Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Stashoo, my God!” she cried, wrapping her short, thick arms around his waist as he towered over her. She didn’t seem to mind that hugging him was like hugging a wet Saint Bernard. “So long I haven’t seen you.” Then she pushed him back roughly and narrowed her gaze. “Who died?”

  “Nobody died, Babcia. I was in the neighborhood and I got caught in the rain.” He did a quick size up of her clothes. “But I see you were going out.”

  “Out—pffft!” she said, waving her arms as if she were dispersing smoke. “Some old farts I have dinner with once a week. Early-bird senior special. They’ll eat without me.” She laughed. She had Marenko’s exuberant laugh. “Some won’t even remember if I was there or not.” She peeked around the door now and caught sight of Georgia. Then she hit Marenko on the arm. Hard. Georgia saw him wince. Ida Marenko was like a four-foot-eleven-inch linebacker.

  “You bring a nice young lady, leave her standing there in the rain, and you don’t introduce? What? You were raised in a cave?”

  “Babcia, this is Georgia Skeehan. She’s my…uh…my…” Marenko stumbled. Ida turned to Georgia, a wide smile on her bright red lips. She beckoned her inside. Georgia could smell the woman’s Lily of the Valley cologne from a foot away.

  “Are you dating my Stashoo?” Ida asked as they walked in the door.

  “I am,” said Georgia, extending a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Marenko…”

  “Ida, dear. Call me Ida.” She turned to Marenko. “Is ‘girlfriend’ such a hard word?” Ida nodded to the belt secured around Georgia’s waist with its holstered nine-millimeter. “Are you a marshal, too, dear? Or do you just like to keep my Stashoo in line?” Nothing escaped Ida Marenko’s attention. Georgia laughed.

  “I’m a marshal.”

  “Come,” she beckoned. “We must get you dried off.”

  Stepping into Ida Marenko’s immaculate row house was like entering another era. The front foyer sported a plastic Jesus with a dish of holy water below his upraised hand. Scatter rugs and plastic runners covered a plush cream-colored carpet that looked as if it had never been walked on. The living-room couch and love seat, done in Wedgewood blue satin brocade, were covered with plastic. The drapes were velvet. There were doilies under the lamps, and photographs covered almost every wall and table surface in the house.

  Ida brought Georgia two fluffy towels and a short-sleeved blouse to change into until her own blouse dried. The blouse was pink like the underside of a pig’s belly and had large white flowers all over it. The collar was trimmed in lace, the buttons were pearl and there were darts at the seams.

  “It won’t fit well, I’m afraid,” said Ida. “I am built like a Polish peasant and you, dear, have a lovely young figure. But you will feel more comfortable being dry.”

  “Thank you,” said Georgia. “That’s very kind of you.” She dried herself off in the bathroom and slipped into the blouse. Ida obviously loved pink. The entire bathroom was pink—even down to the crocheted skirt of a plastic doll on the back of the toilet tank. Her skirt hid an extra roll of toilet paper.

  Georgia found Marenko sprawled in a chair in the kitchen beside a large Formica-topped table. Clearly, this was where all the real living in the house took place. He was toweling off his hair.

  “What’s Babcia mean?” Georgia mumbled.

  “Bob-che,” said Marenko, pronouncing the word slowly and phonetically, so Georgia would get it right. “It’s Polish for ‘grandmother.’ Ida was born in Poland.”

  He looked up from his toweling, took in her blouse and grinned. The blouse had darts for a large bustline. Trouble was, Georgia was small-breasted. The excess material made her chest look like a beach ball someone had forgotten to inflate.

  “Don’t say anything,” Georgia warned.

  “Can’t talk about what ain’t there, right?” Marenko teased.

  “You like pierogies, Georgia?” asked Ida, pulling a skillet out of a cabinet.

  “We just came to say hi. You don’t have to feed us,” said Georgia.

  “Pffft. You don’t eat, I think you don’t like me.”

  “But you’re all dressed to go out.”

  “Out.” Ida rolled her eyes. “They will dress me like this to bury me, too. Only Rosemary probably won’t let them do my nails. And she’ll put some God-awful crucifix around my neck, big as the one they nailed Jesus to.”

  “Rosemary’s my father’s sister,” Marenko explained. “Babcia’s daughter. She’s sort of…”

  “—She’d make the Vatican Council look like a bunch of hooligans,” said Ida as she took out several small, homemade turnovers of pale white dough and began to fry them in butter and onions in the skillet. The smell made Georgia’s stomach rumble with hunger. She hadn’t had anything to eat for hours.

  “Aunt Rosemary’s very straitlaced,” Marenko explained.

  “Baah,” said Ida. “Shoulda had my tubes tied after your uncle Leonard.”

  Georgia giggled, and Marenko laughed with her. “Told you you couldn’t make my grandmother uncomfortable,” he said.

  Ida Marenko clearly hadn’t heard about Mac’s legal troubles, and neither Mac nor Georgia said a word to her about them. Being here, after all that had happened to him these past twenty-four hours, was like a little haven from the storm. Marenko relaxed in his grandmother’s presence and blossomed under her charm. His whole face brightened. His body became loose limbed as he draped himself across a chair and put his feet up on another. He pulled off his wet socks, and Ida stuck a finger in a hole on the bottom of one of them.

  “I fix that for you before you leave,” she said.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he protested.

  “Baah,” said Ida. “You leave my house, get hit by a car and they see your socks? I will never be able to go out in public again.”

  Both Mac and Georgia ate everything Ida put in front of them, adding heaping tablespoons of sour cream to their hot potato pierogies and wolfing it all down with glasses of ginger ale. Marenko teased his grandmother, and she alternately doted on him and scolded him as if he were six again. Georgia couldn’t ever recall seeing him as happy and at ease as he was in her kitchen. He didn’t even get antsy for a cigarette. They both lost track of time—until Georgia’s pager went off. She frowned at the number, then paled. Chief Brennan.

  Marenko saw the number, too. A darkness fell across his features. Georgia saw the weight return to his shoulders, saw the tightness in his face. Here, in his grandmother’s kitchen, he’d been able to forget for a while. But it was all coming back.

  “Use the phone by the refrigerator, dear,” Ida told Georgia. Then she said something to Marenko that Georgia didn’t catch. Mac left the kitchen for a moment and came back with a chess set, which he began to set up on the kitchen table.

  “You play chess?” Georgia asked him.

  “Pffft,” said Ida. “He’s no Boris Spassky. Ten years I teach Stashoo and still, he doesn’t always remember which way the pieces move. That’s his Italian side.”

  “Babcia.” Marenko strung out the word and rolled his eyes. Georgia turned her back on them and dialed Brennan’s office. He was in a meeting, but as soon as Georgia identified herself, she was transferred through.

  “Skeehan.” He said her name as if he were swallowing steel splinters. “What the hell did you think you were doing today?”

  “Chief?”

  “In Greenpoint. At Flannagan’s house.”

  “How did you…?” But before Georgia could finish the question, she already knew. Tricia had called Hanlon at Engine Two-seventy-eight. Hanlon had called Delaney, and Delaney had called Brennan. I’m dead.

  “I thought I was very clear about what was expected of you on this investigation,” said Brennan.

  “You were, sir,” said Georgia. “It’s just that…”

  “—Do you understand the magnitude of what we’re facing here?”

  “I do, sir. That’s why I had to check out this fire. I think it may be the key to find
ing Robin Hood. Perhaps if I could show you some of Captain Flannagan’s findings…”

  “—Oh, you’ll show them to me all right,” said Brennan. “I’m on my way to the Knights of Columbus Hall in Bay Ridge right now. And you’re going to meet me there ASAP.”

  “Bay Ridge, Brooklyn?” asked Georgia. It seemed an odd location for a meeting with Brennan. The chief wasn’t even from Brooklyn.

  “William Lynch was moved over to the NYPD this afternoon. He’s their headache now,” Brennan grunted. He had always hated Lynch. “Chief Delaney has been appointed acting commissioner in his place. Some of the men from his old division are putting together a celebration in his honor. You, however, are not there to celebrate.”

  “I understand.”

  Georgia scribbled the news on a pad of paper and held it up for Marenko to read. Marenko squinted at the page, then began to fill his grandmother in on the intricacies of department politics, as labyrinthine as any chess match.

  “A piece of advice, Skeehan?” said Brennan. “William Lynch may have appreciated your renegade style in this department. But Ed Delaney’s an ex-marine. He follows orders and he expects everyone else to do the same. You want to stay in this department, you’ll learn that, pronto.”

  Brennan hung up. Georgia took a deep breath and walked over to the game. “I’ve got to go meet the chief in Bay Ridge,” she explained, forcing a smile to her lips. She didn’t want Marenko to see how unnerved she was by the call. It paled in comparison with his own situation.

  Marenko rose from his chair. “You want me to come with you?”

  The light in his eyes faded and his face turned blank, as if a curtain had been drawn over his emotions. It was a protective reflex, Georgia knew. Marenko was going back “out there,” where practically everyone he knew regarded him with suspicion. He had to be strong and show nothing. Yet right this minute, the thing he needed most was to be a little boy again in his grandmother’s kitchen.

  “Stay here,” Georgia said softly, putting a hand on his arm and easing him back down in his chair.

  Marenko was about to object, but she interrupted him. “I can’t take you with me. It wouldn’t look right,” she explained. “I’ll just change back into my blouse…”

  “—Pffft,” said Ida, jumping up from the table. “You put on wet things, you catch cold. Wear my blouse. You give it back another time.”

  “Oh, Ida,” said Georgia. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “What, you couldn’t? You wear. You return. This way, I see you again, yes?”

  Marenko grinned. “That’s my Babcia. Always got an angle.”

  “Shut up,” said Ida, swatting his arm. “Or I’ll make you visit your aunt Rosemary. She’ll have you saying Hail Marys for a week.”

  30

  Georgia could hear the whine of bagpipes and squeal of a fiddle even before she stepped up to the steel front doors of the Knights of Columbus Hall in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. High and reedy, the sound wafted past the firefighters’ double-parked cars, then lingered in the pearly mist like a battle cry across a Gaelic glen.

  The rain had stopped. Two firefighters with crew cuts sat on the front steps of the hall, staring out at the street of tidy stucco homes with televisions flickering in the windows. They eyed Georgia with curiosity as she picked her way past them and went inside. Ed Delaney’s party was a firefighters’ event. Wives and families were not invited. Georgia was likely to be the only woman in attendance.

  The alcove was dark. It took a moment for Georgia’s eyes to adjust to the dim light and the nicotine haze that wafted over the Irish clan symbols on the walls and the tartan plaids that looked like couch fabric in somebody’s den.

  Beyond the alcove was a long, narrow room with a bar along one wall and a quartet of musicians in the opposite corner, hammering out a frenetic Irish tune that sounded to Georgia as though the bagpipes, banjo, fiddle and flute were playing their own separate melodies. There were maybe fifty men—all white—gathered in small clusters about the room. The only women were the six step dancers in plaid skirts near the musicians. The dancers, all very young and unsmiling, were staring zombielike at the opposite wall, their hands plastered to their sides, their legs moving so fast, it looked to Georgia as if their upper and lower bodies belonged to different people.

  Georgia scanned the room for Chief Brennan while other eyes scanned her. She was waiting for the day when she could walk into a gathering of firefighters, and not have every head turn and every opinion already formed.

  The isolation of being different got to Georgia more than anything—the loneliness of working with people she never knew outside the job. It kicked in when she heard firefighters talk about a bar they were going to meet up in after work or a fishing trip they were planning or a night at a ball game. She’d picture them, surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke and the warm, musky smell of beer, telling their raucous jokes, laughing loudly and professing their loyalties to one another.

  She didn’t necessarily want to hang out with them on a steady basis. But once—just once—she would have liked to feel welcome. She knew that could never be. Most weren’t hostile toward her—just uncomfortable. They didn’t know how to socialize with a woman who wasn’t family or a girlfriend. Their fraternal world was not open to her, and in the fire department, there was no life without it.

  “Hello, Georgia,” said a voice behind her now. She turned and was startled to see Andy Kyle grinning at her, drink in hand. “Nice blouse.”

  Georgia looked down at the accordion folds of pink floral rayon that rippled where an ample bust was supposed to be. She frowned. She’d forgotten that she was wearing Ida Marenko’s blouse.

  “I got caught in the rain and borrowed this,” she explained. She cocked her head at him. “Man, you must be connected to be at something like this.”

  He laughed. “Did it ever occur to you I’m just here to drive the chief?”

  “Brennan?”

  “In the back room.” He pointed to a small hallway with a scarred oak door on one side. Then he swirled the ice in his drink. “This, by the way, is just club soda, in case you were wondering. Brennan’s waiting for you. And he’s got Delaney and a man from the mayor’s office with him.” He furrowed his brow. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Yeah, probably.” She could feel the vibrations of the step dancers across the planking.

  “Anything I can do?” He gazed at a manila envelope in Georgia’s hand. “They were talking about taking some papers from you. Has this got something to do with the Rosen case you were working on?”

  The papers. They were Pat Flannagan’s only copies. She’d promised Tricia she’d get them back to her. Without them, she’d have nothing to back up her suspicions about Bridgewater. Unless she could find out what had been stored at Kowalski’s warehouse and by whom.

  “Andy? Can you do me a favor?” Georgia pulled out a pen and scribbled Marenko’s cell phone number across it. “Can you call Mac? Tell him Georgia needs him to call his friend at HIDTA and run a check on Tristate Trucking. Can you do that for me?”

  “Tristate?” He squinted at the slip of paper. “What do you need to know about them for?”

  “Look, Andy. This is really important. You talk about wanting to help people in a big way on this job—here’s your chance. A lot of lives could be resting on this.”

  He tucked the slip of paper into his shirt pocket. “Sure, Georgia. I’ll call Marenko,” said Kyle. “But you be careful in there, okay?”

  In the back room, Ed Delaney was seated behind a desk, next to a poster for a Knights of Columbus charity picnic. This should have been a night of celebration for him, but he looked worn-out. Gus Rankoff, behind him in a chair, next to an American flag, drummed his fingers on the pants of his suit. Brennan, pacing nervously, scratched at the sunburn on the top of his head—a souvenir from today’s little excursion to the beach.

  Georgia suspected that this bomb threat was keeping them all on twenty-four-hour alert r
ight now. The highest levels of the NYPD and FDNY were probably in a state of near-frenzy over this thing, though so far, they were doing a good job of keeping it out of the press and away from the rank-and-file. For Georgia, the panic wasn’t so easy to contain. She had to face Robin Hood.

  “You have some explaining to do, Skeehan,” said Brennan when she closed the door. No one offered her a seat. Georgia took a deep breath and, as succinctly as she could, began to pour out everything she’d been able to find out about the Bridgewater fire and how it appeared to relate to Robin Hood. Delaney’s face betrayed nothing as he listened to her story. In the main hall, the music had turned sweet and sorrowful, mimicking the vast, barren hills of Ireland and the ceaseless winds off the sea. The wailing tenor of the bagpipe came at her as if it had been borne on a North Atlantic breeze.

  “Chief, er…Commissioner,” Georgia corrected herself, “if I could just get ahold of that Division of Safety report you wrote in nineteen eighty-four, perhaps we’d be able to find the definitive link.”

  “I don’t have the report,” said Delaney. “And from what I recall of it, it wouldn’t help you anyway.”

  “Skeehan,” Brennan warned. He’d stopped pacing at the mention of the report. “Do you realize who you are talking to?”

  “It’s all right, Arthur,” said Delaney. “The marshal is just being thorough.” He looked embarrassed—not, Georgia sensed, because she’d pressed him, but because he couldn’t give her what she asked for. She looked into Delaney’s brown eyes and saw a hesitation there, as if his words didn’t match his feelings. He wants to help me. But he can’t. Why?

  Georgia opened the clasp of her manila folder now and spread the pictures of the Bridgewater firefighters on the desk before Delaney. “Chief, look at these men. They were firefighters. Just like you and me. And they died horribly from something in that warehouse.”