The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 21

Credits, debentures, unpaid bills, canceled orders …

the whole sordid history of a business failure-it was like walking onto a battlefield after the war was over but the corpses had yet to be buried. Still, somebody had to do it, Douglas thought, and Larry had no head for figures.

He could add a column six different times and come up with six different answers. Not that he wasn’t bright, but his knack for business lay more in public relations and sales.

Douglas leaned back in his chair and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. For a moment his mind wandered back ten. years to when he had met Larry at a football game in Oakland. Douglas had been working for another decorating firm then and the local client had invited him to the game. Larry had some sort of butt job in the front office of the Forty-Niners and the client-what had been his name, anyway?-had introduced them during half time, probably intentionally matchmaking.

He and Larry had liked each other instantly. It had been an odd sort of courtship, with no apologies offered and none expected. When it came to love, whatever they had been looking for, they found in each other. Larry’s career depended very much on his being circumspect and yet, with Ian, he had seemed to grow almost overnight into a fully functioning human being with no hang-ups and few regrets. Two weeks later, Douglas had returned home, but they continued to correspond and then one morning Douglas had received a telegram from Larry asking Ian to meet him at the airport. Larry had never returned home.

But all of that was over now. Douglas suddenly snapped his pencil and threw the pieces against the wall in sudden decision. He may have grown too old for Larry, who now had other interests, but he couldn’t continue to drift, couldn’t continue to be weak and indecisive about both. Larry and the business. He couldn’t continue to live as a weakling.

He reached down and pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk.

There was a group of manila folders stacked upright within it and in the last one he found what he was searching for. Edged in green curlicues, it looked very impressive. The title said: “Comprehensive Fire and Liability Coverage.”

He thumbed through it for a moment and nodded to himself; it was the simplest solution. They would split the payments and go their separate ways. The cash wouldn’t amount to much, perhaps fifteen thousand dollars each after their creditors were paid. But with that, he could go to California or Oregon and perhaps start all over again, build a new life. There would be no Larry in it-nobody could fill that void and, in any event, he was too old and too tired to look. It had been very good while it had lasted; it was asking too much to expect lightning to strike twice.

What one needed in life, he thought, were courage and determination.

He stood up and went into the outer shop, almost bumping his knees against a charcoal-co ore settee over which had been arranged some draperies; they were of shantung with thin threads of gold woven throughout the rich silk. It was the perfect place to begin ‘ he thought. He found the lighter fluid in a table drawer and stripped the spout from it with a pair of pliers, then began to dribble the fluid over the drapery fabric and ‘ the settee upholstery. He tossed the can in a wastebasket, fumbled out a pack of paper matches, struck one, and threw it on the couch. It flickered and went out. He tried a second, feeling his resolve begin to fail. It lay for a moment on the soaked couch, guttering, and then caught.

A smoky flame-raced from the match and leaped at the drapery fabric.

A few seconds later the entire surface of the couch with its burden of drapery fabrics was blazing.

The room started to fill with a greasy, black smoke, and the flames brightened.

For a moment Douglas watched the flames with all the fascination of a child, and then the seriousness of what he was doing suddenly hit him.

“My God, oh my God!”

The radiant heat from the couch felt hot against his face and even as he watched, the flames leaped higher, filling the room with rolling clouds of smoke. The wooden arms of the settee were charring now as the fire ate into the flammable varnish. The polyurethane foam upholstery began to swell and smoky flames raced across its exposed surface; the smoke from the foam was thick and acrid and made Douglas gag. A few minutes more, he thought, and the whole shop would be blazing.

He suddenly turned and ran back to the storeroom to look for the carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher. It wasn’t hanging in its usual space on the wall and Douglas could feel the panic start to build inside. He should run into the hall and sound the alarm but there would be questions…. Then he remembered that Larry had taken the extinguisher down to repair its bracket. He found it at the foot of a pile of throw rugs. He grabbed it and ran back into the display room.

The foam upholstery was blazing as if it had been soaked in gasoline.

Douglas aimed the black cone of the extinguisher at it and thumbed the trigger. Clouds of frost-flecked carbon dioxide spilled out over the flames. They shuddered for a moment and then leaped higher.

Douglas moved in on them, firing burst after burst from the extinguisher. He finally had one end of the settee under control and worked toward the other, then attacked the flames already creeping up the side of a bolt of drapery goods leaning against the couch. If there was only enough charge in the extinguisher …

The last of the flames finally died and he grabbed up a sample of Fiberglas draperies to beat out the remaining sparks. He hurried back to the office washroom and filled a large flower holder with water, throwing the blooms on the floor, then returned and doused the wisps of smoke still coming from the charred settee and upholstery, returning for more water until the furniture and the fabric had ceased to smolder altogether. Then he sank down into a nearby Empire chair.

The reaction from the fire made him weak and for a moment he thought he would vomit. The fumes from the upholstery had been nauseating and this, coupled with the heavy charge of adrenalin in his system, had left him shaking. He might have been trapped, he thought slowly.

Another minute and his exit would have been blocked by the flaming draperies, and after that there would have been no way out. The upholstery, he thought, still breathing heavily, the foam had burned far faster than he had believed possible.

He sighed after a moment and began to pick up the charred fabrics.

There were heavy vinyl bags in the storeroom and he could fill them with the charred materials, though the showroom would still be a mess.

There was little he could do about the settee frame itself-possibly knock it apart and pack the pieces in bags as well. But the smoke had permeated the shop and the fabrics themselves; the cleaning bill alone would break them and there would be explanations to be made to Larry.

He flinched inwardly. Half the shop was Larry’s but he hadn’t acted that way; he had made all the decisions, as if Larry’s opinions were worth no more than those of an office boy. .

He sniffed the air, realizing the smoke was still very heavy in the display room in spite of the air conditioning.

Opening a window might help air out the shop and he walked over and pulled aside the draperies. The windows were completely sealed; there was no way to open them.

It was because of the air conditioning, he thought; he could not open any one of the windows, short of shattering it, though presumably maintenance might have a way.

He looked closer, spotting the recessed slot in a corner of the frame, and recalled that the window could be released with a special tool. But no such tools had been issued to the tenants; he would have to call the maintenance people, which he wasn’t about to do.

He returned to the showroom and finished bagging the remaining scraps of charred cloth. There was no way he could explain this to Larry, he thought, agonized. The burned settee, the ruined fabrics, the sodden cloth, and the smell of smoke throughout.

The smoke was still very intense and he suddenly stopped and sniffed.

It wasn’t the humid, after-odor o smoke and water, the smell of something that had been burned. His watering eyes and face told him that this smoke was warm, that it wasn’t coming from the doused ashes of a dead fire but from a fresh one, a fire that was still burning someplace. He dropped the vinyl bag that he had been holding and went back to the settee, searching for some stray spark, some piece of charring fabric that he had missed.

No, everything was out. Only now he was sure that the smoke was becoming more intense, and that the odor was somehow different. In place of the acrid, poisonous odors from the upholstery, this smoke had a thinner quality with a trace of volatiles that had not been characteristic of the smoke from the earlier fire. It reminded him just a little of the odor of the lighter fluid that he had used to start the rue in the first place.

Abruptly, he located the source of the smell and ran to the corridor door and opened it. The hallway was already filling with smoke. At the far end, several doors beyond the elevator bank, was the storeroom for the floor, its door now framed by white smoke. He had wandered past several times when the cleaning women or Krost, the maintenance super, had been in it and knew that it was filled with huge containers of waxes and solvents, as well as cartons of toilet tissue and stacks of moving pads.

Smoke was oozing out from the wide crack under the door and even as he watched he saw the first small finger of solvent flow from under the door, blue flames racing across its surface. It was joined by another and then a pool of flaming liquid was flowing out from under the door.

The corridor ceiling above the storeroom door had already begun to blacken and he knew it was only moments before it would be blazing.

He slammed his office door, his heart beating wildly.

An accidental fire, the very thing he might have prayed for. A solution to his own problems and without any assist on his part; in fact, once the fire crept down the hall, it would cover the evidence of his own folly. The catch, of course, was that there were more people in the building than just himself. He reached for the phone on the nearby table and dialed security’s three-digit number.

Garfunkel answered and he blurted, “Mr. Garfunkel, this is Ian Douglas. We have a fire up here in the corridor storeroom. It smells like a solvent fire…. I’d say it’s too late for fire extinguishers, my guess is that the whole storeroom is blazing-it looks like the ceiling tile is ready to go.”

Over the phone, Garfunkel’s voice was crisp and authoritative: “Mr. Douglas, get the hell out of there.

Understand? Don’t try to take anything; get out now.”

There was a sudden click at the other end and once again Douglas felt panicky. He started for the door, then hesitated by the glass display case. He opened it and plucked out the small netsuke of the water buffalo. He couldn’t leave it behind, he thought; of all the things in the shop, it had the most sentimental value for him. It, and Larry’s “Minotaurmachie.” He lifted it off the wall and tucked it under his arm, then raced for the door. The odor of smoke was now intense and for the first time, he felt real fear.

He threw the door open and a chill suddenly ran down his spine.

The far end of the hall was now burning furiously and the pool of flaming solvent was flooding swiftly toward where he stood.

It had already cut him off from the elevator bank.