The Glass Factory (12 page)

I’m wondering how I can chase down this lead—that is, if it is a lead at all—when we get home, and Colomba says to me, “You got a call back from that last place. They want to see you tomorrow.”

Later that evening I decide to call Jim Stella to ask him out on another date.

He goes, “Filomena? Shh—” I can hear a woman giggling in the background.

“Oh. I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

“Jeez, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

He calls me back about an hour later and starts in: “Listen, I’m really sorry about that—uh—”

“I said don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, but—I mean, I hope I didn’t mess anything up.”

“Hey, we’re not married.”

“See, that’s what I like about you, kid. You’ve been around the block. Nothing fazes you. I still want to make it up to you, though.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

He chuckles.

“You really want to get something on this Morse guy, huh?”

I have to say that my heart almost stops. What’s happening to me? I used to face down
los rurales,
mounted police armed with hunting rifles, without flinching: Hell, it
thrilled
me.

“Well, let me tell you something, Ms. Filomena Buscarsela, I am not what I seem.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure, I’m working for Morse Techtonics, trying to make the zoning for the Kim site more profitable—”

“But?”

“But—I’m also gathering files for a major environmental lawsuit
against
Morse Techtonics.”

Well, I hear that and go semi-nuts.

“You are? Tell me about it!”

“Ah-ah-ah, not over the phone.”

“Okay. When and where?”

“Over dinner?”

“Sure.”

“Great! My—oh, uh, I have to set up some meetings tomorrow. Then I’ll know my schedule better. I’ll call you, okay?”

“Sounds good. Uh, Jim?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t keep me waiting too long …”

I pull out the bits of scorched paper from the ruins of the old Shore Oaks library and spread them out on the kitchen table. The text looks like standard business report language, duplicated, even. But the fragments are just too small to mean anything. So far.

Antonia’s outgrown
Barney,
but I manage to find
Sesame Street
for her on channel 21. Billy stays put. If it’s on TV, he’ll watch it. “Gee, that Gina’s kind of cute, ya know?” he says of the blond actress doing a scene with Oscar the Grouch. I’ve got to leave Antonia with Colomba today, but I don’t feel so bad about it this time. Now that we’re getting along, we talk mostly in Spanish. It’s warmer. Colomba insists that I not rely on the
agua sucia
(dirty water) that Americans call coffee and, fortified with two cups of Spanish coffee, my upper lip sweating from caffeine and nerves, I fire up the heap, spin the die for luck, and take her into battle once again.

My second interview is with the Billing Office. With my identity blunted by KGB-issue sunglasses and my frizzy
mestiza
hair lashed into submission with damp leather thongs, I sign in, pass the metal detector and stalk the halls of Morse Techtonics with a security guard. When I ask to stop at the ladies room, he knocks on the door, opens it a crack and announces, “Uncleared personnel coming in!”

Even the wastebaskets have one-way tops and padlocks. Shit. All the phones have at least five lines and
very
different phone numbers. I am starting to tingle, electric with the possibility of breaking this enterprise, or die trying (a distinct possibility). I count three radios quietly tuned to WBIW “Lite” rock. Must be the official office Muzak. Desks are piled high with invoices I’d give an appendage to sneak out of here, but that’s beginning to appear not too likely. One of the secretaries takes a coffee break, and before she leaves, she pops the Mylar ribbon out of her typewriter and locks it in her top drawer. Shit again.

Well, there’s no lock on the water cooler. I think.

A middle manager named Joseph Kurst shakes my hand and leads me into a cubicle to discuss the job. I give a performance worthy of a Redgrave or a Plummer (or at least a Curly or a Shemp), trying to get the information I need from them while convincingly answering the nonstop barrage of hard-nosed questions. When you include the fact that we’re
both
lying, perhaps you can appreciate the mental juggling I’m doing.

I do keep seeing invoices for hundreds of “customized” Unisystems computers going for $28,000 each to Ergot Importers in Athens, Greece. Athens? Greece? After I’ve given them enough reasons to think I’m worth considering for the job and asking a few questions about the health plan, I learn they have a lateness policy (Show up after 9:00
A.M.
more than twice for
any reason at all
and you’re fired), and some pretty tight security, but that otherwise, everyone’s just one big happy family. Do I have any questions?

Boy do I have questions. “What kind of computers do you sell for twenty-eight K?”

“Oh, we customize those. It’s a very specific niche. We can’t possibly compete with IBM, Dell, and Apple in the PC market, but we’ve done remarkably well with the floor models and mainframes.”

I see a weakness, but I can’t do anything with it now. Steady, girl, steady … Morse is up to
something,
but I can’t act without more knowledge or I’ll risk losing it all. Hmm.

I ask for a tour of the shop floor. It’s a bit unusual, but he sees no reason to keep me from it. Apparently, I’ve already seen the inner sanctum of secrecy, so there’s no harm in letting me see the production line.

We walk down the wrought-iron stairs and skeedaddle between two adjacent rows of assembly stations. My nostril hairs prick up, excited by a sudden increase in chemical odors.

I ask, “Where are the twenty-eight K models?”

“Oh, we don’t do the customizing here.”

“Who does it?”

“A subcontractor.”

“Maybe I’ve heard of them.”

“Oh, I don’t imagine so—”

“I’ve worked with hundreds of computer companies over the years.”

He won’t tell me.

“It’s really very small. You wouldn’t have heard of them.”

And I guess I’m not going to hear of them from this horsefly. But I have to pretend I’m not pushing.

“Would you like to see the molding room?”

“Yes.”

I wonder what inspiration Dante used for the Seventh Circle of Hell. A fourteenth-century meat market? A plague-infested mass grave? A sewer? A sulfur mine? Heaven only knows what images his renascent mind would have cooked up if he had followed Mr. Kurst deeper into the frightful acrid stench growing thicker and thicker around me. I gag. My head swims. Yeeacch!
This
is the source of the smell. I have to pull out my handkerchief, but it’s useless. I’m trying to memorize the faces, hoping to match them to my crayon list as soon as I get out of here, but it’s pretty hard to focus when you’re choking back blood clots.

I still taste the stuff in my soup at lunchtime.

Pale. Afraid.

Rows and rows of eerie gray houses, walkway after walkway leading to dusty gray doorsteps and everywhere the oppressive sameness. Like when I first stepped off the train, only this is the flip side.

The days are getting longer, so I’ve still got an hour to catch them at home by the pale blue of fading daylight.

The first guy tells me in a hoarse growl to get the hell away. The second lets me in, his wife fetches tea, but when I ask about the skin rashes he says they’re nothing and How ’bout those Mets? A constant cough keeps the third one from speaking to me. Number four: I don’t get past the
WELCOME
mat.

The fifth guy lives across the street from a corner of the Tungsten site that’s been neglected so long a bunch of neighborhood kids slip easily through a permanent trench under the steel mesh fence and play war games on stacks of rusty fifty-five-gallon drums. He can’t hear so well, and keeps popping Mylanta for his ulcer the whole time I’m there. He tells me everything about his job—I now know in detail how many impact-resistant PVC casings for the 3600MBX computer Morse Techtonics expects a single worker to pull steaming hot from the molding vat and haul on his shoulder over to the trimming belt every hour (would you believe seventy-five?) and just how hard it is to keep that pace up (pretty damn hard).

But when I start in about his condition, he says, “Whaddaya mean my condition?” and when I explain that I mean his symptoms he tells me to get the hell out of his house.

The sixth guy won’t even open the door.

Call me slow, but it’s not ’til I’m driving back to Colomba’s that it hits me: Every one of these workers saw me this morning down on the shop floor talking with a front office executive. Of course they won’t talk to me—they all think I’m working for Morse!

Damn this cancer-clogged brain-pan! What a waste of time!

Blocked
again.
This is getting tough. And I don’t have the time for this kind of tough. When I get back to the house there’s a letter waiting for me. It’s a card from Jim Stella with a condom inside it offering its use “Anytime.” Boy does he have a lot to learn.