Holy Terror (32 page)

‘Whatever,' the young man told them.

‘Nice to know we have an understanding. Now, what are we going to do, Captain O'Neil?'

‘We're going to go up to 525. Where's the fire alarm on that floor?'

‘Right at the end of the corridor,' said the young
man, sweating and visibly shaking, ‘Next to the ice-making machine.'

‘OK … you'll hear the alarm go off, but there won't be any fire. You understand me? You don't have to evacuate rooms, you don't have to panic. All you have to do is call the fire department and tell them that you're experiencing a false alarm. Some drunken guest, something like that.'

‘I got it. Whatever you say.'

John Convertino added, ‘You won't try to call the cops. In fact, you won't call nobody. You'll stay here and act as normal as you can, which by the look of you isn't very normal.'

The young man dumbly and violently nodded his head.

‘Let's go,' said Conor. ‘Frank – can you stay down here and watch the door. That's what you're good at. Anybody tries to get in here, delay them, OK?'

‘You got it, Captain O'Neil.'

As they walked toward the elevator, Conor thought how incongruous it was, not only to be walking in the company of wise guys, but to be addressed by his former rank in the police department, not sarcastically, in the way that Drew Slyman did it, but with respect.

They crowded into the elevator and waited while it chugged up to the fifth floor. The light-bulb was on the fritz and it flickered like a strobe. ‘So what's this all about?' asked Tony Luca. ‘How come these guys are holding your old lady?'

‘It's a long story. But believe me, they're going to pay for it.'

‘You know what, Luigi used to have a contract out
on you once, captain. Quarter of a million bucks. Just think about it, if I'd whacked you, I could be in Florida now, sitting on the beach, instead of doing this?'

‘You'd hate Florida. You try getting a decent
maccheroncini alla saffi
in Fort Lauderdale.'

The elevator arrived at the fifth floor. The corridor was narrow and dimly lit and drab, with a patterned olive-green carpet that looked as if it had been salvaged from a fire-damage sale. There were framed prints all the way along the walls like the Stations of the Cross, except that these were photographs of various heavyweight boxing matches at Madison Square Garden, Primo Camera and Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, mountainous men in voluminous boxing shorts. Most of the photographs were blotched with damp.

They reached 525. ‘Quiet now,' Conor cautioned. ‘They're not expecting us. I don't want them getting jumpy.'

Without a word, Tony Luca and John Convertino took out their guns. They were so huge that Conor couldn't think how they had kept them concealed: a .357 Magnum revolver and a .44 automatic. The corridor smelled of mold and gun oil and danger. Conor reached around and pulled out the Browning that Luigi had left on the kitchen table at Bleecker Street. He had also left a note: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better to you than light and safer than a known way.' Deep man, Luigi Guttuso, Conor had thought, as he checked that the automatic's clip was full.

He took Sebastian's mobile phone out of his shirt pocket and pressed out the number for the Madison Square Marquis. After a few moments the spotty young man answered and Conor said, in a whining voice, Tut me through to five two five, will you?'

There was a crackling pause. Then Conor heard Victor Labrea's voice on the phone.

‘Yeah, what is it?' Labrea demanded, as if he had his attention on something else altogether.

Conor kept up the whining voice. ‘I don't wish to alarm you, sir, but we have a small fire emergency in the hotel and I must ask you to vacate your room immediately and make your way to the stairway which you will find situated at the end of the corridor on your right-hand side.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said, the hotel is on fire, sir, and you must leave your room at once. Make your way to the fire escape at the end of the corridor on—'

‘Who is this?' Labrea demanded, suspiciously.

‘Desk clerk, sir.'

‘Desk clerk, hunh? And you're trying to tell me this hotel is on fire?'

‘That's right, sir. It's on the third floor, directly beneath you. We have to evacuate the entire hotel immediately.'

There was silence. Conor could almost hear Labrea thinking. ‘Sir—' he began. But then the door to room 525 opened up, and he and Luigi Guttuso's men flattened themselves against the wall It opened only on the security chain, however, and was held open, and it was obvious that whoever had opened it was listening, and listening, and then Conor heard
two or three deep sniffs, too. A few more seconds passed, and then the door was closed.

‘Sir—' Conor repeated.

‘I don't hear nobody else leaving their rooms,' said Labrea. ‘I don't hear no fire alarm and I don't smell no smoke.'

‘Well, sir, it's only a small fire. But we're concerned that it might get out of control.'

‘You've called 911?'

‘Sure. They should be here any minute.'

‘I don't hear no sirens.'

‘You're sure you don't hear sirens?' said Conor, in a flat, expressionless tone.

‘What the hell are you talking about? Of course I don't.'

‘You're sure you don't smell smoke? Remember all those times when you've smelled smoke before. All those burned-out buildings.'

Labrea sounded baffled. ‘I know what smoke smells like, for Christ's sake.'

‘Yes – and you can smell it now, can't you? You can smell smoke and you're worried that the hotel is on fire. You have an overwhelming urge to leave the room.'

‘I can smell smoke. You're right. I
can
smell smoke.'

There was a critical moment when Conor thought that he almost had him. But then he heard somebody else in the room say, ‘Mr Labrea? What's the matter with you? What are you talking about? There isn't any smoke!'

Labrea hesitated; and then he said to Conor, ‘I don't know what kind of a stunt you're trying to pull,
Mr Desk Clerk or whoever you are, but me and my friends are staying put.'

‘Sir – I have to warn you—' Conor said, but Labrea hung up.

‘What was that all about?' asked John Convertino.

‘I was trying to hypnotize him into believing that the place was on fire.'

‘
Hypnotize him
, for crying out loud?'

‘Say what you like, it nearly worked. The trouble was, one of his pals interrupted me and broke his trance. That's why it's difficult to induce hypnosis over the telephone. You don't have any control over anybody else – only the person you're talking to.'

‘So what now?'

‘Plan B, and quick. We make him believe there's a fire by starting a fire. Tony – do you want to get me that chair from the end of the corridor. And your big friend here – what's his name?'

‘Bruno,' said the man with the flattened face, obviously irritated that Conor had asked Tony Luca instead of him.

‘I'm sorry, Bruno. But here's what I want you to do. You see that fire alarm down there? When I give you the signal I want you to break the glass and set it off.'

‘Fine by me,' said Bruno.

Tony Luca brought the chair back and Conor set it right outside the door to 525. It was a plain black metal-tube chair with a red padded vinyl seat. Without being asked, John Convertino took out a butane lighter and handed it over. Conor struck it and turned the flame up full Then he played the
flame along the edge of the seat, and underneath it, too.

The vinyl shrank like burning skin. Beneath it was gray foam rubber, which flared up almost immediately, and began to pour out thick black choking smoke. Like all the furniture and fittings in the Madison Square Marquis, it had probably been made long before fire regulations insisted on flame-resistant plastics.

As soon as the chair-seat was blazing, Conor gave Bruno a thumbs-up signal and Bruno smashed his elbow into the glass of the fire-alarm box. Instantly, the corridor was filled with a harsh shrilling, and Frank Garibaldi clamped his hands over his ears. The alarm didn't seem to disturb any of the hotel's other guests, however, if there were any. Neither did the rapidly thickening smoke. No doors opened, no anxious faces looked out.

‘Jesus,' shouted Conor. ‘If this was a real fire—'

‘They're out of it,' John Convertino shouted back. ‘They're on the nod. Crack or smack or Thunderbird Red. If this was a real fire, they'd all be burned alive.'

Tony Luca leaned close to him and said, ‘You remember the Dauphin Hotel in Chelsea? Seventeen adults cremated, two babies. The Dauphin – that was one of the reasons that Luigi gave up torching hotels.'

Conor stared at him. Three of his detectives had worked with fire department special investigators for seven months to find out who had set fire to the Dauphin Hotel, and no arrests had been made. Yet here was John Convertino calmly admitting
that it was Luigi Guttuso who had ordered it.

A terrible truth struck him. John Convertino and Tony Luca and Frank Garibaldi and Bruno with the flattened face were quite unworried about discussing their criminal activities with him because they now regarded him as one of them.

Tony Luca said, ‘Jesus, look at this smoke. This Labrea guy's going to
have
to believe us now.'

Conor coughed and held his hand over his face. ‘Don't breathe too much of this stuff. Hydrochloric cyanide. Kills more people than the fire itself.' The chair-seat was still burning and globs of flaming plastic were dropping onto the brown nylon carpet below. That began to smolder, too, much more quickly than Conor would have expected.

He could see the smoke being sucked under the door of room 525. The alarm bell was still clamoring, so loudly that it began to take on waves and patterns in Conor's ears. But the door remained shut, and when Conor tried to call Labrea again he didn't pick up.

‘I can't believe it,' said Tony Luca. ‘If I was in there, I wouldn't be in there. I'd be running for the fire exit by now.'

‘Don't underestimate this man,' said Conor. ‘I put a gun to his head and he didn't even flinch.'

Tony Luca wrapped a silk handkerchief around the lower part of his face. Over the noise of the alarm, Frank Garibaldi shouted, ‘Hey, Tony! You look like a bank robber!' which wasn't especially funny because it was true.

The carpet began to char more fiercely, glittering with tiny orange sparks and shedding dense black
smoke. ‘Bruno,' said Conor. ‘You'd better bring us that fire extinguisher before this gets out of hand.'

‘Yeah, sure thing,' said Bruno, and went shambling off along the corridor again, coughing.

Conor and Tony Luca and John Convertino waited tensely for the door to open. Conor said, ‘Let them all rush out – all of them. Don't give any one of them the chance to duck back in the room.'

John Convertino nodded, his eyes reddened and watering over his handkerchief.

Somewhere, an elevator door was opened, and a sudden rush of air came along the corridor. It wasn't very much, but it provided enough oxygen for the carpet to flare up. Its glue backing acted as an accelerator, and flames began to sprout all along the wall, like flowers blooming in a speeded-up nature documentary.

Conor beckoned Bruno to hurry up with the fire extinguisher. He pulled the safety pin, unhooked the hose, pointed it down at the base of the fire, and squeezed. Two or three drips of water fell onto the floor.

‘Terrific,' said John Convertino. ‘Now what do we do? Stay here and choke to death?'

‘Yeah, I mean this was a really good plan, man,' Tony Luca told Conor. ‘You set fire to the whole goddamned hotel and what happens? Labrea doesn't come out, a hundred people get burned to death, you don't get your girlfriend back, and the only person who benefits out of this is probably the owner, because he's been dying to burn it down for years.'

Further along the corridor, a single door opened, and a thin, bewildered-looking young man with
scarecrow hair came staggering out. He looked left, then he looked right. He was swaying so wildly that Conor thought he might fall over. The air from his room fanned the flames even higher. He blinked, breathed in a lungful of smoke, coughed, and then he went back inside, colliding with the door-frame as he did so.

‘Hey!' Conor called. ‘There's a fire! You need to get yourself out of here!'

The scarecrow teetered out again and stared at him, trying to focus through the smoke, trying to work out who was shouting at him and what they had said. Then he staggered back into his room again and slammed the door.

‘I'm going to have to call the fire department,' said Conor. ‘This is out of control.'

‘In that case, we're going to have to get the hell out of here,' said John Convertino, urgently. ‘I'm not being collared for torching a tenth-rate firetrap like this, especially since I didn't even do it.'

Conor couldn't believe how rapidly the fire was taking hold. He had attended fire department training sessions and he knew just how voracious fire could be. But he had reckoned without the highly inflammable materials which lined the corridors of the Madison Square Marquis – the carpet adhesives and the wax polishes and the varnish on the plywood wall-cladding. The styrofoam ceiling tiles which could give off gases that were deadlier than Zyklon-B. One lungful and you were history.

He beat on the door of room 525. ‘Fire! You have to get out of there now!'

Still there was no reply. Tony Luca and John
Convertino were growing increasingly twitchy, their guns pointing at the door but their eyes darting nervously along the corridor.

‘Come on, man, this isn't going to work,' said Tony Luca. ‘The cops and the fire department are going to be here at any minute.'