Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“I’ve a single-track mind. I’m after a firebrand. Where’d you breeze to this afternoon after the flame broke out?”

“International Broadcasting. To make arrangements for another rehearsal studio.”

“The show must go on? Your star won’t be able to—”

“You’ll be surprised—” Kelsey’s eyes were very bright; the color high in his cheeks — “how little the Lownes vocals will be missed. There’ll even be those who’ll contend it’s a better show without her.”

“You’ve kind of a single-track mind, yourself.” Pedley took the chair away from the door. “I just hope for your sake you haven’t been trying to outfox the Fire Department.” He went out into the hall. “Don’t arrange for any Havana vacation until you hear from me.”

From a phone booth beside the checkroom, he phoned his office.

“Anything on the Wasson chick, Barney?”

“Sure have, boss! Listen—”

“What’s her address?”

“Twelve-ten Horatio! The damnedest thing—”

“Apartment house?”

“If you’d lemme tell you!” Barney was excited.

“What’s eating you?”

“A still alarm come in from there just a few minutes ago!”

Pedley snarled at the transmitter. “From where?!”

“Twelve-ten Horatio, boss. There was an explosion of some kind.”

Barney was talking to a dead line.

The Greenwich Village Street was a welter of noise. Women shrieked. Men yelled incoherently. Teen-age girls, wrapped in blankets, giggled hysterically. Half-clad children scampered screaming from frantic parents.

Policemen bellowed at young boys pressing against the fire lines — at the crowds milling out of near-by houses into driving snow tinted claret from the headlamps. The thunder of the pumpers reverberated across the icy rubble. Water lanced up hoarsely toward the roof of Twelve-ten.

The top of the building was glowing like a brazier seen from beneath. Against the dark line of the cornice, orange flashes illuminated black, oily coils spewing up from below.

The gusts whirled smoke down into the street, blotting out the bedlam, momentarily. A sprinkling of sparks was whipped by the wind from the windows on the top floor; intermittent showers of brick chips and broken glass rattled down on the red hoods of the apparatus.

Below that radiance on the fifth floor, the apartment house was dark, save for firefly flashes of lanterns moving behind the windows of the lower floors. But every window in the adjoining buildings was lighted. Heads were silhouetted against squares of soft yellow, all up and down the block.

Short ladders were in place across the sidewalk. In the middle of the street, Hook Eighty’s giant extension ladder was being cranked up toward the top floor.

To the morbidly excited or frightened people on the streets, this was a scene of inexplicable and ominous confusion. But like one of those old slapstick films in which the automobile ran backward and the hat that had been knocked off the fat man’s head magically rose from the ground to perch again upon his bald pate, the picture unwound itself backward to Pedley.

Without being conscious of it, his mind retraced in an instant what must have happened before he reached the spot.

The engine company had raced in, gated their hoses to the hydrants. The hosemen had unreeled their lines, started one in the front door at the street level, another up an extension ladder which the first truck company would have slapped up against the building within a few seconds after its arrival. A third line would have been laid in through the alley and up back of the building on the fire escape.

The hook-and-ladder men would have raised their short ladders, helped the tenants to get out. Some of them would have gone up to the roof to ventilate the building. Normally, with a fire starting in the basement or one of the lower floors, the hot gases and smoke mushroomed right up there under the roof. That’s why most people who lost their lives in tenement fires died on the top floors. The fire would spread out horizontally unless a skylight or a bulkhead were opened up to give a draft and clear out the smoke so the pipemen could work their way up from floor to floor, putting the fire out ahead of them as they climbed.

That was the way it was supposed to be done, but sometimes conditions were such that you couldn’t go by the book. Pedley could see that this was one of the times. None of the windows on the lower floors had been smashed in; those in the upper apartments were all opened. This blaze must have started on the top floor — and it seemed to be spreading down!

Rubber-coated men sloshed in and out of the darkened doorway, carrying axes, Quinlan force bars, wrenches, flashlights. Pedley started in past them. A hose-company lieutenant put a hand on the marshal’s sleeve.

“Can’t get up, Ben.”

“Stairs going?”

“Whatever it was, blew all to hell and gone. Spilled out into the well, ran down a flight or so. Flames chimneyed right up. Treads are gone.”

From the street came a megaphoned roar pitched so as to be heard over the maelstrom:

“Don’t — jump!”

Pedley jammed his flash up against the row of letter boxes. There it was: K. Wasson 502!

He dodged out to the street. The portable searchlight from the emergency truck was shooting a solid beam of brilliance up through the swirling flakes, spotlighting the end window on the top floor.

Only her head was visible above the sill. But in spite of the smoke and the snow, Pedley could make out the arranger’s face clearly.

Beneath her, short ladders were in place up against the building; on them hosemen were passing up loops of canvas into the lower floors. The sidewalk was ridged with ice-jagged drifts. Not even the small net would fit into the cramped space on the pavement below her window. If she jumped — that was it!

Kim’s shoulders appeared above the sill. One of her hands came out, clutched at the ledge.

From surrounding windows, from the fire lines below, surged a shout:

“Wait! — Wait! — Don’t jump! — Don’t jump!”

The 85-foot spring ladder inched upward toward her. Kim climbed onto the sill, crouched there. She still wore the vermilion suit; one side of it was black, now.

A whoof of flame puffed out of the smashed window at her back; for a second it seemed as if the girl herself were aflame. But the orange flare was replaced by a gush of smoke.

The crowd quieted. A ladderman was already halfway up the towering extension, climbing fast.

The tip of the ladder moved toward the sill. A burst of blazing embers cascaded from the room behind her, scattered around her, on her. She screamed, recoiled. The involuntary movement put her off balance. She toppled, her arms flailing wildly.

The ladder touched the sill. The ladderman locked his knee over a rung, leaned out, pinned her against the wall.

For a long agonizing moment she seemed to be sliding out of the fireman’s grasp. But he braced himself, shifted his grip slowly. Then for a split second she dangled over the sidewalk 50 feet below — was swung over to the ladder.

The crashing roar of the crowd was like the breaking of a dam.

Smoke enveloped the ladder, obscured the rescuer from the marshal’s view.

The fireman reappeared a dozen rungs lower. The girl was limp over his shoulder; her arms dangled loosely, like a rag doll’s.

The interns were waiting when helping hands lifted her from the ladderman’s shoulders. Pedley was there, too. He needed no more than a single glance at the singed hair, the ugly sheen on the back of her neck and the side of her face. Third-degree burns. Shock. Possibly lung burn. Not much chance—