“You’re actually content to let him have his outside interests?”
There was a slight jiggling to the cage now; the wind was catching at it, Thelma thought. She forced her mind back to the question. “You mean his having a mistress?
Tolerate would be more accurate, I suppose. But what can I do?
Nag?
Issue an ultimatum? It might be effective for a while, but eventually he would look for considerably more than he does now. And .
. . I don’t think it would do me any credit. Besides, if I …
pushed it, I might lose Wyn. And I don’t want to lose him.”
“If it were Craig I would have to tell him to get out.”
“That’s confidence without considering the consequences, Jenny.
And I think it shows you want to own him.” Thelma was surprised at her own obtuseness. Another time, another place, and she would be considerably more diplomatic. But their own immediate situation hardly invited diplomacy. “I don’t want to own Wyn; I don’t think I could stand to live every moment of his life along with him. Much of his life has no appeal to me and there would be no point in pretending that it does.
He gives me a great deal of himself. I need him-and he needs me.
“He’ll need you more than ever after this is over,” Jenny said.
That was very true, Thelma realized. There would be inquiries into the fire, attacks in the newspapers, all sorts of innuendoes. Now, more than ever in his life, Wyn would need her. For a moment she had a strange feeling of satisfaction, then dismissed it as being unworthy of her.
“Jenny, I said I depended on Wyn but you can’t carry that too far.
There’s a difference between love and dependency.
I think if a person does not live their own life that they eventually end up with no internal strength at all; and without that, a couple would have nothing to give each other. A man and a woman live their own lives and I$ their gift to each other is the sharing thereof.
I think . ‘ .
At that moment the cage shuddered and the air was filled with the screeching of the emergency brakes on the outside rails. People began to scream and once again Thelma threw her arms about Jenny, half to comfort her and half to comfort herself.
The cage began to sway like a pendulum, dropping as it did so.
Some’of the passengers were thrown to the floor and Thelma winced as somebody fell heavily across the lower part of her legs. But there was no time to cry out at the pain. The brakes, she thought. The cage must have gradually slipped to the point where the guide rails had been spread and the emergency brakes had now released their saving grip.
She realized with horror that they had started the long drop toward the street below.
Then, suddenly, the cage jerked short. For a moment it was completely quiet, except for a faint, swaying motion.
The cables had held, she thought, slowly releasing her breath.
But the cage was no longer braced against the side rails. They were now dangling in midair, held only by the four remaining cables.
CHAPTER 61
Barton and Infantino were outside on the plaza, staring up at the shear wall, when the scenic elevator broke loose from its rails. It slipped a few feet, then suddenly plunged from its seating on the stele tracks. It came to an abrupt stop when the remaining cables broke its fall. The cage bounced a few times, then settled down to swaying gently in the wind, occasionally brushing against the side of the building.
Barton slowly let his breath out. He could imagine the panic inside the darkened cage. He wondered again if Jenny were in it or if she were still up in the Promenade Room. If she were in the cage she had taken quite a jolting. And if she were in the Promenade Room …
Infantino watched his eyes traveling up the side of the building to the smoky red haze that hung around the sixty-fourth floor. “When the Southport pumper gets here, we can do something about that, Craig.
I already have men and hoses in the stairwell on the sixty-third floor landing and below.”
“The fire will have gotten quite a foothold by then.”
“Sorry, Craig-we do the best we can.” The night had been full of tragedies, Barton thought.
Certainly Infantino had his: Lencho, who had been from Infantino’s own division and something of his personal protege, probably because he needed babying.
And Chief Fuchs, now in intensive care, with the first reports anything but encouraging. Plus Gilman, the veteran under whom Infantino had once been a rookie. But tragedies were something you were selfish about. And Infantino’s had already happened; Barton was still waiting for his to occur. There were more sirens cutting through the crisp night air now. There was something strange about them to Barton’s ears; partly the number of them and partly the slightly different pitch to their sirens. Then one of the firemen was racing across the plaza to Infantino. “Chief, the crews from Southport have just passed the barricades!”
Infantino turned and shouted to Barton, “Lets go!”
and took off across the plaza to the street. Barton followed.
The winking red lights on a small parade of new pumpers and salvage trucks were now plainly visible as they slowly drove down the crowded street.
A red command car was the first to pull up. The man who bounced out was small and wiry with a weatherbeaten young face, the type of face a professional surfer might have after a few years of riding the waves on the ocean. A younger version of Chief Fuchs, Barton thought.
“Chief Infantino?” Infantino nodded. “Battalion Chief Jorgenson from Southport.”
They shook hands and Infantino asked, “How many companies did you bring?”
“More than you asked for. We’ve got a number of high-capacity respirators, heat shields, and several dozen proximity suits.”
“What about the shape charges?”
one-pound charges and a dozen or so ten pounders. About a thousand feet of Primacord to go along with them. You can’t get a simultaneous detonation without connecting the charges with Primacord.”
He looked at Infantino curiously. “You thinking of blowing through a floor with the charges?”
“Yes, we were thinking about it.”
Jorgenson shook his head. “I’d think twice if I were you, especially if the building is structurally weakened.”
Infantino was shouting against the wind now. “We’ve got some serious problems on nineteen through twenty-five, but I think we can contain them without explosives -most of the windows have blown out and pretty well vented the floors. It’s the fire topside that really worries me.”
He described the situation to Jorgenson. The Southport chief whistled. -“When you big city people have a fire, you really pull out all the stops, don’t you?”
Southport didn’t have the problems that their city did, Barton thought. It was primarily an industrial shopping center town; their fire chief hadn’t had to do the budget balancing that he suspected Chief Fuchs had had to contend with. And the tax base was such that money was no problem.
“We stand a chance now that you’re here,” Infantino was saying.
He suddenly turned toward the street and scanned the Southport equipment lined up against the far curb. Already men in aluminized suits were getting off the trucks. “Chief, where’s the Seagrave pumper? None of those at the curb have the capacity.”
Jorgenson looked grave. “She’ll be late. She skidded off the freeway coming in; we’ve got tow trucks trying to pull her out of the ditch now.”% “For Christ’s sakes!”
Infantino shouted. “How long is that going to take? We don’t have the time, man-we just can’t sit here and wait!”’ “I feel as bad about it as you do,” Jorgenson said.
“There’s no way of telling. Maybe in the next half hour, maybe not until morning. I didn’t stick around to see how deep she was mired in.”.1 Infantino turned away in disgust and Barton asked him, “What’s it mean,
