Edsel (4 page)

A block before American I changed my mind. Above the trees planted in boxes on the sidewalk, the gaunt arm of a crane was frozen in mid-reach against the sky, a steel I-beam dangling from its end. Just below it, girders arranged in a Madras pattern sketched the rudiments of an architectural leviathan. I had lost touch, all right. Time was when the slightest tremor as far away as Ypsilanti had sent electrical shock waves straight to the center of my nervous system. Now they were throwing up buildings between my morning
Free Press
and my first cup of coffee of the day.

I found a space next to a board fence with a tin sign tacked to it warning away unauthorized personnel and got out while the Studebaker’s motor hiccoughed to a stop. The fence enclosed the entire block, inside which two distinct towers, one forty feet taller than the other, were assuming shape with nothing beyond them but flat farmland. Nothing was going on, it being Sunday, and an eerie quiet hung over the project like the girder from the crane, not even swaying. I felt like the last person left in an evacuated city. In a labor town, double-time for Sunday carried the clout of a master switch.

Gravel crunched behind me. I turned as a 1954 Ford Crestline Deluxe Skyliner drifted in behind my car. It was emerald green and had a clear Plexiglas insert in the front half of its hardtop, extending the view from the windshield but otherwise serving no purpose whatever except perhaps the chance to catch a tan without the strain of having to push a button and open a convertible top. Abruptly the overhead valve V-8 under the hood stopped burbling—my engine was still going through the dry heaves—the long door on the driver’s side swung open on silent hinges, and my world filled up with Israel Zed.

He was built for the role, six feet and two hundred athletic-looking pounds in saddle shoes and a brown chalk-stripe double-breasted with lapels as wide as a six-lane highway. His tie, equally wide, was burgundy silk with tiny gold saxophones in a club pattern. He had a broad forehead, square cheekbones, a large clean-shaven chin, and no eyebrows.

That lack lent the appearance of perennial surprise to his eyes—bright, clear, and amber-yellow, the color of tawny port. His gray hair, thinning at the temples, was clipped close. The only thing about him remotely Jewish-looking was his nose, bold and thick and bent sharply with a dent on either side where his reading glasses rested when he wore them; that, and the black silk yarmulke on the back of his head. His thin upper lip folded down over the lower in a V like the flap of an envelope.

I wondered at first, having been tipped off by Agnes to his identity and remembering the name vaguely, why I didn’t recognize him. Later I found out that the Roosevelt administration and then the Republican Party had taken pains to keep him away from events where cameras would be present. As an orthodox Jew he refused to remove the black beanie and the sight of it was considered anathema to an electorate made up largely of Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and moviegoers who thought Jeff Chandler celebrated Easter instead of Passover. And so at those times he had sat alone in a room somewhere, listening to the events on the radio and calling in his counsel over the telephone like a baseball manager ejected from the game for spitting on the umpire.

“Good morning,” he said, wrapping my hand in an oddly delicate grip considering the size of his palm and the strength I sensed in it. “Sorry the place is such a mess. I hate things in progress. The problem is when they’re finished there’s nothing to do but start something else.”

“I apologize for doubting you, Mr. Zed. I was on top of things so long I get to thinking I still am. They tell me it’s the same way when you lose an arm or a leg.”

“The real publicity blitz hasn’t started yet. All the better for privacy. Let’s go on up.”

“Up?”

He leaned inside the car and retrieved a square steel case the size and shape of a woman’s makeup kit with a combination dial as big as an apple. He grasped the edge of the fence gate and rattled it until it was opened from the other side by a gray-skinned Negro in a yellow hard hat and white coveralls crusted with dried mortar, who peered at the picture ID Zed showed him and pulled the gate open the rest of the way.

When we were both inside he closed and padlocked it. More heavy equipment and stacks of girders and cement blocks cluttered the raw earth inside the fence. At Zed’s direction the Negro unlocked a board shed with a slanted corrugated roof and WARNING—EXPLOSIVES stenciled on the door. The big man reached inside and brought out two hard hats, one of which he handed to me. Mine was too big and I had to double over my right ear as a shim, but his fit his broad head with just enough room for the yarmulke, as if he’d had his haberdashery run it up. Somehow it made him look even bigger and wider. I, however, was sure I looked like one of the dancing toadstools in
Fantasia.
Leaving the Negro to lock up, he led the way through the building’s steel superstructure to a wooden platform upon which stood a steel cage I didn’t like the looks of at all.

He spotted my hesitation. “Do you have a problem with heights?”

“Not when there’s a building around me.”

“Believe me, if it weren’t absolutely safe I wouldn’t be going up with you. My people are born worriers.”

He folded aside the grate and held it while I stepped in. Joining me, he closed the grate and signaled to the Negro, who started a shiny red generator the size of a school bus and entered the maze of girders to work a lever nearly as tall as he was. The elevator jerked like a drunk snoring himself awake and rose between the rails. We cleared the fence and the top of the nearest building, after which Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and greater Detroit spread below our feet, and beyond them the quilt patchwork of pastures and crops. We left the shorter tower behind us and still we climbed, past a fat seagull blinking at us from its perch at the end of an exposed rivet, up to where the wind freshened and the sky opened around us like a parachute.

The car didn’t slow down as we approached the top of the greater tower. There was nothing above it but tattered clouds and I was starting to think we would just keep on going like in a cartoon when we stopped with a clank that nearly threw me off my feet. Zed pulled open the grate and stepped onto a platform made of two-by-sixes laid across two I-beams. A pair of steel folding chairs faced each other there, with a large wooden crate between them marked UNIONBILT TOGGLES. I pried my fingers off the handrail and followed him. The entire building swayed beneath me. I made my way across the platform in a gridiron crouch and grasped the back of one of the chairs in both hands as if it were the bar of a trapeze.

“It hit me the same way the first few times,” said my host. “You get used to it. You should see the Indians we hire from up North; they hop from girder to girder like parakeets, and with a bellyful of Jack Daniel’s to boot. I think it has something to do with their ancestors jumping stagecoaches and covered wagons.”

I didn’t say anything. The wind was stiff and puffed out the back of my sport coat like a sail. My toes gripped at the platform through the soles of my shoes until they hurt. A haulaway thundered down Ford Road and I felt the vibration behind my knees. It was like being drunk, minus the sensation of well-being.

“Sit down, Mr. Minor. You’ll feel better.”

Without letting go of the back, I worked my way around the chair and lowered myself onto the seat. I sat there a long time before my heart stopped hammering between my ears. “Is there any special reason we couldn’t do this on the ground?” I asked then.

“Just one moment.” Seated opposite me on the other side of the crate, he lifted a field telephone from its top, black steel with a dial attached to the bottom of the receiver, and dialed a number. “Me, Janet. Anything? No, he needs to get Dinah Shore out of his head, she’s committed to Chevrolet for at least three years. There’s a new cowboy show on the board, though. CBS wants John Wayne and they’ll need a sponsor who won’t squawk at his fee.” He listened. “Okay, tell him we’ll make it a condition: No Wayne, no deal. I’ll be at this number.” He laid down the telephone. “Sorry. The problem with walls is you can’t tell who’s listening from the other side. I used to read your column when I was clerking in the legal department at Chrysler. You had a reputation for keeping secrets. It’s my observation that that’s a lifelong trait”

Having thus been warned, I leaned in, folding my arms on top of the crate and opening my face.

He leaned back at the same time. I wondered if he were playing with me. “We’re sitting atop the main building. Twelve stories. I imagine it feels higher.” Without waiting for a response he pointed at the shorter tower. “That will be the Lincoln Mercury Building, six stories, with a parking garage in between so the employees won’t have to cross a dark lot at night. Hank takes care of his people, unlike his grandfather. The business has plain outgrown the old barn on Schaeffer; also there is no privacy, people barging in at all hours without taking the trouble to knock. Once they get in that habit the only way to break it is to overawe them with their surroundings.”

“I’d probably just lock the door.”

“That’s a retreat. Hank Ford doesn’t back off. Harry Bennett thought he would and now the old bully is rotting away in that ridiculous castle he built for himself on Geddes Road, writing his memoirs. Strange, isn’t it, how people who have had nothing to do with writing all their lives think they’ll suddenly become writers when they retire.”

“You don’t have to patronize me, Mr. Zed. I’m not a writer. I’m a pitchman.”

He placed his steel case on top of the crate. “I wasn’t born wealthy. One summer when I was putting myself through law school I worked for the Shrine Circus. One of my duties was to poke a rake under the elephant’s tail and loosen its bowels before it entered the big top so it wouldn’t disgrace itself in front of the audience. This is a roundabout way of saying there are worse jobs than writing advertising copy.” While he was speaking he worked the combination lock, hinged back the lid, and thumbed through the accordion files inside. From one of the pockets he drew a slim paperbound pamphlet that made me blush exactly as if I’d been caught masturbating. “Community involvement is a serious interest of Mr. Ford’s. He contributes heavily to the chamber of commerce and expects everyone on his staff to stay abreast of its activities. Recently this came to my attention. As a rule I don’t waste much time with cheerleading publications when I can enjoy a ball game or something else less predictable. One picture, however, caught my attention.” He opened the book to a place marked with an uncirculated five-dollar bill.

“It was the only good one I ever took,” I said. “No heads to cut off.”

“It has irony. I was much more impressed with the caption. I won’t bore you with how much trouble I went to in order to match the passage to its author. The chamber was unhelpful and your firm is reluctant to admit it’s anything but a cohesive machine and that whatever issues from it could be the product of individual effort. I was forced to remind your Mr. Slauson that the Ford Motor Company is the second biggest advertiser in the Detroit market before he would put me in touch with your art director, who in turn gave me your name. Of course I recognized it immediately.”

“Let me guess. You thought I was dead.”

“Not an unreasonable assumption. Your decade burned up a lot of good men young, and you have kept a low profile. Your concept of Detroit as a living thing intrigued me. How did you arrive at it?”

“Are you asking me where I get my ideas?”

He closed the book and held it in front of him in both hands, like a Bible. “I am making conversation. I have to say you have a caustic attitude to bring to a job interview.”

“Is that what this is?”

“I didn’t bring you up here for the view. Unless I’ve read the blueprints wrong, we’re sitting in your office. It will be next door to mine and three doors down from Mr. Ford’s.”

The building swayed and I gripped the seat of my chair with both hands. It was a time to say nothing and for once I did.

Zed returned “Detroit the Dynamic” to its pocket and counted down from it to another, at length producing a fold of stiff gnurled paper of the kind the illustrators used at Slauson & Nichols. He actually glanced from side to side before spreading it out on top of the crate. It was a charcoal sketch, seemingly done in haste but with a sure hand. “Nobody on Schaeffer knows this is missing,” he said. “I have to put it back in the file by noon. I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes you have to keep secrets from your employers in their own best interest. Do you know what this is?”

“Sure. It’s a spaceship. Captain Video flies one every Monday.”

“Of course it’s an automobile, but not like any you’ve ever seen. The designer was told to forget every existing car and to draw one that looked as if it were doing eighty when it was standing still.”

“It sure doesn’t look like a Ford.”

“Actually it’s a Mercury; the body, anyway. What do you think of the grille?”

“What’s this, the spare tire?”

“It’s a design feature we’re working on. It has a few bugs. There are other things on the board: push-button electric transmission, self-adjusting brakes, seats that actually fit the human body. We’re giving Cadillac a run for its money, and at an affordable price. Ten years ago it was sliced bread. Now it’s luxury on a budget.”

“What are you going to call this miracle?”

“That needs work too. Hank wants to name it after his father.”

For the life of me I couldn’t remember the name of Henry II’s father, or even what he looked like, although I’d been told I had sat next to him throughout a dinner Henry Primo threw for the press at Fairlane to celebrate the Model A’s first day of production.

“What do you want me to do, sell it?”

“Any hack could sell it. I want you to make it an indispensable item in every American household.” His expression as he folded the sketch was entirely serious. “That caption you wrote couldn’t have been written by an ad man. You don’t think like one, and that’s what’s going to put one of these in every driveway.” He returned the paper carefully to its pocket and removed another. “This isn’t our standard contract. You’ll note there’s a clause prohibiting you from discussing the nature of your job with anyone on pain of immediate dismissal and possibly legal action, except with me and Mr. Ford. That includes Ford employees.”