The old Port Ellery City Hall was built in 1911 out of gray granite and civic optimism. It had a clock tower that had been four minutes slow since the Truman administration. Everybody in town set their watches by it anyway, then subtracted.
On Thursday at 7:52 a.m., five architecture firms stood on its front steps in borrowed hard hats. We looked like a choir that had been told the wrong venue.
I was there as coordinator, holding a clipboard I had no use for. Bryce was there in a blazer, holding his tablet against his chest like a shield. And Gus was there in the tan work boots, standing slightly apart from everyone. He was looking up at the building the way other men look at the ocean.
"Don't say anything strange," Bryce whispered to him.
"I never say anything strange," said Gus. "People hear things strangely."
The other firms had sent their best. The largest was Lusk Collective, which had designed half the glass towers on the waterfront. Its founder, Victor Lusk, was forty-four and wore a black turtleneck under his hard hat. He had a voice like an expensive podcast.
"Marlowe," he said, strolling over. "I read your packet. Page four."
He smiled. "Lovely sentiment. Very artisanal."
"Thank you," said Gus, who did not know what artisanal meant and did not intend to find out.
"I hear the inspector read it too." Victor glanced at the boots. "Shame about the code."
At 8:00 exactly, the front doors opened, and Harold Pruitt came out.
I had pictured a large man. Pruitt was small, round and sixty-one, with a gray mustache trimmed to a precise rectangle. He wore a city-issued windbreaker and steel-toed boots that had clearly seen more buildings than all of us combined. Over one shoulder, in a canvas sleeve, he carried a four-foot spirit level.
"Good morning," Bryce said warmly, offering a hand. "How are you?"
Pruitt shook the hand once. "Sixty-one," he said.
Bryce blinked. "I meant, how are you doing?"
"I'm doing the walk-through." Pruitt checked his watch, then checked the clock tower, then subtracted. "Which of you is Marlowe?"
Gus raised a hand, like a student.
Pruitt looked at him for a long, flat moment. Then he looked down at the boots.
"Code 14-3(b)," he said. "Good."
The tour took two hours. Pruitt walked us through every floor, reciting facts like a man reading a will. The lobby: Vermont marble, cracked in 1957, patched in 1958, patched again in 1989 by someone he did not respect. The grand staircase: forty-two steps, one riser a quarter inch taller than the rest, "so mind the nineteenth."
Behind me, an architect from one of the smaller firms tripped on the nineteenth.
"I said mind it," said Pruitt, without turning around.
Gus stayed beside him the whole way. He asked questions, but not pitch questions like Victor's, about "civic narrative."
Gus asked when the radiators were last bled. He asked which way the building leaned in a north wind. He asked where people waited when it rained.
And Pruitt answered every one of them exactly. Last October. Slightly southeast. Under the portico, by the third column, because the drain at the first column backed up.
"You know this building very well," Gus said.
"I've inspected it every year for thirty-four years."
"You love it."
Pruitt stopped. He looked at Gus as though Gus had reported a crack in the foundation.
"I don't feel things about buildings, Mr. Marlowe," he said. "I measure them."
He walked on. But as he passed the newel post at the top of the stairs, he touched it. Just once, the way you might touch a dog on your way out the door.
On the way up, Bryce tried to build rapport. It was the thing he was best at, and he had clearly prepared.
"Mr. Pruitt, can I ask you a quick question?"
"You just did."
Bryce laughed politely, then realized Pruitt was not joking, and stopped. "Would you say the city is looking for something bold?"
"I'd say the city is looking for something that passes inspection."
"And beyond that? What's the vision?"
Pruitt considered this. "Drains," he said finally. "Working drains."
Victor Lusk wrote that down. I saw him do it. Then he crossed it out, as though it had been beneath him to agree.
Bryce tried once more on the landing. He asked whether Pruitt had a favorite building in Port Ellery. Pruitt said he did not have favorites. He had inspection schedules.
Bryce asked which one was first on the schedule. Pruitt said this one.
"Interesting," said Gus, to nobody in particular.
Bryce gave up after that and walked beside me, typing. I glanced at the tablet. He had opened a new note and titled it Pruitt: Interests. So far, it said only drains.
The council chamber was on the second floor. It was the best room I had ever stood in.
It was oval, paneled in dark oak, with a gallery rail along the east wall and tall windows above it. The floor was white oak too, laid in long boards that ran toward the dais like a river toward a dam. A hundred years of people had stood here to complain about parking. You could almost hear it.
"The selection committee meets here," Pruitt said. "Presentations will be given in this room in three weeks. Abatement on the ground floor will be complete by then. This floor will no longer be an active work zone."
Bryce perked up. "So on presentation day..."
"On presentation day, it's a meeting room," Pruitt said. "What you put on your feet is your business."
Gus did not seem to be listening. He was walking slowly along the east wall, under the windows, in his boots.
Halfway along the gallery rail, he stopped. He tilted his head, the way he did on the Floor. Then he frowned, very faintly, like a man who has heard his name in a crowded room and can't find who said it.
"Problem, Marlowe?" said Victor Lusk.
"I don't know," said Gus. He sounded puzzled. "I can't tell. Not in these."
"That's where the Tuesday Club stands," said Pruitt. "Retirees. Forty of them, every Tuesday council session, along that rail.
"They heckle the zoning votes." He paused. "It's the only time the room is full."
At the end of the tour, the other firms filed down the grand staircase. Most of them minded the nineteenth. Pruitt asked Gus, Bryce and me to stay behind.
He stood in the middle of the council chamber with his level on his shoulder and looked at us. His mustache did not move. I was beginning to suspect it never did.
"Your page four," he said. "You received my email."
"We did," said Bryce. "And I want to say, in all transparency, that the language was aspirational. It's really more of a—"
"Is it true?" Pruitt asked Gus.
Gus thought about it. He always thought about it. "Yes," he said.
"Then here is my proposal."
Pruitt set the level down on a councilman's desk, gently, the way you set down something that's yours.
"I have inspected this floor every year for thirty-four years. There is one defect in it. I know exactly where it is. Nobody else does."
"What kind of defect?" I asked.
"The kind I'm not telling you."
He turned back to Gus. "On presentation day, before your slides, you will find it. In front of the committee.
"If you find it, page four stays and I'll say so on the record. If you don't, you withdraw it, in writing, before you sit down."
"And if he refuses?" said Bryce.
"Then he withdraws it now."
"Could you give us a hint?" Bryce asked. "A general area? A quadrant?"
"It's in the floor," said Pruitt.
Bryce waited for more. There was no more. Pruitt had answered the question exactly as asked, and was now looking at the windows as if Bryce had left the room.
Bryce looked at me. I looked at Gus. Gus was looking at the floor, the long white oak boards running toward the dais. He looked happier than I had seen him in three weeks.
"Agreed," Gus said.
"Gus," said Bryce, in a strangled voice. "We should discuss—"
"No exceptions," said Pruitt. He picked up his level. He checked his watch, then the tower, then subtracted. And then, on his way to the door, he said one more thing over his shoulder.
"Don't bother guessing, Mr. Marlowe. Nobody's ever found it."
His mustache stayed perfectly still. "I put it there myself."
Up next: Out of Compliance
Continue to Part 4 →