Chapter 5

I told him the truth, that Vic had told me, and he wrote that down too.

"Go to work," he said. "Don't take a vacation."

That was all I got out of the Bureau that month.

The Wednesday after the All-Star Game came to the Stadium, I came off my tour and went to the diner on Boston Road for eggs.

Vic Fusco slid into the booth across from me and took a piece of my toast.

He was there the next morning too.

By the second week I knew what he wanted, and it wasn't what I had thought.

He didn't come to scare me. That was extra. He came to talk.

He had the best stories in the Bronx, and who was he going to tell?

His landlords didn't want to know, and his girl had stopped taking his calls and thought he sold policies.

Here was a guy who knew the business, who had to sit there, and who nobody would ever believe.

I was the best thing that ever happened to him.

He told me which landlord stiffed him and which one cried.

He told me how it's done, and I'm not going to repeat that.

He told me that for Fox Street he had a nun, in case anybody ever asked, and nobody ever had.

He told me four landlords had called him the week after the blackout, because now the whole city figured it was looters.

"Thousand fires," he said with his mouth full. "Who's counting?"

I should have gotten up.

I've told myself I stayed to learn something, and I did learn things, and I couldn't use any of them.

The truth is that he was talking and listening is what I do, and by the second week I caught myself looking up when the door opened.

One morning he put a flat box on the table from a laundry on Pelham Parkway.

Inside was my pale blue shirt, folded on a cardboard with a paper band around it.

"She left it on a chair," he said. "I had them do the collar. A guy should look nice."

He moved the ketchup bottle to the middle of the table and looked at it.

"I asked a guy at a firehouse, nice guy. Your ladders go a hundred feet. That's ten floors, Marty, eleven if you lean." He tapped the bottle with his spoon, about halfway up. "You told an old man on six to stay put, and that's a funny story. What are you going to tell a girl on nineteen?"

He left a five for both of us. He always paid.

That Saturday a locksmith on Riverdale Avenue put a new lock on 19-F for eighteen dollars.

I found Artie Lombardi in the lobby, a thin man of sixty-one with a gray crew cut, and I told him to keep the service door shut against a guy in a Monte Carlo.

"The insurance fella?" Artie said. "Four months he's been coming in my service door after nine. Always says hello." He scratched his neck. "I figured he was your brother."

Janine took her new key without asking why and put it on her ring.

We had kept the schedule, because neither of us could afford to move in July.

She worked days, I worked nights, we passed in the kitchen at six, and she had the bed.

She said she had seen him laugh at her once and that was enough.

That didn't mean she believed me.

She still filled the thermos, and she left it on the counter now.

I didn't tell her about the ladders.

I figured she'd call it more of me cracking up, so I changed the lock and went to work.

At ten past three on the morning of Thursday the twenty-eighth, the direct line rang at my position.

"Fire Department."

"Marty, it's me." She was talking low and even, the way she talks to a patient. "There's smoke coming under the front door."

"What's the address?" I said.

There was a pause.

"You know the address, you jerk."

That's how far down it goes, that voice.

I had it on the air before she finished: Hudson Crest, Ludlam Terrace, nineteenth floor, occupant inside.

Barry's head came around at the sound of nineteen.

The Riverdale company was four minutes off, plus the building.

"Where are you?"

"At the door. I brought the phone."

That cord. It reached the bed and it reached the front door.

"Put the back of your hand flat on the door, up high. Not the knob."

I could hear her breathing.

"It's warm," she said. "Like a coffee cup."

"Don't open it."

It was the same voice and the same three words, and I had said them once before, on a Wednesday in March.

"Wet some towels and pack them along the bottom. Bring the phone. Then get down low and stay on the line with me."

"I could make the stairs."

"You don't know what's on the stairs. You stay where you are. Do you hear me? They're coming."

Water ran, and I heard the towels hit the floor.

For a while there was only her breath and the air conditioner, and I listened to that.

I have listened to a lot of that.

"Is this it?" she said. "Is this what you do all night?"

"Yes."

She was quiet for a bit, and then her voice changed.

"There's somebody at the door. Somebody's banging. He wants me to open up."

My hand went cold on the phone.

I had heard that from another caller, and I'll get to that.

"Who is it?"

"Who is it?" she yelled, away from the phone.

A voice came through the door, a long way off, gravel, with a lot to say about the door and the fire and the mothers of everybody involved.

She came back, and I swear she was almost laughing.

"It's Artie. He says it's out."

"Hand on the door. Is it cool?"

"It's cool."

"Okay," I said. "Open it."

Barry took the headset out of my hand and told me to go.

It was a doormat. That's all it was.

Somebody had come up the stairs, soaked our doormat, lit it, and gone back down, and it had burned the paint off the bottom of the door and filled the hall with smoke.

It was getting light when I got there, and the Riverdale guys had gone.

One of them had raked through the ash and found a key, black from the fire, and Artie had tried it in my new lock and it didn't fit.

It was the key to the old one.

Janine was out in the hall in her robe, barefoot, with the whole floor stinking around her, crouched by the scorched square where our mat had been.

She had a piece of it between two fingers, and she held it under her nose the way I had seen her check a dressing.

"That smell," she said. "It was on his hand. In March."