The Glass Factory (11 page)

Now we’re waiting outside on the Academic Mall for Katherina Minola to free herself from the Administration Building and rescue us from Investigative Dead End Number Three.

Here she comes, skipping down the stairs, full of vitality.

“You know, your talents are wasted on those geeks,” I say.

“Yeah, well, what can you do? When I graduated they should have said, ‘Here’s your degree in design
and
your first unemployment check. Get used to it.’“

“Four years of art school and they’ve got you laying bricks.”

“Don’t knock bricks. My father laid them every day of his life so I could get that diploma. At least I’ve got a steady job. I had a fabric importer
break down and cry
on me after telling me business is so bad he might have to close. And this guy is based in the Hamptons.”

“I want to go to the Hamptons,” says Antonia.

“Later, honey.”

“I want to go to the Hamptons!”

“Toni, it’s a long way away.”

“I thought of something else after we spoke,” Katherina says. “Did you know that Morse Techtonics has put in a bid for the old Shore Oaks estate?”

“What’s the old Shore Oaks estate?”

“I want to go to the Hamptons!”

“Seventeen acres of private woods and beachfront property. Do you want to go to the beach?” she asks Antonia.

“Let’s go to the beach!”

“Okay, okay,” I say.

“We’ll take my car,” says Katherina. “You need a university sticker to get in.”

On our way to the parking lot, Katherina explains, “Old man Carter’s place. Remember the Susquehanna Hat Company? Well, that was him. Made his millions back in the Roaring Twenties and bought up
all
of the land around here. Sold it to developers in the fifties and sixties with the stipulation that they build in the ‘colonial’ style of his mansion. All of this land we’re standing on was donated to make the State University. About twenty years back the family donated their estate in Old Town. Too bad the place burned down.”

“When was that?”

“Six or seven years ago. Damn shame. They used to have concerts there, and rooms for visiting faculty. But the upkeep cost too much. The SUNY system doesn’t have much of a budget for the maintenance of mansions.”

“What caused the fire?”

“You ready for this? Irony Department: A defective smoke alarm.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“So now what’s this about Morse wanting to buy it?”

“Well, I normally don’t pay too much attention to the Foundation’s propaganda. But when somebody makes an offer of $10 million, you sort of take notice. Besides, Morse owns half the town. You can’t go for an ice cream cone without Morse getting his cut. Everybody loves the guy. I mean, when half the employers on the island are folding, his checks are still good.”

“So what does he want to do with the site?”

“Well, the acreage is absolutely fabulous, there’s just no house. I hear he’s planning to build another.”

“Is he going to find a buyer?”

“That’s the market around here, sister. Two-hundred-thousand-dollar cardboard houses in Strathmore have been on the market for five years, but brand-new $2 million homes on the beach are selling as fast as they can build ’em.”

This is all very useful information. “How much are they paying you? Tell ’em I said to give you a raise.”

“Thanks.”

We’re driving under a canopy of sunstruck leaves illuminated to a translucent green. The road narrows a bit, and the easy-to-read street signs start to disappear. I ask about that.

Katherina says, “The folks in Old Town want to keep the place as private as possible.”

We come to a big iron gate topped by a gilded arc that says
SHORE
OAKS.
The iron has gone rusty and has been painted over many times. Katherina makes a left and we start down the potholed and crumbling road.

“This place would be beautiful if we had the money to put into it,” says Katherina. “I guess that’s why the trustees are so willing to let Morse take it off their hands.”

The driveway to this place is about half a mile long. Just before the seacliff drops down to the water, Katherina parks the car. We get out and walk.

“This used to be a millionaire’s estate, woman,” says Katherina. “Now look at it.”

I look. I see. We have ruins left over from the Spanish conquest of the 1530s that look better than this. What is it about the faded glory of American money that makes a place fall this low after only ten years of neglect? To call the brick walkway overgrown would be generous. Two-inch pine tree hopefuls are shooting up five or six to a brick in some places. The surface is bubbled from so many advancing roots it looks like a still photo of boiling lava. Onions—green onions, scattered about the unkempt and corrupted grounds—are sprouting all over the unmowed, unmowable lawn.

And yet there is fertility, of an uncontrolled sort. In the dry fountain, the cracked brick is lush with thick, wet leaves, bright as any green in the Ecuadorian tropics, and a coven of tall white flowers, bell-shaped and drooping with wetness. Nature is reclaiming Mr. Carter’s $10 million estate, and is converting it back to nature.

Day-Glo green moss invades from the borders and shoves between the broken parallels of reddish brick, crowding into any space not already occupied by some tougher organic formation. The question is no longer one of a battle between order and chaos, but rather which particular chaos will triumph.

We get to the flat stretch of blackened embers that used to be the house. The brick walkway from what used to be the second floor down to the gardens stills stands, and one can only wonder at the ghost of its lost magnificence. There’s a circular red-brick lily pond, and after that the stairs lead to a couple of acres of well-tended lawn that drops sharply to a few hundred yards of North Shore beachfront property.

“Nice place,” I point out. “Antonia, don’t touch that, it’s
fuchi.”

“It’s what?” asks Katherina.

“Fuchi.
It means ‘dirty’ in Quichua.”

“Sorry, but what’s Quichua?”

“The dominant native language of the Ecuadorian highlands.”

“You’re teaching your kid
Quichua?”

“No, not really. But a lot of Quichua words are used in Andean Spanish. I bet your family uses a lot of Italian American words that the good people of Wyoming have never heard of.”

I bend down to dust off her hands and find the brittle, waxy remains of burnt pages among the ashes. “This was the library?”

“There was a library. Pool table and everything. Damn shame. About the only thing they salvaged was the grandfather clock.”

“And where’s that?”

“Oh, in a storage closet on South Campus. Nobody’s got the money to rebuild a sixty-year-old clock.”

I look at the fragments. I do not recognize the text. It’s so badly burned you can’t even tell what kind of paper it once was. It seems almost to have been glazed, as if the heat had turned it into ceramic or something.

One piece says: “iety, rules emerge”

Another says: “particular for—the competiti—identi”

Others: “include one—participants”

“it must be”

“ety,
rules emerge—of contract—erely”

And it goes on like that. Katherina opens an eye at me when I fold the fragments into a sheet of notebook paper and slip them into my purse.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” she says.

“Plenty, I suppose.” I give her a bit of a fill-in, but not too much. I’ve got reasons for investigating this Morse character. And since I figure anything he’s involved with has to be part nasty in some way, it’s only a matter of time before I dig up
something.

“Okay, just don’t let the Board of Trustees know,” says Katherina. “Morse is also offering one and a half million to have a new wing of the library named after him. Lot of jobs connected with that project.”

“Yeah, but what good is a paying job if it costs you your soul? Matthew 16.”

“Say what?”

“Oh, nothing. Just my Catholic upbringing.”

“Oh,
that
Matthew! Great evangelist, but he wasn’t much fun on a date, was he?”

“No. Now how do I find out more about this place’s past?”

“Check the town files.”

“I haven’t found the town officials terribly cooperative.”

“Then try the reference librarians. They’re always pulling old design motifs out of the vaults for me. They’ve got blueprints and elevations of the whole place.”

We meander through a rock garden that Antonia thinks is just the greatest, although we have to sidestep some half-scorched beer cans and other such signs of campfires and partying.

I tell Antonia, “There goes a dragonfly!”

And she gasps:
“Uhh! A dragon?”
She’s looking at the lily pond, the most likely spot for a dragon to be, I suppose.

“No, a dragonfly—See?” But it’s too fast for her. Besides, she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. I ask Katherina about her boss, Phil Gates. She says he’s one of those highly paid, minimally competent administrators who tries hard not to distinguish himself in any way except bullying subordinates, confirming an old theory of mine that bosses are all assholes in one way or another.

“How’d he get to be a fucking VP?” I ask. “By eating the competition?”

“By cloning himself. That butt kisser Frank Schmidt is really only about three years old, you know. I never thought I’d be working for someone who doesn’t remember what life was like before
The Power Rangers
went into syndication.”

We lean against a railing and look out at the sea.

“Man, who ever thought it would turn out like this?” she says. “When I was a kid we all figured that American Airlines would have commercial space flight by now. So what happened?”

“Ford came out with the Pinto.”

She looks at me as if to say, “Come on, I was being serious.”

“A car made of aluminum foil that explodes when it’s rear-ended?”

She considers this.

“Planned obsolescence,” she says, nodding.

“And when they realized that people preferred foreign cars that lasted a good ten or fifteen years, the way American-made cars
used to,
they tried to appeal to your patriotism to get you to buy American.”

“Unfortunately, there’s no law against screwing up the economy.”

“I don’t know, it got Louis the Sixteenth killed.”

“That’s what we need: The guillotine for white-collar crime.”

“Why not? It would be a reliable deterrent.”

“That reminds me,” she says, “some of the rich Old Town kids actually go to the State University, and their parents actually endow.”

“So?”

“So they might know a few things about the old Carter estate that might not be in the town records.”

“Hmm. I—”

We’re turning back towards the house and I guess I betray a start when I see a man standing there. Suit, tie, demeanor like he’s lord of the realm and he’s caught two peasants poaching rabbits on his property. It’s Phil Gates.

“Oh, shit,” says Katherina.

Gates is standing on the ashes of the old mansion, looking down at us. But Ms. Minola is good. Damn good. She hasn’t kept that job all these years by letting her boss know what she really thinks of him. She goes, “Hi, Phil!” like it’s the pleasantest surprise on earth to run into your boss when you thought you were alone (and talking about him), waving vigorously and running up the old brick steps to have a chat with him about how wonderful the change is going to be as soon as the Zoning Board clears Morse’s building permit so the deal can be sent to Albany for approval.

Oh, she’s good all right. It’s that kind of acting that doesn’t look like acting, because there is a kernel of truth in it. Ms. Minola, after all, needs to eat, too. She is singing for her supper, and the boss is buying. If he called the sun the moon she’d probably agree with him and say how bright and goodly it shines. But I can see that he doesn’t like my being here, and I wouldn’t want Katherina to suffer for it. Mr. Gates looks like the kind of guy who would carry a vendetta into the next millennium, smiling the whole time.

Gates is not as good. He tries to fake a grinning interest in Antonia, who pulls away from him, as if he didn’t just give me the dirtiest of looks for bringing her into his office just a few hours ago. What does he think, I don’t remember that? Or maybe he’s just so used to his staff’s selective memory that he’s forgotten that ordinary citizens don’t have to put up with that crap. The mind of a boss is a mysterious, dark place that lies deeper than my plumb line cares to sound.

He keeps up appearances by giving me a rundown on all the fabulous things that are going to be done with this site. Since it’s all going to be in private hands and sold for upwards of $30 million, ask me why I should give a fuck.