Keith Thomson: Once a spy

Drummond dove, wrapping his arms around him and propelling them both out the window.

The explosion left walls charred on the houses on either side of Drummond’s. Scraps of stucco and wood and metal littered the block. Burning hunks of timber fell from Drummond’s eaves and glowed in the alleys. Waves of fire made a loud, crackling meal of the rest of the house. With coats thrown over nightclothes, dozens of neighbors poured onto the sidewalks and watched, through smoke and haze and heat, as the men of Engine Company 204 slashed the flames with shafts of water.

Among the spectators were Charlie and Drummond, uninjured but for bruises from run-ins with the swing set crossbar-fortuitous, because it slowed their descent-and the frozen ground.

Charlie was the only person in the crowd not wholly fixated on the firefighters. “Maybe something was up with the gas man after all,” he said over the din.

“Oh,” said Drummond.

The firemen reduced the blaze to a few stubborn sparks, and, eventually, just steam. The house was left a blackened skeleton.

While neighbors offered Drummond their sympathies and returned home, and soot-streaked firefighters coiled their hoses, Charlie shared his concerns of foul play with Engine Company 204’s chief, a wiry man with a whisk broom of a mustache like those of his professional antecedents.

“We found the heat exchange tubing halfway up the block,” the chief said. “Ten times outta ten, that means a fuel leak caused a boiler blow. We see it all the time with these older electric ignition units, especially with seniors who forget to check the fuel valve.”

“Wouldn’t the gas man have checked the fuel valve?” Charlie asked.

“We looked into that. The gas company hasn’t got a record of any service here so far this month. Their nearest call today was way down on Bergen, at ten A.M.”

Frustration heated Charlie. “Doesn’t that make it more suspicious that the gas man was here this afternoon?”

The fireman smoothed one end of his mustache to a point. “All due respect, sir, gas men haven’t got the exclusive on white uniforms.”

Charlie turned to Drummond for corroboration. Drummond was hunched on a stoop, engulfed by an oversized, lime green down coat lent by neighbors who probably were in no rush for its return. He was watching the ribbons of steam blend into a purple sky. In his right mind he’d be distraught. His eyes showed only childlike wonder.

“If the guy were a house painter or Mister Softee or anybody else in a white uniform, it’s still strange,” Charlie said to the chief. “The way he glanced up the block, then rushed off-now that I think of it, it was like he was on the lookout for my father. Then he just disappeared onto Nostrand, which is a bunch of locked brownstones without alleys between them. There was no time for him to get inside a building. And we looked everywhere else; if there were even a manhole for him to have gone down, we’d have found it. So you have to think he had some kind of escape route.”

The chief glanced at his truck. His men were all aboard now, impatient to go. Returning his focus to Charlie, he pursed his lips. “Sir, there are set fires that go past us, sure. It takes a real professional though, and I mean a heckuva pro. Why would a guy of that caliber be in this neck of Brooklyn picking on a senior citizen?”

Charlie weighed the odds that “HumDrummond” would be the target of a professional assassin.

“I guess you’re right,” Charlie said.

The fire trucks barreled off into the darkness, and Prospect Place reverted to its usual eleven P.M. form-the occasional taxi, the odd homeward-bound drunk, talk shows flickering behind window shades. Charlie and Drummond should have been in a taxi headed to Charlie’s apartment for the night. But the gas man was stuck in Charlie’s thoughts like a sliver of glass.

Settling alongside Drummond on the stoop, he asked, “Dad, have you been playing the horses lately?”

“Do you mean gambling on horse races?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never done that.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

“There used to be Racing Forms around the house all the time.”

“There used to be whats around the house?”

“Racing Forms. As in the Daily Racing Form — ‘America’s Turf Authority Since 1894.’ You used to pick it up at the magazine store or the newsstand in the subway, like, every day. You couldn’t have been reading it just for your edification.”

“I suppose not.”

“I was thinking, what if you called in a bad bet, then forgot, for whatever reason, to pay up? The characters in that racket don’t take it so well when they don’t get their money-or so I’ve heard.”

“Pardon the intrusion?” came a man’s voice.

Charlie looked up to find a lanky twentysomething in a conservative, dark-blue suit and gray overcoat. He had fine features; precisely combed, wavy hair; and the earnest demeanor of a student body president. Charlie had noticed him before, among the spectators.

“My name’s Kermit Smith,” the young man continued in a smooth blend of country and urban refinement. “I’m an attorney-”

“He was thrown out of the bar,” shouted a second man, walking the curb like a tightrope and failing, probably a function of the brown paper bag he clutched and the bottle of booze it surely contained. He was about the same age as Smith but shorter and stouter. He too wore a blue business suit and gray overcoat. His shirt collar was open and the knot of his tie was halfway down his chest.

“That’s my friend, for lack of a better word, MacKenzie,” Smith apologized to Charlie. “The bar he referenced is the Blarney Stone on Flatbush. Probably by now you’ve developed a theory as to which of us in fact was the problem.”

Clever guy, this Kermit Smith, thought Charlie. But ambulance chaser all the way. In this part of Brooklyn, at this hour, the Samaritans were only bad.

Seeming to have read Charlie’s edginess, Smith said, “Cutting to the chase, I overheard some of your chat with the fire chief. I’m with Connelly, Dumbarton and Rhodes, notable for winning twenty-four of twenty-four negligence suits against boiler manufacturers by convincing juries that the victims would have needed to be rocket mechanics to adequately maintain the dozen or so indeterminate valves on the older electric ignition units. If you’re at all interested…”

The fire had made selling the house hugely problematic. Who knew how long it would take and how much work would be required to collect the insurance-assuming Drummond had remembered to make the payments? “I guess it couldn’t hurt to know about, on my father’s behalf,” Charlie said, faking a yawn so as not to appear overeager. This was an arena in which a clever ambulance chaser could yield a big score.

MacKenzie griped, “Come on, we’re gonna miss last call at Flanagan’s.”

Turning his back on his friend, Smith said to Charlie, “Why don’t we step into my office for a moment?” He took a few steps down the sidewalk.

“Just give him your card already,” MacKenzie said, prompting Smith to stray farther.

“Dad, please don’t go anywhere for half a second?” Charlie said.

Drummond nodded. Charlie’s concern was eased only a little.

Catching up to Smith, he noticed a sparkling new black BMW Z4 roadster four parking spots down. “I’ve always wanted to win a boiler manufacturer negligence suit and buy one of those,” Charlie said.

Smith advanced to take the car in. “Well, this could still be your lucky night.” He halted in a pool of shadows between streetlamps and reached into his coat, presumably for a business card or BlackBerry.

Smith’s larynx was crunched by a fist, thrown by Drummond on a dead run.