Hell's Kitchen

THREE

Ettie’s building, like most New York tenements built in the nineteenth century, had measured thirty-five by seventy-five feet and been constructed of limestone; the rock used for hers was ruddy, a terra cotta shade.

Before 1901 there were no codes governing the construction of these six-story residences and many builders had thrown together tenements using rotten lathe and mortar and plaster mixed with sawdust. But those structures, the shoddy ones, had long ago crumbled. Tenements like this one, Ettie Washington had explained to John Pellam’s earnest video camera, had been built by men who cared about their craft. Alcoves for the Virgin and glass hummingbirds hovering above doorways. There was no reason why these buildings couldn’t last for two hundred years.

No reason, other than gasoline and a match…

This morning Pellam walked toward what was left of the building.

There wasn’t much. Just a black stone shell filled with a jumble of scorched mattresses, furniture, paper, appliances. The base of the building was a thick ooze of gray sludge – ash and water. Pellam froze, staring at a hand protruding from one pile of muck. He ran toward it then stopped when he noticed the seam in the vinyl at the wrist. It was a mannequin.

Practical jokes, Hell’s Kitchen style.

On a hump of refuse was a huge porcelain bathtub sitting on its claw feet, perfectly level. It was filled with brackish water.

Pellam continued to circle the place, pushed closer through the crowd of gapers in front of the yellow police tape, like shoppers waiting at the door for a one-day Macy’s sale. Most of them had the edgy eagerness of urban scavengers but the pickings were sparse. There were dozens of mattresses, stained and burned. The skeletons of cheap furniture and appliances, water-logged books. A rabbit-ears antenna – the building wasn’t wired for cable – sat on a glob of plastic, the Samsung logo and a circuit board the only recognizable part of the former TV.

The stench was horrific.

Pellam finally spotted the man he’d been looking for. There’d been a costume change; he was now wearing jeans, a windbreaker and fireman’s boots.

Ducking under the tape, Pellam walked up to the fire marshal, pasting enough authority on his face to get him all the way to the building itself without being stopped by the crime scene techs and firemen milling about.

He heard Lomax say to his huge assistant, the man who’d pinned Pellam against the wall in Ettie’s room, “There, the spalling.” He was pointing to chipping in the brick. “That’s a hot spot. Point of origin’s behind that wall. Get a photog to shoot it.”

The marshal crouched and examined something on the ground. Pellam stopped a few feet away. Lomax looked up. Pellam had showered and changed clothes. The camouflage on his face was gone and it took a moment for the marshal to recognize him.

“You,” Lomax said.

Pellam, thinking he’d try the friendly approach, offered, “Hey, how you doing?”

“Get lost,” the marshal snapped.

“Just wanted to talk to you for a second.”

Lomax’s attention returned to the ground.

At the hospital they’d taken his name and checked with NYPD. Lomax, his detective friends and especially the big assistant seemed to regret that there was no reason to detain Pellam, or even to search him painfully, and so they settled for taking a brief statement and shoving him down the corridor, with the warning that if he wasn’t out of the hospital in five minutes he’d be arrested for obstruction of justice.

“Just a few questions,” he now asked.

Lomax, a rumpled man, reminded Pellam of a high school coach who was a lousy athlete. He rose from his crouch, looked Pellam over. Quick eyes, scanning. Not cautious, not belligerent, just trying to figure him out.

Pellam asked, “I want to know why you arrested her. It doesn’t make any sense. I was there. I know she didn’t set the fire.”

“This is a crime scene.” Lomax returned to his spalling. His words didn’t exactly sound like a warning but Pellam supposed they were.

“I just want to ask you-”

“Get back behind the line.”

“The line?”

“The tape.”

“Will do. Just let me-”

“Arrest him,” Lomax barked to the assistant, who started to.

“Not a problem. I’m going.” Pellam lifted his hands and walked back behind the line.

There he crouched and took the Betacam out of the bag. He aimed it at the back of Lomax’s head. He turned it on. Through the clear viewfinder he saw uniformed cop whisper something to Lomax, who glanced back once then turned away. Behind them, the smoldering hulk of the tenement sat in a huge messy pile. It occurred to Pellam that, even though he was just doing this for Lomax’s benefit, it was grade-A footage.

The fire marshal ignored Pellam for as long as he could then he turned and walked to him. Pushed the lens aside. “All right. Can the bullshit.”

Pellam shut the camera off.

“She didn’t start the fire,” Pellam said.

“What’re you? A reporter?”

“Something like that.”

“She didn’t start it, huh? Who did? Was it you?”

“I gave my statement to your assistant. Does he have a name, by the way?”

Lomax ignored this. “Answer my question. If you’re so sure she didn’t start the fire then maybe you did.”

“No, I didn’t start the fire.” Pellam gave a frustrated sigh.

“How’d you get out? Of the building?”

“The fire escape.”

“But she says she wasn’t in her apartment when it started. Who buzzed you in?”

“Rhonda Sanchez. In 2D.”

“You know her?”

“Met her. She knows I was doing a film about Ettie. So she let me in.”

Lomax asked quickly, “If Ettie wasn’t there then why’d you go in at all?”

“We were going to meet at ten. I figured if she was out she’d be back in a few minutes. I’d wait upstairs. Turns out she’d been shopping.”

“Didn’t that seem kind of strange – an old lady out on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen at ten p.m.?”

“Ettie keeps her own hours.”

Lomax was now in a talkative mood. “So you just happened to be beside the fire escape when the fire started. Lucky man.”

“Sometimes I am,” Pellam said.

“Tell me exactly what you saw.”

“I gave him my statement.”

Lomax snapped back, “Which didn’t tell me shit. Give me some details. Be helpful.”

Pellam thought for a moment, deciding that the more cooperative he was the better it would be for Ettie. He explained about looking into the stairwell, seeing the door blow outward. About the fire and smoke. And sparks. Lots of sparks. Lomax and his pro-wrestler assistant remained impassive and Pellam said, “I’m not much help, I suppose.”

“If you’re telling the truth you’re tons of help.”

“Why would I lie?”

“Tell me, Mr. Lucky, was there more flame or more smoke?”

“More smoke, I guess.”

The fire marshal nodded. “What color was the flame?”

“I don’t know. Fire-colored. Orange.”

“Any blue?”

“No.”

Lomax recorded these facts.

Exasperated, Pellam asked, “What do you have on her? Evidence? Witnesses?”

Lomax’s smile pled the Fifth.

“Look,” Pellam snapped, “she’s a seventy-year-old lady-”

“Hey, Mr. Lucky, lemme tell you something. Last year, fire marshals investigated ten thousand suspicious fires in the city. More than half were arson and a third of those were set by women.”

“That doesn’t really seem like admissible evidence. What was your probable cause?”

Lomax turned to his assistant. “Probable cause. He knows probable cause. Learn that from NYPD Blue? Murder One? Naw, you look like an O.J.-Simpsonwatcher to me. Fuck you and your probable cause. Get the hell out of here.”

Back behind the police line Pellam continued to take footage and Lomax continued to ignore him.

He was filming the grimy alley behind the building – memorializing the stack of garbage bags that had saved Ettie’s bacon – when he heard a thin wail, the noise smoke might make if smoke made noise.

He walked toward the construction site across the street, where a sixty-story high-rise was nearing completion. As he approached, the smoke became words. “One a them. I’ma be one a them.” The woman sat in the shadow of a huge Dumpster beside two eroded stone bulldogs, which had guarded the stairs to Ettie’s building for one hundred and thirty years. She was a black woman with a pretty, pocked face, her white blouse smudged and torn.

Crouching, Pellam said, “Sibbie. You all right?”

She continued to stare at the ruined tenement.

“Sibbie, remember me? It’s John. I took some pictures of you. For my movie. You told me about moving down here from Harlem. You remember me.”

The woman didn’t seem to. He’d met her on the doorstep one day when he’d come to interview Ettie and she’d apparently heard about him because without any other greeting she’d said she would tell him about her life for twenty dollars. Some documentary filmmakers might balk on the ethical issue of paying subjects but Pellam slipped her the bill and was shooting footage before she’d decided which pocket to put it in. It was a waste of money and time, though; she was making up most of what she told him.

“You got out okay.”

Distracted, Sibbie explained that she’d been at home with her children at the time of the fire, just starting a dinner of rice and beans with ketchup. They easily escaped but she and the youngsters had returned, risking the flames to save what they could. “But not the TV. We try but it too heavy. Shit.”

A mother’d let her children take a risk like that? Pellam shivered at the thought.

Behind her were a girl of about four, clutching a broken toy, and a boy, nine or ten, with an unsmiling mouth but eyes that seemed irrepressibly cheerful. “Somebody burn us out,” he said, immensely proud. “Man, you believe that?”

“I ask you a few questions?” Pellam began.

Sibbie said nothing.

He started the Betacam, hoping her short-term memory was better than the recollections of her youth.

“Yo, you with CNN?” the boy asked, staring at the glowing red eye of the Sony.

“Nup. I’m working on a movie. I took some pictures of your mother last month.”

“Geddoutahere!” He cloaked his astonished eyes. “A movie. Wesley Snipes, Denzel, yeah! Shit.”

“You have any idea how the fire started?”

“Be the crews,” the boy said quickly.

“Shutcha mouth,” his mother barked, abruptly slipping out of her mournful reverie.

Crews meant gangs. “Which ones?”

The woman remained silent, eyes fixed on a key that passing traffic had pressed deep into the asphalt. Beside it was the butt end of a brass pistol cartridge. She looked up at the building. “Lookit that.”

Pellam said, “It was a nice building.”

“Ain’t shit now.” Sibbie snapped her fingers with a startling pop. “Oh, I’ma be one a them.”

Pellam asked, “One of who?”

“Livin’ on the street. We gonna live on the street. I’ma get sick. I’ma get the Village curse and I gonna die.”

“No, you’ll be okay. The city’ll take care of you.”

“The city. Shit.”

“You see anybody around the basement when the fire started?”

“Hells, yeah,” the boy said, “What it is. Be the crews. I seen ’em. This nigger keep his eyes open. I-”

Sibbie viciously slapped her son’s cheek. “He didn’t see nothing! All y’all ain’t worry about it no more!”

Pellam winced at the slap. The boy noticed his expression but the tacit sympathy didn’t comfort any more than the blow’d seemed to hurt.

“Sibbie, it’s not safe around here,” Pellam said. “Go to that shelter. The one up the street.”

“Shelter. Shit. I save me a few things.” Sibbie motioned toward her shopping bag. “Be looking for my mama’s lace. Can’t find it, shit, it gone.” She called out to a cluster of sightseers, “All y’all find any lace ’round here?”

No one paid her any attention. “Sibbie, you have any money?” Pellam asked.

“I got fi’ dollar some man give me.”

Pellam slipped her a twenty. He stepped into the street and flagged down a cab. Pellam held up a twenty. “Take her to the shelter, the one on Fiftieth.”

He glanced at his potential fare. “Hey, man, I’m going off duty-”

Pellam silenced him with another bill.

The family piled in. From the back seat Ismail, eyes cautious now, stared at Pellam. Then the cab was gone. He hefted the Betacam, which now weighed a half ton, and lifted it to his shoulder once again.

What’s this? A cowboy?

Boots, blue jeans, black shirt.

All he needs is a string tie and a horse.

Yee-haw, Sonny thought. Everybody’s tawking at me…

He’d watched as the cowboy had stuffed the shriveled-up nigger lady and her little nigger kids into a cab and had returned to the charred remains of the tenement.

As he’d been doing for the past several hours Sonny studied the destroyed building with pleasure and a modicum of itchy lust. At the moment he was thinking about the noise of fire. The floors had fallen, he knew, with a crash but nobody would have heard. Fire is much louder than people think. Fire roars with the sound of blood in your ears when the flames reach your, say, knees.

And he was thinking of the smell. He inhaled the unique perfume of scorched wood and carbonized plastic and oxidized metal. Then, reluctantly, he surfaced from his reverie and studied the cowboy carefully. He was taping the fire marshal as he directed an exhausted fireman to hoe through some refuse with his Halligan tool, combination axe and crowbar. Invented by Huey Halligan. An all-time, world-class firefighter, pride of the NYFD. Sonny respected his enemies.

He knew a lot about them too. For instance, he knew that there were 250 fire marshals in the City of New York. Some were good and some were bad but this one, Lomax, was excellent. Sonny watched him taking pictures of the alligatoring on a piece of charred wood. The marshal had spotted that right away, God bless him. The black squares on the surface were large and shiny, which meant the fire was fast and it was hot. Useful in the investigation. And the trial – as if they’d ever catch him.

The marshal picked up a six-foot hook and broke through a ground-floor window, shone his flashlight inside.

A few years ago the city created the Red Hat patrol in the fire marshal’s department. They’d give marshals red baseball caps and sent them cruising through high-risk arson areas. Those were the days when Sonny was just learning his trade and it had been very helpful to flag the marshals so obviously. Now they dressed like regular plainclothes schmucks but Sonny had enough experience that he didn’t need red hats to spot the enemy. Now Sonny could look in a man’s eyes and know that he made fires his living.

Either starting them or putting them out.

Sonny, no longer quite so happy, feeling shakier and sweatier, glanced at the big camera in the cowboy’s hand. A cable ran to a battery pack in a canvas bag. It wasn’t one of those cheap videocams. This was the real thing.

Who exactly are you, Joe Buck? What exactly are you doing here?

Sonny began to sweat harder (which didn’t bother him though he’d been sweating an awful lot lately) and his hands began to shake (which did bother him because that was a very bad thing in someone who assembled incendiary devices for a living).

Watching tall, thin Joe Buck take some more footage of the burnt-out tenement. Sonny decided he hated the cowboy more for his height than because he was shooting so fucking much tape of a building he’d just burned down.

Still, in some part of his heart, he hoped the tapes were good; he was proud of this little fire.

After he’d started the blaze and slipped back out through the basement door, he’d hidden in the construction site across the street and turned on his Radio Shack scanner. He heard the dispatcher put out a second-alarm assignment. It had been a 10-45, code 2 call. He was pleased about the alarm – which meant a serious fire – but disappointed about the code, which meant that there’d been only injuries, not fatalities. Code 1 meant death.

The cowboy continued to shoot for a few minutes. Then he shut the big camera off and slipped it back into his bag.

Sonny glanced again at the fire marshal and his cronies – my gosh, that’s one huge faggot assistant. Lomax told the big boy to order a backhoe and start the vertical excavation as soon as possible. Silently Sonny told them that this was the correct procedure for investigating a fire like this.

But Sonny was getting more and more worried. Pretty soon he was all worry, the way a corridor fills with smoke; one minute it’s clear, the next it’s dense as cotton.

The reason, however, wasn’t Lomax or his huge assistant. It was the cowboy.

I hate that man. Hate him, hate him, hate him hatehimhatehim.

Sonny tossed his long blond ponytail off his shoulder, wiped a sweating forehead with shaking hands and eased through the crowd, closer to Joe Buck. His breathing was labored and his heart slammed in his chest. He sucked smoke-laden air into his lungs and exhaled very slowly, enjoying the taste, the smell. Beneath his hands the yellow tape trembled. Stop that stop that stop that stopthatstopthat!

He glanced up at Pellam.

Not quite a foot taller. Maybe a lot less than that. Ten inches, if Sonny stood up straight. Or nine.

Suddenly a new spectator eased between them and Sonny was jostled aside. The intruder was a young woman in a rich, deep-green double-breasted suit. A businesswoman. She said, “Terrible. Just awful.”

“Did you see it happen?” the cowboy asked.

She nodded. “I was coming home from work. I was on an audit. You a reporter?”

“I’m doing a film about some of the tenants in the building.”

“A film. Cool. A documentary? I’m Alice.”

“Pellam.”

Pellam, Sonny thought. Pellam. Pell-am. He pictured the name and spoke it over and over and over in his mind until, like the top of a column of smoke, it was there but was no longer visible.

“At first,” she continued, looking at the cowboy’s, at Pellam’s lean face, “it was like there was nothing wrong, then all of a sudden there were flames everywhere. I mean, totally everywhere.” She carried a heavy briefcase stamped Ernst & Young in gold and with her free hand twined her short red hair nervously about her index finger. Sonny glanced at her laminated business card, hanging from the handle.

Pellam asked, “Where exactly did it start?”

She nodded. “Well, I saw the flames break through the window there.” Pointed to the basement.

She didn’t seem at all like an Alice to him. She looked like that somber little thing on The X-Files, whom Sonny, in a private joke, called “Agent Scullery.”

Like Pellam, Scullery was taller than Sonny. He disliked tall men but he venomously hated women taller than he was and when she happened to glance down at him the way she’d glance at a squirrel his hatred turned from anger to something very calm and very hot.

“I was the one that called the fire department. From that box on the corner. Those boxes, you know, you see but you never think about.”

He also hated short hair because it didn’t take very long to burn away. He wiped his hands on his white slacks and listened carefully. Agent Scullery rambled on about fire trucks and ambulances and burn victims and smoke victims and jump victims.

And mud.

“There was mud all over the place. You don’t think about mud at fires.”

Some of us do, Sonny thought. Go on.

Agent Scullery told Joe Buck the faggot cowboy about glowing-red bolts and melting glass and a man she’d seen pulling burnt pieces of chicken from the embers and eating them while people screamed for help. “It was…” she paused, thinking of a concise word, “excruciating.” Sonny had worked for a number of business people and he knew how they lived to summarize.

“Did you see anyone near the building when it started?”

“In the back I did. There were some people there. In the alley.”

“Who?”

“I didn’t pay much attention.”

“You have any idea?” the cowboy persisted.

Sonny listened intently but Agent Scullery couldn’t recall very much. “A man. A couple of men. That’s all I know. I’m sorry.”

“Young. Teenagers?”

“Not so young. I don’t know. Sorry.”

Pellam thanked her. She lingered, maybe waiting to see if he’d ask her out. But he just smiled a noncommittal smile, stepped into the street, flagged down a cab. Sonny hurried after him but the cowboy was already inside and the yellow Chevy was speeding away before Sonny even got to the curbside. He didn’t hear the destination.

He was momentarily enraged that Pellam the tall Midnight Cowboy had gotten away from him so easily. But then he reflected that that was all right – this wasn’t really about eliminating witnesses or punishing intruders. It was about something much, much bigger.

He held up his hands and noticed that they’d stopped shaking. A tatter of smoke, dissolving ghost, wafted before Sonny’s face and, helpless, he could only close his eyes and inhale the sweet perfume.

Remaining this way for a long moment, motionless and blind, he came back to earth slowly and dug into his shoulder bag. He found out that he only had a pint or so of juice left.

But that was plenty, he decided. More than enough. Sometimes you only needed a spoonful. Depending on how much time you had. And how clever you were. At the moment Sonny had all the time in the world. And, as always, he knew he was clever as a fox.