Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  “There are Three Musketeers cooped up in there with the engineer, coach. Ross and a bird everyone calls Chuck—plus a silver-haired gent with a bandage on his chops.”

  “Chuck’s the producer. The other’s their lawyer. Where’s the hospital patrol?”

  “I run across a corp’ral who’s been giving the up and down to the sand buckets and the sprinklers and the hoserolls. You want him?”

  “Quick. Where is he? Backstage?”

  “He was. You got to crawl through the orchestra.”

  “Snap it up.”

  The hall was a natural draftmaker. Big floor space, high-vaulted composition roof, wartime construction with the beams and girders insufficiently fireproofed. Wood floors. Wood sash. The place would go up like a box of matches. A lot of good those red globes and EXIT diagrams would do if it ever caught.

  And there were no steel fire shutters to keep a blaze from spreading horizontally to other buildings, he noticed. He was glad he’d notified the nearby Richmond companies to get “on the box”—be ready to roll at a split second’s notice.

  They went Indian file, stooping over, behind the percussion instruments to a tiny door under the stage apron. Above them the voice throbbed on:

  “Through… the smoke and flame

  I gotta be… where you are…

  “Good grief!” Olive murmured, as they passed into the dimness below stage. “Does she have to sing that?”

  They came up out of the half-light into the wings. A group of coveralled men huddled behind the heavy glass-fiber curtain. One wore khaki, with chevrons on the arm.

  Shaner sss-ed, “Hey, Corp. Fire Marshal wants you.”

  The corporal resented the interruption. “Whatsamatter, Chief?”

  “Sprinkler system all right?”

  “Yeah. Anything—?”

  “Tested the down pipes from your roof tank?”

  “They ain’t frozen, if that’s what you’re getting at.” The soldier opened his eyes very wide at Olive.

  Pedley said, “You feel her lately?”

  “Howzat?”

  “Have you felt the walls?” Pedley strode toward the rear drop, turned to look out across the stage and up at the line of bulbs under the proscenium. The illumination which beat down on the singer’s bronze hair wasn’t clear and sharp; it quivered like sunlight over a midsummer pavement. “Hot air up there, buddy. Making the lights shimmy. Better feel her.”

  “Sure it’s hot. We keep the steam high on account of our patients.”

  Pedley said sharply, “You wouldn’t know if the seat of your pants was burning! Shaner. Take the east wall.” He didn’t wait for his deputy to begin; moved swiftly along the west wall, passing his hands over the calcimined plaster.

  The plaster beneath his palms became suddenly cooler. Was there some burrowing flame back there under the floor somewhere?

  He sniffed. The strong hospital odor of ether and formalin—but no smoke. Maybe he’d been jittery for nothing.

  No! He’d turned the corner, was working across behind the backdrop. The wall here was warm!

  Sweat moistened his forehead—not from the heat.

  There was something more than radiation from steam pipes, here. The varnish on the woodwork was sticky!

  He didn’t hurry as he went out onto the stage, crossed to the control room. Any sign of panic, now, might be worse than a blaze.

  Gaydel swung around from his campstool, scowled.

  “Now, what?”

  “Call Toleman,” Pedley said easily. “Want an announcement over the mike.”

  Ross cried, “This isn’t a rehearsal, you dimwit! We’re on the air. You can’t break up a network broadcast—”

  “You’ll break it up. There’s a fire backstage, here, somewhere.”

  Amery’s stool clattered to the floor. “I don’t see—”

  “Neither do I. But it’s here. Get Toleman. Get him quick.”

  Gaydel hesitated. Leila was just going into the final chorus of “Chloe.” The heavy beat of the drums was building up to a climax. Maybe another half-minute wouldn’t make any difference; maybe it wasn’t anything serious; maybe—

  Pedley gauged the producer’s indecision, made his decision.

  He went out of the control room, strolled casually to the microphone, put a hand on Leila’s arm. She half-turned, without missing a phrasing. Consternation was clear in her eyes.

  He pulled her back from the microphone, as Toleman glared, started toward him from the wing.

  “You’ll want to lynch me for cutting into the performance,” he said into the mike, “but we’ll have to call it off, temporarily. There’s been an accident—” he made it purposely obscure—“there’ll be rain checks. Everybody out, now.” He gestured with his open hand to the substitute orchestra leader to keep on playing.

  Toleman pawed at him. Pedley brushed him aside. He cut across to the corporal. “Pull your box. Then tell your em-pees to get these boys out of here, fast.”

  The corporal ran.

  Pedley used sign language to Shaner, across the stage. He held both hands at his side as if gripping a rifle, then pantomimed as if he were suddenly shooting the rifle into the ground. Shaner nodded, hurried for the nearest wall rack holding an extinguisher.

  The movement toward the exits began reluctantly. Not more than a third of the invalids were on their feet. None of the wheel-chair cases had spun themselves around to head for the doors. A few veterans were filtering out. The aisles were slowly beginning to fill up. Maybe it would be all right, if they would only move a little faster. They might all get out in time.

  He saw the smoke. No larger than the trailing plume from a cigarette, at first. It drifted aimlessly up from the staircase they had used to climb from below-stage. Before he could reach the top of the steps, it had become a gray funnel a foot wide.

  Then the cry of “Fire! FIRE!!!!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  TRAPPED IN A BLAZING INFERNO

  IT TOOK ABOUT TEN SECONDS for the recreation hall to turn into pandemonium.

  Pedley, jerking a fire ax from its bracket, saw what was happening. The “walking cases” weren’t in any panic; they weren’t crowding and fighting toward the doors at all. That was the trouble; the men who could get out easily weren’t doing it. They were staying to help the others who couldn’t navigate without aid—the wheelchair occupants, the two-crutch cases. Before Shaner came lumbering across the stage with his extinguisher, the two long aisles were a tangle of chairs, canes, crutches, struggling men.

  The nurses, from the back rows, did what they could. The M.P.’s carried men bodily out of the milling mass.

  With the first burst of flame, the marshal knew there’d be a stampede.

  The four men in the control room had run for sand buckets. The fire was eating away under the stage somewhere; Pedley hacked away at the floor beside the hottest place on that rear wall. If he could get a draft through here, it might stop the flames from cauliflowering out over the aisles.

  His ax sank through inch-thick planking as if it had been a rotten stump. When he yanked the blade free, a little sprinkle of sparks followed it. Then a thin trident of orange flame.

  Beside him, Shaner yelled, “One more sock, I can get this baby working.”

  The ax lifted, fell. A square foot of the planking broke away, fell out of sight, was replaced by a gush of vanilla-colored smoke. Shaner let go with the extinguisher.

  A livid sheet of violet flashed as the stream squirted out of the nozzle; it blinded Shaner momentarily, left him stunned. Pedley knocked the cylinder out of the deputy’s hands. It rolled along the floor, sprouting lavender flame over backdrop and floor!

  Gasoline! In the extinguisher!

  The marshal seized Shaner by the collar, dragged him back from the miniature volcano roaring up through the hole in the flooring.

  The backdrop blazed up with the rapidity of a window shade zipping to the top when the catch doesn’t work. Pedley could see through to
the stage.

  Leila was at the mike again—singing. Some of the orchestra men had fled but most of them stayed with her.

  Loud above the crackling and snapping of the flames, clear and cool over the terrified melee of the entangled aisles, came the husky, steadying voice:

  “Ain’t no… chains can bind me

  Where you go… I’ll find you…

  It wasn’t exactly oil on the troubled waters; nothing could have completely calmed that fear-crazed group of sick and injured men. But it was enough. It gave them the narrow margin of confidence they had to have, if they were to survive.

  She had nerve enough to stand there and sing:

  “Lo-o-ove… is calling me

  I gotta be where you are…”

  And they wouldn’t be shown up by a girl—not by the voice many of them had listened to in faraway corners of the world, on shipboard, in foxholes. If Leila could take it, they could.

  The hospital fire crew was swarming in now, with hoses. Men flung sand and retreated before searing geysers welling up out of the floor.

  The seats themselves were nearly empty. But the aisles were still clogged, the exits hopelessly jammed. Another three minutes and most of the boys would be out. They wouldn’t have half that, unless that fireproof curtain shut off the flames from the stage.

  It had jammed on the track somewhere. The patrol corporal and Ollie and Toleman were tugging frantically at the rope; the thing was stuck, a third of the way across the stage.

  Pedley grabbed an armful of the heavy fabric, was attempting to drag it back toward the wing to clear the pulleys, when he saw the widening, luminous circles on Leila’s skirt. He dived at her, beat the flames out with his hands.

  She staggered away from the mike, saw the gilt sparks racing across the material of her dress—and ran.

  He tried to grab her, but she was too horrified at being afire to realize that running only fanned the sparks.

  In an instant she’d reached the wings, staring over her shoulder, terrified at the trail of flame following her. She tripped over the extinguisher Pedley had knocked out of Shaner’s hand, fell headlong—disappeared into the smoke belching from the flight of stairs leading below-stage.

  Pedley was plunging into the smoke and down the staircase before she hit the cement floor. But he couldn’t see her, couldn’t find her when he felt around at the foot of the steps.

  He called to her.

  Her answer came faintly from somewhere toward the opening into the musicians’ pit. He groped toward her in the half-light. She had crawled beside a crate of old costumes, crouched there, whimpering like an animal in pain—

  He pulled her to her feet.

  “You’re not hurt.”

  He had to find out if she was hurt; he couldn’t tell if she slumped there in hysterics.

  She could walk.

  “Come on.” He made for the midget door under the apron, opening into the orchestra.

  When he put his hand on the knob, he knew there was no use. It burned his fingers. The paint on the door was blistering.

  He could open it, easily enough. But they wouldn’t get through. The other side of that door would be a sea of flame.

  “Have to try the stairs.”

  “All right.” She’d stopped whimpering.

  The lights went out. They could still see; the orange glare was sufficient for them to find their way back to the bottom of the stairs.

  They went up part way. But they couldn’t get out. The fireproof curtain had fallen over the stair up onto the stage; from beneath it angry spears of flame stabbed across the top steps.

  Pedley dragged her back. “Doesn’t look so good.”

  “We’re trapped?”

  He pulled her along with him understage. “Might be another exit—”

  There wasn’t. He was pretty certain there wouldn’t be.

  She clung to him. “We’ll never get out of this.”

  “Sure. They’ll get us.”

  They would, of course. But it wouldn’t do any good to tell her how the rescue crew would come through here after the fire was out and everything was soaked down; to explain about the long black rubber bag they use to carry out—whatever was left of them. “I’ve been in tougher spots than this.”

  “This is what Ned went through. And Kim.” She didn’t put it as a question; it was more as if she were understanding something for the first time.

  “Uh, huh. Only we—we’ll be all right.”

  The heat was a tangible thing. It needled the back of his neck, stung his nostrils, made the top of his ears ache.

  “They wouldn’t have had to go through it—we wouldn’t be going through it—if it hadn’t been for me,” she said.

  “Your first husband wasn’t exactly free from blame.” They were as far away from the flames as they could get. Pedley’s back was to the wall. She clung to him, her face half-buried in his shoulder.

  “I forgot. You read my—day book.”

  “Yair.” He slapped at a spark that dropped on her neck. It slid down inside her dress. He ripped the silk from her shoulders, flung the burning cloth aside. She didn’t move away from him.

  “You know about—Ned—”

  “I know he was some guy who came to your home town with a show and you ran away and married him, went into his vaudeville act.” A portion of the stage floor fell in, some twenty feet away; it was like watching a preview of hell, Pedley thought. “I found out you never did divorce him. That you had a lot of—uh—men friends. Guys who could help you along in show business, mostly. But you never committed bigamy until this kid Conover came along.”

  “I never really fell in love until I found Bill. I never met anyone like him before. Maybe that was why. He wouldn’t—have anything to do with me, unless he could marry me.”

  “The lieutenant didn’t know you’d—played around?”

  “Yes.” It was getting hard for her to speak; her lips were beginning to swell from the heat. “I didn’t fool him about that. But I couldn’t tell him Ned and I were married.” She shrank behind Pedley’s shoulder as a knot in the flooring exploded and scattered fragments of glowing wood over them.

  “Why’d you put stuff like that down on paper, anyway?”

  “I never had many friends—except boy friends. I couldn’t keep them very long, either. Ned wouldn’t let me. He kept breaking up my friendships, even though he didn’t care for me, himself. He didn’t mind my—sleeping with men as long as it helped get us jobs or more money for the act. But he didn’t want me to like them.”

  “Dog in the manger.” Pedley could smell the hair singeing on his head. Maybe it was her hair—didn’t make any difference. They were both going the same way.

  “So I put my friends in my diary—where I could be sure of having them when I needed them. That was pretty often, with Ned the kind of man he was. I never meant a living soul to see the diary, of course. I hid it from Ned until one night he came in my room and caught me writing in it.”

  “After that he held a club over your head?” It would be better if he could keep her talking; it wasn’t going to be for long, now.

  “He found out Bill wanted to marry me. Then he swore he’d show the hook to Bill unless I did marry him. Bill.”

  “By that time you cared enough for Conover not to want to give him up?”

  “I didn’t want him hurt. He’s such a swell kid. And I knew if he saw—the things I’d written—it would break him all up. Besides, I loved him. I wanted to marry him. Only thing, I didn’t want to be a bigamist. But that’s what I was.”

  “Then Ned had you right where he wanted you.”

  “He’d been mean, before. After that, he was evil. He made me give him most of the money I made. He insulted me in public. And he wouldn’t let Bill tell anyone we were married. Of course, poor Bill doesn’t know why I was so afraid of Ned. He thinks it’s just because Ned was such a heel. If it should come out I’m actually a criminal, I think Bill would shoot himself.”
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  “Somebody else found out—all this? Figured if he had the book and Ned was out of the way, he’d he able to keep you under his thumb just as Lownes had?”

  “I guess so—but—” She was getting faint. “I don’t know—who—” She leaned against him weakly, sank against the wall in a crumpled heap.

  Her skirt began to smolder at her knees. It broke into flame.

  He tried to put it out by flinging his coat around her. It smothered the blaze for a moment, then it flared up again.

  He dropped the coat, clawed at the flaming fabric until he ripped her dress away completely.

  Then he covered her body with his own and waited.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  DISCOVERIES POST MORTEM

  HE HAD PLENTY of light to scratch the name on the back of his watch. He lay across Leila’s body with the shoulder-padding of his coat over his mouth so it filtered out the worst of the sparks and a little of the heat which made every breath a brief agony.

  They wouldn’t get to them; that was impossible, now. But they’d find the watch. Barney, at least, would have sense enough to search for some message left in the moment of extremity.

  The pain seemed to be numbing him; the back of his neck even felt cool. Mirage of the nerves; it must be. They said you felt no thirst at the very end when you died in the desert, looking for water.

  The coolness spread. He put one hand up at the back of his head. His hair was wet. He rolled on one side. The glow from the fire was dimmer. The air seemed full of mist. It was mist. The fog nozzle!

  Picking its way carefully over burning planks and red-glowing beams, came a fantastic figure that might have been spawned by Frankenstein. The Suit!

  No wool-clad, rubber-shod fireman could have walked into that inferno. But the Suit!—Pedley would back the Suit against hell-fire any time, from here in.

  That asbestos-coated grizzly bear with the diving helmet headpiece and the square of gleaming glass for the eves, held in its mittened paws a thin, twelve-foot applicator, an extension nozzle-tip bent at right angles to the length. From the nozzle came a mist of fine, drizzling spray that cut down flame, blacked out embers and sent a cloud of steam boiling up from the floor. Pedley felt an invisible screen drop between him and that withering blast of heat.