Chapter 3

Hudson Crest to the Bronx office is twenty-five minutes on a normal night.

That night it took me close to an hour.

My Dart was still at the hydrant with the door unlocked.

There were no traffic lights and no street lights, just headlights and whatever was burning.

On Fordham Road the gates had been ripped off the stores and people were walking down the middle of the street with sofas.

A woman in a housecoat was rolling a rack of men's suits along the sidewalk as if she had a train to catch.

I drove past all of it with a thermos on the seat.

The Bronx office sits in the corner of Bronx Park on East 180th Street, a little light-brick building with a tile roof and arched windows, like somebody's idea of a post office in Italy.

On a hot night you can smell the zoo from the lot.

It was the first building I had seen since Riverdale with its lights on, because it ran on its own power and it had to.

I walked in at a quarter to four.

I had been due at ten.

Barry Mahoney was standing behind the boards with a phone on each shoulder.

Barry was fifty-six, a supervisor since Eisenhower, and I had never seen him stand up during a tour.

"Where the hell have you been?"

"In an elevator."

"How long?"

"Five hours."

He looked at my face and he looked at the thermos.

"Sit down," he said, and that was all the sympathy I got, and it was plenty.

I'm not going to explain how that room works.

Boxes were ringing in and every phone was lit, and there were more fires than companies, and there had been since before midnight.

Every off-duty man in the department had been called in, and it didn't matter.

The slips for fires with nobody to send filled my desk and started on the floor.

Companies came on the air from Tremont and Southern Boulevard to say they were getting bottles off the rooftops and they were pulling out for the next one.

Somebody said fifty new Pontiacs had been driven off a lot in University Heights, and nobody had the strength to laugh.

"What's the address?" I said. "What's the address, ma'am? We have it. Get everybody out now. Don't wait for us."

The card on the desk says to tell them companies are on the way.

I quit saying that about four-fifteen, and nobody stopped me.

A man on Prospect Avenue held his phone out the window so I could hear it.

A woman on Crotona Avenue asked if she should save her mother's sewing machine, and I told her no, and I could hear her dragging it to the door while she thanked me.

I was never better at that job in my life, which is a terrible thing to say.

For the first time since nine-thirty, nobody was telling me about my kitchen.

Around four-thirty I unscrewed the thermos.

It was iced coffee with too much milk, the way she knew I liked it, and I drank it.

Here is what I did wrong that night.

I had an address in my head the whole time.

Bathgate Avenue, next week, same landlord, same mother.

The marshals were one phone call away, and I could have told them a six-story on Bathgate was going to burn and who told me.

I told nobody, because he was a drunk in an elevator, and because it was next week, and because I was thinking about my shirt.

At 4:41 a box came in for Bathgate Avenue.

A minute later a guy called it in from a pay phone.

He said it was the empty building with the tin on the windows, going good on the first floor, nobody in it.

I looked at the clock and worked it out without wanting to.

Vic would have finished his drink in my kitchen around three.

The city was dark, the cops were on Fordham Road, and no company in the Bronx had a minute to spare.

If you were a torch, you'd be a fool to wait till next week.

He had finished his drink and gone to work, same as me.

I had exactly one ladder company coming back in service right then, and Fordham Road wanted it.

A furniture store had gone through the roof, the chief was screaming for a truck, and by every rule on that desk the truck was his.

I gave it to Bathgate.

"Report of occupants, top floor," I said on the air.

There was no such report.

I made it up, in my work voice.

"Who reported occupants?" Barry said behind me. He was looking at the slip.

"Some guy."

The lieutenant came on the air at 5:14, and you could hear how tired he was.

"Bronx, you were right about the top floor. Two females removed by aerial, both conscious. Sisters, seventy-four and seventy-nine. They say the landlord told them the building was closed. They've been hauling water up in a mop bucket since February."

Barry looked at the slip, then at the phone log, where there was no guy.

He kept his mouth shut and wrote it down.

The furniture store took a shoe store and a dentist with it, nobody inside, and the chief put my name in his report.

Barry sent me out at noon and told me to be back by midnight.

The smoke was lying in the trees of the park and the sun came through it brown.

A burgundy Monte Carlo was parked across the back of my Dart.

He was sitting on the hood in a clean shirt with a big collar, one heel up on the bumper, as if he was waiting for a bus.

It was a clean shirt, but he'd had the same hands all night.

There was soot on his cuffs, and when I got close he smelled like Brut and a gas station.

"Look at you," he said. "Busy night?"

I stood there holding the empty thermos.

He took the silver flask out of his back pocket and held it out to me across the hood, smiling as if it was the best morning of his life.

"You've earned a drink."