“Thanks much,” Nat said. He made himself smile. It was a grimace. “But from here on I fight my fires in forests.”
“Are you all right?” This was Patty, whom Nat had not even noticed.
He noticed her now, small, bright, at the moment concerned, genuinely concerned. Why? “Fine,” Nat said. “Soon as I get my breath.”
“You look,” Patty said, “as Daddy used to say, like something dredged up out of the East River.” She showed him an unsteady smile.
Brown said, “What about the elevator?”
Nat gestured wearily. “It may work. They’re going to try it.” There was no other way. Unless—“The Coast Guard is taking its time,” he said.
Giddings came up the steps. Seeing him, Nat got some idea of how he himself looked. Giddings’s face was freckled white where the mask had been. His forehead was black and soot colored his hair. His corduroy jacket was sodden and streaked. “What’s funny?” Giddings said.
“A couple of chimney sweeps,” Nat said, grinning still.
“And sweeps,” Patty said, “are lucky as lucky can be. We’ll hold that thought.” And pray, for luck in all directions, she told herself. Wherever you are, Daddy, Godspeed!
Brown said, “Well?”
“If it goes,” Giddings said, “it won’t stop until the Tower Room unless—” He shrugged. “Oh, hell, unless almost anything. But the point is that we won’t even know it’s gotten there unless they tell us. Better get on the horn.” He and Brown and the two chiefs moved toward the telephone.
Patty said softly, “Nat.” What compelled her to this? Mere loneliness? She had no idea, but neither had she the strength to resist. “He’s gone, Nat. Daddy. As big and strong as he was, he’s—”
“I’m sorry.” Nat took both of her small clean hands in his own. He looked at the results in dismay. “I’m sorry about that too.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Patty made no effort to take her hands away. “Mother called. She saw him, but—he—didn’t—know—her! ”
Nat squeezed the small hands. “Easy. Easy.” What else was there to say? I’m no good at this kind of thing, he thought; all I know is things, not people. “I’m sorry,” he said again. The words were inane.
Patty had caught her lower lip between her teeth. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them, they were bright but not tear-filled. “I’m okay.” She paused. “Paul,” she said then in a different voice.
“What about him?”
Patty drew a deep unsteady breath. “I told Daddy at lunch about Paul and Zib. I’m sorry, but I told him I was leaving Paul and I had to give a reason.”
Nat squeezed the small hands again. “Of course.” But where was pain in the knowledge, the concept that he had been cuckolded? Hadn’t he cared to begin with? All along had he been fooling himself that he and Zib had what he had always thought of as a marriage when all the time it was merely a legal shakeup, no strings attached?
“Paul saw him after that,” Patty said. “Paul was there when he had his attack.” She was silent, watching Nat’s face.
At the far end of the trailer the four men were clustered around the telephone. There were voices, words unintelligible. Here in a little area of isolation there was silence. Nat said slowly, “What are you saying, Patty?”
“Daddy being Daddy,” Patty said, “he braced Paul with Zib. Isn’t that how it had to be? Isn’t it?” She paused. “And what do you think Paul would have said?” She paused, and then gave her own answer. “That you and I were rolling in the hay too. Just to get even. Being Paul.” The silence surrounded them and time seemed to stand still. “I don’t know,” Nat said. But he did know. Paul being Paul—there was the operative phrase. “I don’t know much about people,” Nat said. “Why not give him the benefit of the doubt?”
Patty’s head was shaking slowly. Her chin was set. “If that is how it was,” she said, “then he killed Daddy.” She paused. Her hands in Nat’s were tensed. “And if I get the chance,” she said, “I’ll kill him. So help me.”
Nat said quickly, “Patty—” He stopped.
Brown’s voice was saying into the telephone, “You’re sure? Goddammit, man, make sure!” He spoke to Giddings and the two battalion chiefs. “He thinks the elevator has gotten there. Thinks!” And then, again into the phone, “It is sure? Yes, Governor? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” A pause. “Yes, sir. We’ll hang on.” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “The elevator got there. They’re working the doors open now. How about that?” He looked the length of the trailer at Nat. “Now we can forget that breeches buoy nonsense.”
Nat hesitated. Here, at least, he thought, he was dealing with a matter he could judge with some competence. “No,” he said. “If the elevator works, fine. But let’s have a backup, just in case.”
21
Windows in the northeast quadrant on the sixty-second floor of the building were the first to shatter from heat. Heavy shards of the tempered tinted glass sprang out from the building as if from an explosion, glistened like icicles in their long fall, and crashed into the plaza. The crowd squealed and shrieked in its excitement.
“Move those barricades back!” a bullhorn shouted. “Back, goddammit!”
Patrolman Shannon put his hand to his cheek and stared unbelieving at the blood that instantly covered his palm and dripped between his fingers.
Barnes whipped out his handkerchief. He wadded it against the long clean cut. “Hold it tight, Mike, and head for that ambulance. You’ll need stitches.”
“Do you think,” Shannon said, irrepressible, “that there’ll be a Purple Heart in it, Frank? I’ve always longed to be a wounded hero.”
“You have your wish.” Barnes set about helping to move the crowd back out of apparent range.
The signs had disappeared from the plaza, but in the building’s torment the Reverend Joe Willie Thomas saw opportunity for a message:
“It is the will of the Lord!” he shouted in that revivalist voice. “It is just retribution! Wickedness and waste, hand-in-hand, cheek-by-jowl, Sodom and Gomorrah repeated, I say!”
There were those who thought the comparisons apt.
In the plaza air there was a taste of ashes. Puddles of water on the pavement had spread into ponds, their surfaces dull with soot.
High up, impossibly high, near the building’s gleaming tower, smoke roiled into the sky. Lower, on the opposite side of the building, more smoke oozed out and, wind-driven, curled around the structure like a smothering cloak.
Smoke still poured out of the concourse doors, but its quantity was lessened. Many in the crowd thought that the fire was being contained. It was not.
“Sooner or later,” a Pine Street insurance underwriter in the crowd said, “it had to happen. I don’t want to be quoted on that, but there it is. And, thank Heaven, we are not involved.”
“Rates will have to go up.”
The underwriter nodded. “No question. Losses have to be covered.”
“What about the people up there?”
“That,” the underwriter said, “is a good question. I don’t know the answer. We insure things, not people.”
22
The office off the Tower Room was again the command post, and the governor dominated the room. “What is the elevator capacity? Maximum? Even overloaded?”
Ben Caldwell said, “Fifty-five persons is the rated load. Another ten, perhaps, could be squeezed in.”
“They will be,” the governor said. He paused. He smiled then, without amusement. “Traditionally,” he said, “women and children are first. Does anyone see a reason to flout tradition?”