Chapter 6

She stood up in the hall with that piece of burned mat in her fingers.

"I said to him, what's that smell? He had his hand wrapped in a dish towel and it stank. He said a radiator cap blew, he'd been helping a guy with his car." She looked at what she was holding. "So I wrote radiator. You write what the patient says."

She went in and sat down at the kitchen table, and she put the piece of mat next to the black key Artie had left there.

"You were so calm," she said. "'What's the address.' You were so goddamn calm, Marty. Where do you keep it?"

I didn't know.

"I sat on that floor with my hand on the door because you told me to. Now tell me about the old man."

I had told her to stay put and she had stayed put, and she was sitting in front of me alive, in her robe.

I pulled out a chair.

I was working a double that Wednesday, in at six for a guy with a bad back.

It was eight-oh-two at night and the voice was old and very polite.

"Excuse me," he said. "I'd like to report a smell of smoke."

He gave me the address as if he was ordering from a catalog: Fox Street, top floor, Kaplan.

He was eighty-one and he had been in that apartment since Coolidge.

The landlord had shut off the heat and the water in January and everybody else had gone, but Mr. Kaplan had paid through April.

I told him to wet a towel for the bottom of the door.

"I have no water," he said. "They shut it. I have seltzer."

"Use the seltzer, sir," I said, and I listened to it go, that hiss, all along the door.

Janine had her hand flat on the table.

The two nearest companies were already out on other fires, because that was March in the Bronx, and the next ones were coming from a long way off.

He asked if he should go down, and I told him to feel the door, and he said it was warm.

"Don't open it," I said. "Stay put, sir. Stay on the line with me. We're coming."

That's what the card says, and most nights it's right.

He asked if he should bring his teeth. They were in a glass. He wanted to know if there would be people.

Janine laughed, one short bark, and I knew that laugh. They do it on her floor.

"Bring your teeth, sir," I said.

About seven minutes in he said, "Excuse me one moment. There's a fella at the door."

I heard the phone go down on a table, and I heard him walk away, and I heard him walk back.

"Is it a fireman, sir? Has he got a helmet?"

"He doesn't have a hat," he said. "I looked, on the chain. He wants me to come out."

Nobody could have gotten there yet.

I figured a junkie stripping pipe.

"Is the door hot?"

"It's hotter."

"Don't open it again," I said. "You stay put. Tell him to get out of there."

"I'll tell him," he said.

I heard him, far off from the phone, in that same voice, telling somebody what the Fire Department said.

He came back on.

"Thank you very much," he said. "I'll hold."

That was the nine minutes.

He didn't say anything after that, but the line stayed open, and I stayed on it thirty-one more minutes, until it quit.

"Who was at the door?" Janine said.

"Nobody. They didn't find anybody. The marshals wrote down possible vagrant."

"And you came home and ate four eggs."

"Yes."

"That was the morning he came in," she said. "Eight-fifteen, March tenth."

She sat a minute. She got up, reached on top of the refrigerator, brought down the Cool Whip tub, and turned it over on the table.

It was hundreds and fifties in rubber bands, and they had dried stiff.

"Forty-two hundred dollars. He asked could he keep a little something in the freezer. I found out what when it thawed." She squared up the stack with one finger. "A burial man collects quarters, Marty. I've had that up there two weeks, telling myself things."

"Janine."

"I'm talking. You had your turn."

She told it the way she gives report at the change of shift.

His left hand was swelling that morning, so she cut the wedding ring off it herself, with the ring cutter, and he cried and said his wife had passed.

He was left-handed, and the hand stayed wrapped into April, so he would sit in that chair with his black rate book and say the addresses of his prospects, and she wrote them in for him.

Six addresses, in her very nice handwriting.

"What addresses?"

"Kelly Street. Two on Intervale. Bathgate."

She heard it as she said it.

She had dressed the two old sisters from Bathgate the day after the blackout.

I had one more thing, and I said it, because I'd been saving it like a fool.

"He's got a nun," I said. "He told me at the diner. The night of Fox Street he was at a parent-teacher conference, in a little chair, twenty mothers looking at him, and nobody has ever even asked."

She looked at me.

"He doesn't have kids," she said.

She took the phone off the wall and called a girl she knew on the ER desk.

It took four minutes to get the March chart read to her: next of kin, Paula Fusco, sister.

She dialed the number and held the receiver out from her ear so I could hear.

A woman answered, wide awake, with a radio going behind her.

"Is this Vic Fusco's sister?" Janine said.

"He doesn't have a sister. Who's this?"

"Who's this?"

"This is Mrs. Fusco."

Janine hung up very gently, the way you close a door on somebody sleeping.

She stood with her hand on the phone for about as long as it takes to read a thermometer.

"Get your keys," she said. "There's something you've been storing for him."

We walked down, twenty flights, and neither one of us brought up the elevator.

Behind the boiler room at Hudson Crest there's a long hall of wire cages, one to an apartment.

Ours had two pairs of skis nobody used and a chair of her mother's.

"He said it was paint for the Poconos," she said. "He was between garages. I gave him the key in April."

Behind her mother's chair four five-gallon cans stood in a row, with paint thinner on the labels.

You didn't need the labels. I had smelled that on the hood of a Monte Carlo.

There were twenty-four floors of people asleep on top of it.

On the wire door hung the tag I had printed myself: SCULLY 19-F.