4 was still at work when Adelle turned in at the meandering, crushed rock drive to the manor. The pole had been erected, and he was mixing the last of the cement needed to fill its hole. She waved at him, and as usual she was ignored. She walked on, maintaining a steady pace until she abruptly emerged from the trees that screened the manor from the road. There she halted. The building was a familiar sight to her by now, but she always stopped to admire it.
It seemed to sprawl endlessly, with bulging wings in a conglomerate of architectural styles and materials that was at once breathtaking and hilarious. Oddly enough, there seemed to be a weird kind of logic about it. Only when one considered that this building was also the editorial and production headquarters of Z-R Publications did it become preposterous.
The south wing, on the left, was a miniature Gothic cathedral, complete with flying buttresses. The large portico was from ancient Greece, a miniature Parthenon complete with sculptured friezes, but its imposing effect had been spoiled somewhat by the insect screening that had been added between the fluted shafts. Behind the portico, the upper story’s facade could have been lifted intact from Shakespeare’s Tudor Stratford. The wing beyond was imitation Georgian.
The same hodgepodge continued all around the building, with incongruities at the sides and rear that Adelle was still discovering. On her first puzzled glimpse of it, the structure had seemed like a montage of illustrations from a textbook on the history of architecture. She learned later that it actually was a textbook. The strange, extremely wealthy professor of architecture who created it, Adolph Feinstwaller, intended it to illustrate different types and styles of buildings and their construction problems. The project was a lifelong obsession with him. There always was one more wing and one more interior to design, and in the end it became an architect’s dream turned nightmare.
Adelle usually brought her lunch from her apartment, and on pleasant days she ate it in a neatly kept French jardin from which she could look at a miniature palace of Versailles on one side and the simple beauty of the Romanesque wing on the other. While she ate, she wondered about the builder—whether he was genius or crackpot to sink a fortune into such a monstrous mutation and whether he had accomplished what he wanted and got his money’s worth. Probably the fun had been more in the doing of it than in having done it, the traveling hopefully rather than arriving, which was why he continued to add wings as long as he lived.
Adelle had no idea what his heirs had made or tried to make of such a white elephant, or how Z-R Publications came to locate there. If the firm flourished as Madam predicted, the stained glass, the fan and ribbed vaultings, the bay and oriel windows, the linenfold and fielded and sunken panels, the hammerbeam roofs, the sculpture ornamented domes and cupolas, the hard carved balustrades, and all the rest were forever doomed to look down on humming and purring and clanking business machines and offset presses. Even a crackpot’s dream, she thought, deserved a better fate.
But even if this gloomy future was not irrevocable, Adelle still had the uneasy foreboding that something was very wrong about Z-R Publications.
CHAPTER 2
At ten minutes before one o’clock, Adelle seated herself at her desk to begin a new page of statistics. She was being extravagantly overpaid. Giving Z-R Publications a generous measure of whatever it was they thought they were paying her for was the least she could do in return.
Madam’s cheerful voice sounded in the hallway as she tiptoed past Adelle’s open door. “Back at it already, Darlink? Those pants look nice.”
Adelle waved without looking up. Apparently Madam had never seen a pants suit before, and she was still grappling with the idea of a dressed up woman in trousers. Her blank expression when Adelle walked in that morning—wearing the first new outfit she had bought in more than a year—was a memory to be cherished.
She typed one seven-digit number and paused to frown at the next. The copy was in pencil, and the figures had been corrected without erasing—an eight changed to a six, she thought, followed by a five corrected to a three or vice versa.
She glanced at her watch and then picked up the copy. When she stepped into the hallway, she caught sight of Goon 1 vanishing around a corner. Smiling, she headed in the opposite direction, descended the hanging staircase, and turned away from the main corridor toward the sound of splashing water.
At the end of a short intersecting hallway, a massive door stood ajar. Beyond it, the oversized opening had been screened around the framing of a normal-sized screen door. Adelle emerged in a small courtyard surrounded by a stone-faced gothic exterior. The fountain was a hideous gargoyle on the wall that spat a stream of water into an equally hideous sculpture whose mouth served as a basin. On a stone bench in one corner, knees drawn up and clasped, placidly puffing on a cigarette, was Kevin Mondor.
He was slender, dark, clean-shaven, and dressy-looking—he always wore a sport jacket and tie to work—and ridiculously finicky about his appearance. One of Craig Dolan’s insults, told to Madam as coming from Adelle, was that Mondor pressed his own permanent press slacks each night. Mondor also had his hair cut weekly, but for some reason he left it long in front to tumble down over his face. His thick glasses were an indication of the havoc that could be wreaked on one’s eyesight by a lifelong fascination with mathematics. The lenses gave his brown eyes a perpetual wildly-staring look. In any rational organization, his title of Researcher/Statistician would have ranked him far above Adelle in both status and salary. At Z-R Publications, there was no status, and their salaries were the same. He was the senior member of the production staff—he had been employed three weeks longer than Adelle and two weeks longer than Craig Dolan.
Adelle preferred the French jardin for her lunch hour. Mondor favored this medieval courtyard, and though he never brought his lunch from home, he came here daily the moment he returned from The Greenry. Perhaps the surroundings put him in mind of a happier age when mathematics had not yet got cluttered up with computers and pocket calculators.
She thrust the copy under his nose. “Pity they don’t teach mathematics students to write legible numerals,” she said.
“Pity they don’t teach liberal arts students to read them,” he answered without looking up. He exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“Well—what is it?” she demanded. “I’m assuming the first numeral is a six. Is the next one a five or a three?”
Mondor studied the page for a moment. “Yes,” he answered.
“Yes, what?”
“It’s a five or a three. I’ll check after the lunch hour.”
“It’s after the lunch hour.”
He turned her wrist so he could see her watch. “I have two more minutes.”
“Why don’t you get your watch fixed?” she asked disgustedly. “You’re as bad as Dolan.”
“I resent that insult. At least I own a watch, even if it doesn’t run, and I keep it in a safe place at home. I have a high regard for anything involving numbers. But who needs a timepiece in this building? There are clocks striking everywhere.” He settled back to enjoy his two minutes. “I never thought I’d learn to hate an Eighteenth Century drawing room. But then, I never expected to work in one. What’s the hurry? Dolan’s always late, and no one says anything. It isn’t as though we have a deadline.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
He flipped the cigarette in the direction of the fountain and missed. “Tell me honestly,” he said, lowering his voice. “Don’t you think there’s something loony about this
