The Glass Inferno

by Thomas N. Scortia

  Jesus started to scramble away from him. “No, you got me wrong, man!” he pleaded.

  “I got you right, you mean!” Douglas caught Jesus along the side of the head with the flat of his hand and sent him sprawling. “What else did you take from her?

  Did you get her rings, her wrist watch? Anything you forgot?”

  “You don’t understand!” Jesus blubbered. “I was sick, I needed the money… .”

  Douglas grabbed him by the front of his shirt and yanked him to his feet. “I ought to throw you down the stairs. I let you go once but I won’t make that mistake this time… .” His eyes widened.

  “You set the storeroom on fire, didn’t you? It had to be you; there wasn’t anybody else around!”

  Jesus twisted in his grasp, his eyes wide with fear. “I didn’t do nothing, man. I didn’t do a goddamn thing; you’re outta your mind!”

  The cleaning woman struggled to her feet, wincing at each movement. She had apparently twisted her ankle under her when she had fallen to the concrete. She tugged at Douglas’ sleeve, shaking her head. “My son,” she said.

  “Mi hijo …

  Douglas looked his amazement. “Your son?”

  She nodded, her eyes dull. “My son,” she said in a heavy voice.

  Douglas loosened his grip and Jesus backed away.

  “She’s my mother,” he said. “She’s been working here since the place opened. I wanted to to borrow some money from her tonight.”

  “Borrow, bullshit,” Douglas said, disgusted. The kid would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes. He probably tried to shake the old lady down. Douglas began coughing again and abruptly remembered the fire below.

  “We have to get out of here. There’s a bad fire in the building.”

  Albina looked at him, apparently not understanding. She had started to cough herself.

  “Fuego,” Jesus said, explaining the situation to her in ?,p slightly halting Spanish. Her eyes widened. “Fuego.

  Then she turned on him, her manner accusing, the words pouring from her in a torrent.

  Jesus shook his head. “No, Mama, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it!”

  “There’s no time for that; let’s get out of here,” Douglas muttered.

  He took Albina by one arm to give her support and slowly started down the stairs, Jesus following. At the halfway landing, he turned toward the second flight of stairs, then caught his breath. The flaming solvent had seeped under the door, setting fire to the paint.

  The metal panel itself was blazing. In the next moment he watched the puddle of burning liquid spread until it reached the Picasso “Minotaurmachie” leaning against the wall. The umber-rubbed gilt of the frame peeled before his eyes, then the glass cracked and shattered into a hundred pieces. The paper darkened and turned brown. The bull man, contorted in agony before the maddened crowd of the bull ring, seemed to stare at him with agony-filled eyes, then dissolved in flames.

  A The entire landing was now covered with flames.

  “We can’t go down,” Douglas said quietly. “We’re trapped.”

  More solvent seeped under the warping door. A sudden wave of heat from the smoky flames drove them back up the steps, away from the landing. A waterfall of fire poured do the concrete risers to the next floor below.

  “We gotta get out!” Jesus screamed and ran back up to the eighteenth floor. He hammered at the stairwell door and tugged at the knob.

  Douglas helped Albina hobble up the steps to the landing; he pulled Jesus away from the door. “Don’t be a fool, you can’t get in that way; it’s locked after seven.”

  “What the hell are we gonna do?” Jesus demanded.

  “We can’t stay here and fry, man!” His eyes widened.

  “Oh, God,” he sobbed, “look!”

  Smoke had started to seep under the stairwell door.

  Smoke traveled up, Douglas thought. And so did the fire.

  The eighteenth floor was now probably on fire, as well as the seventeenth. That meant they had to go up-all the way up, to the Promenade Room. Every stairwell door along the way would be locked, every one but the top one. He had dined one evening in the Promenade Room and discovered what he thought had been the men’s room door had actually been the door to the stairwell; there had been no difficulty re-entering once the door had closed behind him.

  Apparently the fire doors at the top and bottom of the stairwell were kept open.

  “We’ve got to go up,” he said slowly. “We’re cut off down below.”

  He helped Albina up the next flight. She suddenly turned at the landing and glared at him suspiciously.

  “How far? How far up?”

  “All the way up to the top.”

  “You’re crazy, man!” Jesus spat. “That’s more than forty stories.

  We ain’t ever going to make that. Mama can’t make that!”

  “You got a better idea?” Douglas asked coldly. “It’s either go up or stay here and suffocate or burn. It’s the only chance we’ve got.

  Take it or leave it.” He turned to Albina. “You understand?”

  She nodded, her face impassive. “Albina understand.”

  They started up the steps again. Behind him, Douglas could hear Jesus making vomiting sounds. Moments later, Douglas heard the scrape of his shoes on the stairs.

  It was going to be a long walk, he thought-and the air was already heavy with smoke.

  CHAPTER 33

  It was a quarter to midnight when Mario Infantino turned into Elm Street, two blocks from the Glass House.

  Ahead of him was pure chaos: The street was a tangle of automobiles full of thrill seekers, police cars, ambulances, and fire equipment.

  Quantrell and the eleven o’clock news must have brought half the city down to watch the fire in spite of the weather, he thought, disgusted.

  At the end of the block, the stream of fire buffs had finally been stopped by police barricades and forced to detour to the right.

  He drummed his fingers impatiently against the steering wheel, his frustration building up with every bulletin that crackled from the car’s two-way radio. It had been difficult getting there at all because of the weather and then the closer he got, the thicker was the sightseeing traffic. His siren had helped at first but now he was locked in; traffic was too jammed for it to get out of his way. Just ahead, he could glimpse the Glass House jutting into the overcast, almost lost in the driving sleet and snow.

  Heavy smoke was billowing from the seventeenth and eighteenth ‘floors and behind the windows he could see an occasional smudge of orange flame. It looked as bad as his radio had described it.

  A car to the immediate left suddenly stalled and he whipped the wheel over and edged into the gap, then broke into the empty lane and roared toward the road block ahead, scattering spectators who had wandered into the street. The sidewalks, he noted, were as jammed with sightseers as the right lane of the street was with He’d have to get the police to move them back another block at least.

  That would make for twelve road blocks instead of four and require more police. But there was no helping it; the winds around the building were getting stronger and pieces of glass from broken windows could sail this far.

  The police waved him through the intersection and Infantino pulled up behind Fuchs’s official car on the opposite side of the street. The chief engineer had beat him there but then he had a head start. He reached in the back seat for his helmet and got out, buttoning up the collar of his turnout coat. The sleet seemed to bite right through the canvas-covered Neoprene. The temperature was still dropping-the worst thing they could have hoped for. The colder the weather, the greater the difference between the temperature indoors and out and the stronger the chimney effect. It was a condition firemen dreaded, particularly in multiple-story buildings such as high rises -and the Glass House was one of the tallest in the city.

  The one bright spot was the strong north wind. If he remembered the layout of the building correctly, it would help to
keep one of the stairwells relatively free of smoke, though God help anybody trapped in the other one.

  The street was a jungle of hoses leading from the city hydrants to the pumpers and then to the Siamese connections jutting from. the side of the building, extensions from the standpipes in the stairwells.

  Aerial ladder trucks and snorkel units were helpless in any fire this high up; you had to fight it from the inside. The hosemen must have carried in their fifty-foot coils of two-and-a-half-, inch hose and connected up to the standpipes by now.

  He saw only one salvage company and made a mental note to call up another one; water would cascade down the stairwells and the elevator shafts and even the poke throughs made by the utilities people. They’d best be prepared to handle the lobby and two or three floors at least.

  “Hey, Mario, somebody said this is your baby. That true?” Tom Bylson, chief communications officer, thrust his head out of the department’s communications van at the curb.

  “You heard right; what’s the picture up there?”

  “Hot as hell by the sound of things-heavy smoke and fire on the seventeenth and it’s breaking through to the eighteenth. It’s into the sixteenth, too. Flammable liquids flowing down the stairwell.” He shook his head. “It’s going up faster than anybody expected.”

  “Get a call through to the battalion chiefs. I want personal reports in fifteen minutes; make it in the lobby.”

  “Not a good idea, Chief; most of the tenants are camped in the lobby.”

  “Have they got a security room?”

  “Right.”

  “Make it there.”

  Bylson ducked back into the track, a brief babble of radio transmissions cutting through the cold night air before he closed the truck door.

  Infantino jogged toward the lobby entrance, nodding at several familiar faces huddled around the Red Cross van where harried workers handed out cups of coffee to firemen and a small group of tenants in pajamas and overcoats.

  The confusion in the lobby was worse than that in the street outside.

  Tenants still streamed from the residential elevator; they stood in small groups, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

  Some had suitcases and small stacks of clothes and valuables. One couple even had a small poodle on a leash; the dog, half crazed by the noise and commotion around him, was snapping at everybody within reach.

  Infantino motioned to a young policeman nearby. “Get that dog out of here.”.” The policeman noted his rank and nodded. “What do you want me to do with it, sir?”

  “I don’t give a damn-lock it in a storeroom in the lower lobby, if you have to. I don’t want it running around in here if it gets loose.”

  A small knot of tenants by the reservation desk were arguing with one of the building’s security guards, insisting that they be allowed to go back to their apartments to retrieve wallets and other valuables . . Infantino strode over to the guard. “Nobody goes back up, absolutely nobody. Once they’re down, they stay down. We have to have free access to the elevators.”

  At the elevator bank, he spotted Captain Miller of Engine Company 23.

  “Having any difficulty getting up?”

  Miller shook his head. “Not too much. Electric locks on the stairwell doors; pried one open, then borrowed a key from a security man for the others.” He stepped aside as a hoseman hurried onto an elevator carrying a fifty-foot coil of hose in a pack on his back.

  “We’re getting as much hose up as possible. Heat’s pretty bad; we’ve lost one section already.”

  “Elevators?”

  “Two of the commercial elevators have a manual override; we’re taking them up to sixteenth and then up the stairwell. Sixteen had started to go but we knocked it down pretty fast.”

  The manual override would eliminate the use of the elevators by any of the tenants who might have been working late, Infantino thought, but that couldn’t be . helped. If they were below the fire floor, they could use the -other commercial elevators to come down. And if they were above … Well, God help them.

  He glanced around the lobby again. A young woman in a nightgown and a flannel robe was trying to fight her way back onto the residential express elevator; several firemen and a male tenant, probably her husband, restrained her. He knew from long experience what the story was. He searched the crowd for the police officer in charge, finally locating him by the phone booth at the cigar stand.

  The officer hung up just as Infantino walked over.

  “You the ranking police officer here?”

  “That’s right-until a superior shows up. You?”

  “Division Chief Mario Infantino; I’m operating chief here.”

  The officer looked uncertain. “Chief Fuchs is here; wouldn’t he be in charge?”

  “It’s been delegated to me; check with him if you want.

  In the meantime, better set your barricades a block farther out in all directions-there’ll be glass and maybe masonry and aluminum panels dropping into the street.

  You know where the chief of security for the building is?”

  “He’s with some of the other building officials in their monitoring room. Want him?”

  “So long as I know where he is; I’ll get hold of him later.” He nodded at the hysterical woman. “You’ll need more patrolmen to handle scenes like that, too; there may be others. I can’t detail firemen to do it.”

  The woman was screaming hysterically: “Let me go, let me go! Oh God, he’s still up there!”

  The police captain looked surprised. “I thought that was her husband standing next to her,” Infantino shook his head. “It probably is.

  Chances are she’s hysterical because they’ve left a kid up there.

  If they have three or four, in the rush to get them out they either miscount or lose track of them; somehow, they always think they’ve got them all together. We usually find them when it’s too late, hidden in closets or under blankets; if we go into a burning house or apartment and we know a kid has been left behind, that’s the first place we look.

  It’s hell when you find them afterward.” He recalled the painful scene two years before when he and a man in his company had found two children in the second story of their gutted home. They had pulled pillowcases over their heads and crawled under the rug in their bedroom. They had died from smoke long before the fire had found their room.

  A residential elevator on his left opened to discharge more tenants and several firemen. Some of the tenants were hacking badly from smoke inhalation. One of the firemen yelled, “Get a respirator over here!”

  He was half carrying another fireman; heavy strings of dirty mucus streamed from the nostrils of the unconscious man, smearing on his turnout coat.

  Infantino watched them fumble with the respirator a moment, then muttered to the police captain: “Get this lobby cleared as soon as you can; We’re going to be having a lot more of that.” He walked away, brushing past two Red Cross men in blue hard hats talking with several tenants and taking notes.

  He found one of the building’s security guards, looking very young and very frightened, and had him act as escort to the security monitoring room. The room was already half full. Infantino introduced himself to the. chief of security and his assistant-Dan Garfunkel and Harry Jernigan; they both looked worn and strained. Garfunkel introduced a worried-looking chief of maintenance named Donaldson.

  Garfunkel’s suit and face were smeared with smoke; Infantino guessed he had headed up the building crew that had tried to put out the fire with hand extinguishers. “Have you got a census of who’s left in the building?”

  he asked.

  Garfunkel shook his head, his face haggard. “No real way of knowing.

  There are maybe half a dozen tenants unaccounted for from the commercial floors. As far as the residential tenants go-no idea.”

  “Casualties?”

  The security chief shook his head sadly. “Griff Edwards, senior engineer. He was with us when we first
went up; it was too much for him. He’s in the hospital; doctors suspect a coronary. I haven’t had time to check back.”

  “Where’s the building supervisor?”

  “Vacation. His assistant went home this afternoon with the flu.

  Griff was third in line.”

  Infantino looked over at Donaldson. “What about your hVAC system?

  Can we use it to exhaust smoke from the building?”

  Donaldson looked sour. “The fans should have reversed automatically.

  Two jammed, one with a motor burnout and another with frozen bearings.

  The others are on exhaust.”

  His face suddenly reddened with fury. “I told the bloody bastards it was cheap gear the moment I laid eyes on it!”

  Infantino glanced around at the monitoring tubes. “Any way we can use these for anything?”

  Garfunkel shrugged. “Don’t see how. They cover the lobby, the bank entrance, the Credit Union in National Curtainwall, and the restaurant lobby and sky lobby. The one for the Credit Union is out; the Union’s on the eighteenth floor.” He hesitated. “We have infrared personnel sensors set up in the stairwells. Several of them are gone, too, but just before one of them went, we detected some people in the south stairwell on seventeen.”

  “How many?”

  “Three, maybe more.”

  The south stairwell, Infantino thought. The north stairwell would be relatively smoke free; the south stairwell … Well, good luck.

  The crippled hVAC system would help keep it partly free of smoke-but only partly.

  By now, three of the four battalion chiefs on duty had shown up and he turned his attention to them. “Where’ s Captain Verlaine?”

  “On the seventeenth floor; he’s got his hands full,” a voice said.

  Infantino turned toward the door. “It’s good to see you, Chief.”

  Fuchs nodded. “Gentlemen, in case you’re not aware, Chief Infantino has complete charge of this operation. I know you’ll give him every cooperation, as will I. I’m not abandoning my own authority; I’ll be here all the time.

  But Chief Infantino’s the best man for over-all command. I won’t hide my own disagreements with him in the past, but for the moment they’re irrelevant. It’s a serious fire-one of the worst our city has ever had-and we’re all here for the same reason-to knock it down.