Had he expected this kind of shakedown? Paul asked ! himself. Probably, he thought, because he felt no sense of outrage or shock, merely determination that the bargain would be a good one. He had no doubt of his ability to out-haggle this little man. “How much?” he said.
Harris was smiling again. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Paul went up the stairs alone. Down in the game room the television set was again turned on, Harris engrossed in the unfolding tragedy. To Mrs. Harris, who had taken out her blue hair curlers and now smiled fetchingly, “You have a lovely home,” Paul said.
“Why, thank you, thanks a lot.” There was genuine pleasure.
“Pat,” Paul said, “is a lucky man.”
As he drove away, a black-and-white police cruiser turned the corner toward the Harris home. Paul watched it in his mirror. It parked at the curb facing the wrong way, and two uniformed policemen got out and walked up to the Harrises’ door.
Paul drove on.
19
Within the building’s core, as in a chimney, heated air rising created its own draft, which sucked fresh air in through open concourse doors.
Outside the city’s tallest fire ladders maneuvered uselessly; the problem was within, not without.
On floor after floor, above and below street level, sweating, panting, coughing, and sometimes vomiting firemen wrestled hoses and hurled water, tons of water, at the sometimes seen, but usually hidden enemy—fire.
In a thousand points within the walls of the building, ten thousand, material smoldered or burst into hesitant flame, grew in force and fury, or faded into mere glow and then nothingness from lack of oxygen.
But where, for example, plastic-foam insulation had melted, flues were formed and in them a new chimney effect reached down and out into open halls and corridors for fresh air to feed the blaze, and the growing flames themselves added strength to the draft.
Firemen Denis Howard and Lou Storr paused on the sixtieth floor. They stood for a time gasping, merely existing, while their lungs poured oxygen into their blood and strength gradually returned to their bodies. They looked at each other in silence.
It was Howard who approached the fire door, tried it, and found it free. He opened it cautiously and, as a blast of furnace air enveloped him, had a look inside. Then he shut the door quickly. “Let’s go,” he said.
Storr opened his mouth. He shut it again. Slowly he nodded. “Might as well.” He paused. “Excelsior and all that jazz.”
In the trailer Patty turned from the telephone and held out a slip of paper to Lieutenant Potter. “John Connors,” she said. “He worked on the job months back. A sheet-metal man.” She paused. “He was fired.” She paused again. “The union made no protest.”
The last sentence said a great deal, Nat thought. The firing was clearly justified or the union would have been up in arms. But what did that mean, except that John Connors had obviously been found wanting in some respect? There was no point in probing further into the circumstances of the firing. Connors himself had to be the answer to the question of why he had come to the building today and done what he had.
Potter saw it the same way. “A sorehead?” he said. “Maybe. You never know how deep resentment goes.” Patty was looking out the trailer windows at the plaza, the dirty shimmering water now covering almost the entire area, the hoses like spaghetti, the pumping engines, and the crowds watching. “But,” she said, “to do what he did?” Her tone was incredulous. She turned to face the two men.
Potter shrugged. “You never know.” He tucked the slip of paper in his pocket. “We’ll try to find out.”
Patty said, “Why?” Her chin was up. “It’s done. It can’t be undone. And the man is dead.”
“Let’s say,” Potter said, “that we like things neat and tidy.”
Nat, watching Patty, found himself thinking that there was bulldog in her, more than a trace of her father’s stubborn pride. He thought of Bert McGraw and the mobster forty-five floors above the street, a showdown just as relentless and irrevocable as any scene in a Western. There was no give in Bert; there was none in Patty either.
“There has to be more to it than that,” Patty said. Potter sighed. “There is, of course. From each of these—things we try to learn. Maybe some day we’ll know enough to stop crimes before they get started.” His smile was deprecatory, aimed inward at his own foolishness. “That will be a day.” He walked to the trailer door, opened it, and started out. Then he stopped and turned. “Luck,” he said, and was gone. .
At the far end of the trailer a walkie-talkie came to life. “Seventy-fifth floor,” a tired voice said, “and it’s getting hotter than the hinges, Chief. No smoke up here yet, but I hate to think what’s happening beyond these fire doors.”
“Play it cool, boy,” the chief said. “If you can’t make it, you can’t make it.”
Nat saw Assistant Commissioner Brown open his mouth and then close it again in silence. The battalion chief saw it too, and his jaw set in rising anger. “I’ll not deliberately throw good men away in a lost cause,” he said, “no matter who is up in that building.” Commissioner Brown nodded wearily.
Nat said, “Are you sure it’s a lost cause?”
“No, I’m not, and neither can you be sure it isn’t. Inside the fire doors of that building we’ve worked men up twelve floors with hoses.” The chief paused. “Near as we can tell there are a hundred more floors, each with their own fires, before the top is even in sight. I’ve spent twenty-five years learning my trade—”
“Nobody questions that you know it well, Jim,” the assistant commissioner said, and there was temporary silence.
“Another thing,” the battalion chief said, speaking still to Nat, “that electrical genius of yours. Drawing pretty pictures about how you string a wire here and a wire there and, lo and behold, an express elevator suddenly works.”
“You don’t think so?” Nat said.
“No, I don’t think so!” It was almost a shout. Then, in a weary quiet voice, “But I’m willing to try rockets if anybody thinks they’d have the chance of a snowball in Hell.”
The chief was silent for a few moments before he turned to look at the assistant commissioner. “You haven’t said it yet, Tim, but you’ve been thinking it and I can’t blame you. My district—just how in hell could a thing like this happen? We’ve got a building code. It isn’t perfect, but it’s too good to let this happen. For five—six years this building has been under construction in front of God and everybody, with inspectors and my people and heaven only knows who else watching every step.” He stopped and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
The assistant commissioner looked at Nat. “You seem to know more about it than anybody else,” he said, and left it there, implied accusation plain.
His first reaction was resentment; with effort Nat stifled it. He said slowly, carefully, “I’m beginning to find out some things about it, maybe put some of them together, not that that helps what you’re trying to do.”
Brown walked to the trailer windows and looked out, up. “If you didn’t build them so goddam big,” he said. There was anger in his voice, the anger of helplessness. He turned from the windows. “What in hell are you trying to prove anyway?”
“That,” Nat said slowly, “is a good question. I don’t know the answer.”
“I think we’ve outsmarted ourselves,” Brown said. “You know what I mean?” He walked to a chair and plumped himself down, a sad, helpless, angry man. “Look. I was born and grew up in a little town upstate. Tallest building in the county was two stories not counting widow’s walks—no, the four-story Empire State Hotel over in the county seat. We had streams. With fish in them. And I can still taste the water that came out of our well.”