The Watchmaker’s Hand

“Good morning, this is up-to-the-minute business news with WKDP. Investors came down with a bad case of the jitters following the collapse this morning of a crane at a construction site on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. One worker was killed and a half-dozen injured. Evans Development and Moynahan Construction are the companies involved in building the luxury seventy-eight-story high-rise, where units will start at five million dollars. City officials report that the inspection certificates of all the tower cranes operating in New York are current, but federal regulators have urged that construction at those jobsites be suspended pending an investigation by the Department of Buildings and the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST has investigated the World Trade Center collapses and Pentagon attack on 9/11, and the Champlain Towers South building collapse in Miami. Stock in Evans Development, a publicly traded company, fell to an all-time low.”

6

The lights left little doubt as to where the incident had happened.

Hundreds of them, white, blue, red.

Sachs piloted her ancient Ford Torino, painted an urgent crimson, fast along the cross street toward the macabre spectacle, whipping through and around traffic. She nearly resorted to the sidewalk when several trucks refused to part and let her pass. At Third Avenue, the impatient honking resulted in a man’s raised middle finger, which was instantly joined by its three companions and thumb to offer friendly greeting — the sort you’d give to a baby — when he saw the portable blue flasher unit and the NYPD placard on the dash.

Finally, a vehicular break, thanks to uniforms diverting cars and trucks elsewhere. She gunned the engine and made the finish line, skidding to a stop at the edge of the massive construction site on East 89th Street.

The vids on the news hadn’t come close to depicting the carnage. The crane — made of blue pipes, much thicker than they appeared from a distance — lay between the two buildings it had narrowly missed, a tornado track of debris and damage extending from the base — a slab of concrete — to the park, where the tip of the boom had dug itself deep into the earth. Everything beneath it was flattened. The strip of disaster was a clutter of piping, metal parts, papers, slabs of cement, machinery, girders, concrete dust, bits of plastic, wire and cables, bent ladders and twisted stairs and landings. Apparently you didn’t climb straight up to the top of a crane but ascended a ladder twenty feet or so, then turned and climbed once more, the rungs staggered so a slip-and-fall would be injurious but not fatal.

She looked at the cab, metal crushed and glass shattered. The damage was extensive. The operator would have died instantly — impact must have been at a hundred miles an hour — but what a terrible last few seconds he must have had, thinking of his fate as he saw the ground race toward him through the large windows.

Smoke rose, though there did not seem to have been a fire.

Like all New Yorkers, Sachs had seen hundreds of cranes in her years in the city, but had paid little attention to them. She’d heard of some accidents, but they were rare. To her, the machinery signaled another problem: they were flags of construction sites, which meant street lanes would be closed, further slowing the city’s already decelerated traffic.

Another fact she knew about cranes from her job: they were referred to by organized crime triggermen and bosses as “headstones,” because they rose over construction sites, which were popular places to dump hit victims when concrete was being poured.