Remo had acted insanely.
Remo stuck out his tongue and gave them both a razzing. He hadn't felt this good in a long time.
Chapter 3
Joe Piscella and Jim Wiedznan did not expect to die that day when they brought their lunch pails filled with beer and sandwiches to work. By their own choosing, they led simple lives. Both had served in Vietnam and both had decided that construction work paid well and you didn't bring it home to bed with you like other jobs. When you left your shovel or carpenter's gauge at the job, you didn't think about it until the next day.
After coming out of that war alive they had no desire to risk their lives again, so they insisted on never working on tall buildings or in tunnels. Life, they would say, was too precious to risk. Their wives agreed with them. They would rather do without a few things than have their husbands work with worry.
On the day Joe and Jim died, they were at one of the safest construction sites in the business. They were building a one-story auditorium, laying the cement roof along reinforced girders. When the tons of gray cement dried, the roof would be as secure as a bunker.
Jim thought they were laying too much too quickly. Joe said he didn't care. All he wanted was his onion sandwich and beer for lunch.
"If I wanted to worry about how much cement we was layin', Jim, I woulda gone for foreman. We do our job. We break for lunch. We do our job some more, buddy, and then we go home for supper."
Jim looked back toward the main sluices vomiting the gray lavalike cement into the loose molds above the reinforcing girders. The thing about cement, wet cement in particular, was that it was heavy. And the roof was wide, wider than any he had ever seen for cement. To his eye the girders did not seem strong enough.
The sun was hot this summer day in Darien, Connecticut, and he and Joe worked with their shirts off. It was the best time of year for construction. Work was plentiful and there was none of the draining numbness of the cold days of winter.
No one laid cement in winter, because in cold weather it didn't dry properly. And it was the drying that was so important.
"You hear something, Joe?" asked Jim.
"I hear the Yanks aren't gonna be in the playoffs this year," said Joe.
"No. Under your feet. The cement. The girders below. Don't you hear nothin'?"
"Hey, I don' listen to this. I don' think about this. I just do this. C'mon. What's the problem? We fall twenty feet if the whole thing goes. Big deal. Now whaddaya think of the Yanks last night?"
Jim looked out over the expanse of glistening wet cement. He could not remember so much being laid in one day. Usually they would do sections and let it dry and then build on that, because not only was dry cement strong, it was much lighter.
"Never mind the Yanks, for Chrissakes. Listen! Somethin's moving!"
Like many disasters, it looked at first like a harmless curiosity. The middle of the auditorium roof seemed to be turning into a whirlpool. A giant dimple formed in the center of the roof, and then, as though the cement were actually consuming itself from the center, the rest began to flow there, sucked in like water down the bathtub drain.
Joe and Jim were carried with that river. Their heavy boots caught instantly in the thick cement, and although the collapse of the wet cement skin on the roof appeared to be happening in slow motion, Joe and Jim moved even slower. It was impossible to run in wet cement.
Other workers tried to throw poles to them. Someone tried to get a crane to lower a beam they could grab. Everything happened so slowly, Joe even began to laugh at their awkwardness.
But as they got closer to the center and the beams beneath the cement began to crack under the suddenly shifting load, Joe realized what Jim had been screaming about for the last five seconds. They were going under.
In Darien that day, Jim and Joe did not get to their lunch. Instead they died horribly in a gooey gray mass, their lungs filled, their screams smothered, and their bodies sucked into the center of what was supposed to be the auditorium roof. It wasn't the fall that killed them. It was the breathing, or the lack of it. On that very dry day, surrounded by nothing but land, they drowned.
Even in their grief, the widows were glad to see the young attorney from a Los Angeles law firm which specialized in this sort of litigation, Palmer, Rizzuto He knew exactly what the construction company had done wrong. Their husbands would be alive today if the company followed proper procedure. It was a perfect case of gross negligence. "In America buildings are not supposed to collapse. This isn't Russia, where it happens all the time. This is America. Your husbands shouldn't have died. "
At the company the engineers were dumbfounded. They couldn't figure out how it had happened. They knew they weren't supposed to lay cement over that broad an expanse all at once. And yet, somehow, every one of the daily construction orders called for that. It was as though some mysterious hand, a hand that knew exactly how the construction business worked, had cooked up a recipe for disaster.
The small company, already laden with debt, was going to be bankrupted by the lawsuit, not because they weren't covered by insurance. They were. But the next premiums would be so large that the firm would not be able to bid successfully on any future work.
In Los Angeles, in the shining new towers of Century Park City, the tragedy of Joe Piscella and Jim Wiedman was the first order of business at the offices of Palmer, Rizzuto Nathan Palmer himself had called a meeting of the partners.
Palmer, Rizzuto had started out in a small storefront in Palo Alto, chasing ambulances for cases. They still kept the secondhand desk from their first office as a memento, encased in glass in their ultraluxurious, wall-to-wall-carpeted, footballfield-size offices.
Nathan Palmer often referred to the desk as "our reminder of where we came from." Palmer, a graduate of one of the more prestigious Eastern law schools, played humble very well. Arnold Schwartz, who had barely gotten through one of the lesser law schools in California, never dared play humble. Arnold would tell passing cocktail waitresses the gross income of Palmer, Rizzuto Arnold wouldn't drive to the drugstore in anything but his Rolls-Royce lest someone he would never see again might think he couldn't afford a Rolls.
And Genaro Rizzuto would go into poetic raptures about the desk. They were so poor, he would say, that this secondhand desk was almost repossessed and a collection agency actually was carrying the desk out the door when Rizzuto was listening to a judge award their first multimillion-dollar judgment.
The three partners never quite agreed on anything except the need for money. The millions they had made somehow didn't seem to make them free of money worries, but instead added to them.
Nathan Palmer, of good blond patrician looks, tended to marry often, and his divorces were always expensive. Genaro Rizzuto referred to gambling as "harmless entertainment" and could actually prove other hobbies were more expensive. Being a good lawyer, he could prove anything, but he had an ability to lose several hundred thousand dollars in a night, making Palmer's marriages and subsequent alimony settlements seem cheap by comparison. But the biggest financial disaster among the three partners was Arnold Schwartz.
At an early age Arnold had figured out an investment strategy of such complexity that a college math teacher suggested he make a career in physics instead of law.
This mathematical organization of the variations of the stock market kept Schwartz in a state of near-bankruptcy, barely able to sustain his Rolls-Royce and Beverly Hills mansion, both heavily mortgaged by loans. Because of the intricacies of his investment strategies, he was one of the few people who had managed to lose money in the boom markets of the early eighties.
Since Nathan Palmer, Genaro Rizzuto, and Arnold Schwartz had stopped using that plain scarred wooden desk back in Palo Alto, their personal money problems had increased to gigantic proportions. So when Palmer called a meeting of the partners, the other two came immediately. And they came yelling.
Rizzuto had been interrupted in the middle of a three-day poker game and was down almost a half-million dollars. He was sure his luck was going to change, and he immediately accused Palmer of being responsible for his inability to be able to recover his current losses.
Genaro Rizzuto was handsome, with a deep bronze California tan. He wore tight-fitting gray slacks, a sport shirt open to the navel, and enough gold chain around his neck to open a traveling jewelry store. He had one wife, to whom he gave anything she wanted except himself. They had honeymooned in Las Vegas and did not consummate the marriage until they returned to California. Sex was not high on Genaro Rizzuto's list of pleasures.
"What's going on?" demanded Rizzuto.
"Disaster," said Palmer. He wore a light summer suit with his Ivy League tie.
"So? Everything's a disaster. It could have waited. I was down, and just coming back. But you and your disaster stopped me. I'm owed for this, Nathan."
"Your half-million dollars is penny-ante compared to this," said Palmer. He held a report on a death-by-negligence case in Darien, Connecticut, that Palmer, Rizzuto had just secured that morning, "We're all facing disaster. I don't know why we missed it before."
"What's we? You missed it. I never missed it," said Rizzuto, going to a glass bar set against a mirrored wall and pouring white wine into a Waterford crystal glass. Schwartz had insisted they buy expensive crystal even for the washrooms, lest by accident a plastic glass get transferred into an office and someone think they couldn't afford the good stuff.
"You don't even know what you missed?"
"What did I allegedly miss?" asked Rizzuto.
"That we're the biggest fools in the whole damned world," answered Palmer.
"How?"
"Wait for Schwartz," said Palmer.
Schwartz was delayed because he would not leave his house without his Rolex. He arrived looking as ever the epitome of prosperity. A dark three-thousand-dollar Savile Row suit fit his thin frame perfectly. Sedate but elegant horn-rim glasses made him appear thoughtful, and the gold Rolex just happened to appear from a cuff every few seconds as he adjusted one thing or another around his body.
"Don't tell me about disasters. I've just been on the phone with my broker."
"It's worse than the stock market."