Condominium: A Novel

1

HOWARD ELBRIGHT FINALLY FOUND Julian Higbee, the condominium manager, lounging against a concrete column, staring toward the pool area where two young women were taking turns diving from the low board.

Excuse me, Elbright said. The girl in the office thought you were maybe by the tennis courts. That’s where I looked first.

Higbee, the manager, did not respond in any way. He just stood there beside Elbright, big brown arms folded, thick brown ankles crossed. He was a large and meaty fellow, and on all areas not covered by his pale blue sports shirt and his dark blue shorts, his sun-darkened hide was fuzzed with sun-bleached white hairs. On his solid jowls the hair was pale stubble. Though obviously too young a fellow for a hairpiece, his auburn hair was so carefully coifed to sweep across his forehead just above eyebrow level, it looked glossy and wiglike.

Howard Elbright wondered if the fellow could be deaf and also lack peripheral vision. Alternatively, there was the possibility that Elbright himself had become invisible and inaudible, condemned forever to wander around this bright Florida island trying to join incomprehensible conversations, trying to get people to take his money in exchange for indestructible plastic merchandise. It seemed to him he had been having dreams like that lately.

Excuse me! he said.

Without turning toward him, Higbee said, The so-called girl in the office is my wife. She is Mrs. Higbee. Lorrie Higbee. He spoke in a curiously loud voice, accenting every syllable, as if accustomed to speaking to the semi-deaf.

I didn’t mean any—

What it was about the tennis courts, it was Colonel Simmins that lives in One-G. It was Colonel Simmins telling me there are ripples in the west service court, in the second of our two tennis courts, and his serve bounces funny. He made me watch his serve bouncing funny. Okay, so it bounces funny. So, like I told him, everybody’s serve bounces funny. He spun so suddenly that he startled Howard Elbright. Fair for one, fair for all! Right? Julian Higbee shouted.

I’m not a tennis player myself.

What he should do, I told him, like I tell everybody: Take it up with your Association. That’s what they are there for. That’s what you elected them for. Then if they want something done, they’ll come to me and they’ll ask me if I can get it done. Right?

I guess that’s right.

The manager put his big brown hand out. My name is Julian Higbee, sir. I am the manager here. If you are interested in purchasing, there are only two units left here at beautiful Golden Sands. Five-A and Six-E. Every apartment has a breathtaking view of the Gulf of Mexico. If you are interested in renting, I can show you a wide assortment of beautifully furnished—

We’re in Four-C.

Higbee went blank and then grinned. That’s right! I knew I’d seen you before somewhere. Moved in day before yesterday, right?

No. Ten days ago. May third, exactly.

Congratulations on finding a new and rewarding life-style, Mister.… Don’t tell me. Please don’t tell me. Higbee closed his eyes, bowed his head, made a fist and pressed the back of his fist to his lips. He made a barely audible humming sound. Elmore! he yelled. I never fail.

It’s very close. Elmore. Elbright.

It’s close enough, Mr. Elmore. What’s on your mind?

I’ve got a list.

A list? A list of what?

A list of things that have to be fixed. In Four-C.

Have to be fixed? That’s very strong language. Are you making a threat of some kind, Mr. Elmore?

Elbright. No threats. I just mean that you move into a new place, little things are always wrong and sooner or later they have to be fixed to make the place livable. For example, the air conditioning is—

Let’s go to my office and I’ll get out your file.

Higbee led the way through the parking garage. Golden Sands was an eight-story building. The parking garage, the entrance foyer and the manager’s office and apartment were on the ground floor. The floor above that was called the first floor. There were seven apartments on each floor, but, because of penthouse patios, only five apartments on the top floor. Forty-seven, plus the manager’s efficiency. It was a pale concrete building, one apartment thick, shaped like an angular boomerang. It stood on four cramped acres of land, its rear convexity backing upon an impenetrable jungle of water oak, palmetto, mangrove and miscellaneous vines and bushes. Its concave front faced the constant noisy traffic on two-lane Beach Drive and, at a greater distance, the space between two taller beach-front condominiums and, beyond them, the wide blue Gulf of Mexico.

Higbee stopped suddenly, turned and put a big hand on Howard Elbright’s shoulder, and turned him to the left and said, Look at that! Damn it to hell, will you look at that?

Elbright stared in the indicated direction, saw only a silver gray Oldsmobile parked with its nose toward the concrete wall of one of the storage enclosures.

Don’t you see it? Higbee demanded. He took a steel tape out of his pocket and went to the Oldsmobile. A rear wheel was on the orange dividing line. He measured the amount of overhang, then went to the front of the car and measured the distance from the bumper to the wall.

This is Hascoll’s car. Five-F. This time he’s slopped fourteen inches over the side line, and he’s eight inches short of the wall. You know what that does? When there’s a car over there, nobody can get by to these next two spaces, right? Then what happens? I’m watching the television and somebody comes crying they can’t park their damned car. I told him once, I told him thirty times, if his old lady doesn’t know how to park a car, he should park it for her. Is it too much to ask? Keep it between the lines. Touch the wall with the front bumper. Is that too much to ask? I’m telling you, you people have just got to learn how to park your cars.

Howard Elbright stared up at the young man’s angry face. Howard felt his ears heat up and felt his neck swell. He knew he was not supposed to let himself get angry.

Did you say ‘you people’? Was that your phrase, Higbee?

What am I supposed to call you people?

Residents. Owners. With respect rather than derision.

Rather than what?

Derision, contempt. I help pay your salary, do I not?

You pay for management, Mr. Elmore.

Elbright. Then shouldn’t you make an effort to please the owners here?

Why should I? Oh, I see. Look, you got it wrong. I don’t work for you people. I work for the Gulfway Management Corporation. And Gulfway has got a twenty-year contract to manage this place. Me and Lorrie work for Gulfway. That’s the people I got to please. There’s no use you getting uptight about me, Mr. Elmore. You people can’t do anything about me. Maybe you’re better off with me than the next guy they send over here. You want to know how it works, why don’t you talk with Mr. McGinnity. Seven-B. Pete McGinnity. He’s president of the board of directors of the Golden Sands Association. He doesn’t like it any better than you do. But there it is. Come on, let’s get this list business over with.

They went into the small office off the ground-floor foyer, opposite the two elevator doors. Lorrie Higbee stopped typing when they came in. She was a small woman with long dark hair that would have hampered her vision had her eyes not been set so close together on either side of the knife bridge of a long sharp nose. In profile all that showed was the end of the nose projecting from beyond a sheaf of shiny black hair. Head on, the visible items were the small dark eyes, the long nose and a ripe red bulge of underlip.

Mrs. Fish has been calling you, she said.

What about?

She wouldn’t say.

Get the file on Four-C.

Mrs. Higbee went over to a file cabinet. She wore pale faded jeans, tighter than anything except the very best skin. Howard Elbright tried not to stare at her breasts wobbling unrestrained under her yellow T-shirt.

She brought Higbee the file. Higbee sat at the larger desk and waved Elbright into the visitor’s chair. Got that list? He’s got a list, Lorrie. How about that?

Elbright took it out of his wallet and unfolded it and read aloud, slowly and carefully. The water which comes out of the hot faucets is quite warm, but not hot. The rain comes in under the sliding glass doors in the living room and the front bedroom. There seem to be two refrigerator shelves missing. The compressor on the air conditioner makes a loud yelping noise. The shower door will not close completely. The hot and cold controls on the sink in the smaller bathroom are reversed. The bathtub in the larger bathroom is badly chipped. The interior of one closet was never painted. Two wall plugs seem to be dead. There is a sizable crack in the balcony railing outside the living room.

Is that all?

Thus far.

Thus far? Okay, now do you remember coming into this office the day you arrived?

I do.

What happened?

Happened? You … gave me the keys and a stack of literature.

You’re leaving out the most important part. Right in front of me and Lorrie you signed this here. You’ll find a copy of it in with the literature, right?

Howard Elbright had difficulty with the fine print. He read it with a growing dismay. He had certified that the apartment was acceptable to him in all respects, that all work had been completed, and the builder and the developer were relieved of any responsibility whatsoever for incomplete or unsatisfactory work or equipment.

You said it was a formality, he said accusingly.

That’s what it is. A formal binding agreement. You don’t believe me, see a lawyer. What you should have done, you should have taken a day or two to check it out, right?

My furniture was here. In the truck.

You could have put it in storage. Anyway, I’ll tell you what I can do for you, Elmore. I think I can get you those missing shelves with no problem. I think I got some in storage we didn’t know where they went. About the air conditioner, you got the warranty papers on it, and the address of where it come from, and you can handle it yourself. Matter of fact, you can handle any of this stuff on your list yourself, getting a plumber, an electrician, a painter, whatever. Or you can let me go ahead. You let me do it, and it will be Gulfway’s cost plus ten percent. What my advice would be, you let me handle it because Gulfway can get some crew from the builder that put up this place, and you ought to do better even with the ten percent than when you go outside by yourself, not being acquainted locally. The way it works, you let me do it, it will come through on your monthly billing in addition to the management fee and the land lease and recreation lease and so on.

But either way, I have to pay for every one of these things?

There’s no way I can give you any free gifts, Elmore.

Elbright. Please. Mr. Elbright. Think up a word association to help you remember. I was not very bright to sign that damned agreement. Bright. Elbright.

That’s pretty good, Mr. Elbright. Isn’t that pretty good, Lorrie?

Fan … tastic, she said in a dead voice.

I won’t forget it again ever, Higbee said. I’ve got an almost perfect memory.

Ha, said Lorrie.

You want me to take care of the list?

Howard folded it and put it back in his wallet. I’ll let you know.

Suit yourself. To me it’s just another nuisance, but that’s what I’m here for, right?

Howard thought he could hear Higbee laughing after the door was closed. As he walked toward the elevators his ears got warm again. He pushed the button. One came down from three, empty. He rode it up to four, got off and turned left, toward the north wing. Four-C was the second door he came to as he walked along the narrow exterior walkway, behind the chest-high concrete wall.

He took his key out, but before entering his own domain he leaned against the wall and looked out toward the east, across the jungly acres to the pale silvery blue of Palm Bay and the misty mainland beyond.

You are now a retired chemist, he told himself. You are a very happy retired chemist, because you live in your fifty-eight-thousand-dollar condominium right here in Golden Sands on Fiddler Key with your loving wife. Your kids are grown and doing well enough. You have the use of an easement to the beach (thirty feet wide, no vehicles permitted) and an easement to the bay shore (twenty feet wide, no vehicles permitted). You are in reasonably good health (one infarction, healed). Edith too (high blood pressure difficult to control). Repeat: You are very happy, Howard. This is the Great American Dream. Enjoy.

Edith was in the kitchen slicing a tomato. "You were so long," she said.

We retired fellows take a long time over everything.

She looked at him. Is everything okay, dear?

Everything is just fine.

Will they start soon? Not having hot water is driving me up my new walls.

I’ll keep after them, never fear.

There wasn’t any trouble, was there, about anything?

What kind of trouble could anybody give me? I am immune, he said. He hugged her and went into the living room and knelt and tried to figure out how the rain could come under the sliding doors. As he knelt there he had the grotesque feeling that he was part of some mass ritual, that up and down this west coast of Florida, on all these narrow elongated offshore islands tucked close to the subtropic mainland and named Clearwater Beach and Anna Maria and Longboat, Siesta Key and Casey Key and Manasota Key and Seagrape Key and this one he was on, Fiddler Key, there were thousands of sixty-two-year-old retired chemists named Howard something, all living in these tall pale structures by the sea, all of them at this moment kneeling and facing their sliding glass doors and wondering how the rainwater managed to seep in and stain their pastel shags. Face west, all you plump old men, and ponder your tropic fates.

2

GUTHRIE GARVER, known as Gus, was a small, quiet, knotty man. He and Carolyn had been the first couple to move into Golden Sands. They had moved into 1-C two days after the building was given a certificate of occupancy, when the land around it was still raw, with no swimming pool, tennis courts, or surfaced parking areas behind the building. One year ago last month, April.

He was a sallow man with a white brush cut. He looked like a bleached Indian. When he swam in the pool, he revealed a spare, heavy-boned body, with nicks and slices and welts of scar tissue on tough hide which slid across the strings and slabs and lumps of lifelong muscle. He had spent his life on construction jobs, most of them very large and in very far places. He liked solid structure, well specified, well planned, competently built.

Consequently he despised Golden Sands, but having spent six months looking at condominiums up and down Florida’s southwest coastline, he admitted to himself that he had not yet seen one he could not learn to despise. Carolyn had loved her bright clean shiny apartment. To her it was the symbol of the end of travel, a place for roots without the ever-present fear Gus would be sent somewhere else.

After long deliberation Gus had told her one evening that if he couldn’t put up a better building using only toad shit and wax paper, he’d resign from the profession. But this upset her so badly and so obviously, he convinced her he was only kidding and vowed to himself not to mention his doubts to her again.

They had their first Christmas together in the apartment, and a week later over at Beach Mall Shopping Plaza, only a quarter mile south, Carrie had slipped on a banana skin and broken her hip. That was the old comedy routine. Banana skin. She had been pushing the loaded cart as they walked toward their car. When she fell she shoved it out ahead into the path of a tourist Cadillac. Most of the groceries went up in the air and fell onto the hood and windshield. As Gus knelt by Carrie trying to figure out how badly she was hurt, he was bothered by the stout florid man from the Cadillac who was bending over Gus yammering about who would pay to have his car repaired. At last Gus lost patience and stood up and said, Hush! At the same time he pushed two rigid fingers into the fellow’s belly, two inches above the belt buckle. The man bent over and lowered himself to the asphalt pavement and sat like a fat baby, gray-faced and quiet.

They operated on Carrie and pinned her hip. A week later she went into pneumonia, and they moved her into Intensive Care and then had to perform a tracheotomy. Just as she was finally recovering from the pneumonia, she had a stroke which paralyzed her whole right side. In mid-February he was able to move her into a nursing home. He had medical disaster insurance through an ASCE group policy, so his out-of-pocket expenses were 25 percent of her $9,000 hospital bill, less that portion covered by Medicare.

In early April the doctor told Gus Garver that he could make a reasonable guess as to the permanent disability to be expected. There was some return of function to the large muscles of the right side, but he doubted it would ever be possible for her even to sit up without help, much less walk. Regarding communication, the stroke had destroyed that part of the left lobe of the brain which deals with the comprehension of speech and writing.

The condition is called aphasia. Sometimes, in younger patients, the right side of the brain can be trained to take over communication. But one could not hope for such a result in the case of your wife, sir. Yes, to a certain extent she is aware of her surroundings. And she would recognize you, yes. As you may have noted, she attempts to communicate on a subverbal level, to make simple wants known with … those sounds. Words are essential to the processes of thought, we now believe. Much of our thinking is in word forms. Deprived of the tools of words, the processes become more primitive and simplified: hot, cold, hungry, thirsty. No, I wouldn’t say her life expectancy is seriously impaired. At sixty-three she is quite a healthy woman, aside from her traumatic infirmities.

By mid-April Gus Garver had adjusted his needs to his resources. There was Social Security, the pension, the savings, the investments, the insurance and Medicare. The logical thing to do would be sell the apartment and find something to rent near the nursing home. But that seemed, somehow, to be letting go of life, even though he knew Carrie would probably never come home again. She seemed to be more present, the Carrie of memories, in the bright clean apartment than in her small shadowy room in the home. He sensed that it was good for him to take care of the apartment, serve as a member of the five-man board of directors of the Association, cook for himself, go grocery shopping, take the laundry down to the bank of coin machines at ground level. It created the subconscious feeling that she would one day return unimpaired, and he could not sustain that myth were he to move out.

He saw Carrie for two hours each day, from three until five. He would sit at the left side of the bed, her good side, or at the left side of her chair and hold her hand and they would watch the small screen of the television set he had gotten for her. It did not matter to her whether the sound was off or on. She watched the movement and the color. He sat and thought back to a flood-control project in Assam, a highway in Peru, an airfield in Fiji, thought of dead friends and jungle mountains, village cantinas and village maidens, rock slides and typhoons, while in the silent room on the back street of this small city of Athens, Florida, he watched without comprehension the prancings and grimacings of the gameshow masters.

Whenever he had any free time, he examined the structure of Golden Sands. It stood upon pilings which reached an unknown distance down into the native marl. He estimated there would have to be over three hundred of them. From the ones he could inspect he saw that they were set to a minimum of fourteen inches diameter. Reasonable safety factor would call for a working capacity of fifty tons each.

Sure, the architect and the project engineer could call for any specifics they wanted. Fifty tons apiece. Forty-foot depth. ASTM standards. Minimum compressive strength of four thousand psi after four weeks. You could call for independent testing lab reports. You could watch them like eagles.

But these were uncased auger-drilled poured pilings, with the grout in direct contact with the native materials. All concrete was supposed to be pumped into the hole under steady positive pressure as the auger was pulled. And the grout had to be first class. Good cement up to federal specs, commercial-grade fly ash, fresh clean water, some Pozzolith #8 retarder or equivalent, and fine aggregate, all measured and mixed in spanking clean equipment.

To do it right you had to have men who knew what they were doing and were committed to doing it according to the book. Gus Garver couldn’t inspect the underground pilings, but he could inspect the visible cast-in-place concrete and make a judgment of the piling work from that.

Over a period of weeks he had made notes of the defects he had found. He found construction joints badly located, impairing the strength of the structure. He found one where the bond at the joint was faulty. Where one pour stops, after the concrete has set, it is necessary to sandblast the face of it, scouring away the cement down to the exposed coarse aggregate solidly embedded in mortar. Then, before the new pour is made against that face, all the debris and dried drippings have to be blown out by compressed air. He found a hairline crack in a joint, and when he found two places along the crack too deep for the blade of his penknife, he had returned with a two-foot length of stiff leader wire and satisfied himself that the joint had been carelessly prepared in addition to being badly located.

He found joint marks and fins, surface voids and stone pockets, irregularities and leakage stains. In a bearing surface area where he knew that the specifications had called for class-A concrete, he found a wall in the garage portion where the pour had been skimpy, where he estimated cement content at four sacks per yard instead of six. He could tell by the look of it, by the sandy feel, by the way he could scrape it away with his pocket knife. He found a stone pocket in that wall and stuck the blade of his knife into it and worked the stones loose easier than he should have been able to. In earthquake country, he thought, the damned wall would come down like a giant Nabisco.

All the finish work seemed to be good enough. He did not pay much attention to it. It was all cosmetics. He was concerned with stress, with the ability of the materials, as used, to withstand all anticipated stress. Put something up and you want it to stay.

He could not make as informative an inspection of the pre-stressed concrete work. He knew only that it was more complicated and there were thus more things which could be done badly or not at all. The forms could lack the rigidity to prevent displacement by an external vibrator. The inserts could be installed a little bit off. The hidden tubes, ducts, spacer bars, anchorages and so on could have been improperly secured in place before the pour. Some congenital damned fool could have attached imbedded inserts to the main stressed steel. They could have skimped on the shoring during construction and gotten too much deflection in the stressed members. Some could even have been repaired after chipping or cracking, rather than replaced. The wires, strands and bars could be underspecified in some instances, and random sampling couldn’t hope to catch it all.

The structure seemed to Gus to have been properly designed and engineered. It had that look. The elements and components were of sufficient size and apparent sturdiness. And he knew that good engineering adds a sufficient safety factor to overcome the minor goofs and oversights during normal construction, the ones not caught by inspectors and specialists. But in genuinely sloppy concrete work, as this seemed to him to be, there comes a point where the accumulated goofs eat up all the safety factor, and then if there is enough stress on any portion, enough to crumble it or crack it, the deflection is transmitted to other portions of the structure. They in turn crack or twist or crumble, and the whole thing comes down.

He remembered—what year was it, 1957?—going into Mexico City from the south after the earthquake. Mike had parked the Rover on the east side of Insurgentes, and they had put on their hard hats and walked across to take a look at what was left of the apartment house which had come down two nights previously. It would be impossible to determine just where the first failure occurred, but once it started, all the slab floors came down, one atop the other, so that something almost a hundred feet high was transmuted into a rubbly pile about sixteen feet high. The slab floor had remained curiously intact, forming a horrid sandwich, ten slices of bread with thin dollops of meat between them. Mike had picked up a piece of concrete as big as a walnut and had kneaded it between his powerful fingers until it crumbled to dust. He slapped the dust off his hands and gestured toward the work crews and said, The folks were in bed when the jolt brought it down. Some Mexican comedian owned it. They did not have to discuss the problems of mixing good structural concrete. Or the penalty for not doing it right.

But, of course, Florida is not earthquake country.

He kept wondering about the underground pilings, and finally he checked and found out that the piling contractor on the job had been Romez Foundations. He found out they were down on Riley Key, putting in pilings. In dark pants and white shirt, wearing an aluminum hard hat and carrying a clipboard, Gus Garver went onto the job and roamed, unimpeded. Once he was asked what he wanted, and he said he was with the State Bureau of Regulatory Services, and was told that if he wanted anything, just ask.

The equipment looked overworked and undermaintained. The crew was slow and slovenly. Gus tasted the water they were using. It was salty, brackish. He was there an hour. He saw two interrupted pours. In each case the reason was the same. The auger evidently bit into some underground cavity in the underlying limestone, and then the pour used more yards of concrete than was immediately available. So they stopped and, after ten minutes, resumed pouring into the same auger hole, brought it up to the surface form, shoved in the reinforcing bars and poured the cap.

Checking the foundation work stimulated his curiosity about how these narrow islands so close offshore had been formed. He made his guess and proved it correct at the Athens Public Library. A very long time ago Florida had been under the sea. As the seas receded and the land rose, great rivers had come roaring off the mainland into the Gulf of Mexico, fed by continuing cloudbursts. When the seas retreated farther and the rivers shrank, these offshore islands appeared, composed of the materials the rivers had carried down to the sea and deposited in their delta areas. Thus they were quite unlike the true Florida keys, from Key Largo down to Key West, a long huge dead reef, composed of the googols of skeletal remains of tiny dead sea creatures.

Googol was one of the words which pleased him. It was easier than trying to say the figure one followed by one hundred zeros. And it pleased him to be right about the geological history of these false keys, which were alluvial deposits, long windrows of marl, of shell washed down the rivers and deposited and compacted over the centuries, slowly acquiring the living plants and the top-soil and the white ribbons of seaward beach.

It accounted for the narrowness of the bays which separated these islands from the Florida west coast mainland, and their similarities in structure, elevation and flora.

At night, alone in Apartment 1-C, in the dark bedroom silence, Gus Garver could feel the tangible weight of the six stories over him. And he could see, quite vividly and specifically, one of the underground pilings at the Riley Key project where the pour had been interrupted. During the ten-minute wait, there had been water seepage from the rough sides of the augered hole, bringing down with it bits of shell and marl and soil to form a thin layer atop the wet concrete. The new pour had not displaced this debris. It remained, like a form of insulation, weakening the bond between the two pours, creating the future fracture line, the place where it would go in the event lateral stress was ever placed upon it.

Wouldn’t have to be lateral, he thought. Assume the mix was heavy and during the ten-minute wait it set up at a fifteen-degree tilt from the horizontal. Then, if the native materials in the side wall are soft enough, sufficient vertical stress could force slippage. On the other hand, during the ten-minute wait, a couple of bushels of dry shell could have tumbled onto the old pour and there could be no damn bond at all between the bottom of the piling and the top of the piling. And they wouldn’t know it.

Okay, smart-ass engineer, how would you handle it if you had to pour right in that spot, and for some reason you ran out of grout? Hmmm. Pull the auger and the pressure pipe and shine a good light down the hole and make visual inspection. Drop a length of number-six reinforcing bar down and see how much sticks up out of the first pour. Ideal would be a twelve-foot length, with six in and six up. Drop about five of them, and on the new pour make it a little wetter, less aggregate, so the bar would help make a solid joint. They might end up too close together or too close to the exterior of the piling, but it was a lot better answer than nothing at all.

Thinking of the bars made him think of all the reinforcing steel in the building around him, under him and over him. All the marginal bars with their dowels and splices, the deformed bars and the melded wire fabric, all the supports and spacers and mesh.

He made a mental list of the things which could go wrong with all the reinforcing steel. Too long a wait—over an hour—before the tension reinforcing of the pilings. Steel with grease on it, or too much rust, or with mill scale on it. Bad welds. Too few dowels from footings to walls. Undersized bars. Brittle tie wire. Unstaggered splices in adjoining bars. Bending and field cutting of bars around openings and sleeves. Fast sloppy pours that left voids under and around the reinforcing, or knocked the bars off the chairs, unnoticed.

No, this was not earthquake country, but it was waterfront, and this was a low island indeed, and there was a great warm shallow sea out there, where the big storms come a-roving in season.

At night he began to think of structure in relation to the sea and the tides, and he began to think of Sam Harrison, who, as a green tough kid, had worked for him not too many years ago. They come on the job and you size them up. There are three kinds. The first kind can’t hack it, for all the reasons known to man, and so you ease them out before they kill themselves or, worse, kill somebody else who is worth their wages. The second type you look for, because you can keep them a long time. They are competent, loyal, diligent and quite happy to have somebody else take the career risks and the money risks. Sam Harrison was of the third variety. At first you think they belong in number-two class. But then you slowly learn that they are doing just a little bit more than you asked for, and doing it a little better than you thought possible. Then, feet on solid ground, they start coming to you with innovative ways of doing things more easily and quickly, and some you approve and some you don’t. Then you know what you have on your hands. So you make an extra effort to keep them on the team as long as you can, knowing you are going to lose them. The Sam Harrisons always get restive. They have to run their own store. It is the only way for them. So, when the highway and the bridges were finished in the Peruvian mountains, Sam went his own way.

Sam had gone to follow his own most intense area of interest, man’s efforts to tame the sea. In lonely places when work is done there is time for talk. Sam had said that you can’t tame it, you can’t overwhelm it by force. You have to comprehend the way the sea uses its power, and use its own strength to make it defeat itself. Gus had heard later how Sam Harrison, in his first job, had devised a new kind of dog-bone groin which, laid in rail-fence fashion and laced with cable, had rebuilt a Spanish beach without causing the usual deep erosion down-current from the groin.

This was the sort of problem Sam Harrison would like to tackle. Relate the remaining safety factor in the construction of Golden Sands to the possible and probable impact of hurricane tides this far from the actual beach front of Fiddler Key, and recommend measures to be taken. It would be no great feat finding him. But paying his fee would be. There are too few Sam Harrisons in the world at any one time, and they are in demand.

And so, thinking again about his list of defects, he drifted into sleep, where he stood on the lip of a deep river gorge in Peru watching his survey crew work out the precise dimensions of the span he had calculated from the aerials.…

3

MARTIN LISS STOOD on the blue pile carpeting by the big corner windows of his office on the mainland, in downtown Athens, and looked out across the roofs of smaller buildings toward the bay and toward the caramel and vanilla buildings along the beach front of Fiddler Key. It was a clear hot windy day, a breeze off the Gulf blowing the usual smutch inland. The big windows were tinted blue-gray. The north bridge over to Fiddler Key was open to let a small sailboat through, the stacked traffic glittering in the mid-morning sunlight. He could see the red markers of the Intracoastal Waterway spaced down the middle of broad Palm Bay, and he wondered how long it would be before he could get the LissLess III out of freshwater storage and go cruising.

He was a short plump man in his forty-third year. The lifts in his shoes brought him up to five foot six and a fraction. He was deeply, permanently tan. The entire front half of his head was bald. From that midpoint the hair was combed straight back, falling in dark ringlets over his collar. He wore a small goatee, black salted with gray, squared off. He had a third wife he mistrusted and two grown children he despised.

For a week he had experienced that familiar hollow breathless feeling which meant it was decision time. It was the high-roller feeling. After a series of straight passes, do you drag down, or do you try to make just one more pass?

From his windows on the twelfth floor of the Athens Bank and Trust Company, he could see the jungle-green fourteen acres of the Silverthorn tract on the bay side of Fiddler Key, with the familiar shape of Golden Sands just beyond it. Beyond Golden Sands, across Beach Drive, rose the higher towers of Azure Breeze and the Surf Club. Martin Liss did not see only the fourteen raw uncleared acres. His mind superimposed upon it the architect’s rendering of the Harbour Pointe Club with its 168 units, tennis courts, pools, yacht basin and clubhouse.

The concept represented thirteen months of planning, negotiating and spending. Twenty-eight thousand for an option on the land, not recoverable no matter what, against the price of $1.28 million. One hundred thousand spent on architectural fees, legal fees and other service fees. Allocation to payroll and personal expenses of the Harbour Pointe Club project, say fifty thousand.

Now it could be started. No more roadblocks. Corps of Engineer approval, approvals from four departments of the State of Florida, from three regional commissions, from five Palm County governmental bodies, and even from the Fiddler Key Association. The contractors were lined up. An $11-million line of credit was all established. The feasibility study indicated that, after sellout, there would be a $2.8-million net before taxes. Or fold the whole tent right now and swallow the loss of the out-of-pocket hundred and seventy-eight thousand. It would be a legitimate business loss for the Marliss Corporation.

Arguments in favor of folding it: Seventy-five thousand unsold condominium units in Florida, either completed or being constructed. Brutal interest rates. Fantastic prices for materials. A whole world on the slide into depression. And right now you could cash in for how much? Three and a half mil? Cashing in is the wrong term, being as how most of it is already in Treasury notes. So right now, dummy, you could put it into those municipals that are guaranteed by the Fed and paying like six and a half almost tax free, make it a net two hundred thou tax free. Rent a damn palace at Acapulco. The best booze and the best broads. Big staff. Keep house parties going for weeks at a time.

And never have this feeling in the gut again? Never feel the queasy flutter of risk-taking, of high rolling, of doing things they said you’d never pull off?

Arguments in favor of going ahead: When things look the blackest, then is the time to make your move, because you get the jump on the ones holding back. The politicians can’t risk big unemployment. They’ll goose the economy. The government protects industrial pensions. Social Security will keep going up. They have to come to Florida. Where else can they go? They’ll keep coming down and all you are betting, Marty, is that one hundred and sixty-eight of them will be able to spring for an average eighty-thousand-dollar apartment, sixty for the cheapest, a hundred for the tops. They’ll be on the water with an easement to the beach. They’ll keep coming until there’s no more water to drink or air to breathe, and that is a long time off. Like five years? And I can be in and out in two—if I decide to go ahead. Jesus Christ, it is scary.

Miss Drusilla Bryne tapped upon his door and came in, a tall slender handsome girl, a blue-eyed brunette with delicate features and a strong Dublin accent. It’s the ones from Golden Sands, darlin’. Maggie says they’re in reception a bit early.

The who?

The delegation. Four, not five, so one is missing. And one is a Mr. McGinnity, their president.

He frowned. Oh, shit! I forgot. Would you get me my confidential file on Golden Sands?

There on the corner of your desk where I put it not an hour ago, love.

So what are the rest of the instructions?

She laughed. Oh, to tape it, in case there’s any threats at all. And to stay at my desk and watch the little box, so if the blue light comes on I can come in and tell you you have something important to do. And … hmmm … tell Lew to stand by in case you should call him in for some legal matter.

Almost perfect. The only other thing is give them the coffee routine, the first-class version.

They’re all that important now?

No. But they are going to be very pissed. Benji’s arithmetic was way off.

You’ll tell me when to go bring them?

It’ll be about five minutes.

She went out and he opened the folder. Two left unsold: 5-A at seventy-two five, and 6-E at seventy-five. And they had been transferred from the Marliss Corporation to Investment Equities, Inc., for a total of a hundred and ten thousand, severing the last direct connection between Golden Sands and Martin Liss. No, not quite the last direct connection to be severed. That severance happened early last month, in early April when they held the meeting of all the owners in the communal dayroom on the first floor at Golden Sands. Up until the meeting, the officers and directors of the Golden Sands Association had been Martin Liss, president; Lew Traff, vice-president; Benjie Wannover, treasurer; Drusilla Bryne, secretary; and Cole Kimber, director at large.

It made for a cozy relationship, to have a board composed of the developer; his secretary; his attorney, Lew Traff; his accountant, Benjamin Wannover; and the contractor who had built the place, Cole Kimber. It was the same team he had fielded on his other condominium projects on Fiddler Key: Captiva House, Azure Breeze and the Surf Club.

During the period they had held office, better than a year, they had operated the association according to the provisions of the Declaration of Condominium, as drawn up by Lew Traff. They had made the contracts, set up the Association obligations, devised the rules for the owners, amending the Declaration of Condominium whenever useful or convenient.

Prior to the April meeting, they had appointed a nominating committee, and at the meeting the owners accepted the resignations of the original five directors and voted the five new ones into office.

The names of the new directors were in his confidential folder. They were all retired. He remembered the meeting. Three of the ablest owners, when approached by the committee prior to the meeting, had refused to serve, saying they had had enough of responsibility before retirement. And that, Martin knew, was a mistake. If the Association was well run, it would be a good place to live. If the new officers were not qualified, it would go downhill quickly. They all had a substantial investment to protect.

He ran quickly through the names, trying to remember the faces. He had attended many of these meetings. Except for variations in size, they were all about the same. He had written the prior occupations opposite the names. McGinnity, VP and sales manager of an industrial belt company in Pennsylvania. Forrester, partner in a Cleveland ad agency. David Dow, CPA from Indianapolis. Wasniak, plant manager from Youngstown. Garver, civil engineer from Baltimore.

Very probably he would remember the faces when they walked in. He wondered how ugly they would come on, and how well organized they would be. They had come to let off steam. And that was all it would be. Steam. Hot wet air.

He leaned to the intercom and said, Okay, Dru.

Lew won’t be available. He’d already left for the airport. He’s meeting that man who’s coming about the claim.

It’s okay. I probably won’t need him.

He got up and opened his office door and stood in the doorway. Soon he saw Drusilla leading the four grim-faced men through her office. She was smiling back over her shoulder, chattering about how lovely it was indeed to see them again.

McGinnity had to be the big broad one with the red face, potato nose and shaven skull. So greet him warmly by name, shake his hand long enough to identify Wasniak as the one with the shoulders and the hair dyed rusty brown. Take a chance that Dow is the one with the glasses. Right! So the lanky and consumptive-looking one is either Forrester or Garver. Had to be Forrester. So look around and say, Where is Mr. Garver? He couldn’t make it?

McGinnity was put off balance by the cordiality, trying to smile and trying not to smile. Gus may be along later. He hasn’t been … very active. Because his wife is so sick.

Come on in, gentlemen. Miss Bryne, I think we would all like coffee. Come on in. Let’s sit over here.

One corner of the large office was furnished like the corner of a lounge in a men’s club—with a couch and three leather chairs arranged around a big slate coffee table. Martin Liss maneuvered himself onto the couch with McGinnity beside him and the CPA at his right. It broke up their formation. Forrester unzipped a leather portfolio and took a sheaf of papers out of it. He put the portfolio on the coffee table and placed the papers on top of it, saying, We have been over the—

On my bathroom radio this morning I heard on the local news there’s some red tide off the south end of the key, Martin said. Can you notice anything where you are?

Wasniak shrugged and said, I jog every morning right about dawn to an hour after. This morning I got the old tickle in the throat and I didn’t know what it was, and then I said oh-oh and I started looking for dead fish. In six miles, three down the beach and three back, I counted seven dead fish, not big, dead a long time, they looked.

Liss shook his head. It’s a terrible thing. I hope we’re not in for a summer of it. Important scientists are working on it, but they seem to come up empty. Ah, our coffee wagon, gentlemen.

Dru Bryne wheeled her stainless steel cart in. She put the big hot coffee urn on the table and plugged it in. McGinnity said coffee was off his list. Drusilla, with a deepening accent, asked him if she might bring him a nice cup of Irish tea, and he beamed and said that would be nice. She filled the other four cups, large cups, bone white and delicate. She put out the sugar and cream and the dish of scones and the dish of ginger cookies and the spoons and the small linen napkins. In her serving she managed, in some mysterious way which Martin had never been able to dissect, to make each man feel she was treating him in a more special way, to make each man feel he and she had some unspoken secret between them.

As soon as she left to get McGinnity’s tea, Martin Liss became very sincere and slightly oratorical. Gentlemen, a piece of my life went into all the planning and the accomplishment of Golden Sands. I am proud of it. It is a unique life-style, a unique and distinctive place to live. I feel that when I can bring together the dream and the reality, then I am making my contribution to the society in which we live. Golden Sands was one of those dreams, and now it is a reality. I want to tell you that even though I no longer have any legal or financial connection with it whatsoever, I will always feel a responsibility to give my advice and counsel to the directors of the Association, whoever they may be. That is why my door is open to you today. Now please tell me how I can be of any help to you.

Hadley Forrester was the first to recover. He even managed to look amused. First, to explain our position, Mr. Liss, at Pete McGinnity’s direction Dave Dow and I have worked up a little presentation, which will show you the shape and size of the problem.

Martin smiled and nodded, and the little voice in the back of his skull said, Look out for this one, Marty.

Forrester said, Though we have been over this many times, I think we should all be looking at the figures along with Mr. Liss. He handed out the sheets. "Every purchaser of an apartment made his decision to buy based upon average monthly charges of $81.50, or $978 a year. This was supposed to cover the management contract, the recreational lease, normal maintenance and incidentals. Now look at the next page. At the top are