Chapter 4

I didn't take it.

I had taken it plenty the night before, and I figured that was enough for one man.

He screwed the cap back on, not bothered at all, and slid off the hood.

"You're a hell of a listener," he said. "I mean it. I'll see you around."

I climbed nineteen flights that afternoon, because Artie had shut down his diesel to save fuel, and I slept on the couch in my pants.

Janine came in a little after eight that night, still in her whites, her hair tied back with a strip of gauze.

Jacobi had kept her for a double, thirteen hours of burns and people cut up on plate glass.

She lit a candle off the stove and looked at the refrigerator instead of me.

"Everything's going to go," she said.

She got a garbage bag from under the sink, opened the freezer, and started taking it apart while the water ran across the floor.

"You want me out, I'll go to my mother's," she said, with her back to me. "I'd like to sleep first."

"How long?"

"April." A package of pork chops went in the bag. "I'm not going to tell you it was nothing."

"Who does he say he is?"

"Vic Fusco. He sells burial insurance. He's got a place in the Poconos he keeps meaning to paint. His wife died, which is why the ring's on that hand, you move it over after a while. He came into the ER in March with a burn, and he made me laugh."

"He's a torch, Janine."

She went on working.

"He burns buildings for landlords. He told me in the elevator. Fox Street, in March, that was his, and an old man died in it."

She straightened up with a box of peas dripping in her hand, and she gave me the look I had seen her give drunks who say they're fine.

"He said you'd say that."

"He said what?"

"After you left. He sat me down right there. He said that guy had a bad fire in March, some old man died on his shift, he's been cracking up ever since, and now he'll say anything." She dropped the peas in the bag. "So I'm asking. Did some old man die on your shift in March?"

I didn't answer fast enough.

"See, I wouldn't know," she said. "I only live here."

That one got through.

"You came home one morning in March, and you sat in that chair and ate four eggs and looked at the wall. I said what happened. You said nothing happened, go to work. So I went to work, and that's the morning he came in with his hand." She reached into the back of the freezer. "You stopped talking, Marty. You listen to people all night and you come home and nobody's in there. He talked. That's all. He's a big mouth and I know what that's worth. I'm not giving you a reason. I'm telling you what happened."

She had a Cool Whip tub in her hand.

She worked the lid off with her thumb and looked in it for a while.

She put the lid back on, reached up, set the tub on top of the refrigerator, and went back to the bag.

I took it for leftovers.

I listen for a living. I'm not much for looking.

"You didn't hand me my thermos," I said. I don't know why that's what came out.

"No," she said, and she didn't look up.

We stayed like that a long time, me at the table and her on the floor with a towel, not talking, which we had gotten good at.

At 10:39 the refrigerator shuddered.

Everything that had been on the night before came on at once: the kitchen light, the air conditioner, the clock radio by our bed, very loud, in the middle of "Best of My Love."

She got up and turned it off, and she came back and stood in the doorway with the towel.

It was the first time I had seen her face in real light since Wednesday supper.

The picture of us was still on the refrigerator door, with the water running down under it.

"Okay," she said. "The lights are on. Tell me about the old man."

I opened my mouth.

She had asked me straight, in a lit room, with nobody else there, and all I had to do was start.

"I've got to get to work," I said.

She nodded as if that was what she'd figured, and she went to bed.

I took it to the marshals on Monday instead, because it's easier to tell a stranger.

The Bureau had a room over a firehouse off Webster Avenue, with one fan and a map of the Bronx so full of pins it looked diseased.

Fire Marshal Lou Ortega was forty-six, stocky, gray at the temples, in a short-sleeved white shirt and a clip-on tie, with a hoarse voice.

There were thirty-five marshals left for all five boroughs, he told me, and I could have twenty minutes.

I told it straight while he wrote with a stub of pencil.

"I know Fox Street," he said. "We came up from Ponce when I was fifteen and that's where we lived. My mother's building is a lot now." He turned the pencil over. "This guy in the elevator. How do you know this man?"

"He's with my girl."

The pencil stopped.

He rubbed his eyes with two fingers, and he wasn't mean about it.

"You know what I get in this room? I get brothers-in-law. I get partners who got cheated. You sat in the dark with a drunk, nobody else heard it, and afterward you found him with your girl. You've got a grudge and no proof, Mr. Scully."

It had taken four days, and I could hear Vic grinning from wherever he was.

"He knew what I told the old man," I said. "He said the Fire Department told him to stay put."

"That what you told him?"

"Yes."

He looked at me a second longer than he had to, and he pulled a thin folder out of a stack.

"That never ran anywhere. The News gave it two sentences. Who'd know that?"

"The landlord, maybe. From you people."

"Maybe."

He wrote one word on his pad, and I couldn't read it upside down.

I had my hand on the door when he spoke again, in the same tired voice.

"One thing. Thursday morning, four forty-one. No occupants on any slip in your office, I pulled them. You took your last truck off Fordham Road and sent it to the top floor of an empty building, and two old ladies came down alive. Very nice."

He looked up.

"So how did you know about Bathgate before it burned?"