survived.
Jesus and Albina were both coughing now and starting to gag when suddenly Douglas remembered something he had once , read. “You two have handkerchiefs?” Jesus nodded and produced a dirty white piece of cotton. Albina fumbled in her smock and drew out a startlingly red bandanna. Douglas had a crisp linen handkerchief in his suit-coat pocket, carefully folded into the appropriate triangle.
“What are we supposed to do with these?” Jesus asked, curious.
“Piss on it,” Douglas said. Jesus looked at him, obviously not believing what Douglas had said. “Piss on it,” Douglas repeated.
“Then tie it over your nose and mouth; it will help cut the smoke.”
Jesus looked shocked. “Man, you gotta be kidding!”
“I’m dead serious,” Douglas said sharply. “Now do as you’re told!”
“Who’s telling me, man? You?”
The contempt in his voice was too much for Douglas.
He slammed Jesus against the wall, then grabbed him by the collar and slapped him twice with the flat of his hand.
The anger was bile in His throat.
“I don’t give a crap what you think of me; you’re going to do as I say! We’ve got another twenty floors to go and we’re not going to make it if we can’t breathe.
You got a better-idea? Now’s the time to tell me. Otherwise, do as I say or I’ll knock your teeth right down your throat!” He drew his fist back.
Jesus managed to straighten up even though Douglas had a heavy hand on his shirt. “You’re taking it out on me, man.” There was no fear in his voice but neither was there any contempt.
“Taking what out on you?”
“What you are.” Jesus’ eyes were steady. “I don’t give a shit, man-I probably never really did. Junkie …
queer … who gives a damn. Another ten minutes and nobody’s gonna care one way or the other.”
Douglas reddened and lowered his fist. For a moment, Jesus was the world, the sum of all the taunts and sneers and whispers that had piled up over the years. He felt ashamed of himself. “Piss on the handkerchief,” he muttered. “It’s the only thing that I can think of that might help.”
“Do as he say,” Albina said sharply. “Is he the only man here?”
Jesus turned without a word, the handkerchief in his hand.
Douglas did the same thing, while on the stairs Albina turned and with remarkable grace repeated the action. Douglas helped her adjust the kerchief around her face. Then he hooked her arm over his shoulder and continued up the steps. Jesus followed.
They managed another two flights before Douglas realized the wet handkerchiefs were more a psychological help than real. The cloth was too thin to screen the small smoke particles and it was little help in filtering out the gases themselves. Douglas started to cough again as did Albina. Jesus tore his handkerchief off and dropped it on, the steps. He said nothing and neither did Douglas.
At the next landing, Douglas noticed the fire hose behind the glass case. Suddenly he ‘ thought he saw an answer.
He stopped while the others watched, untied a shoe and took it off.
He halted it, then brought the heel down sharply against the glass, shattering it. He picked shards of glass out of the frame, then reached in and tugged the hose out of the case.
When he had about twenty feet out, he turned to the landing window behind them. “Okay, stand back away from the window.” Douglas lifted the body of the hose over his head so about ten feet of it, including the heavy brass nozzle itself, was behind him. Then he swung it Late Evening forward and down, like a whip. The brass nozzle f over his head and smashed against the window. There was a shatter of glass and a sudden blast of cold air. He did it twice more to clear the frame of large pieces of glass.
The cold air poured in from the north now and spilled down the stairwell, effectively capping the g smoke.
He had created his own inversion layer, Douglas thought, by venting the stairwell. It might work They began to climb again.
Another flight up and he shivered; the temperature of the stairwell air was dropping fast. But at the same time, it was getting considerably easier to breathe.
“I’m sorry about the handkerchief idea,” he said suddenly. “I had read about it someplace; I honestly thought it would work.”
Jesus laughed. “Don’t sweat it, man. At least you thought of something. I-didn’t think of anything.”
There was a sense of equality in his, voice, of acceptance, and for a moment Douglas hated himself for responding to it. Who the hell did he think he was? But there had been no condescension. He suddenly wondered what Jesus thought of himself as an addict. Did he despise himself? Did he accept himself?
He looked at Jesus, thinking: It was hard but they both had learned to live in their own skins and accept it.
CHAPTER 43
The sidewalk and plaza in front of the Glass House were coated in a glistening sheath of ice. Infantino’s boots slipped on the glaze underfoot; he held onto the open door of the CD comm van as he stared up at the building. In spite of the scars of the fire, it was still a thing of beauty with the banks of floodlights playing on its exterior.
The queen of the city, he thought, but a tattered queen now. He could see the gaps in the curtainwall where the windows had been knocked out on the seventeenth and eighteenth floors. The thick mantle of ice ridged these floors and flowed down the outside of the building almost to the ground level.
Perversely, the effect added to the building’s beauty. The tower above was a glittering, golden gem swathed in a curtain of ice.
It hadn’t gone too badly, Infantino thought. For a while he had feared the fire might spread and they would have to bring in helicopters for a rooftop evacuation.
But the main fires on seventeen and eighteen were pretty well knocked down while the fire on twenty-one was now contained. They could look-forward to a morning of pulling down the remains of walls and ceilings and searching for minor smoldering fires hidden in remote recesses of the various floors. Sometime before dawn the majority of his companies could probably secure, coil up their hoses and go back to their cold meals still sitting on the firehouse stove. They would try to forget that they had been part of one of, the major near disasters of the city.
Infantino was surprised that there had been so few casualties. In a fire of this size, he would have predicted more. Out of a working crew of well over a hundred, perhaps a dozen had been sent to the, hospital for smoke inhalation, burns, and cuts from falling glass.
Some of the burns had been bad ones, both from the intense radiant heat and from some of the older turnout coats which had crumbled in the heat.
But as yet there had been only one fatality-the man with the hot lung.
Shevelson’s appearance on the scene was helpful but troubling.
The blueprints were proving useful, though not as much as Shevelson obviously thought they should be.
It was more helpful to learn, finally, that it was Shevelson who had been feeding information to Quantrell. Whether or not Fuchs would believe it, at least in.his own mind Infantino knew he was free and clear. But Shevelson had impressed him in one area-the Glass House was a minimal building. The equipment in it was designed to serve sixty-six floors and not one more. There was no reserve, no back-up system. If there were any unpleasant surprises now … well, they could really be unpleasant.
He took one last look at the building, then walked over to the Red Cross canteen truck where Chief Fuchs was having a cup of coffee. He took the cup offered by the girl inside, added cream, and ladled three heaping spoons of sugar into it.
“Sweet tooth, Infantino,?”
“You burn up a lot of energy fighting fires.” He studied the chief for a minute and decided to have it out. “Shevelson, the construction foreman for the Glass House, showed up a while ago. He brought along a set of the
