But against this Sidney Clark had to weigh, in all honesty, the fact that at least three tenants, even apart from the rich Mrs. Pringle, had moved their furniture and their belongings from their apartments today, rather yesterday, as it was now 4 a.m. And there had been Bernard Newman again just before noon, with another newspaper item to show him, something about Supercockroach in heavy type over a paragraph that said that Lexington Avenue’s Jade Towers, which had for half a year topped all in the Big Apple for luxurious apartment living, had now topped all in the size of its cockroaches, and that the current cleanup was driving the huge varmints upward to the penthouses.
Mr. Clark, bleary-eyed but spruce as ever in a dark business suit and white shirt with french cuffs, was at the reception desk by 9 a.m. He put on a smile of welcome for returning tenants. Ricky telephoned down, sounding tired but cheerful as he said: “We’re winding up the penthouses today, and that’s the end, except for the towers, and we might have a question about them.”
“The towers? But nobody lives in the towers!” The towers were simply hollow domes with some metal bars inside to support them. Mr. Clark had been up to see the towers once.
“Still, we want to do a thorough job, sir.—Want to come up and see the pool? No water in it now, but it’s clean as a whistle, all shiny jade tiles again.”
Mr. Clark said he was glad to hear that, but he was too busy at the desk to come up.
Around 3 that afternoon, Ricky telephoned again, and asked if Mr. Clark and Mr. Vinson could come up, because he had “an urgent question.” Ricky sounded so urgent that Mr. Clark agreed to come up. Mr. Clark interrupted Paul Vinson to tell him the situation, and asked Madeleine, one of the switchboard girls, to hold the desk for a few minutes.
The two went up, and Ricky met them with green zip suits. “Just for safety!” yelled Ricky. They were at penthouse level, and again Sidney Clark looked on to a scene of tubes, cables and rolling vacuum tanks. He saw some roaches on the floor, too, but to his relief these seemed all dead.
“The problem’s up!” said Ricky, beckoning.
They entered a service section with a staircase up and down, one of the fire escape stairways, and here it seemed Ex-Pest had not yet started work. Mr. Clark saw hundreds of rather large roaches crawling nervously about on the metal staircase, as if changing their minds over and over again in a split-second about whether to go up or down, but most were definitely climbing the stairs.
“Only the biggest are still making it after all the fumes,” said Ricky. “Now here’s the problem—”
They were now on the level roof, under the sky. There were many roaches crawling around on the grey surface of the roof, walking in all directions, but somewhat aimlessly, and it occurred to Sidney Clark that they would have to jump to their deaths to escape, but on the other hand, how could fumes kill them in the open air? And couldn’t they simply walk down the sides of the building? And should all these cockroaches have been allowed to get up here in the first place? He was about to ask a question, when Ricky said: “They’re all up here, see?” Ricky indicated not the tower nearer them but the other tower some fifteen yards away, where five or six green-clad workers, some on ladders, pointed hose nozzles upward into the dome. “We can’t get ’em all this way and we want to torch ’em!”
Sidney Clark was alarmed at the thought of fire. He certainly couldn’t give permission on his own. He turned to Paul Vinson, who was nervously tapping Sidney Clark’s arm, and saying something he couldn’t hear.
“Sprayers can’t finish ’em off!” Ricky yelled at both men. “Air’s not confined up there and the domes’re full of ’em! Look!” From a pocket in his suit, Ricky pulled a big flashlight and held it in his gloved hand, directing it up at the dome’s interior.
Sidney Clark took a step back in horror. He had seen a quivering circle, maybe twenty feet in diameter, of madly active cockroaches, clinging to one another, not able to go any higher, and not able to escape.
“Y’see my point!” yelled Ricky. “Torchin’ ’em’s the only way!”
Paul Vinson gave a muffled cry, and swayed as if about to faint.
Laughing, Ricky grabbed Vinson’s arm, and unzipped his head covering, so that Vinson could get some air. “Go down, go ahead down!” Ricky pointed to the open doorway which led to the stairs.
“I really must ask the Board about using fire!” said Mr. Clark, also drifting toward the open doorway, and promising to be in touch as soon as he knew what the Board decided.
Mr. Clark and Mr. Vinson shed their protective suits, and rode down in an express elevator.
“Look at that!” cried Paul Vinson, pointing to a cockroach which appeared to be six inches long in a front corner of the elevator floor.
It was laying an egg! Both men retreated to the opposite corner of the elevator, though the cockroach seemed to be paying them no mind, certainly wasn’t facing them. The egg emerged in a brown rectangular form, nearly as large as the little cakes of soap that the Jade Towers dispensed in cardboard boxes on the rims of bathroom basins, if tenants used the housekeeping staff for their apartment cleaning. Step on the roach and the egg, Sidney Clark told himself, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t the guts.
“Christ,” he said wearily to Paul Vinson. The elevator arrived at ground floor, they both stepped out, and Sidney Clark at once pushed the button for penthouse, and sent the parturient cockroach up.
Mr. Clark telephoned the Board, could not reach Cushings, but spoke to a man who sounded appalled at the idea of torching the interior of the towers, though Mr. Clark told him that there appeared to be nothing inflammable in them, just some metal supports. The man said he would be over right away, and hung up.
Paul Vinson had gone home, sick or claiming to be, so Sidney Clark was busy. Lots of tenants were coming back today, inquiring about mail and messages.
“I see you’re celebrating today,” said a young woman whom Mr. Clark recognized, Susan Dulcey, an actress who lived on one of the higher floors. “Fireworks on the roof. Very pretty. Have you seen them?”
Mr. Clark shook his head and smiled. “No, I haven’t. Not yet. Welcome back, Miss Dulcey!” Fireworks? Mr. Clark took the first opportunity to go outside and have a look. It was around 6 p.m., and dusk was falling.
People were standing on the sidewalk across the street, gawking up, pointing, laughing. From among them, even across busy Lexington Avenue, Sidney Clark thought he heard the word “. . . roaches . . .” Or was he becoming obsessed? He crossed the avenue on a red light. He could see reddish-orange sparks shooting and drifting from the lower edges of the twin domes—each spark a cockroach; he knew—and he could hear, or did he imagine hearing, the crackle of cockroaches sizzling into oblivion? The towers themselves glowed an orangey-pink, as if they might be about to melt from the torches’ heat, and more frightening was the rim of pink that marked the top edge of the building. Or could that be a reflection of the towers’ fires?
“Anyone for fried roaches?” a male voice in the crowd asked.
“Ha-ha! Nah, it’s some kind of fireworks!”
“No!” said another voice. “I can see workmen up there! They’ve got blow-torches!” The man speaking was holding binoculars to his eyes.
“Can I have a quick look through those?” asked a woman.
Sidney Clark trotted back to his desk. What next, a fire, he wondered? Would the next horrid sound be that of a fire engine making its screaming way through Lexington Avenue traffic?
“Hello, Mr. Clark,” said an incomng tenant. “Any letters for Simpson, fifty-nine H?—Thanks! The fireworks look nice on the roof. Today’s sort of special, eh?”
Mr. Clark returned Mr. Simpson’s smile. “It certainly is. We’ve got a clean house now.”
“Mr. Clark—telephone for you,” said a switchboard girl.
“Kellerman in seven J,” a man’s voice said. “I’ve seen four roaches in the last ten minutes since I got home from work and they’re all Bermuda-sized! If you don’t believe me, co
me up! I heard those exterminator guys’re still here, so send them up too, would you?”
“I am sorry, Mr. Kellerman. I’ll be up myself right away. Thank you for phoning.” Mr. Clark told a girl to buzz Ex-Pest on the penthouse floor and send someone to 7 J at once. Then he hurried to an elevator.
If there were any cockroaches in this elevator, Mr. Clark did not know, because he didn’t look, and it was a short ride to the seventh floor, where he found the corridor rather busy.
Kellerman’s door stood open, so did at least three other apartment doors, and a couple of women were talking excitedly together in the corridor.
“Oh, Mr. Clark!” one woman said. “Those roaches aren’t gone! There’re two in my kitchen and I can’t even scare them off the drainboard!”
“My bathroom,” said the other woman with a pained face. “Would you come in and look?”
Mr. Clark gestured toward Kellerman’s apartment. “As soon as I answer this call, Mrs—” He went quickly into 7 J.
“This way,” said Kellerman, a large man in shirtsleeves, motioning toward his bathroom.
A monstrous cockroach, truly five inches long, floated in Kellerman’s bathtub, which held several inches of water.
“Good heavens!” said Mr. Clark. The cockroach floated facing Mr. Clark, motionless but not dead, he saw, because the long flexible antennae moved lazily from left to right. Some of its three pairs of legs stirred, the cockroach turned a little, and Mr. Clark was reminded bizarrely of a fat person lolling on the surface of a swimming pool.
“How about that?” Mr. Kellerman asked. “I was getting ready to take a bath. So much for these Ex-Pest jerks!” He picked up a toilet brush and whammed the cockroach with the back of it.
Water splashed, and Mr. Clark stepped back.
The blow roused the brown insect to activity, it swam to the tub’s back end, and climbed with giant strides up the slanting enamel to the tub’s rim and stopped, facing them.
“Okay, you kill it,” said Mr. Kellerman. “I swear I’ve had it and I’m not staying another night here.”
“I have to say the same.” This was from one of the two women from the corridor, who had come into Kellerman’s apartment and was standing just outside the bathroom door. “Excuse me for intruding. My husband just came home, Mr. Clark, and we’re going to . . .”
Sidney Clark nodded nervously, and made his way to the apartment door. There were more voices and people in the corridor, and some tried to get his attention.
“Is this a joke?” one young man asked, looking ready to hit Mr. Clark with his fist.
Sidney Clark thought the elevator would never come. “I’m going to speak to Ex-Pest—to the Board—”
“The nerve of them!” cried a woman. “Getting us out and then back to this!”
Mr. Clark darted into the elevator and jabbed the button for ground floor, then realized that a man and woman with suitcases were also in the elevator, and a second later noticed two rectangular objects, which he now knew were cockroach egg sacs, on the elevator floor.
“Mr. Clark, what is going on?” asked the woman. “Absolutely huge roaches all over the building! My husband and I are going to stay with friends tonight.”
“And nice of them to take us in,” her husband added. He was elderly, as was his wife. “They’ll want to fumigate us, I’d imagine.”
Mr. Clark couldn’t recollect their name. “We’re speaking with the exterminating people now, sir.”
Ground floor. Mr. Clark remembered his manners, helped the woman with her suitcase, and let the two precede him. The lobby was chock-a-block with people, suitcases, even a few trunks, and everyone seemed to be talking at once.
“. . . finished!” said an angry female voice.
“No way! Ha-ha-ha! . . . Want to share a taxi?”
“. . . like the ones in my apartment! My Dobermann’s afraid of them!”
Mr. Clark made his way to the reception desk, where he found Ricky with his back against the desk, besieged by questioners.
“. . . everything under control, I swear,” Ricky was saying. “Naturally just a few—very few of the biggest survived.” Ricky was hooted down, and he wiped his sweating forehead with his arm. He had pushed back his head covering, and he looked like an outer-space traveler in green instead of white.
It did not escape Sidney Clark that the people in the lobby were laughing at Ricky’s efficient-looking uniform and at his efforts to explain the presence of giant cockroaches as a “normal development.”
“The weaker strains have been exterminated—by us,” Ricky was saying to people around him. “All we need is a different agent to kill what’s here now.”
Ricky was clinging to his job, Mr. Clark realized, doing his best to save the Jade Towers too.
“These cockroaches belong in the zoo!” yelled a man. “Behind bars!”
A lot of people laughed.
“I think this place is on fire!” This from a woman who had just rushed into the lobby. “The roof! Go out and look!”
“Now we’ve had it!” said a man.
Sidney Clark heard the dreaded moan of a fire engine’s siren, close, he realized, or he wouldn’t have heard it through the din in the lobby. “Ricky!” he yelled. “What’s happening on the roof ?”
“Nothing!” Ricky replied, with a tired wave of his hand. “We got water up there. Sure, we’re torchin’ ’em as they come.”
“What do you mean ‘as they come’?” asked a man.
“They’re climbin’ up, sure. Layin’ faster than normal, and we’ve gotta torch the egg cases too, natch.” Ricky rested an elbow on the reception desk top in an attitude of self-assurance, but his words provoked jeers from the listeners.
People were departing via the glass doors, and others, struggling with luggage and coats over their arms, poured out of the elevators. Strangers, Sidney Clark saw to his alarm, were coming in from the street. Strangers meant theft to Sidney Clark.
“Michael!” Mr. Clark called sharply to a doorman. “Who’re these boys coming in?”
“They say they’ve got appointments. They give names,” Michael replied.
“Keep them out!” said Mr. Clark. “Repeat out!”
The switchboard girls were overbusy as were the doormen, trying to cope with calls for taxis, maybe complaints too. But no, the complaint stage was past, Mr. Clark realized. He was witnessing a mass exodus.
“Madeleine!” Sidney Clark called. “Have you tried to reach Cushings?”
“Yes, sir, two hours ago. Mr. Cushings won’t come.”
It was like the captain abandoning his ship. Was he supposed to be the captain now? “Did Paul come back?”
“No, sir,” said Madeleine hastily, and turned back to her buzzing board.
A bell clanged outside, and Mr. Clark saw a fire engine at the curb. Was the place really on fire?
“Oh!—Watch out!” With these words, a woman instantly cleared a space around her. “Eeek!—My God!”
“Step on it, my brave fellows! Ha-ha-ha!”
Mr. Clark knew that it must be a huge roach which was walking toward the door, judging from the swath in the downward-looking crowd. The doormen looked down too, and not one of the four big men made an effort to kill it.
Two firemen who hurried in, heading for the elevators, raised a cynical cheer from the changing and mostly merry people in the lobby. Television people were here! One came in on a rolling ladder, filming from a height.
“Here’s one! Get this one!” A woman pointed to a wall near her.
Mr. Clark realized that the strangers he had seen barging in were the TV crew—or some of them were—because now they were hitching up their lights to the electric outlets in the lobby, and without so much as a by your leave. He made a dash for the door, curious about the fire situation on the roof. He found the sidewalk crowded, cops and firemen urging the crowd back from the doorway.
“Is there a fire?” Mr. Clark asked a cop.
“No, false alarm,” the
cop replied. “Smoke up there and someone turned on an alarm. Roach smoke!” The cop was smiling.
People stared at the fire engine, stared up and pointed. The sidewalk bore great black crumbs of cockroach carcasses, and some people looked up warily and dusted their shoulders, yet lingered, fascinated.
“Disgusting!” said a woman, moving on.
“Look!” a small boy cried, pointing. “Jeepers!”
A big cockroach was crossing the sidewalk toward the street, rather slowly, and Mr. Clark saw that it was in the process of laying an egg, and consequently looked nearly twice as long as any he had seen so far, Women shrieked. Men said things like, “Amazing!—But it’s really a cockroach, I can see that!”
The fire engine pulled away, and taxis at once took its place at the curb. TV cameras ground, filming the notables and the not so notable who were trickling out of the Jade Towers with their luggage.
“Do you intend to sue, Miss Dulcey?” a man asked.
“Don’t know yet,” replied Miss Dulcey with a smile, following Michael who was carrying her suitcases to a cab.
It seemed that no one was staying in the Jade Towers overnight. It was past 9 p.m., Sidney Clark saw to his surprise. The TV crews were gathering their long cables. Some of the Ex-Pest men, looking exhausted, straggled into the lobby in quest of Ricky.