He turned to Jernigan who was obviously ready for his own orders.
“Harry, find the ranking police officer in charge and ask him to come over here.”
Jernigan disappeared and Barton inspected the lobby again. At the elevator bank, two firemen, their faces smeared with soot, staggered out. Firemen nearby immediately slapped a respirator on the one; the other of the pair clung to the wall for support and started to vomit on the salvage cover. The doors to another elevator slid open; a rescue team came out lugging still another stretcher. The huddled form beneath the blanket was completely covered. Barton watched in morbid fascination as the ambulance crew, blank-faced, carried the stretcher toward the door. Maybe it was because their faces were too carefully blank, maybe it was because of the etched lines of strain. Barton was suddenly glad that the blanket was completely draped over the stretcher itself; the shape roughly outlined beneath it couldn’t possibly be human. They passed him on the way out and he caught a whiff of odor, There were two smells that you never forgot, he thought, his stomach suddenly uneasy.
One was that of rotting potatoes. The other was that of burned flesh.
On the other side of the entrance, one of the guards was making a call on an outside phone; Barton guessed he was setting up hotel reservations for the tenants. Then, on the fringe of the crowd, he noticed Garfunkel in earnest conversation with some of the older women tenants.
They listened for a moment, then followed him toward the escalator to the lower lobby. As soon as they had made coffee, the lower level restaurant would be open, Barton thought, and at least one problem would be on its way to being solved.
Jernigan suddenly appeared at his side with a slightly disgruntled police captain in tow; the snow just beginning to melt off his slicker.
“Mr. Barton, Captain Greenwall.”
The captain didn’t give Barton a chance to introduce himself.
“I’ve got problems out there, mister; what’s so damned important that you have to see me here?”
“Because you’ve got problems in here, too,” Barton said dryly.
“How come this lobby hasn’t been cleared?”
The captain looked at him coldly. “I didn’t catch the name.”
“Craig Barton. I’m chief architect for the building.”
“That’s fine, I’ve got a mess outside to clean up.” He turned to go.
“I’m filling in for Wyndom Leroux until he gets down here,” Barton continued. “What’s the situation outside?”
“Leroux?” The captain visibly thawed and said, “We’re moving the barricades back another block around the building. Falling glass.”
“Bad?”
“It’s pretty windy; it’s probably as bad as it can get.”
His face blanked for a moment at something he obviously didn’t want to remember. “One fatality a block away.
Pretty messy. Half a dozen others hospitalized. Maybe a dozen cars with slashed tops or hoods.” He glanced at Barton sharply. “Was that all you want to know?”
“We’re starting to evacuate the tenants. There’ll be cabs coming in a few minutes to take them to hotels; they have instructions to approach from the north. Tell your men to let them through.”,He glanced at the lobby again and noted that more people were going downstairs.
“We could use some more men here and downstairs to keep order.
Can we get them?”
The captain shrugged. “I’ll do my best. Outside it’s a circus.
All the television stations are carrying film on the fire; half the city is out there, weather be damned.”
Bread and circuses, Barton thought. Except there was no attraction half so fascinating as a fire.
“You have a walky-t?”
The captain nodded toward the communications station at the cigar counter. “I’m hooked in over there; they can get me any time.” The lobby crowd was gradually thinning out now.
Garfunkel came back, his face less clouded than before.
“The lunchroom win hardly hold them all, but the tenants can camp in the lobby down there; the coffee and the food’s helping a lot-at least the level of complaints has dropped.”
“Anybody sick or hurt down there?”
“No, most of those were taken out by ambulance crews before you came down. Mostly smoke inhalation.
He hesitated. “We’re making reservations in some of the nearby hotels, but a lot of the tenants don’t want to leave.”
“Any Red Cross people around?”
“They’ve got a van outside serving coffee. Some of them were in the lobby half an hour ago taking down names and addresses of relatives to be notified.”
Barton turned to Jernigan. “Go out and contact their senior man-see if you can arrange for cots and blankets.”
After Jernigan departed, Garfunkel said: “Craig, I told the chief-Infantino-about the gas station downstairs. He was pretty annoyed, particularly when I said we had just filled the tanks the first part of the week.”
“What’s he want done about it?”
“He’s done it already-called City Gas and Oil; they’re sending over a truck to pump out the tanks and fill them with water to force out the explosive vapors.”
“Better call Greenwall and tell him the truck will be coming through his barricades. North entrance again.”
It wasn’t very likely that the fire would ever reach the basement, but there was no sense in sitting on a time bomb, either. He had noticed the spillage and the fumes in the basement when he had parked………. Oh, crap!”
He turned and ran for the escalator stairs. Garfunkel had just finished giving instructions to the fireman at the relay station. He saw Barton forcing his way through the crowds and ran after him. “Mr. Barton, what the hell’s wrong?”
In the lower lobby, Barton noted that the restaurant was filled; the hysteria and,frightened looks had given way to a quiet murmur of conversations and discussions of what to do next. A few dozen of the tenants were leaning against the lobby wall of the restaurant, sipping coffee and eating sandwiches and stale doughnuts. The atmosphere was changed now, Barton thought. The survivors were beginning to enjoy the thrill and store up memories for reminiscing later. Barton ran past them to the stairway leading to the parking garage. He plunged down them, Garfunkel after him. “Where’s the car hiker, Dan?”
Garfunkel bellowed, “Hey, Joe!” The young parking lot attendant came out of his booth, looking scared.
“Look, Mr. Garfunkel, how bad is it upstairs? I’ve been afraid to leave, but I don’t know a damn thing about what’s going on. How bad’s the fire?”
“It may get worse. A truck should be here any minute from City Gas and Oil to pump out the tanks.”
The attendant blanched. “It’s getting closer?”
“It’s precautionary,” Barton interrupted. “We want to get the cars out, too. How many down here?” The floor looked half empty, probably because of the holidays, he thought.
“Seventy-three, Mr. Barton. Not counting my own.”
“How many car jockeys do you know personally whom you could get over here in a matter of minutes?”
“Maybe half a dozen. The weather’s lousy and the clubs in the area aren’t doing any business.”
“Call them up and ask them to come over. I want all these cars out of here. as soon as possible.” It was a remote chance, but if a fire started, the presence of the cars would be as bad as the full tanks themselves.
“Where’ll we take ‘em?”
“There’s a city garage at Elm and Taylor, three blocks away. I’ll have the police call and make the arrangements.
Turn your tickets over to the garageman there.”
He started back upstairs, Garfunkel trailing him.
Mario Infantino was waiting for him at the communications desk, looking tired and grim. Barton felt his stomach begin to knot. Now would come all the questions he was afraid to ask and all the answers he didn’t want to hear. & “How bad is it, Mario?”
“A lot worse than I thought it would be. You might as well have sprayed your walls with kerosene. So far as we can tell now, it started in a storeroom stocked with solvents and waxes. Once it got a foothold, there wasn’t any stopping it.”
“Casualties?”
“One of my men dead, three to the hospital-smoke inhalation and burns. Two tenants, maybe more, we don’t know yet. Smoke may have caught a lot of them while they were sleeping. Carbon monoxide builds up slowly; you don’t notice it. I understand one of your maintenance people is in the hospital with a coronary.” He shrugged.
“That’s all so far.”
Barton forced himself to ask the next question. “What about fighting the fire itself?”
Infantino hesitated. “A lot depends on luck. The seventeenth floor is gutted but it’s also pretty much burned itself out. We should be able to contain it on eighteen.
A lot of windows were broken on both floors; that vented the fire and helped a lot. For a while I thought we might have to hole through the nineteenth floor and try and get at it from above, as well as venting it. We don’t have to do that now. There’s been a lot of smoke dammage-it’ll probably cost Curtainwall a fortune just to clean its own offices.”
“That’s Leroux’s worry. What about the floors above?”
Infantino seemed a little less certain. “I haven’t been able to spare the men to check all the floors. There’s been smoke as high as the thirty-fifth, probably much higher depending on what side of the building you’re talking about. The wind’s from the north so that side of the building is relatively free from smoke. One thing for sure, both the fire and the smoke spread fast. The building’s like Swiss cheese, Craig. There’re so many poke throughs in the floors and the walls, I don’t think there’s an effective fire barrier in the entire structure.”
“The hVAC system should have changed over to exhaust once smoke -was detected,” Barton said slowly.
It couldn’t be that bad, he thought desperately.
“A lot of things should have happened that didn’t, Craig. Part of your system did exhaust-but only part.
One of your maintenance men can fill you in. We also should have received a smoke and fire warning at department headquarters automatically. We didn’t; the alarm was phoned in.” He caught the expression on Barton’s face. “Nobody’s blaming you, Craig-you didn’t build it.”
It had started when he had noticed the cladding around the elevator banks, Barton thought. Since then, the building had been full of surprises for him, all of them unpleasant.
“You said the smoke spread fast and so did the fire. Even if the hVAC system was only partly operating, at least it was either shut down or on exhaust. How come the fire itself spread so quickly?”
A fireman interrupted with a message for Infantino.
He scanned it, then turned briefly back to Barton. “It depends on the fire load. On the seventeenth floor, it was exceptionally heavy-solvents and waxes in the storeroom, an interior decorating shop jammed with flammable draperies and upholstery materials, a number of very posh offices that were decorated like tinderboxes. What you end up with is a fire load that makes for a lot of smoke and a very hot fire.” He turned toward the elevator bank. “Be back in a few minutes-I’ll have to know about the fire loading on the other floors.”
Barton was silent for a moment after Infantino left then said: “Do we have any kind of a building census, Dan?”
“Not one that would be worth a damn.”
“What about the commercial floors?”
“One of the cleaning women is missing; the others got out. So far as we know, aLex Hughes who works in your Credit Union never left the building, though it’s possible he got out during the height of the confusion. And there’s one of the partners in Today’s Interiors, Ian Douglas.
He tipped us about the fire to begin with. We have no record of him leaving the building, either.”
Today’s Interiors was on seventeen, where the fire had started, Barton recalled. The upholstery and decorating materials that Infantino had mentioned were in his shop.
Douglas probably didn’t make it.
“Anybody else?”
“One of the maintenance men-Krost. Nobody knows where he is, either.”
Jernigan snorted. “Nobody ever does.”
“There’s also a John Bigelow, a veep for Motivational Displays.
We’ve been trying to raise their executive suite by telephone. He apparently was entertaining a client back there; he called Donaldson to have a refrigerator fixed. So far, nobody answers. It’s a couple of floors above the fire floor so maybe he got out, too, though we have no record.”
“What about the evacuation of the residential tenants?”
Jernigan shook his head. “It’s been one mother of a mess, pretty disorganized, as you can see. Nobody really knew what to do including me. None of us were ever told. But I think we got almost everybody out. The firemen got Mrs. Halvorsen and her husband down.”
Barton vaguely remembered them-an elderly couple.
She was a wheelchair case.
“Did you try to notify -everybody by phone?” Infantino had rejoined them.
Jernigan nodded. “The operators buzzed everybody in the upper floors, whether I had them logged out or not.”
“Have the operators ignore all incoming calls and keep trying those apartments where you’re not sure they made it down or aren’t absolutely certain they’ve left for the weekend. “Have them ring every fifteen minutes.”
Barton felt curious. “Why have the operators keep trying, Mario?
It seems like a Waste of time-if they don’t answer, they’re not home.”
“That’s the wrong assumption,” Infantino said grimly.
“They might have been watching television when you called and couldn’t hear the phone or didn’t want to answer if the show was exciting right then. Then there are the people who were taking a bath or a shower at the time or who turned the phone off for the evening or have taken sleeping pills and then hit the sack. As soon as I can spare the men, I’ll have them check the upper floors personally with a pass key.
If your phone operators do get a response tell the tenants to stay put and place wet towels around the door and over the ventilation grills.
If they insist on leaving the room have them feel the door first to see if it’s hot, though we don’t think there’s any fire above eighteen.
If they leave, and the smoke is thick, have them head for the north stairwell as quickly as possible-it’s relatively free of smoke.
Under no conditions do they take the elevator-the sky lobby transfer point is right by the south utility core and the smoke is too thick there now. But have the operators keep trying the suspect apartments.”
Jernigan suddenly looked stricken. “Mr. Barton, there’s the Albrecht family in 3416.”
Barton felt as if he should know something he didn’t.
‘So?”
“They’re deaf mutes.”
Infantino whistled. “Okay, I’ll get some men up there as soon as possible.”
Barton had unconsciously glanced at the elevator indicator board when they were discussing floors. He suddenly tensed. “What elevators are your men using?”
Infantino followed his glance. “The two at the right with manual override. No need to worry.”
On the indicator board, the red lights showed that the rest of the elevators had lined up neatly at the seventeenth floor; the lights read across in a single row. Then, they suddenly flickered and went out.
They were stalled there for good, he thought; the call button ‘ s had fused, calling them to the fire floor. If there had been anybody on board trying to get down … It left them with three operating elevators, the residential express and the two commercial cages which were equipped with manual override.
Infantino said, “Craig, we were talking about the fire loading before. Do you have any idea what’s directly above and below the seventeenth floor?”
Barton shook his head. “Curtainwall takes up the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth floors. The executive offices are on eighteen, probably flamboyant decorated by your standards. The other two floors are standard office floors, what you would probably call an ordinary fire load. I’m not sure what’s on sixteen, ditto from the twenty-first on. up.” He paused. “Motivational Displays is on twenty-one; they’ve got a pretty large suite of offices and a storeroom that they keep most of their displays in.
It’s the holiday season so I imagine the storeroom is stuffed with polystyrene Santa Clauses, that sort of thing. Other than that, I don’t know what’s on the floor. This is the first time I’ve been in the building since the dedication. I also suspect there’s been a heavy changeover in.
tenants.”
“We can get most of the information from the building directory and make an educated guess at the contents.
How about building blueprints? It would be nice to know where the numbers go.”
“To the best of my knowledge, they’re e m our offices on eighteen.”
Infantino looked frustrated. “We don’t have a set, and you can’t get at yours. Could you draw me a general floor diagram from memory?”Barton felt around in his pockets, then walked over to the checkin desk where the girl had been making X’s against the names on the Promenade Room reservation list. The small, black Magic Marker was right where she had left it. He picked it up, along with her clipboard, and hurried back to the cigar stand. He turned over one of the reservation sheets and drew the rough floor plan, then motioned Garfunkel. “You’ve been on fire patrols in the building, haven’t you, Dan?” Garfunkel nodded. “Okay, fill in the numbers of the office suites and tell Mario about the furnishings-drapes, sofas, open filing systems, wooden desks or metal, anything he asks. If you can’t remember all the offices, check with the building directory.
Jernigan-” He glanced around. “Where the hell did he go?”
The Glass Inferno Page 25