On the Nickel (29 page)

‘Man, is a bear Catholic? Look, if your folks can get inside the hotel, there's a black policewoman in the lobby who's injured. Possibly shot.'

‘Do you know where she is in the lobby, sir?'

He noticed that the man's voice didn't even betray a hitch at the word ‘shot.' How could you become that inured to catastrophe? He shook Gloria's shoulder to call her to full consciousness. ‘Where do you think Paula is?'

She came around, barely, and he felt the weight against him lessen. ‘Near the basement door, behind the counter.'

He repeated it.

‘Stay on the line, sir. I'm going to hand you over to firefighter Willie Stone while I attend to things. You're in good hands. Is that OK with you?'

‘Go, go!'

‘Hello, sir.'

‘Hello, Willie. How come you're expendable?'

The man laughed once. ‘I'm a rookie, but my dad was a big fire hero so they keep me close to the captain. And I know what I'm doing. Who are you?'

‘My name is Jack, and I've got four other people up here that I'm responsible for: a teenage boy, two very old men and a police officer who's my wife and who's nearly unconscious with injury. Tell me the truth about the chopper.'

There was the tiniest of hesitations. ‘Aerial won't be back, sir. Not with a twenty-meter plume of flame shooting out of the roof. Sorry, Jack, the Fortnum looks like a birthday cake from hell. But it's all defined procedure now. We've got you. It's a toss-up whether Westlake Number Eleven from Seventh and Union, or Chinatown Number Four from North Main will get there first to replace the defective truck. They're both less than a mile away and coming like hell on their sirens. They'll be there damn fast, I promise you.'

He could hear the wails approaching. ‘Have you got guys inside yet?'

‘Yes, just now. Tommy Smiley from Station Number Nine with a full silver firesuit and oxygen.'

A mist began wafting across the roof and then a steadier patter, plopping down on them. ‘Whoa, we got water here.'

‘Good. You'll get more, sir.'

And as he said it, the artificial rain redoubled.

‘I suppose that's reassuring,' Jack Liffey said dubiously.

‘Yes, sir.' The man didn't add, ‘That's probably all it's good for,' but Jack Liffey could sense that's what he was thinking.

The water streams arcing down at several points couldn't do anything about the superhot flare in the middle of the roof, steaming away to nothing as they approached it, but he noticed that where water pattered down on the tarpaper nearby it was starting to boil off to a fog, and he felt the roof getting tacky under his shoes.

Then the water began to splash heavily on to them and became a little unpleasant.

‘You got an ETA for those ladder trucks?' Jack Liffey asked.

But Willie Stone was apparently otherwise occupied, though the phone crackled as if the line was still open.

‘I'm a narc!' Thibodeaux shouted, as they surrounded him. ‘You're all in real trouble now!'

‘Man, you're so fulla shit your eyes are brown.'

‘I'm going to set off a grenade and take you all to hell with me!'

A man named G-dog tripped him from behind and several of them pinned the minuscule white man down to the street against his desperate thrashing.

‘Listen up, assclown, you nothing at all!' G-Dog shouted in his face. ‘Stay the fuck still.'

Two police officers were striding their way toward them – Smarty and Pantsy, as they were known locally, but not to their faces. Chopper Tyrus was sitting on the curb, holding his stomach and arm where he'd been stabbed, and he was moaning a little, but he didn't appear to be bleeding badly. A middle-aged woman held out with two fingers the large knife someone had grabbed from Thibodeaux – as if it were a dead rodent.

‘Officers! That there's the cutter who attacked us. You gots to take him.'

‘Stop writing now, Conor! You have to pay attention to what's happening right here!' He wasn't actually writing. Jack Liffey grabbed the small black notebook out of his hand as he seemed to be contemplating tossing it toward the pillar of flame.

Ironically, he came near doing the same thing out of pique. But he hesitated, with a glance at the boy, as if to check whether he was worthy. The whole world around them was transforming into a miasma of hot fog.

‘I'm sorry, sir. I'm a bad accident, I think. Go on and throw it in the fire. It's valueless.'

He tucked the notebook into his pocket with a grimace. ‘Maybe everybody deserves to try to be known.'

Moses Vartabedian had finally managed to get the smeary little sash window in his supply room to stutter up eighteen inches, and his chin rested on the sill, his eyes fixed on the scene outside – a single towering flame rising off the roof and more fire down at street level. The blaze was obviously well on its way to consuming any hope for a Fortnum Luxury Lofts, the heart of the new arts downtown. The rear of a big firetruck was visible peeking around the building from San Julian and fire hoses seemed to be having little effect.

He watched the tiny moving figures on the roof of his dying hotel with the water streams playing over them. The instant he'd first seen those human apostrophes in obvious danger, he knew he was utterly ruined. Every dark alley of his thought process yawned open. His building as good as gone. Journalists would be after him. Detectives at his door. Maybe even off to prison for hiring those two sad sacks.

He had no doubts, really, no rationales to struggle with any more. McCall and Thibodeaux had gone apeshit over there for some reason – predictably, he supposed, but expressly against orders. Yet who in the press or the D.A's office was going to take the side of an Armenian slumlord? A man with far more money in the bank than any of them had.
Look here, people, a prime example of immigrant greed.
And he'd contributed to them all, too – election years, public record – so they'd be forced to make an example of him to exonerate themselves.

All he'd ever wanted to do was his part to make the city better and more habitable, more beautiful, one or two buildings at a time. It did no favor to the homeless to bottle them all up in that one sewer of neglect, and certainly did no favor to the city. The Nickel. Skid Row. He hated those expressions. The New Arts District was what it would be. It was just starting to happen and would come to fruition one day, but without him now, he knew that.

‘They're here!' Jack Liffey yelled.

As fate would have it, both the replacement ladder trucks arrived at the same moment and began to defer like mad to one another – Alphonse and Gaston – but finally one conceded the game and the other one backed up to another flank of the building. None too soon. The blowtorch flame had been carving the roof outward minute by minute despite all the water pouring onto it. One section of roof toward the far edge had caved in and was leaking ugly black smoke. They hugged one another in the artificial rain and fog, their immediate world getting very warm and humid.

‘Willie! Willie Stone!' Jack Liffey called into the cell phone.

‘I'm here, Jack. Sorry – had to check in.'

‘Look, I've got two very old men up here and a woman with a broken ankle.' Gloria opened one eye to his statement and he waved her quiet. ‘What can you do for me?'

‘I can't send you a chopper now, no shit, man. That's in the protocol. I can send you some gorillas strong enough to carry anyone down a ladder.'

Jack Liffey thought of trying to carry Gloria himself, and he knew damn well he couldn't. You can't save the world by yourself, and sometimes you can't even save a small part of it.

‘Send the gorillas,' he said.

T
he next time he looked down, both ladder trucks had outriggers planted, and one ladder was already on its way up toward him like an arm reaching slowly for something on the top shelf. Several other firetrucks were parked anyhow and they still emitted scurrying men in yellow overcoats who were carrying big sacks and cases of unidentifiable apparatus. Jack Liffey took a few steps and felt the tar underfoot suck and grab at his feet.

‘I feel like this all happened before,' the boy said, staring down at the ladder trucks.

‘It did,' Jack Liffey said. ‘Just not to us.' Something made him think,
I need to calculate time differently now, or the night will be made horrible with our cries.
‘Gloria goes first, carried down,' he announced.

He could tell she was about to demur.

‘You're hurt. We've got to get you out of our way. Go with it now, there's too many people to argue!'

She seemed to give up and withdraw into herself again. It was as if she drew in all slack, all softness, gathered it into a hardened unresponsive core. He was not even sure whether it was something she was actually doing or some warp of his own consciousness under the influence of his fear.

He did his best not to look at the biblical pillar of fire that was so loud now it made them shout to be heard. Look or not, it warmed their backs and sides unpleasantly and filled the air with the tang of asphalt and char. The last time he'd had a peek, the flame had gnawed itself a dramatically larger vent and was apparently spreading through something stored in the attic or whatever lay directly beneath them. And now the roof trembled underfoot like an endless subway train.

Abruptly the top of the first fire ladder appeared, bristling with hose attachments, lamps and strange sockets. It poked up over the parapet and then stopped at eye level, swaying in mid-air, the periscope-weapon of a movie alien come to visit.

He glanced down quickly and two big men were scrambling up the ladder fast, tugging themselves along by the handrails. The lead guy was black, still a bit unusual in the fire department as far as he'd seen. The second ladder was about halfway up and coming. At last, at last.

Heat welled around them, plus unendurable bellowy noise. He could barely rip his feet out of the tar. Jack Liffey held on hard to whatever composure he could muster, but he was starting to lose his focus.

‘So,
nu,
I suppose we trust this
shtarker
?'

Jack Liffey looked at the two old men, who had touchingly linked their arms, obviously very frightened, waiting trustingly in front of him. ‘Stand right here. You're number two, and you're third, after Gloria.'

‘Oy,
you're right but you're wrong.'

‘No arguments.'

‘No but yes.'

Chopper Tyrus sat straight up, holding his gut and wondering if he'd been forgotten. It wouldn't have surprised him. Luckily the bleeding seemed to have slowed to a slow seep. Nearby, the cops had taken over wrestling with the strange little white man, who was bucking and screaming about his inalienable rights, and most everybody else was watching with more fret than satisfaction. MaryLou was still trying to interest the police in the knife, like a vendor with a day-late fish.

‘Today is my birthday,' Chopper said, bemused, to the dark empty air.

‘Birthdays ain't what they used to be,' a man he didn't know commented with a wry twist of his lips.

‘Yes, friend, I believe that a true statement.' He heard a siren, and his practiced ear could tell that this one was an ambulance. He felt a sense of relief. A night or two in a real bed up in County, real food, attended by kindly women.

‘Hey, could one o' you gents look after my stuffs? I think I go away for a time. It right back there in the blue condo.'

‘Chopper, man, I look after it for you. You know me, Jonas. But you been saved by the blood of the lamb?'

He could see that Gloria was doing her best to tolerate the classic fireman's carry, lying head forward across the big black man's shoulder, one of his arms bunching up her skirt across the inside of her right knee as his hand came around front to hold her right wrist. So encumbered, he backed expertly down the ladder, sliding his free hand in fits and grabs. Before giving in to her pain, she had glanced up for an instant at Jack Liffey. It only took that instant to read:
You will never mention this to any of my colleagues, under the very worst of penalties.

A second big fireman had snapped, ‘I'm Don, come closer.' He stabbed a control box into one of the receptacles at the top end of the ladder as if he were angry at it.

‘We're only allowed five hundred pounds on the ladder at a time and were almost there now,' Don explained, mostly to Jack Liffey. ‘But we can't wait.' Nobody needed to mention that the fire had noisily engulfed more than half the roof. The fireman had spun off his big yellow coat and was letting the others shelter from the heat behind it. As he used his controls to manipulate the ladder to angle down to rest against the masonry, he shouted to Jack Liffey, ‘I'll brace it and take a chance. Bring me one now.'

The second ladder was just appearing, rearing its own movie alien face a few yards away.

Jack Liffey shoved Morty Lipman at the fireman.

Lipman's eyes went wide as the big man swung him bodily through the air and deposited him on the ladder. ‘Go down as fast as you can, man! If you hang us up, I'll kick you off!'

They all knew he wouldn't, but Lipman started down as if bee-stung, clamping his eyes shut against panic. It wasn't the way Jack Liffey had envisioned it at all, but it was working.

A section of roof right behind them gave way with a howl and a wave of sparks washed over the coat and then over them. They all ducked down to protect themselves from the new heat.

‘We all go now,' the firefighter said. ‘Don't wait for the other ladder. You!' He grabbed Samuel Greengelb, and swung him on to the ladder. ‘Go!'

Conor Lewis shielded himself in front of Jack Liffey leaning into him. ‘I'm burning up.'

‘The boy next!' Jack Liffey shouted.

‘But where's my dad? I want to know about my dad!'

‘Honey, calm down. I'm sure he's OK.' A woman in a blue uniform – fire? police? – was trying to give Maeve Liffey a Styrofoam cup of coffee that smelled rancid, but she didn't like coffee of any kind.

Maeve pushed the cup way. She felt tight and angry. ‘Do you know how annoying that is when I know for a fact you don't have a clue about my dad?'

‘Sorry, hon. I'll go find out.'

One ambulance had already howled off carrying Paula Green. She was in bad shape, but might make it. Jack Liffey sat tenderly on the curb beside the fire engine, resting his hands on his knees. He was careful to hold as still as he could and not disturb the burns on his back and shoulders. They'd given him something like codeine, and the pain was tolerable, but just.

He'd gone next to last, right after the fire had virtually engulfed them on the roof, but the firefighter Don, going last an instant later, had reclaimed his fire coat and seemed pretty much OK now. Most of the back of Jack Liffey's favorite linen and wool jacket had charred away, and some of his shirt beneath it, too. An EMT with a weird flat-top had slathered his burned back with some sticky white ointment and then hurried off to check the others.

Jack Liffey's attention was caught by a movement across the street. He glanced over and saw what was unmistakably Eleanor Ong – or Sister Mary Rose, watching him from behind a car without much emotion. He beckoned, and she shook her head. He had a feeling this might be the last time he would ever see her, and he tried to beckon, more urgently. She smiled and shook her head. Then she gave him a big thumbs-up. OK, sister. This is the best you can do. You're negating the last goodbye message you offered me: I don't think you're going to make it.

After a few minutes of contemplation, Conor came and sat down next to him. The boy appeared unhurt, though maybe a little sunburned. What a difference a few moments of escape could make.

‘Hi, Mr Liffey.'

‘Are you ready to go home?' Jack Liffey asked him, not unkindly.

‘I guess. Nothing like a big scare. I miss Mom and Dad.'

‘Did you learn anything important out here?'

The boy smiled, then glanced around himself, as if for dangerous beasts. Jack handed him his notebook and he took it with a glum smile. ‘The poor manage to stay so upbeat. It's incredible to me. They're much more kind than the people I grew up with.'

‘Yes, I think so, too.'

‘Liffey!' The EMT with the flat-top strode their way and reached down to tug Jack Liffey to his feet. ‘Your daughter has been moving heaven and hell to find out how you are.'

‘I'm going to live, right?'

The man stepped around and plucked at some torn cloth on Jack Liffey's back, each pluck a twinge of pain. ‘You won't live forever, but a while yet. If you're virtuous.'

‘What does virtue have to do with it?'

‘It's always a good idea.'

‘Fuck you. Get me a stronger painkiller.'

‘Tell his daughter he's got a big mouth but he's OK,' he barked into a radio.

The man sat him on the edge of a gurney near an untended ambulance and left him there.

Jack Liffey looked around him and realized that the Fortnum was right at the cutting edge of gentrification. A fancy refurbished building just across the street had a doorman standing just inside the thick glass doors, wearing an implausible red sash, like some factotum out of Graham Greene.

And what had he himself learned through this mess – through the weeks trapped in the wheelchair, the immobility and loss of speech, the days on Skid Row, and now the preposterous trial by fire?

He stared across the street again to see the windowless bottom floor of the gentrified building that had been artfully disguised as pattern but was really a blank windowless concrete wall. A wall to keep out even the curiosity of the poor. This new model for society was taking on an overwhelming power: the blank wall. The wall between us and discomfort, us and the poor, us and
them,
with all their grief and rage.

There were fresh walls everywhere in America now, so many since he'd grown up. Separating the needy homeless and the new Downtowners. Walls and gates around the fancy suburbs. Walls at the
frontera
between so many desperate workers and the jobs in
El Norte.
Walls, he thought, between genuine deprivation and the lies that denied the existence of deprivation.

It seemed to him the essential activity of the rich and powerful these days was to build these walls. Of concrete, of disguised foliage, of electronics, of military power, of spy satellites – plus an opaque media that ignored it all. The time of the walled-out and defeated and homeless seemed to stretch on forever now, but it couldn't.