Infantino said quietly, “You’ve got a point.”
Fuchs let himself be led out into the stairwell and helped down the steps. Infantino followed as far as sixteen, then turned in at the stairwell door. The corridor was slippery with water and cluttered with a tangle of hoses that led from the stairwell standpipe. The smoke was light at the landing entrance but thickened rapidly a few feet farther in. Boiling clouds of smoke churning at the far end of the corridor, past the elevator shafts, marked the present extent of the fire. Occasionally the dull orange flicker of flames could be seen through the smoke. Infantino started to cough, slipped on his mask, and picked his way down the corridor until he ran into a hose crew. He knelt and tapped the rear man on the shoulder, bellowing into his ear: “Where’s the rescue team that went to look for Chief Fuchs?”
The man turned slightly-and shouted back: “Second feeder corridor off is one. They’ve covered the others and have been working their way in.”
There were two ways of doing it, Infantino thought, and that was the wrong way. They had assumed that Fuchs had started searching the feeder corridors closest to the stairwell landing, which was easier and quicker but hardly logical. Chances were the old man had gone directly to the farthest corridor, the one at whose end the explosion had occurred. He had probably been knocked out or pinned by falling debris, or else …
Infantino turned and ran back to the stairwell landing.
“Who’s got a spare respirator? Any bottles with pure oxygen?
Okay, give them to me.” -He ran back in past the hose crew, cutting off into the feeder corridor just before the fire itself, catching the spray from the nob full against his side before the crew could Turn the hose away. Then he was past it and into the no-man’s land that was the battlefield for the wars fought between fire and men, the burned-out areas that were desolate marshlands of ash and water.
It was a land of charred wars:and studding, of thick, greasy smoke, of burned-out offices, of twisted, half- melted skeletons of fire-blackened typewriters and adding machines, of shredded draperies dripping water on smoldering carpeting. Farther down the corridor, the fire had consumed most of the combustibles, and the active blazes had ‘been extinguished.
He passed a salvage crew pulling apart the smoking remains of a pile of office furniture. The offices in the area had been completely gutted, sagging metal wastebaskets and half-melted hangers drooping from warped coat hooks indicating how intense the fire had been. The smoke was considerably ‘heavier now.
At a cross corridor, Infantino hesitated, considering his next move.
He could hear the salvage crew moving up behind him, dampening down the last of the smoldering debris. To his left, an entire section of acoustical ceiling had collapsed as its supporting walls had buckled.
Here the debris was surprisingly free of the touch of fire. The collapse had apparently denied air to the fire in this section and only occasional tendrils of smoke drifted up from the heavy mass of wreckage. He was about to Turn to the right-hand corridor when his eye caught a gleam of rubber and canvas.
He knelt and scrabbled away at some of the fragments of tile.
What he had seen was the tail end of a fireman’s slicker. He heaved a section of the debris to one side and uncovered a booted foot.
He started to work feverishly now, tugging desperately at the hot wreckage and prying away hunks of plaster and tile and lengths of partially burned two-by-fours. In a few minutes he had tunneled part way underneath the pile, exposing the man below up to his waist.
Suddenly the stack of debris he had pushed to one side began to slip.
He grabbed a length of metal pipe that had fallen from the ceiling area and used it to prop Up the wreckage. It was some minutes before he could grab the man about the waist and gently ease him out from under the remaining mass of tile and charred studding.
He turned him gently over on his back. Chief Fuchs.
For a moment, -Infantino thought the old man was dead.
His respirator mask was lying to one side and his skin was acyanotic blue. Then he noticed Fuchs’s chest moving slightly. He quickly removed his own mask and tried giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
After a moment, the chiefs chest heaved spasmodically and settled into a more normal breathing cycle. Infantino scrambled back into the corridor where he had left the spare respirator and the tank of pure oxygen. He had forgotten to put his own mask back on but that could wait a minute. He accidentally took a lungful of acrid smoke and started coughing.
He forced himself to stop while he tightened the mask on Fuchs’s face and carefully adjusted the oxygen flow. Then he quickly strapped his own respirator back on and tried to lift Fuchs to his shoulder.
Jesus, what was wrong, a little smoke and some exertion and he was dizzy as hell…. He tried to half carry, half drag Fuchs down the corridor.
Suddenly he felt other hands taking the chief from him.
The salvage crew had abandoned their hoses and ran to help him.
Two men carried the chief down the corridor and the third put his arm around Infantino and helped him down The hall toward the stairwell.
Once on the landing, he took off his mask and sat down on the steps for a moment to let his head clear. He started coughing again but it wasn’t too bad, not serious enough to require attention. A moment’s rest and some fresh air …
He craned his neck and watched the salvage crew carry Fuchs down the steps. He hoped desperately he had found.
the stupid, obstinate, brave old bastard in time.
He watched a moment longer and automatically started to move his lips in the old familiar litany: Holy Mary, Mother of God.
CHAPTER 60
Thelma had instinctively clutched at Jenny at the sound of the explosion and the clatter of the cables as they fell on the roof of the cage. Then she abruptly loosened her grip, fearful that Jenny could feel her own trembling.
The situation was bad enough as it was; there was no sense in communicating to Jenny her.own fright. She wondered briefly how it would feel if the last cables snapped and they plummeted to,the ground.
What would she think about, and then the crash on the plaza below.
. .
. .
She couldn’t, she wouldn’t think about that. instead she concentrated on her husband’s voice roaring above the hubbub in the cage: “We’re perfectly safe! As long as even one cable holds, we’re safe!” Jenny was on the verge of hysterics and had started to cry.
Thelma reached over and touched her shoulder gently, as she might to reassure a child. “Don’t be afraid - Wyn knows what he’s talking about.” She believed Wyn, she believed him implicitly, and at the moment she was proud of him. He was the steadying influence in the darkened cage, the voice of sanity and courage that kept the rest of the passengers from panicking. Twice now the, emergency brakes had slipped briefly and Wyn had calmed the fear . s of those in the cage each time. She knew that Wyn was actually as confident as he sounded-and fortunately he could communicate that to those around him.
Funny, she thought. In a situation like this, he could be so brave.
What worried her was how he would react in the months to come, when the challenges were of a different - sort.
Jenny had huddled closer to her in the darkness, partly for warmth and partly for the sense of security that Thelma knew she radiated. A sense of false security, Thelma thought to herself. But the mere effort of trying to remain calm for Jenny’s sake was helping herself as well.
“You’re very close to him, aren’t you, Thelma?”
“Close?” She thought about that for a moment. “I suppose so.
You might say that Wyn and I depend on each other.”
