elevators ran up and down in perfect safety, and that all the physics and chemistry and biology laboratories and experimental research projects scattered by the acre across the length and breadth of his territory were supplied with their multiplicity of individual needs, the proper flow of gas and water and air both hot and cold, and electromagnetic waves traveling along wires and cables at something like the speed of light.

Densmore and LeClear, 1905-6.
Homer pulled out the big plan of proposed additions to the serving room and kitchen of Memorial Hall and laid it on the table. The addition had been built on the north side of the building in 1906 to make the task of preparing and serving thousands of pounds of food to the students in the great hall a little easier, in the days when that enormous room had been a student commons. Homer stood over the table and spread his hands on the plan. There had been a meat room down there in those days, and an apple room, a milk room, a bakery with huge walk-in ovens, a laundry and a vegetable cold room. And a room full of tables:
White help dining room.
White help? Homer was stunned. He looked further. Sure enough, there was the
Colored help dining room,
and here were the separate locker and toilet rooms for white and colored help. Of course. Good lord.

“What's so funny?” said Donald Maderna, looking up from his desk.

“Oh, it's not funny. That was what you call an ironical sort of laugh. More like a snort. I'm appalled, that's all. Here you've got a building, a giant building, a huge colossal pile of brick erected in memory of the gallant graduates of Harvard who died in the Union cause in the Civil War. And what did they fight the Civil War for? To free the slaves, wasn't it? Well, at least it was partly to free the slaves. And look at that, will you? They've got the colored help segregated from the white help in the basement. And the white help was probably mostly all Irish, I'll bet. I'll bet my own great-grandparents were down there with the rest of them, stirring the pots and passing the plates; while upstairs in the dining hall the students were all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Well, nowadays the students are pretty well mixed up, but otherwise it's just the same as modern Boston. Oh, the human race. Oh, alas, for humankind. Oh, Donald, how one despairs. All that blood, all the names on those gallant marble tablets. And to think, Donald, just to think of Henry James standing in front of those memorial tablets with his hand on his heart, rejoicing that the place was erected to duty and honor, that it spoke of sacrifice and example, that it was a kind of temple to youth, manhood, and generosity. Generosity! and right there under his feet were the toilets of the colored help. Oh, it makes you think, doesn't it, Donald, of the fall of man, of the lost last hope of—What's it mean, here,
Fan Room,
next to the toilets? What was the fan room?”

“Well, I suppose it was part of the ventilating system. I guess it collected all the smoke and steam from the kitchen and blew it up through the big ventilating shafts in the tower, and then pulled the fresh air down. It was a big interconnected system of pipes running around into all those little spaces down there. The spaces are rearranged now, ever since 1946, when they did the basement over. But we've still got those ventilating shafts. It's just more of the same thing. Of course, part of those shafts in the tower now are for the air-conditioning system in Sanders Theatre.”

Homer pulled more plans out of the drawer. “Here, Donald, this is the way it looks now, right? All these little rooms? Look, this whole plan is just plumbing. And this one is wiring. My God, what a complicated mess. What's this thing here at the west end? It looks as if a piece of the basement goes right off the map.”

“Oh, that's the tunnel. The service tunnel. For the utilities. It goes all the way to the Cambridge Electric Company down by the river.”

“A utility tunnel? But it's so big.”

“Oh, sure. You could drive a small car through most of it. Except where it crosses the Charles by way of the Weeks Bridge to the Business School. And under Mass Av.”

“It goes all over the place? Right under Mass Av?”

“Sure. Right there behind Widener. It's only about four feet high under Mass Av because of the subway under the street. They've got this little cart there. You lie down in the cart and pull yourself across with a rope.”

“Is that a fact?” Homer was dumfounded. “Well, how do you get into the tunnel in the first place?”

“Oh, there are entrances from all the buildings along the way. They're kept locked, of course. We don't want the students to have access to the tunnel. I mean, when you think of the mischief they'd think up to do.” And then Maderna told Homer a story about the time all the inhabitants of Lowell House had flushed the toilets at the same time and flooded the sewage system. “Of course, we have to use the tunnel for visiting dignitaries and important speakers sometimes. So they can get in and out of buildings without going through crowds of students. Like when Henry Kissinger was here, during the war in Vietnam. He was supposed to give a talk in Langdell Hall. There were a lot of hostile students collected outside the building, but Sloan Tinker brought him in through the tunnel.”

“Well, I'm flabbergasted.” Then Homer began trailing his finger over the plan of the basement, searching for the row of little rooms that ran from north to south below the memorial corridor. Here they were. There was a separate little hallway under the corridor. It must drop down to a lower level than the rest of the basement rooms, because it had its own pair of staircases at either end. The bundle of dynamite must have been fastened to the ceiling of one of those little rooms along that hall, room 197 or 198. That part of the basement was boarded up now, but he had actually looked down into those rooms from above on the day of the bombing. He had seen them shattered and demolished, with the marble tiles from the floor above collapsed all over their fallen walls (along with splattered fragments of the great kindly mind of Hamilton Dow). Glumly Homer stared at the huge sheet of paper on the table. “Has anybody else taken a look at these plans, Donald? I mean, lately? Anytime in the last year?”

“No, I don't think so. Of course, we don't have the only set of plans. The Harvard Planning Office has some. And I suppose they've got the originals in the archives in the Pusey Library. Say, that reminds me, Homer. I meant to call Crawley. He was having a lot of trouble with a knocking radiator. Or a pipe. Something was making an awful racket over there in his office. Only we couldn't get anybody over there because of the emergency we had in William James Hall. All our plumbers were tied up for a week, and a lot of other people too. All fifteen floors flooded, because the solder gave way at one of the elbows on the fifteenth floor. But if Crawley's got a knocking pipe, it might be water in the steam line. It could be dangerous.” Mr. Maderna picked up his phone again and dialed a number. “Hello, there, Mr. Crawley? I just wanted to tell you we're free to come over now, if that radiator of yours is still knocking. I mean, I've got a couple of men I could send over there right now. No? Not since last week? Hasn't been giving you any trouble for five or six days? Well, fine. I'm glad to hear it. I won't send anybody over, then. Let me know if anything else gives you trouble.”

At the other end of the line, Mr. Crawley hung up the phone, leaned away from his desk, and stretched out in his chair. The chair at Mr. Crawley's desk was one of those office armchairs that tip comfortably backward. He tipped it back as far as it would go and lifted his feet up on his desk.

It was a good thing that damn pipe had stopped knocking. He wouldn't have to be bothered with no plumber. They'd probably want to go downcellar and poke around and find out where the pipe came from and want somebody to hold their goddamn tools and help them pry up the goddamn floor or do some other goddamn thing. It was bad enough when the police and the FBI were running around all over the place, asking him questions, making him run errands all over the place during his lunch hour. And what for? There wasn't going to be no more bombs. They were probably bombing Paris, France, by now, for Christ's sake.

Homer was through with the plans in Donald Madema's file. He rearranged them in the drawer and patted them neatly into place and shut the drawer and then explained to Donald Maderna his new understanding of the entire physical and metaphysical nature of the university, because he now perceived the truth, that the whole whimsical intellectual superstructure of professors and students and scholarship and learning and all the libraries chock-full of books, all that tonnage of verbiage weighing down a thousand miles of bookshelves—he was now aware for the first time that it was all only the flimsiest, most ethereal gauzy bit of thistledown floating on the great undergirding bedrock of the Buildings and Grounds Department, that firm foundation supporting the airy universe above, that vast intricate interconnecting sub-cosmos of cables and pipes and wires and ducts tunneling through dark corridors underground, in the perpetual care of a stalwart army of craftsmen, wise in the lore of a thousand arcane professions and secret skills. And Mr. Maderna said, well, yes, he supposed you could look at it that way if you wanted to, and Homer beamed at him and said good-bye and went away. And then the telephone in Donald Maderna's office rang again.