Strawman Made Steel Read Online Free PDF Page A

by his deltoids. A
colossal glass lens rested on his back. Its center had to be a foot thick. If
the sun got through it, the hotdog stand across the street was toast.
    I had to detour around a crew working, from
the smell, on a sewer line beneath the plaza. Atlas’s sewer line looked fine.
    I entered the lobby and looked up the
executive floor of Atlas Co. The elevator attendant resembled a shrunken
Czarist general in red coat and silver buttons, complete with epaulettes. It
was that kind of place.
    At the thirty-ninth floor I said,
“Спасибо,” to the general, and exited the elevator into a spacious lobby of
marble and onyx. A single desk lay at its end, bracketed by downlamps, and
attended by a slim young lady in form-hugging black linen. Her classical looks
were suffocating beneath a heavy layer of foundation. Her eyes managed to see
me and not. They were shot with red.
    I handed her my card, smiled, and said, “I
wanted to speak with Mr. Euripides Speigh’s personal assistant.” I didn’t
expect a return smile. Her foundation looked set.
    She took the card and disappeared through a
door to my left without a word, and reappeared a moment later with a tall man
who introduced himself to be Robert Weatherall. I followed him through the door
into what I assumed was his office. Folders were strewn across a desk already
thick with paper. He didn’t sit or offer me a seat.
    “I’m sure you can appreciate that this is a
very difficult time for us, Mr. McIlwraith―”
    “Worse for Mr. Speigh,” I said.
    Weatherall didn’t see the humor in it. He
turned his back and left the office. Soon we were weaving through a warren of
office-space, me stuck to his heels like a bored kid.
    “The police detectives have already been,”
he said over his shoulder. “I’m not sure what more I can add.”
    “I’m not the police.”
    “That is plain.”
    “Just a few questions,” I said, and
retrieved my notebook and pen. It caught his eye when he rounded a cubicle. He
stopped and pivoted to face me in what looked like a reflex motion. Few men can
resist the lure of being quoted.
    “What do you do here?―I mean Atlas.”
    He smiled till I saw most of his teeth.
“Move the world, Mr. McIlwraith.”
    I scanned the busy dens clustered around
us.
    “One piece of paper at a time,” I said, and
wrote that down.
    He shook his head. “Most of the messages
flying up and down the east coast pass through Atlas products. Optics: fiber,
condensers, alloys. We focus the naked flame a thousandfold and make it speak―”
    “Sounds like you have a head for the business,”
I said.
    He paused and pursed his lips. “It will
sound corny to your hard-bitten ear, Mr. McIlwraith, but I am proud to work
here. And Mr. Speigh”―a shadow passed over his face―“was a fine employer, I
happily confess. I was about to tell you, before you interrupted, that it was
because of Mr. Speigh that Atlas expanded into construction, services, security―”
    “So he did some work, huh?” Billionaire
playboy with his cuffs rolled up. That had to be a first.
    Weatherall’s answered by walking away. I
followed him through an oak door into a cavernous office with square feet of
view on downtown Manhattan. He eased the door shut and a hush fell on the room.
    He advanced on a bureau hard up against the
window. A much-used blotter covered half its surface, weighed down with a
cherry wood set with a crystal inkwell. A heavy book obscured the rest of the
desk. It lay shut, and its cover pronounced it the appointment book of one
Euripides E. L. Speigh.
    Weatherwall heaved it open with practiced
ease to the previous day, which was marked by a ribbon, and then turned back two
more days to the Friday. He stepped back and gestured for me to look.
    I did. It was wall to wall. Even lunch was
marked at Café Martin, reservation for a Mr. Speigh and a Mr. Custom-Plastics.
Lifestyles of the rich and dog-tired.
    Only blank pages now for Euripides E. L.
Speigh. I