Hell's Kitchen

TWENTY

It was just as a horde of bleary French tourists was checking into the tawdry hotel on the West Side that the elevator returned as summoned to the ground floor. And then it opened its doors.

“Mon dieu!”

The flaming liquid inside the car melted through its plastic container and spilled like a fiery tidal wave into the lobby.

“Jesus!” somebody screamed.

“Oh, shit…”

The flames appeared almost magically as the liquid ran along the floor and ignited the carpet, the chairs, the gold-flecked wallpaper, the fake rubber trees, the tables.

Alarms begin detonating with harsh baritone ringing – old-fashioned bells that make one think immediately of lifesaving systems vastly outdated. Screams filled the tattered halls. People began to flee.

More frightening than the flames was the smoke, which filled the hotel instantly as if it were pumped in under high pressure. The electricity simply stopped and, amid the palpable smoke, nighttime filled the lobby and corridors. Even the ruby exit signs grew invisible.

And sounding above all of the screams and ringing and alarms was a frantic pedal tone – the howl of fire.

The Eagleton Hotel was about to die.

The flames consumed the cheap carpet and turned it from green to black in seconds. The flames boiled plastic as easily as it puckered skin. The fire ran up the walls, melting plaster like butter. The flames spit out smoke thick as muddy water and suffocated a half-dozen foreign guests trapped in an alcove without an exit.

The flames kissed and the flames killed.

“Merde! Mon dieu! Allez, allez! Giselle, où es tu?”

In the downstairs banquet room, where three white jacketed busboys cowered, there was a sudden flashover – the whole space grew so hot it ignited like one huge match head.

Upstairs a young man, fully clothed, leapt into a brimming bathtub, thinking cleverly that this would protect him. Sickened rescue workers would find what was left of his body, two hours from now, in water still heated to a slow boil.

One woman in a frenzy of panic flung open the door of her room and with the in-rush of oxygen an explosion engulfed her. The last scream she uttered wasn’t a human sound at all but a burst of flame popping from her mouth.

One man fled from searing wall of flames and hurtled through a fifth-floor window. He cartwheeled elegantly in silence to the roof of a yellow taxi below. The glass in the cab’s six windows turned instantly opaque as if coated with winter frost.

Another man stepped onto a fire escape so heated by flames that the metal rods of the stairs melted through his running shoes in seconds. He climbed, screaming, on burnt, bloody feet to the roof.

In rooms on the higher floors some of the guests believed they were safe from the fire itself; they noticed only a faint haze of smoke around them. They calmly read the in-case-of-emergency cards and, as those reassuring words instructed, soaked washclothes and held them over their faces. Then they sat down calmly on the floor to wait for help and died peacefully in the sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In the lobby, there was another flash-over. A sofa exploded in orange fire. So did the body of a tourist, lying on the carpet. He contracted into the pugilistic attitude – knees drawn up, fists clenched and arms bent at the elbows. In front of him a Pepsi machine melted and exploding soda cans shot through the lobby, the contents turning to steam before the aluminum hit the floor.

Sonny caught glimpses of these vignettes because he’d placed the jug of burning juice in the elevator on the sixth floor and then leisurely made his way down the fire escape. Lingering, watching. He told himself to flee, to be more cautious. But naturally he couldn’t help himself. His hands were no longer shaking, he wasn’t sweating.

The NYFD trucks began to roll up. Sonny slipped into an alley across the street and continued to watch, observing with pleasure that it was an “all-hands” blaze. This was quite a feather in his cap. There were ladders, engines and trucks from number of companies. My God, it was a whole-battalion fire! He hadn’t set one of those for months. He listened to his Radio Shack scanner and learned that it was a ten-forty-five, Code 1.

Fatalities already.

But he knew that.

The apparatus kept arriving. Dozens of Seagrave and Mack fire trucks and engines and ladders. Some red, some Day-Glo yellow-green. Intersection horns blaring harshly. Ambulances. Police cars, marked and unmarked. Men and women in heat-proof gear, with air tanks and masks, hurried into the conflagration. More ambulances. More police. Lights and noise, cascades of water. Steam everywhere, like ghosts of the dead. Cars parked illegally were hacked open to make paths for the hoses.

Crowds filled the streets, looters sized up the risk.

The hotel became a storm of orange flame, towering up to the eighth-floor penthouse.

When the flames were largely under control the EMS medics started bringing out the bodies. Some were cyanotic – bluish-tinted due to lack of oxygen. Some were red as lobsters from the flames and heat. Some were charcoal colored and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the human beings they had once been.

More windows burst outward. Slivers of black glass rained to the street as rooster tails of water rose from the huge nozzles and converged on the weakening flames, turning to scalding steam.

Sonny watched it all from an alley nearby.

He watched it all until, finally, finally, he saw what he’d been waiting for.

His mother had told Sonny that his father used to enjoy hunting. Flushing birds with a boisterous lab named Bosco, Sonny’s father had been a good hunter and he’d spent a lot of time perfecting his skill – though he probably shouldn’t have, Sonny had concluded, because when he and Bosco were away his wife fucked anything that came to the door.

Sonny’s mother’s last lover, on the other hand, never hunted for much of anything – except a way out of his burning bedroom. Which he never did find, of course, thanks to Sonny and a very handy spool of wire.

Now, in the smokey chaos of the dying Eagleton hotel, Sonny saw the bird he’d flushed (using an all-hands blaze, rather than a cheerful black dog): Alex, the fag with the chipped tooth and a mole like a tiny leaf on his right shoulder blade.

Gasping for breath, staring at the building, the young man leaned against a lamppost. Probably thinking what people always thought at times like that: I could’ve been trapped in there. I could’ve died in there. I -

“True, you little faggot,” Sonny whispered, “You might have.” His head was close to the boy’s ear.

Alex spun around. “You… I…”

“What does that mean?” Sonny asked him, frowning. “ ‘You I…’ Say, is that faggot talk?”

Skinny Alex turned to run but Sonny was on him like a mantis. He clocked him on the side of the head with a pistol, looked around and dragged him deeper into the deserted alley.

“Like, listen!”

Sonny slipped the pistol behind the young man’s ear. Whispered. “Like, you’re dead.”

Pellam, breathless from running, paused, leaning against the chain-link fence of a construction site across the street from the Eagleton.

Oh, no. No…

The hotel was gone. You could see sky through some of the windows of the upper stories and gray brown smoke flowed from the dead heart of the building. He said to a passing EMS technician, round man with a sweaty, soot-stained face, “I’m looking for a teenager. A blond kid. Skinny. He was in there. Name might be Alex.”

The weary technician said, “Sorry, mister. I didn’t treat anyone like that. But we got eight BBRs.”

Pellam shook his head.

The tech explained. “ ‘Burned beyond recognition.’ ”

Walking through the numb crowds, Pellam asked about the boy. Somebody thought he might have seen the young man climb down the fire escape but he couldn’t be sure. Somebody else, a tourist, asked him to take his picture in front of the building and held out his Nikon. Pellam stared in silent disbelief and walked on.

Closer to the building he stepped away from the crowd and nearly ran into Fire Marshal Lomax. The marshal glanced at Pellam and didn’t say a word. His eyes returned to four bodies lying on the ground, arms and legs drawn up in the pugilistic pose. They were loosely covered with sheets. His radio crackled and he spoke into his Handi-Talkie. “Battalion commander has advised fire is knocked down as of eighteen hundred hours.”

“Say again, Marshal Two-five-eight.”

Lomax repeated the message then added, “Appears to be suspicious origin. Get the crime scene buses down here.”

“That’s a roger, Marshal Two-five-eight.”

He put the radio back in his belt. A rumpled man in general, he was now a mess. Shirt soot-stained, drenched in sweat, slacks torn. There was a gash on his forehead. He pulled on latex gloves, bent down and tossed the sheet off one of the victims, searched the horrible corpse; Pellam had to look away. Without glancing up, Lomax said in a calm voice, “Let me tell you a story, Mr. Lucky.”

“I-”

“Few years ago I was working in the Bronx. There was this club on Southern Boulevard, social club. You know what a social club is, right? Just a place for people to hang out. Drink, dance. The name of the place was Happy Land. One night there was maybe a hundred people inside, having a good time. It was a Honduran neighborhood. They were good people. Working people. No drugs, no guns. Just people… having a good time.”

Pellam said nothing. His eyes dipped to the macabre spectacle of the corpse. He tried to look away but couldn’t.

“There was this guy,” Lomax said in his eerie, dead voice, “who’d been going out with the coat-check girl and she’d dumped him. He got drunk and went out and bought a buck’s worth of gas, came back and just poured it in the lobby, lit it and went home. Just like that: set a fire and went home. I don’t know, maybe to watch TV. Maybe have some dinner. I don’t know.”

“I hope he got caught and went to jail,” Pellam said.

“Oh, yeah, he did. But that’s not my point. What I’m saying is there were eighty-seven people killed in that fire. The biggest arson murder in U.S. history. And I was on the ID team. See, it was a problem – because they were dancing.”

“Dancing?”

“Right. Most of the women didn’t have purses on them and the men’d left their jackets, with their wallets, hanging on the chairs. So we didn’t know who was who. What we did was we laid all the bodies out and then we’re thinking, Jesus, we can’t have eighty-seven families walk up and down the street and look at this. So we took Polaroids of them. A couple shots of each body. And put it in this notebook for the families to look at. I was the one who handed the book to every mother or father or brother or sister whose kids were at Happy Land that night. I’m never going to forget that.”

He covered up the body and looked up. “One guy did all that. One guy with a fucking dollar’s worth of gasoline. I just wanted to tell you I’m putting a call to the D.A. to move Ettie Washington out of protective isolation.”

Pellam began to speak. But Lomax, fatigue in every move, stood and walked to the second body. He said, “She killed a kid. Every prisoner in Detention knows that by now. I give her a day or two. At best.”

He crouched down and pulled the sheet off.