He had little call to visit the plant during working hours but did so whenever a reason arose—as now, when Beeksma requested a tour—always with the sense of exercising his prerogative as master of everything here. It wasn’t a sense he had of himself but one that was pressed on him, conveyed in the workers’ careful, checking glances as he passed, an impressing on him of his place.
Every tour he made recalled those he’d taken as a boy, bobbing in his father’s wake as all the warmth in the cool brewery closed around him—all the smiles and expressions of interest, so different from any he’d encountered since. It seemed the place itself had changed, and all the people in it, when in fact more than a few of the workers he saw now were the very ones who had smiled on him then. That this remembered atmosphere was a certain order of grace conferred not on a boss, however beloved, but on a father with his small son in tow did occur to him now and again—only dimly, though, because he could hardly make out the difference in himself, let alone imagine he’d once been adorable. He could hardly conceive that somewhere along the line coming here had become tantamount to being loved, so instead he made sense of the warmth by telling himself it was actually his love of the place, heightened, admittedly, with a touch of nostalgia.
Like a lover, he was subject to the brewery’s moods: the turgid, aromatic heat around the mash kettle; the briskness upstairs, where the barley was ground; the cool, biscuity waiting air of the aging cellar. With Beeksma attending, listening with a smile of polite interest as his eyes made a ceaseless inventory, he felt each room adopt a stolid, businesslike mien more suited to the banker’s cast of mind than his own.
They had just come to the foot of the mash kettle as the wort was being pumped back from the lauter tun when, in the middle of explaining the process, his hand raised to point, Frank looked up and found himself squarely in the sights of two men on the catwalk that circled the kettle. In an instant he recognized Cole and Hauser. They were standing side by side, hands on the rail, gazing down at him like a couple departing on a cruise. Their lofty attention, discovered like that, discomfited him. For the first time in his experience, the towering room around him assumed a forbidding aspect, and he felt Beeksma staring at him too, until he remembered that he’d broken off in the middle of saying something, his hand in the air. With a wave of his raised hand, dismissing some annoyance he wasn’t inclined to explain, he proposed that they move on to the bottling plant, across the alley.
The racket there offered reprieve. The atmosphere matched his agitated mood. The workers, each intent on a task and sensibly muffled with the requisite goggles and earplugs and hat, didn’t turn to stare as he shouted to Beeksma about the functions of the various machines, confident the man wouldn’t raise his voice as far as he’d have to to interrupt.
They’d nearly reached the end of the line, and he was explaining the Filtec machine, which scanned the cans for any that had been short-filled, when the worker who’d been monitoring the operation rose and ceded his place to Alice Reinhart. For a few seconds the man stood behind her, hovering as if she were not his replacement but his guest. She paid him no notice, nor anyone else, simply settled at once into watching the screen where the cylindrical X-rays kept marching along. There was that raptness about her, in the angle at which she was leaning to look and her utter indifference to the man at her back, that he found fascinated him in part because it mystified him that anything, especially so mundane, cast that kind of spell.
He hadn’t been thinking of her, hadn’t been looking, hadn’t necessarily wanted to see her, but now, as she continued to sit there so still, suspended while everything around her moved, he felt his relief that he’d escaped her notice giving way to pique; images of her disheveled, regarding him in that same rapt way, replaced the neat figure before him. He was stirred out of his erotic reverie by Beeksma, who was trying to ask him something—something, it alarmed him to realize, that concerned Alice.
He led the way out of the noise. Once they had the window between them and the bottle house, Beeksma asked, “Is that the one?”
The question was startling, as if, all the while he’d seen Beeksma as immune to the nuances in the air the brewery breathed, the man had actually been conducting his own intuitive tour. But another look at Beeksma, who was waiting with a curious patience that seemed not the least bit enlightened, disabused him, and he remembered the newspaper, which everyone at the meeting had seen. “I believe so,” he said.
Through the glass, Beeksma was examining Alice as if her person might offer an explanation, or a solution. All he said then was, “Hunh.”