Forced Entry (20 page)

But he wouldn’t have any problems here. The rain had everybody running for home. Maurice turned down a ramp leading to the basement door of the Jackson Arms, a six-story apartment building on 37th Avenue. The door was open, the lock already busted out. He peered into the dimly lit interior, listening carefully. As expected, it was quiet. He could feel the quiet closing in on him. Maurice was a professional and he didn’t let himself think about fires while he worked. Each job was a series of problems. Like a crossword puzzle. It was the first thing Paul Ziff had told him about setting fires for money. You had to separate the pleasure from the work.

This building, for instance, had been built after LaGuardia had become mayor and it had a fire retardant ceiling in the basement. Ordinarily, it would take an hour for the hottest fire he could set (but not as hot as “flicking my BIC” not
that
hot) to burn through. So the first problem was how to get the smoke up into the first floor apartment where the employer wanted it. Fortunately, the landlord had redone the heat and hot water pipes sometime in the fifty years since the Jackson Arms had been built and his contractor had been sloppy, as they all were. Maurice could see light filtering down from the apartment above. The pipes would be a tunnel for smoke. They’d be the only way for the smoke to get out of the basement.

None of this was a surprise, of course. Maurice had come a week before to check it out. If the pipes hadn’t been cut through, he wouldn’t have taken the job. But there were several bonuses that he hadn’t expected. There was a bed made of two old newspaper-stuffed mattresses on the floor directly beneath the target. Most likely, the janitor used it for afternoon naps and some squatter had taken it over. There was a pile of human feces behind the burners and a faint smell of urine in the dank basement air.

Mattress fires, Maurice knew, make incredible amounts of smoke, but very little fire. Which was exactly what the employer wanted. Just a smoky fire to wake up the tenant in the apartment above. A message fire.

Maurice opened his pack and placed four small candles on the floor, lighting them and making sure they were stuck firmly to the concrete. Then he dropped the cover: a dozen crack vials (empty, of course) and as many tiny envelopes around the mattress; a pile of burnt matches; three bent teaspoons, their bottoms blackened with soot; a dozen bottlecaps; a peanut butter jar of filthy water tinted pink with his own blood. As an afterthought, he placed two syringes (well-used spikes he’d gotten from one of the shooting galleries that infested Inwood), on the mattress as a little joke. Most of the plastic would burn away, but the needles would sit in the charred mattress. Waiting for a fire marshal’s investigating fingers.

Finally, he set a candle directly on the mattress and lit it, then repacked his bag. He checked every inch of the area he’d been through, walked it back and forth to the outside door, making certain he hadn’t dropped anything. Not a lost button or a busted shoelace or
anything
. When the candle flame reached the edge of the first newspaper, he was ready to leave, but he waited a few moments, until the black smoke rose in thick clouds toward the ceiling. Just to make sure.

He did have one regret as he walked to the subway. In a quiet neighborhood like Jackson Heights, he couldn’t hang around to wait for the firemen to show up. He consoled himself by remembering that there wouldn’t be much to see, anyway. No “fried friendlies.” No “flick my BIC.” Just a lot of smoke.

T
HE DARK, OILY SMOKE
curling up into Sylvia Kaufman’s bedroom was heavy with moisture. It stunk of grease, at first, grease and human sweat, the sum total of all the bodies that had ever sunk into the ancient mattress burning on the floor of the basement, but as the smoke began to accumulate, it quickly became caustic, irritating the sleeping woman’s nose and throat. It continued to rise, of course, propelled by the heat of the naked steampipe, and might have found a way out through the poorly cut hole that allowed the steampipe to pass from the first to the second floor, but a tenant, Mathew Healy, long gone from the Jackson Arms, finding the light and noise filtering through the hole objectionable, had stuffed it with pink insulation.

The smoke, with no place to go, began to press downward again, drifting toward the old lady sleeping in her bed. Sylvia’s bed (her wedding bed) was close to the radiator, a concession to age-weakened circulation, and the first thin wisp of smoke fell directly across her throat. Then, propelled by a cooler draft pushing under the bedroom door, it moved toward the closed windows at the eastern end of the room. The windows, cold to the touch despite the presence of storm windows, chilled the warm smoke until it gave up its moisture, dropping beads of oily water onto the glass.

The smoke, lighter now, broke into four waves, running along the wall to the corners of the room, to the floor, to the ceiling. Gradually thickening, it piled up against the eastern wall, then slowly pushed back across Sylvia’s bed until, at last, it found a way out. A small gap between the top of the door and the frame sucked the warm, smoky air into the hall where it quickly rose up into the sensors of the smoke alarm.

Sylvia was dreaming of Betty Haluka and her own daughter, Marilyn, when the alarm went off. The cousins were still girls in the dream, maybe ten years old; she, herself, though she never looked in a mirror, was obviously a young woman. It must have been raining, because the children were in the house; Sylvia insisted the girls play in the fresh air when the weather was nice. In any event, Marilyn was seated at the piano, pounding out a popular tune, a Walt Disney tune, “Happy Talk,” and all three were singing.

At first, Sylvia, trying to keep the sound inside her pleasant dream, mistook the buzzing fire alarm for the doorbell. She looked to the door, willing the intruder to be her husband, but the buzzing continued long after an ordinary visitor would have released the button. Suddenly, the dream evaporating as an idea took hold of her waking mind, she knew the buzzing could only be her alarm clock, inadvertently set. Instinctively, her eyes still closed, she reached out to shut it off, pressing the correct button (she’d done it thousands of times in the course of her working life) on top of the clock, but the buzzing only grew more insistent. It demanded that she attend to it immediately, that she close it down, no matter how badly she wanted to dream.

The first thing Sylvia became aware of, upon opening her eyes, was the darkness. True, her nose and throat were sore, but the inflammation seemed no worse than the precursor of a spring cold. The pitch black was more puzzling. Exploring it, she glanced toward the windows at the eastern end of the room; they overlooked a well-lit courtyard (too well-lit for her taste) and, normally, a ribbon of light framed the shades. This morning, however, they were invisible.

Puzzled now, she began to drag herself toward full waking; she reached out blindly and snapped on the lamp by the side of her bed. The hundred-watt bulb, normally blinding if turned on before dawn, cast only a dim glow, like the sun rising into a dense fog. She stared at it for a moment, obviously confused, then, without transition, she was wide awake and her mind was screaming, “Fire.” Just the one word, endlessly drawn out. A howl of terror.

Sylvia didn’t stop to consider why there were no flames. Why there was no heat. She didn’t try to find the source of the smoke or even to assess the danger. Instead, she sat up straight, her frail body, propelled by a burst of adrenaline, rising into even thicker smoke. That same adrenaline, pounding in her chest, quickly exhausted the oxygen in her blood, forcing a deep, involuntary breath. The choking that followed drove her into panic; though fully awake, she could form no thought more coherent than the absolute compulsion to get out as quickly as possible.

To Sylvia, “out” meant through the bedroom door, down the hallway and out of the apartment. The window might have been a better bet (the fire could very well have originated in some other part of the apartment); she might, in fact, be running directly into the flames. But, choking, retching, her lungs filled with smoke, she could only formulate that single imperative—GET OUT!

Jerking herself into action (moving faster than she had in years), she tried to swing her feet over the edge of the bed, tangled her trailing foot in the blankets and fell heavily to the polished oak floor. She landed on her right hip and the sharp crack told her the bone was broken even before the pain roared up to overwhelm her fear of the smoke and fire. For a moment, she thought she was going to lose consciousness; she almost hoped for it. But the smoke was much thinner close to the floor and as she lay motionless, waiting for the pain to subside, her mind cleared and she found herself suddenly calm.

All the realizations she might have had before lifting her head from the pillow suddenly flooded Sylvias mind. There was no heat and no visible flames and she became almost certain that the fire had originated in some other part of the building, probably somewhere else in the apartment, which made the windows the only sure way out. She was lying on the floor with the bed between herself and the windows and she couldn’t see them; she would have to crawl to the foot of the bed and use the wall to guide herself to the eastern end of the apartment.

Then she realized that the windows were closed, the outer storm windows firmly in place (there hadn’t been a lot of heat lately and all the tenants were protecting themselves against drafts); she would have to stand in order to open the windows and the dull ache pulsating in her hip (and threatening to explode at the least movement) would never allow her to remain erect long enough to get through the glass. For an instant, she had a picture of herself breaking the glass with the straight-backed chair in the corner and diving through, then she rolled a few inches to the right, exerting a slight pressure on her hip, and the eruption of pain dispelled her fantasy as surely as an open window would have dispersed the smoke in her bedroom.

As Sylvia understood it, she was left with two possibilities, both clearly formed in her mind—she could chance the bedroom door or wait for rescue where she was. The telephone (how many times had she resolved to put an extension in the bedroom?) was in the hallway, on a small table about fifteen feet from the bedroom door. If she got through the door, she could pull down the telephone and call for help. In any event, she could test the door by touching it. If it was hot, there was fire behind it; if it was cool, she could open it and get out.

Not that it was going to be easy. Besides the pain (which she didn’t want to think about, not yet), there was the simple fact that she couldn’t see the door; if she took off across the carpet, searching for the shortest line, and missed, she might lose her way altogether. How, after all, would she know which side of the door she was on? No, she concluded, the only realistic way to get out was to crawl to the head of the bed, then use the wall for a guide.

That was her final decision; afterward there was only the pain to deal with. Tentatively, an inch at a time, she thrust her arms to their fullest extension, dug her fingernails into the carpet and pulled herself forward, moving a few inches before the pain, hot and thick, overwhelmed her. Instantly, she resolved to stay put, to wait for rescue and just as quickly, the pain causing her to take a sudden, deep breath, knew the smoke was thickening, that her lungs were old and fragile, that if she were to be rescued, it would have to be soon.

For a moment, as the pain subsided, she listened for the sound of fire engines, for the pounding of the sirens (which no longer screamed, as they had for most of her life, but now sounded like a ship’s foghorn). She heard nothing, not even the crackling of the fire, but her coughing diminished until she was able to maintain herself by pressing her mouth close to the carpet and sipping at the air. That was enough, for the time being.

After several moments, a new idea, a very foreign thought from her point of view, began to filter into Sylvia’s mind. She began to think that she might die. That night, in her own bedroom. The idea frightened her more than the fire. She had spent much of her working life in neighborhoods that terrified other New Yorkers; many times, over the years, she’d faced down adolescent students who were quite capable of attack, who wouldn’t hesitate to pick up a weapon if one were handy. She’d refused to allow herself to be intimidated. Never. Not once had she let fear control her actions; if she did, she knew, she would never have found the courage to go back.

But fear of pain was different; one stood up before a blow was struck in order to prevent the blow. The only preventable aspect of this situation was pain. Or, just possibly, she had to admit, death. Death might be preventable if there was no fire on the other side of her bedroom door. Or if she could bear the pain. She tried to sense the smoke without breathing it, to determine if it was getting worse, but all she could decide was that her eyes were burning and she could breathe if she was careful not to raise her head.

She lay still for several, seemingly infinite moments, drifting back and forth between the two courses of action, until a third possibility, a possibility so simple she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it (as usual, the word Alzheimer crossed her mind, as it always did when she was careless or forgetful); she’d simply pull herself as far as she could. If she didn’t make the door, she’d be no worse off, even if she lost consciousness. The smoke, she was now convinced,
was
growing thicker. If she waited much longer she’d be too weak to try. She summoned up every bit of her resolve, all the intention that had so characterized her life, and began to move. Careful to keep her weight over her left hip, she again dug her nails into the carpet, pulling herself toward the head of the bed, toward a hole surrounding a steampipe, toward a cloud of black, oily smoke.

She managed to move the length of her body before the rising heat brought her to a halt. The smoke was much worse here, but it could be getting worse throughout the room. The heat, on the other hand, was definitely a new phenomenon. Somehow, though she couldn’t see any flames, she was drawing closer to the source of the smoke. The puzzle intrigued her momentarily, enabling her to ignore the pain in her nose and throat, then she realized the only possible explanation. The fire was in the basement; the smoke was coming up from the basement. There was no flame because of steel plates in the basement ceiling (there wasn’t supposed to be any smoke, either), but the smoke must be coming up through a hole in the floor.