Mitchell Smith Read online

  When this woman kept bothering him-raising her voice, gesturing more violently-the captain stepped away from her, over the jungle of hose, gesturing for someone to come deal with her.

  One of the patrolmen in the cars had watched much of this-nudging his partner, who was reading a paperback Western, to make him watch, too.

  “Look at this shit,” the patrolman said. “-Isn’t she a cop?”

  As he said it-and out in the street Ellie began to shout, then reached again for the sleeve of the fire captain’s jacket-a fireman climbed down off Unit #557, came up to the policewoman, and took her by the arm.

  I’m a police officer-“

  I don’t give a shit what you are”-pointing to the fire captain. “-See that guy you been talkin’ to? Well, leave him the fuck alone.”

  Ellie crossed the street, and thought of going back to speak to the sergeant-thought of looking for the firewoman … did, and didn’t see her. She stood at the edge of the marveling crowd, looked way, way up, and was certain she’d found the window again, it had the recalled small air conditioner, its side panels crinkled in to fit it to the window’s paint-flaked frame. She looked up at this window, seeing, in her peripheral vision, a silent column of smoke pouring out thick and slow from the window two down, on the left.

  She stood and stared, feeling foolish, recalling the contempt in the fire captain’s glance, tugged from talking on his radio. She had just recalled this face, when, looking up, she saw for an instant another one remembered, tiny with distance, dark brown, barely visible through dusty glass, peering just over the air conditioner … gazing at the spectacle below.

  Two, three years old. A baby. Must have climbed on a couch … a chair, to look out….

  Ellie considered, standing jostled on the sidewalk in the searing sun, watching the movement, the bright noontime colors of the equipment in the street, and decided what to do. She ran out of the crowd and across the swollen vines of hose, behind a fire engine’s massive rear bumper, which—superb, polished, heavy-duty chrome reflected three blurred suns and the vista of the block in multiples curved in concert with its own rich curves, reflected her as she ran by, splashed a quick step up from the flooded gutter, on up the building’s stoop past two firemen coming out, through the door, and in. She dropped her purse at the foot of the stairs.

  Ellie’d had no notion of the oddness of a burning world, its stink and dimness, its damp and surprising rearrangements. She climbed the first flight of stairs fast enough-past a fireman coming down, who turned to stare up after her, his air tank clanging on the cracked plaster wall beside him. He’d seen her rising to him, white lady’s face (firm jaw, long nose, pale blue eyes wide with excitement). Neat blue summer dress, stockings, blue highheeled pumps. -All brushed past, and, as he turned half around, the clang, and slender lady’s legs vanishing disembodied into a ceiling of smoke.

  “You get the hell back down here . . . !”

  High above him, fifteen feet at least, Ellie, climbing into a darker world, heard an echo of that call. She’d thought she could hold her breath for almost the whole climb-the window had been on the fifth floor-if she were quick. But effort and fear now neatly pulled her breath away as a couple of cheerful boys might yank an old woman’s purse from her, and taunt her, going. Ellie wheezed out the last of her precious breath (taken so long ago out in the hot and sunny street), held her throat with one hand as she climbed endless steps in darkness almost absolute, as though by that light grip she could control any substance going in or out-and doing so, put herself to climbing faster.

  She knew she was past the second floor—certainly past the second-and had heard that in smoky fires the trick was to crawl, so got obediently down on all fours and continued with her climb, her hands soon slippery with ancient dirt, wet and dripping with hose water. Ellie could see no more, traveling in this fashion, than she had in that, but when she tried a little sipping breath, she was able to keep the dark stuff down.

  Her hands then splatted on a landing, knee bumped a riser hard enough to bruise. -The third floor, she thought, surely, fumbled blind around a newel post, and recommenced her climb. Here there was glass, and Ellie felt its sudden bright bites into her hands and knees. Still on all fours, she straightened her legs to keep her knees up out of the slivers, and climbed that way for a number of steps on hands and feet, like a kindergarten child playing bear, her face down for dubious breathing, her buttocks in the air. Her hands continued to be cut, for she still went on them, not being able to bring herself to stand up into the all-smoke.

  Even so, the smoke pressed upon her personally; it stopped her mouth like a large soft hand smelling of toasted wood, no matter how low she bowed. Crawling up steps, weary, slumped back now onto her sliced knees, she became so concerned with breathing she began to forget why she’d come in, began to doubt the reality of the day outside, the superb trucks and hurrying people.

  She thought she heard shouts below her.

  Sanchez and Potts, brown and black under their mighty hats, were coming up after her, furious-ordered in and up by the fire captain as he ran to kneel by his heart-dead man and puff and blow into his mouth while the resuscitator was hustled from the pumper . . . an ambulance far, far away, whooped down the avenue.

  The parked policemen, not having happened to see Ellie’s entrance, stayed in their cars, or held casually the margins of the crowd, taking care not to stare at the dead fireman and his brothers and sister, all odd in black rubber with bright green stripes and numbers painted on it.

  Ellie was halfway up to four, falling from side to side as she crawled up, in grave difficulty. Her lungs were hurting her, a pain lancing into them like a sharpened point, sticking into her every time she tried a breath.

  She reached, after the longest time, the landing for four-slipped in water and recovered, but lost her shoe, hobbled, then kicked off the other and turned the stair’s corner to climb again. Seven stairs up, she screamed at last, a breathless bleat, and stood up into deeper darkness, screaming softly, fluttering her bleeding fingers before her eyes so as to be able to see anything. -She saw nothing at all but blackness so black she supposed something from the fire, some chemical, had made her blind and in panic began to run and stumble up the steps, thinking she might reach the roof of the building so far above her, break out of this darkness into light, regain her vision, and gratefully jump out and down into bright air. Now, failing held no terror for her.

  She ran up, struck her face on an empty old fire-hose box bolted to the landing wall-she would never know what it was-and fractured her right cheekbone. She staggered away from this, felt a doorway, and pulled herself into the fifth-floor hall. Here her life was saved by a draft drumming up from a back stairwell forty feet away. It heaved the heavy smoke aside as it blew, and showed her dimly-seeing one-eyed now, her vision damaged by the blow that broke the bone-a long row of doors, most kicked open, several shut.

  Down this shaded hall she ran, gulping air and smoke together, and then-the finest thing she was to do stopped, panting, thought . . .

  and realized she was in the wrong corridor, going deeper into the building rather than parallel to its front. She remembered the possible child’s face for the first time in some time, turned around leaving a red handprint on a blackened door-and went back the way she’d come, into a feathery, drifting dark gray wall of smoke.

  Men were shouting below her.

  Potts and Sanchez, using their lamps, had found her shoe on the fourth-floor landing. Small, narrow, and blue, with blood on it.

  Raging, they stormed down the corridor a floor beneath her.

  Ellie, in this more likely hall, in air hot enough to sting like bees, breathed in smoke and stood the pain, felt blindly at doorways on her left along her way. Hot paint flaked under her fingers, the doors were wet sometimes with water, sometimes oven-dry, a little sticky soon from her cut hands. Many of these doors were closed. The second, third, and fifth were certainly closed. She heard an odd, deep humming, a
lmost music when she couldn’t breathe, and when that music faltered in the least, she felt her heart commence to skip and pause. The sixth floor was also open. The seventh door was closed; she fumbled for the knob; the door was locked. Ellie wished that she could see. She kicked at it, tried to call, kicked again and fell, crawled a long way to the eighth, found the frame, reached up through darkness to the knob and tried it. Pushed, and the door opened, but not much. She shoved with her shoulder and then crawled in over a scorching floor to light at last, and raised herself on stiffened arms to take a breath.

  Then a little child came out of the light, its diaper damp with shit, and grappled to her, small, potbellied, soft, and warm.

  “You fuckin’ bitch!” cried Sanchez, Potts beside him, as they kicked and chopped their passage through the fourth, below. The small blue shoe was on their minds.

  Far down the hall behind them, in the black rolling chimney of the stairwell, Ellie, strangling-Hector Nunos clutched, fenced firmly in her arms-fell rolling down the stairs to that landing, made the turn, tripped, and fell down the stairs again, curled to guard the child.

  Edward McGinnis, small, plump, fresh-faced as a boy, was a stringer-photographer for the News. He’d run across the street to get a picture of the ambulance loading the dead fireman-He made that, covered it with a second ‘ducked out of the way of a fireman who rushed him, redfaced, yelling-turned, and saw the Pulitzer Prize come stumbling out of smoke, bleeding, onto the stoop of the building. He got the shot.

  It was, as often, a time of some crisis for the Department. A gambling operation in the Bronx had been shown to have continued in very profitable operation with the forbearance of numbers of patrolmen, sergeants, and the officers of two precincts.

  This was a disaster involving indictments and trials to follow-to the fury of the Mayor, facing reelection in less than a year. -A mayor who then might find it politic to request the resignation of one and the appointment of another Commissioner of NYPD. This public relations Titanic had occurred only two weeks before Ellie Klein appeared at the entrance to a burning building, cheek blackly bruised, blond hair (smoke smudged) floating loose about her shoulders, and bleeding hands clutching to her blue-flowered breast (where her bright badge hung) a weeping little child.

  And so appeared on the front page of the Daily News, the third page of The New York Times, and, very briefly, in newspapers and on television across the country.

  “An absolute godsend, sugar,” as Lieutenant Eastmangay as a jay, but tolerated for his quick wit as assistant to the assistant head of Departmental Public Affairs represented it to his chief, a civilian, a lady, and an ex-reporter. She agreed.

  Ellie-made Queen of Metropolitan Hospital-was visited there, briefly, by both the Mayor and Commissioner, on separate visits. People took her picture with each man, Ellie being something of a picture herself, thanks to Lieutenant Eastman-her swollen cheek carefully powdered, her pate eyes lined and shadowed by the Lieutenant himself, her pretty hair down and fanned white-gold against the pillow. And a patrolman’s cap hung artfully off a chair-back beside her bed.

  So, she tasted the odd wine of celebrity, a very small glass and quickly swallowed, but vintage nonetheless.

  The attention, noise, and visitors-the hope, a humiliation still, that Nate Klein would at last be sorry, and might possibly come to the hospital one night, get some way past the nurses to lay his sleek and handsome head down on the bed sheet to weep and beg her pardon these events and imaginings excited and exhausted her, so that she found herself half dreaming in daytime, acting for every visitor the part they’d come to see.

  She considered this foolishness one evening, flushed with shame-the Departmental surgeon had held her hospitalized for several extra days as photo opportunity (on orders and against his will, it should be said).

  This had been reported to Ellie by the night nurse, an angelically naive young girl from Nebraska, perpetually agog at the doings in New York.

  Ellie, while mulling over this embarrassment, found she had to get up and pee. There, in the bathroom’s cramped and dizzying white, she sat and found some comfort in the coolness of the toilet seat.

  The side of her face still hurt her; the cuts on her hands and knees hardly hurt at all. “Expect some sinus trouble later on, with this,” a specialist had told her, pressing with his cold and furry hands across her cheek as she winced away.

  Now, in the bathroom, relaxing, sorting out, discarding the later fuss, she considered the saving of the child. She thought she had done that pretty well, and might do as well again, if she had to. She thought that for once she had not made a fool of herself.

  On release from the hospital, Ellie received a promotion to detective third-grade, a medal from the Mayor-awarded at Gracie Mansion-a letter from the Governor that he had signed himself, and, after some delay, an appointment to the Commissioner’s Squad. -This last she assumed, as did a few other innocents on the Force, to be a signal honor.

  This was not to say the Commissioner’s Squad was not composed of competent police officers, eleven detectives in all. It was. And the Squad was effective in its chores: minor bodyguarding of minor VIP’s, errand-running for the Chief of the Department’s office, following up a few long-term investigations the regular divisional squads had filed as unproductive-and, their most demanding duty, keeping a rather feeble surveilling eye on Internal Affairs, monitoring the activities of these unpopular shooflies in various divisions, to keep the cop-watchers aware that they, also, were watched.

  To compensate for these less than demanding (or rewarding) duties, the Squad found recompense in the close company of the great-the Department’s administrative Offices only one flight up-and in an unusually gentle work schedule (mimicking the brass they served) consisting of regular day shifts, one-or two-man night watches, and extraordinary demands infrequent.

  It was all legitimate police work, and not to be despised, but it wasn’t what Ellie had expected. The Squad handled no big cases, no difficult cases-not, at least, in a fashion likely to cross the lines of regular investigative or enforcement units. It was gradually borne upon her, as it had in their times been borne upon all the more veteran members of the Squad, that they were held in amused contempt by many of those in the Department that were

  “wised up”-a term adopted from organized crime. The Commissioner’s Squad was often a high-class dump, position on it a kick upstairs to nowhere. Most members had, after some usually public feat, been offered to the precinct commands as prize packages-and been turned down for this reason and that, occasionally from sheer superstition, as was the case with Graham, who’d had two partners killed through no fault at all of his own. Usually, though, the reason was a better one than that.

  Ellie’s package had circulated the districts, and been shipwrecked on two rocks: her failure to come effectively to the aid of Detective Drew and his partner four years before-and the bitter complaint addressed to the Department (and included in her file by a sullen lady clerk at Headquarters) from the office of the Manhattan Commander of the New York City Fire Department. It was the first rock, however, that really wrecked her ship; the fireman’s complaint was regarded as simple sour grapes.

  Doing the Fire Department’s job better than it did was well and good, but of no great account to these grim officers, captains and commanders.

  However, failing for whatever reason to succor an officer in distress-to fail, as a civilian might put it, to aid a cop in danger-was of the greatest possible account. It was unforgivable, however minor, however long ago. They refused to take her.

  “Ouch,” the Chief of the Department said, with unusual levity, as his assistant, a cool captain with a law degree and a masters in criminology as well, pointed to the comments column referring to that incident in her file. This assistant, named Anderson, was a lean, handsome man and recently divorced. In a year or so, Anderson would astonish Ellie, having called her up to his office to discuss a report she’d written on another report already on file
concerning corruption at a construction site on Thirty-second Street. Internal Affairs had discovered a police sergeant involved in insurance fraud at that site, helping to steal, peddle, and set up recovery payoffs on heavy equipment. -During this meeting, Anderson will suddenly get up from behind his desk, come around to sit on its edge, lean forward to touch her face with his hand, her injured cheek, and ask if it still hurt her. Then, stroking her there gently with his fingertips, say, “You’re a sad and complicated girl, aren’t you?”

  Ellie was to sit there for a moment, under the Captain’s hand-then turn her head aside, get up, her clipboard held against her breast, and leave the office. In the ladies’ room-, afterward, she would smoke a cigarette on of her last, in fact; she would by then almost have stopped smoking-and look into the mirror, thinking it odd he had called her a girl. In the mirror, water-spotted, cracked at a corner, she would see a tall, thin, tired woman. Tired. Pale, bony blond. Going dry.

  Anderson now indicated the distressing entry, the comments column.

  “—Want me to pull that out of there … ?” offering to contravene Departmental regulations against such interference. Delgado sighed and shook his massive head. He, with a sensitive and more experienced nose, scented that where one such fault in the’ heroine stood revealed and commented on, more were likely to exist, or in future to occur.

  The Captain was quick. “Clevenger is out, sir,” referring to a woman detective promoted suddenly years before out of a daring drug-buy setup.

  A bank record’s check shortly thereafter had revealed to the Treasury people, working in cooperation, that Detective second grade Clevenger, a short, stocky black woman with a high 10 (a darling of the black brass), had recently deposited forty-seven thousand dollars in an account at Marine Midland under the name Henrietta Christopher.