Where There’s Smoke

Chapter One Cooked to a Cinder

The red sedan rocketed up Broadway at a screaming seventy with the siren wide open; for one not hardened to that banshee howl it would have been difficult to catch, beneath it, the hoarse intonation of the panel speaker:

“Second alarm — Second! Brockhurst Theater — Forty-fifth — Eighth and Broadway! Engine Twelve. Engine Twenty-nine. Hose Thirty-one. Hose Thirty-four. Ladder Twenty. Rescue Five. At four fourteen pee-em, authority Bureau Fire Alarm Telegraph. Double-you Enn Wye Eff.”

Ben Pedley caught it and cursed with feeling. A blaze in the crowded theater district was bad medicine any time. But with the mercury down in the thermometer’s socks and a half-gale sweeping in from the Hudson, it was enough to give a man the smoke-eater’s chills.

An expression of grim calculation hardened his harness-leather features; a line of concentration sharpened between the gray eyes as he shot the sedan between a stalled truck and a braking bus. The possibilities at the Brockhurst were numerous and unpleasant.

Hydrants might be so iced up the hose companies would waste precious minutes waiting for the “coffee wagon” to thaw the outlets. There had been an application from the gas company for repairs to the main, on Forty-fifth; if the street had been torn up, the rigs would be delayed getting into the block. Standpipes would probably be frozen solid. The emergency exits would most likely be blocked with drifts so it would take time to get them open.

There’d be 40 or 50 men and half a dozen pieces of apparatus on the job by now — the pumper, hose trucks, hook-and-ladder, and chemical of the four companies to answer the first alarm. The insurance patrol would be there — and the battalion chief’s car and the district police cruiser. But some of the apparatus that was supposed to answer the second alarm would probably be delayed; no driver could get up to speed on these sleet-greased avenues. Pedley bore down on the gas.

If this wind kept up— He shook his head silently.

Up at the Bureau of Fire Alarm Telegraph in Central Park anxious men would be waiting by the flasher for the call from the deputy chief to send out the third alarm. The spreading ripple of gong-taps would bring in more pumpers and additional hose companies from an ever-widening area. This would be a hell of an evening for the Borough Simultaneous!

The sedan slued into Forty-fifth with tires shrieking, bounced over canvas tentacles radiating from an iron octopus, skidded on ice made by leaky couplings, slammed its bumper against the tail of Hose Eighteen. Pedley piled out into a bilious swirl surging from the theater alley.

“What you got, Charley?”

A battalion chief, bulky in wet rubber, blinked smoke-inflamed eyes. “Smoker, Marshal. Rear wall somewhere. Stinker to ventilate. Boys are having to take it in three-minute relays.”

“Everybody out?”

“Wasn’t any audience.” The battalion chief shoved his white helmet back off a smudged forehead. “Just rehearsing for some broadcast.”

Pedley sized up the shivering musicians under the marquee. Some had retrieved their instruments; only a few had salvaged the cases. One guarded a bull fiddle wrapped in his overcoat against the spray. All were intent on a chubby individual struggling with a patrolman at the alley entrance.

“Guy trying to put on the hero act” — the chief made a hand signal to the engineer of a pumper across the street — “claims one of the singers is still inside.”

The stubby man heard; whirled. “One of the singers! You dumb dilly!” He looked like an angry gargoyle carved out of pink glass. “Leila’s in there! Leila Lownes!” He wrenched an arm free from his belted camel’s-hair, lurched back under the policeman’s collar-grip. “She ran back to the dressing-room to get her brother! She’ll burn to death while you stand here and yawp. Lemme in there!”

Pedley eyed him bleakly. “Keep your pants on. You’d only make one more to drag out. We’ll get your friends.”

“Get Leila!” The gargoyle glowered. “Nobody gives a damn whether you get Ned or not. The creep probably tried to burn down the joint, anyway.”

“Who’re you to say so?” Pedley moved toward him.

“Ah—!” The battler smeared sweat off his face. “Don’t mind me. I’m Terry Ross. Press relations for Leila. I’m off my nut, with her still in there. I know from nothing how the fire started.”

“Just letting off steam?” Pedley shed his raglan, tossed it in the sedan.

“Yuh. That’s all.”

Pedley reached for his smoke mask. “Then you better sit on his safety valve, officer. I wouldn’t want him to blow before I get back.” He splashed into the alley past laddermen lugging a smoke-ejector.

“How is she, inside?”

“She’s a ripe one, Marshal. Tough to get a draft through. Ice-sheathing on the roof.”

Pedley put on the mask, edged through the stage door. The switches had been pulled; the only light was a vague blur from electric lanterns moving about in the wings.

He followed a length of canvas snaking in from the alley, up the narrow iron staircase. His first job was to find out where the fire had started. Knowing that much, he might be able to take it from there. Lacking that, he’d be as much up against it as a homicide detective who couldn’t find the body.

Sometimes the boys were able to settle that primary problem for him, by getting a stream on a blaze before Pedley reached the spot. But they evidently hadn’t been able to do that here, even though they’d rushed a two-inch line in fast, coupling up direct from the eight-hundred-gallon reserve tank on the pumper. There was no crackle of flames, no hiss of steam, up ahead. That meant the pipeman hadn’t found a target to shoot at — there wasn’t any sense in throwing water at smoke.

Fumes thickened as he climbed. The beam of his flashlight barely penetrated an arm’s length. In here, the pulse of the pumpers and the wail of arriving apparatus were faint and far away.

A misshapen silhouette loomed up out of the murk at the top of the stairs — a giant with incredible shoulders. The figure lurched against him, bunted him across the slippery steps. Pedley grabbed at the pipe banister. The jolt knocked his smoke mask off; it clattered below in the darkness.

He swung his flashlight up. The beam glinted on the front-plate of a hoseman’s helmet; under it, to one side of the hoseman’s mask, a white face with the slack, open mouth of a smoke victim. The owner of the face sagged limply over rubber-coated shoulders — a middle-aged man with white hair and thin, sharp features. The brother. Then the girl must still be up here.

The rescuer mumbled beneath his mask, clumped on down the stairs.

Pedley would have to follow him; nobody could last five minutes breathing these fumes. It was either go down and hunt for his mask or go back to the apparatus for a spare. He’d better get going while he could navigate, too; maybe the haze wasn’t entirely due to smoke. He could leave the girl to the rescue squad. They’d get to her in time.

He dropped to his knees, crawled ahead, along the corridor.

Smoke banking down from above wasn’t as dense down here close to the floor. He could make out a sullen incandescence beneath a doorsill farther down the corridor. He crawled along, one hand following the hose line, until his fingers touched cold metal.

That rescuer had been the nozzleman, of course. He’d be back up in a minute, but a minute might be too long.

Pedley’s fingers closed around the lever, pulled the handle back slowly so the brass tip wouldn’t buck with the back pressure and knock out a fistful of teeth. Water speared out ahead with a roar. The stream had no more than a hundred pounds of pressure behind it. He could handle it. Easier than he could keep a grip on his senses, perhaps.

He put his mouth close to the hrrussh of the stream. A little fresh air was discharged along with the water. Very little. Maybe enough—

The door above that thin, luminous line was shut. He clouted it with his fist. Stuck. He flicked the stream at it. The rebound drenched him; the door slammed open as if he’d smashed it with a sledge hammer.

A cauliflower of smoke blossomed from the dressing-room, blotted out everything so he wasn’t aware of the forked orange tongue until it licked at his wrist from beside the jamb. He hunched back on his heels, angled the stream up to spatter the ceiling, inched across the threshold under an icy cascade.

Across the dressing-room a garnet heart glowed dully through the haze, spat at the shower splattering down from the ceiling. Before he could get to it, the thing had cooled, lost its radiance. But he guessed what it was before his flashlight came close enough to make certain. The face of an electric flatiron, standing on end on the dressing-table.

He groped for it, felt broken glass under his fingers. The sharp-edged shards of a bottle. He leaned over to feel the switch on the handle of the iron. His knee touched something soft. She was between the dressing-table and the end of a smoldering chaise longue — a sodden heap of wet silk and warm flesh. When he got her over his shoulder, she was a dead weight.

He had to drop the nozzle before he lifted her; he had to clamp it shut before he dropped it or the twenty-pound tip would have threshed around and brained them both. But even with the rush of the water silenced, there was still a roaring inside his head.

He crawled out into the corridor with his burden. The heat became suddenly intensified, as if someone had opened a furnace door at his heels. Sparks stung his neck and face; breathing became an ordeal. His eyes streamed; he bumped into booted legs before he saw them.

A hand caught at his shoulder. The glass eyepiece of a mask came close to his face. The weight on his back lightened momentarily, but Pedley shook his head, clung to the girl’s legs. He could make it under his own power, that nozzleman was needed there in the dressing-room.

The hose companies would have their hands full getting this thing under control, now. That flatiron was like a neon sign flashing the warning word ARSON. And incendiary fires were always the worst; the arsonist would have done everything he could to help the blaze along. It was important that the torch who’d hooked up the flatiron and whatever had been in the bottle, didn’t get the advantage of having his trail covered by the flames he’d started.

The marshal crawled toward the head of the stairs. The murk became penetrable; a gush of cool air swept up at him. The boys on the roof must have managed to hack open a draft hole—

He caught hold of the pipe rail, muscled to his feet, felt his way down.

Frosty air hit his lungs like a blow. He leaned against the whitewashed brick of the alley. Rescue-squad men grabbed the girl, hurried her toward the long, gray car waiting at the street end of the alley. Pedley stalked after them, unsteadily.

There was a little group around the rear step of the ambulance. One intern was unlimbering a stretcher; the other held an ampoule under the nose of the smoke victim, who sat propped against a handhold.

The rescued man was in bad shape. There was a glistening like warm butter along the angle of his lean jaw. His lips were gray; for all the color in his face, he might have been ready for a hearse instead of the ambulance. But his eyes were open; he recognized the girl as the firemen laid her on the sidewalk near him.

“Leila!” he croaked. “She’s not—!”

“Smoke kayo. That’s all.” Even in her present bedragglement, Pedley could see why fan magazines and Sunday supplements featured her as “Luscious Leila.” Her smudged face wasn’t as glamorous as the make-up she wore on those full-color covers; the bronze hair, tousled damply over closed eyelids, made her look more like a tired child asleep after a romp in an ash heap. But there was no mistaking this girl’s appeal.

“I was afraid she’d—” The man on the ambulance step leaned over to touch her; toppled.

Pedley caught him. “Take it easy. They’ll pull your sister around, soon’s they get an inhalator on her.” He pushed the man back to a sitting position.

“Sister?” Pale eyes bulged in the ashen face. “She’s not my sister.”

“Guy said she ran back to look for her brother.”

“She did. When I heard—” he coughed up a thin trickle of smoke “—I went after her.”

“Who’re you?”

“Amery. Her lawyer.”

“Then her brother’s still up there?”

“Didn’t see Ned.” The attorney shrugged. “Wasn’t looking for him.”

“You’re the second person I’ve run into who doesn’t seem to give a damn whether Lownes’s goose is cooked or not.”

“Didn’t say I felt that way.” Amery glanced up. “All the same to me whether Ned goes to an institution, or the cemetery.”

The battalion chief tapped Pedley’s arm. “They’re bringing another one.”

Amery stared at the thing the firemen let down on the sidewalk. Blackened lips curled back against the teeth in a clown’s grimace — a man whose face looked as if minstrel make-up had cracked and peeled from his skin, whose head was covered with charred fuzz where there had been hair.

“I take it back,” Amery muttered thickly. “I wouldn’t have wanted that to happen to my worst enemy.”

“This Ned Lownes?” Pedley knelt in an icy puddle.

“Yes.” The lawyer bent over, was sick to his stomach.

“Your worst enemy, hah?”

“Merely a manner of speech. Ned — always his own worst enemy. Is it too late—?”

“For anything — except the medical examiner.” Pedley put a palm to the dead man’s chest, pressed gently. A tiny feather of smoke trailed from the blackened lips. “I’m curious to know how he got burned like that — when he was alive at the time the fire started.”