“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?”
