“I’m glad they are,” Lisolette said soberly. She was going to have to carry Martin, she suddenly realized; his slow clambering down the steps was holding them up too much. She couldn’t have done it before, but she thought she had enough of her strength back now. She leaned over and swung him up in the crook of her arm.
. The stairwell itself was strange to her, studded with pipes that jutted from the individual floors and ran underneath the individual landings.
“Harry, what stairwell is this? I’ve never been in it before.”
His voice floated back from almost a floor and a half farther down.
“You usually use the one on the north side of the building, Miss Mueller. This one’s the south one, it’s right by the utility core-the hollow core holding all the utility pipes and the inside elevators.
The scenic elevator runs right up the other side of it.”
She had more or less located herself now. A few more flights would see it. “Hurry along now, Chris, we don’t want to lag behind.”
“You need any help up there, Miss Mueller?”
“No, we can make it, Harry.”
She started to move her lips in a silent prayer then, not alone for Tom and Evelyn Albrecht, but for someone else.
It was only the second time that evening that she had had time to think of Schiller, trapped in her apartment.
CHAPTER 40
It was the first major fire for rookie David Lencho and despite the smoke and the frequently broiling heat, there was a perversely exciting quality to it. The fire had become a personal enemy to Lencho, a kind of fiery dragon whose existence had cast him in the role of St. George. He was on the nob of the two-and-a-half-inch hose, fighting his way down the corridor of the seventeenth floor. Directly behind him were two more hosemen, one of them Mark Fuchs, the chief’s son. He knew that Fuchs, too, felt the same kind of excitement.
Crouching down to avoid the layers of heat the ceiling, he slowly worked the nob back and forth, spraying the hall directly ahead of him with’ a heavy stream of water under high pressure. He wore his helmet reversed so that the long brim normally in back would protect his face from radiant heat when he kept his head down.
Visibility was poor but he could tell where the fire was by the heat.
A dozen feet behind him a secondary hose team was playing a spray of water over him and the other members of the advance team. Half the time he felt like a drowned rat or, at the very least, one that was in hot water-and occasionally scalding steam when the water from the hose struck a really hot spot.
He edged a few feet closer to the beast, glanced back briefly at Fuchs and laughed in his excitement. Fuchs returned it as Lencho crept another foot farther toward the blaze. He would-be good for about ten minutes up front and then he would have to be replaced. But that was enough for him to feel that he had gotten in his own personal licks against the fire.
He adjusted the spray on the nozzle slightly and played it over the ceiling, watching the tile Turn black and pieces of it scatter under the ‘force of the stream. Water rivulets coursed down his face from the cooling back spray. -There was a particular satisfaction in fighting fires, and a definite pleasure in working with men he respected. The men with him on the hose team he especially liked: Jenkins, the third man on the team, and Mark Fuchs, the son of the chief, would normally be on the nob in a tight situation like this but had traded with him a few minutes before to give him the experience. Fuchs was his own age and they had gone to school together. A year after Fuchs had joined the department, so had he.
Somewhere along the line Fuchs had managed to get married and now had a small son. Lencho laughed to himself. Where the hell had Fuchs found the time? He supposed one day he would settle down With a nice Jewish girl. He’d have to talk to his mother about that; she had more time to look around for one than he did.
The nob almost got away from him again and Fuchs yelled, “Watch what the hell you’re doing, Dave!” Lencho nodded, his smile gone. The hose was delivering more than 250 gallons of water a minute at a tip pressure of better than fifty pounds per square inch. It took three men to handle a two-and-a-half-inch hose and if they lost control of it, the heavy brass nozzle could whip around and brain a man.
Forty feet ahead he could make out the warped door of the utility room where the fire was supposed to have started. On his left and to the rear, the charred remains of Today’s Interiors still smoldered, although the major portion of the fire was out. Suddenly a piece of tile fell from the ceiling and landed on his gloved hand. He jerked his hand back in a reflex action; the hose sprayed erratically around the corridor walls as Fuchs and Jenkins fought it. Lencho lunged for the nob, caught it, and the three of them brought it back under control.
Fuchs leaned forward and shouted in his ear. “Do me a favor and don’t let it go again, okay, Dave?”
Lencho nodded. He peeled away his cloth-asbestos glove and glanced down at his hand. The place where the tile had hit was raising a blister the size of a half dollar.
It’d hurt for a week, he thought.- The fire was not quite so exciting any more. His face felt burned and raw and his nose was leaking mucus and his lungs had started to ache. He coughed and tried to edge’ farther forward again, making a few inches before his muscles gave out.
He suddenly felt a tap on his back and a voice shouted in his ear: “Okay, guy, you’ve had enough!”
The relief crew took over as he, Fuchs, and Jenkins dropped back to the landing. Chief Infantino was waiting for him there.
“You all right, Lencho?” It was the lead man that usually bore the brunt of it.
“Got my hand fried a bit; it’s okay.”
“Let’s see it.”
Lencho held it out; Infantino glanced at it professionally.
“Okay, go to first aid in the lobby and get it covered.”
“It’ll keep.”
“So it can get infected and keep you out for a N instead of a few minutes? Go to the first aid and get it covered, Lencho.
That’s an order. I’ll let you know when we start giving medals for being dumb.”
. Lencho reddened. “I’ll go, right down, sir. Be back in a few minutes.”
“Not here you won’t.”
Lencho stopped. “I don’t understand.”
“You’ve been beat more than you might think; you need a longer rest than just a few minutes. Send you back in right away and you wouldn’t last half as long as you did the first time.” Infantino’s voice turned grim. “I heard that you lost control of the nob twice, endangering the men you were with. You’ve a brave man, Lencho, and You’ve got lots of energy-but it’s a case of too much engine and not enough steering wheel. Knocking down a fire takes more than courage, it takes brains as well.”
“It won’t happen again, sir.” Lencho felt like crying.
“You bet your ass it won’t; I won’t let it.”’ Wanting eyed him for a moment, then partially relented. “When you get it taken care of, report to Captain Miller on sixteen. Get a pulldown hook and you and Fuchs help the crew down there check the halls. The main fire’s out down there ‘ but they’ll be looking for flare-ups.”
“Yes sir.” Lencho felt like he had just flunked his orals.
He turned for a last look down the corridor and said, “It looks like it’s darkening down.”
Infantino nodded. “With half the lake poured on it, I should hope so”. Lencho started down the steps to the fifteenth floor and the elevator for the lobby. It had been fun while it lasted, he thought.
CHAPTER 41
Barton could hardly wait for Leroux to show so he could wash his hands of the whole mess. But Leroux hadn’t come down in the first elevator load of evacuees from the Promenade Room. Neither had Thelma nor Jenny.
It occurred to him then that when Leroux finally did show up, there would actually be little left for him to do aside from facing the cameras. The lobby had been cleared and those tenants who hadn’t taken advantage of the reservations made for
them elsewhere were sleeping on cots set up in the lower lobby coffee shop and the corridor just outside. A few had gathered around tables in the lunchroom to talk in quiet monotones and congratulate themselves on having made the select fraternity of survivors.
There had been other problems in addition to those of the residential tenants. Barton had managed to locate repairmen for the ventilation fans in the machinery rooms.
They promised him that in another hour all of the fans would be back in operation on exhaust to clear smoke from the building.
Ductwork to The upper floors was still intact for the most part.
Repair of the phone lines to the upper floors, however, would have to wait until the fire had been completely knocked down on the various floors.
Human problems had given him more trouble than the mechanical ones.
A representative of the insurance company for the Glass House had somehow gotten through the police barricades. ‘ Barton had finished a cup of coffee’in the lunchroom and when he came back up he discovered the man taping the operations of the firemen and -the damage in the lobby with a port-a-pal TV camera. When he refused to leave, Barton threw him out physically.
He had also pacified some of the commercial tenants whom the police had brought in after getting Barton’s permission. Most of them were desperately worried about the records in their offices; a few about the actual physical furnishings. Barton had reassured the majority of them.
To others he could offer little consolation beyond suggesting they contact their insurance companies once fire damage had been assessed.
Access to their offices was denied everybody, Barton telling them they would be informed once the Fire Department had secured. There would be a lot of lease cancellations when it was all over, he thought, but that was Leroux’s worry, not his.
There were a dozen tenants in the hospital with smoke inhalation and an equal number of firemen. And there were the missing who had yet to show up and about whom Barton felt an increasing anxiety. Douglas, Albina Obligado, Bigelow, Deirdre Elmon-whom Jernigan had insisted was still in the building, even though she had signed out-and a number of the residential tenants whom Barton didn’t know.
And then there had been the fatalities. A tenant who had died of smoke inhalation. And Michael Krost! The firemen had knocked down the blaze on seventeen, helped by the fact that it had almost burned itself out. They found the doors of the stalled elevator still open. An ambulance crew had taken out Krost’s remains, setting their stretcher down on the lobby floor to ask Barton for help in identification. It had taken a full sickening minute to place who the crisped heap had been. Barton made a tentative guess and the stretcher crew departed with their burden, the trailing edges of the covering blanket dripping dirty water that had collected on the lobby salvage cover.
All in all, Barton thought grimly, it could have been worse-much worse. The fire on seventeen had been knocked down, the few blazes on sixteen had been put out, and now eighteen was coming under control.
Infantino’s men were having problems with twenty-one-the fire had leapfrogged up the side of the building through a channel formed by warping of part of the Curtainwall-but as yet it wasn’t serious. But then, any fire was serious, or could be.
“Jenn down yet?” Infantino had come in from outside . with coffee for the communications crew.
“Not yet-she and the Lerouxes will probably be in the last load from the Promenade Room.” He glanced at the coffee cup in Infantino’s hand.
“Why didn’t you get your coffee from the lunchroom?”
“Garfunkel asked for volunteers and Typhoid Mary was the first in line-that woman hasn’t boiled water in her life. Any report from the hospital about Edwards?”
“Holding his own but still in intensive care. I told Garfunkel-they were pretty good friends.” He noticed a few hosemen waiting by the elevator bank to go up.
“What’s the situation on twenty-one?”
“The fire’s gotten a foothold in a number of the suites on the north side but we’re making headway.” Infantino sounded confident, then realized it, and immediately hedged his bets. “Don’t get your hopes up; fires are unpredictable. Have a failure in one of your machinery rooms and all bets are off. Or if we’ve made a mistake on our estimates of the fire loading on the floors above eighteen, we could be in trouble. And I told you earlier the building was like Swiss cheese; the fire could have worked its way through a dozen different poke throughs and be smoldering away in areas we don’t even suspect yet.”
He shouted instructions to a passing group of hosemen, then turned back-to Barton. “Why didn’t Leroux come down with the first load from the Promenade Room, Craig? I’m glad you’re here, but it isn’t going to look very good for him.”
“Apparently he’s running the evacuation up there, keeping them calm, preventing any panic, that sort of thing.”
He felt uneasy about the question. “Why do you ask?”
“There may be another reason-he’s hot copy and you’re not. The moment he sets foot in the lobby and the reporters hear about it, the cops will have a tough time keeping them away. They’ll be hard on him, any way you look at it. I think Leroux figured all of that out.”
“He could’ve,” Barton admitted. “He could be stalling for time until he’s thought of some answers to the questions they’ll ask, though he could always say ‘no comment.”In any event, that’s his problem.”
Infantino finished his coffee and crumpled the plastic cup. “Let’s go back to your maps again, I want to check on What’s above twenty-one. How far can we trust Garfunkel for knowing the fire loading?”
“I’d stake my life on him.”
“It won’t be yours but’ it might be somebody else’s.
Let’s give Your drawings, a double check.”
They walked over to the cigar stand and the communications relay center. Barton noted that there were fewer transmissions now.
Infantino had stopped sending out calls for more men, and in the rest of the city the functioning of the Fire Department had returned to near normal with no more units being put on alert.
They were deep in a discussion of the fire loading on twenty-one when a Policeman came up. “Mr. Barton there’s a man at the barricades insisting on seeing you.”
“I’m not seeing anybody,” Barton grunted, irritated at being interrupted. Then he sighed and put down his Pencil. “Who is he?”
“He said his name is William Shevelson-that he used to be construction foreman or something on the building.” Barton caught his breath. Shevelson. His eyes met Infantino’s. “Send him in.”
Shevelson strolled through the lobby a minute later, an unlighted cigar in his mouth. He was half a dozen inches shorter than Barton and about the same number widen They sized each other up for a long moment and Barton decided, as he had when he had first met Shevelson two years before, that he didn’t like him. Shevelson had a belligerent attitude that was difficult to assess, an attitude that said he considered everybody else to b an incompetent.
“You’re Barton.” Shevelson studied him a moment longer. “I met you once, remember it now. A couple years back.” He nodded at Infantino.
“Where’s Leroux?”
“He hasn’t come down from the Promenade Room yet.”
“If I were in his shoes I wouldn’t either.”
“You wanted to see me about something?” Barton asked stiffly.
“Yeah.” Shevelson hesitated a moment, then abruptly pushed a roll of blueprints at Barton. “If the bastard was here I’d make him sweat for these, but he’s not and I suppose you can use them.”
Barton took them. “Thanks a lot.” He wished he could put more feeling into the words, but Shevelson was a difficult man to be polite to. Then he caught Infantino’s eye again and suddenly they both knew.
Infantino said it for him. “You were the one feeding inside information to Quantrell, weren’t you?” There was hostility in his voice that he made no effort to disguise.<
br />
“He used me, too,” Shevelson said calmly. “I was an innocent just like you. So now we’re both wiser.” He pointed to the blueprints.
“If you want me to do penance there it is.”
“I don’t know if we need them now,” Barton said..
“Thanks anyway.” It was a dismissal; the blueprints wouldn’t tell him anything now.
Shevelson didn’t move. He looked around the lobby, then glanced briefly overhead. “Oh, I think you’ll need them all right.” He waved at Barton’s sketches spread out on the counter. “If I were you I’d toss those out and take a look at the prints. You might find them of interest.”
“You forget, I designed the Glass House,” Barton said.
“I haven’t forgotten. You designed it and I built it and Leroux didn’t do a goddamn thing but pay for it and that’s the catch. He didn’t pay very damn much.”
Something in his voice prompted Barton to spread the ,prints out over his own drawings. He glanced at them quickly. They were familiar-all too familiar-and took him back three years to when he had been working on them. It had been a long time ago, he thought, a time when he had been happier, if less wise. The happiness he missed and the wisdom he was unsure of.
The prints were very much as he remembered and then he suddenly started noticing inconsistencies-changes that had been made of which he had been unaware. He suddenly realized he was looking at the actual working prints, not the original drawings he had labored over while at Wexler and Haines.
There had to be somebody responsible, he thought sickly. It couldn’t have been Leroux alone. It was common practice for construction companies to suggest ways in which money could be saved, to suggest alternative materials and changes in specifications to the same end.
And Shevelson had been The construction company’s representative.
“You’re right, Shevelson, I designed it and you built it and you did a lousy job. If you want particulars we can begin with the duct holes.
Damned few were fire stopped; that’s one of the main reasons the fire spread so fast.”
The Glass Inferno Page 29