The Glass Inferno

by Thomas N. Scortia

Garfunkel looked blank. “He was here a minute ago.”

  “When he comes back, see if he can help you any.

  I’ll be down in the boiler room.” In the lower lobby the Red Cross had started to set up cots; already some children were asleep under the heavy army blankets. The number of tenants had noticeably decreased; the switchboard and the security guard must be having fairly good luck in placing them elsewhere.

  On the garage floor, the City Gas and Oil truck had arrived and was pumping out the two tanks. A little of the color had returned to Joe’s face and he was shouting directions at the four parking attendants moving out the cars. Another half hour or so and the garage would be empty, Barton thought. When the diners started coming down from the Promenade Room, they would have to arrange for taxis to take them over to the city garage.

  More money out of Curtainwall’s pocket-or some insurance agency’s, depending on how the policy was written.

  Donaldson was sitting at Griff Edwards’ desk, looking tired and worn and on the verge of tears. Another.good friend of Edwards, Barton thought. “Things going all right, Mr. Donaldson?” he asked gently.

  Donaldson’s face was dirty and his uniform rumpled.

  Barton recalled that he had been with the men from maintenance who had tried to put out the fire in, the first place. “Things haven’t gone right since I came on shift, Mr. Barton.

  “I understand some of the fan motors conked out.”

  “One burnout, one freeze-up.” He leaned back in his chair and was silent for a long moment. “Mr. Barton, this may cost me my job but I gotta say what I think.

  The lash-up down here is fine-for a building two thirds this size.

  As it was, Griff had to push it even under normal condition. In an emergency, it just wasn’t up to it.”

  “It met all the codes,” Barton said stiffly: Donaldson looked tired.

  “Did it? I sometimes wonder.

  It wasn’t the gear that was specified.”

  The uneasy feeling that had been building up in Barton’s stomach-grew stronger. “What do you mean?”

  “I ‘knew I was going to be transferred over and I talked with the architectural engineers when they first started construction. They had specified more expensive motors and generators, a more elaborate sensor system.

  What we ended up with does the job-but just barely.”

  He ran dirty fingers over an already streaked scalp. “I guess it’ll do the job all right, provided there’re no sudden demands made on it or emergency overloading.”

  The equipment wasn’t what the Wexler and Haines engineering department had recommended, Barton thought. What Donaldson was saying was that Leroux’s accounting office had scrapped their recommendations and cut the heart out of. the building. He felt the anger start to build in him, then. He had wanted to be site supervisor-a job that would normally have fallen to him. But Leroux had shipped him to Boston. Because Leroux had known he would fight for his building?

  Because Leroux had known he would quit before he would agree to the cost cutting that had gone on?

  He started back toward the steps. “I’ll be in the lobby if you want me, Donaldson.”

  He took a long break in the lower lobby lunchroom, huddled over a cup of -coffee and trying to sort out his thoughts. It was his building, he kept thinking. It had been his baby. Leroux had had no right…

  . But of course, he did. Leroux paid the bills; Leroux paid his salary; Leroux had done the financing. Why had he cheapened it? There hadn’t been any reason for it. , . .

  “Mr. Barton, when do you think the fire will be over so we can go back?”

  . He vaguely remembered her; an elderly matron, her wispy hair done up in curlers, half lost in her soot-smeared silk bathrobe. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Maybe a few-hours but then there’ll be the cleaning up. We’re making reservations for those who want to stay in a hotel until the building’s all right for tenants to move back in.

  There’ll be no expense on your part.” She shook her head and smiled somewhat wanly. “No, I don’t think I’d care for that. This is such a beautiful building and it’s home to us. My husband and I have been living in hotels for years.”

  There were murmurs from other tenants who were watching him; they didn’t know him by name for the most part but knew that he must represent management.

  Some of them started to come over. He finished his coffee in a hurry and fled.

  Back upstairs, Garfunkel had finished filling in several floors for Infantino. Barton had just bent over to study the sheets when there were quick bursts of light near the entrance. A small group of reporters started to crowd into the now almost-emptied lobby.

  “Where’s Leroux?” one shouted.

  “Any statement from management?”

  One of the reporters remembered Barton from the dedication. “What went wrong, Mr. Barton? The building’s going up like it was a torch job.”

  “No comment!” Barton shouted furiously. He motioned to Captain Greenwall who had come in to check at the communications station. “Get some men and clear the lobby. See that all reporters stay behind the barricades -it’s dangerous within a block of the building and I’ll be goddamned if I’ll be responsible for anybody else’s life tonight. No unauthorized personnel are to be allowed within a block of the building.”

  The captain motioned to several of his men standing nearby and headed for the entrance. “Okay, fellas, I’m sure everybody will have statements later on. Let’s move on, let’s go. At least a block and watch out for falling .glass, we already lost one young man that way.”

  One of the reporters asked him what he meant; Greenwall explained in brief, graphic detail. The reporter went white and the group backed quickly out, a few taking last-minute shots of Barton.

  After the reporters were herded out, the captain came back.

  “There’s a man from the insurance company by the barricades; he wants to talk to you. Also some people who claim they lease stores and offices and want to check their shops and empty the cash registers or else look over the premises.”

  “Nobody gets in,” Barton said automatically. “Absolutely nobody.”

  “Some of them are pretty worked up.”.

  “Tough.” They wanted to complain to somebody, he thought, they wanted to confront somebody in authority so they could threaten to sue.

  But that was Leroux s job, that was his dirty laundry.

  “Greenwall?”

  The captain turned. “Keep them out of my hair; I don’t care how you do it. It doesn’t matter if they’re tenants or from the insurance company or what. Tell them . …” He hesitated, then shrugged to himself. He had done enough, he had done more than enough.

  From now on, it was going to be Leroux’s ball game. He had had it.

  And it didn’t matter to him what Jenny was going to think.

  “Tell them,” Barton said slowly, “that Mr. Leroux will be down in a few minutes to talk with them.” Before he could get to a house phone, Infantino called him over. He was puzzled. “Craig, is there any way at all we can get blue prints? We need to know the distances between these offices and exactly which ones are above one another.”

  “No way, Mario, unless your men can get. into Curtainwall’s offices.”

  “Okay, so we do without them. But it would help.” He glanced up from the drawing in front of him. “I wish the hell you had designed in fire doors in the stairwells, too.

  It would cut smoke spread. It’s not required by city code but it would have helped in preventing smoke spread-helped in evacuation, too.”

  Barton Rasped in sudden anger. “I did design them, Mario! I knew they weren’t required by the local code but I know the value of them.”

  Infantino shook his head. “They never bothered to install them Craig.” He laughed bitterly. “Looks like your baby was a breech delivery.”

  Barton stalked over to the house phone and savagely dialed the Promenade Room. He no longer trusted Leroux’s -
reasons for having sent him down..It had been a setup, he thought. Leroux had known what he would hear and he didn’t want to face it. So it was send down Barton As his patsy. Well, this was the end of it. He’d call Leroux and have Jenny come down with him. And when Leroux arrived, Barton would turn in his resignation on the spot.

  He finished dialing and waited for the ring. There was dead silence on the phone. He dialed again and still nothing. Then he dialed the operator.

  A moment later he hung up, feeling sick and tired and frightened.

  There was no phone contact to the forty-fifth floor and above.

  Somewhere, the fire had cut the coaxial for the bank of phones that served the Promenade Room.

  The restaurant was now cut off from all outside contact. And so was Jenny.

  Nearly all of the offices in the area of the seventeenth floor utility room, the birthplace of the beast, have now been gutted. rugs and draperies are rich fuel for the fire, as are the heavy parquet floors installed by Psychiatric Associates half a corridor length away.

  The paint on the office walls and those of the corridor is a Popular brand that advertises itself as “fire resistant.” In the incandescent heart of the fire, it quickly bubbles, exposing the flammable surfaces beneath. The exposed metal studding glows and begins to melt; Plaster decomposes and spalls in a rain of dirty white flakes.

  In the washrooms, grouting crumbles away and tile walls buckle.

  Plastic water tumblers and hampers slump, then finally char and flame.

  The paint on the paper-towel dispensers blackens and the towels blaze, peeling away from the roll like the leaves of an onion. In various offices, the bottles in water coolers crack and shatter as their contents boil and turn to steam. In a lunchroom area,- the glass front of a sandwich vending machine breaks and the sandwiches inside toast, then char as their Plastic wrappings burn away. The front of a nearby softdrink machine warps and buckles with the heat, then curls aside.

  The cans of soda explode in a continuing chain, like a string of giant firecrackers. In the offices of the collection agency next door, the fire sweeps the desks clear of correspondence and file.

  folders, fuses staples and paper clips into solid ),masses of metal.

  It scorches the paint from a line of file cabinets and warps the drawers, then reaches inside to finger the contents. The records of a thousand debts go up in a rush of flames.

  On the eighteenth floor, the fire has pushed its way through badly sealed duct holes to race across the carpeting in a dozen different offices. It climbs the wallpapered walls of an insurance company and Penetrates into the air space above the acoustical tile ceiling. Here it discovers a long air-conditioning duct that has accumulated a heavy coating of dust and lint inside its walls. There is just enough air within the confines of the duct for a hot, incomplete combustion that chars the organic contents, releasing flammable gases to burn in the limited oxygen.

  The temperature of the resulting mixture of carbon monoxide and resinous fumes approaches 1,000 degrees.

  A hundred feet farther down, the duct fails at a plastic joint.

  The hot, fuel-rich gases hit the open air. There is a low-order, gaseous explosion that tears away whole masses of ceiling tile. For a few seconds, the equivalent of a massive blow torch flares over the wooden furniture below and plays against a wall covered with plastic paneling resembling walnut veneer. The wall bursts into flame.

  At the far end of the eighteenth floor, a portion of the aluminum Curtainwall outside has heated to the point where it pulls away from the framework of the building this opens up a channel leading as high as the twenty-first floor. Clouds of hot smoke billow up the resulting flue and stream across the windows of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first floors, heating the metal frames.

  On the twenty-first floor, a window suddenly cracks and drops from its frame, plunging to the street below to shatter between two cars.

  The draperies inside twist and dance in the hot blasts of air, then start to blaze. They lash back inside the office, flapping against a wall poster that says simply “Motivational Displays Move Products.”

  A curling edge of the poster browns, blackens, and begins to burn.

  Three floors below the beast pauses as it realizes it has almost run out of food. Abruptly something stings it on one side and it retreats a few feet. There is another, more painful hit and it recoils farther. It is suddenly frightened; something is trying to kill it.

  The pain is continuous now and it slowly but steadily falls back upon itself. It senses a growing numbness.

  CHAPTER 37

  Through the long early moments of the emergency, Wyndom Leroux sat silently, watching the dialers. They were in no immediate danger and they seemed for the moment to know it. A sense of futility was settling over him, drowning his thoughts in a deadening blanket. He watched the diners and their reactions as though he were seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope. He was scarcely aware of Jenny or of his wife on his left.

  For a while, after word of the fire had spread throughout the Promenade Room, the diners had treated the emergency almost as a lark.

  The roar of the fire engines below, the free wine on -the house, the sense of danger and yet at the same time realizing they were far removed from it, the sensation of being suspended in the sky while the world below burned … all of these combined, evoking a mood of almost frantic gaiety. A few of the diners had quietly left, taking the scenic elevator down, but the others found themselves bound together by a tight camaraderie. A quiet night out now became a block party with people at adjoining tables joking and sharing the sense of distant danger, or else drifting out onto the promenade to try and see what was happening on the streets far below. They pointed out to each other the barricades and the police cars and fire engines, half hidden by the drifting snow.

  It was great fun.

  Then the ambulances pulled up to the edge of the plaza and tiny figures carrying rolled-up stretchers disappeared into the building; these reappeared a few minutes later bearing the same stretcher with a blanket covering it.

  From that distance it was impossible to tell whether the blanket completely covered the figure on the stretcher or not. The party atmosphere began to die as the entire dining room emptied. Nearly everyone crowded onto the promenade to silently watch the scene below.

  The smoke billowing from windows many floors beneath them and the driving snow made visibility difficult. Still they could see the oil truck drive down the ramp into the basement but few guessed the reason why. Shortly afterward a steady stream of cars began to leave the parking garage.

  At the north entrance, taxis picked up pajamaed tenants on their way to their lodgings for the night.

  Moments later the windows on the fire floors began to explode outward. The tiny figures on the plaza scattered as the glass knifed downward, shimmering briefly in the falling snow. The diners became far more sober after that and the babble of cheerful conversation fell to an occasional murmur or whisper. A feeling of apprehension started to build in the room. Guests drifted slowly back from the promenade to drink and eat in silence, occasionally asking questions of the hostess.

  She seemed to have lost none of her self-assurance but she seemed disturbingly uninformed. Her calm had done a lot to reassure jittery diners earlier; now her calm seemed forced and her lack of information frightening.

  Several of the more perceptive diners guessed the the phone lines to the lobby had been cut by the fire. A few more quietly paid their tab and drifted over to the scenic elevator, where a line began to form.

  Leroux felt more uninvolved than at any other time in his life.

  He ate and drank mechanically and made small talk when it seemed to be expected of him. He could tell that Jenny was terrified and went out of his way to say all of the usual things to calm her. Thelma, he knew, was watching him carefully, trying to guess at his inner strain.

  There was no way that she could; his business affairs had been a part
of his life that he had seldom shared with her and it was a little late to start now. Intellectually, he knew and accepted what was now going to happen: The public outcry, his personal crucifixion in the newspapers and on television, the investigations, the lawsuits.

  He also realized that it hadn’t hit him yet emotionally.

  Thelma and Jenny, the dining room and the fire itself were remote from him; in a sense, they didn’t exist. The fire was a catastrophe that he-had yet to acknowledge, could not acknowledge. The worst that could happen had, but he couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t face what it meant. In the long war of Wyndom Leroux against the world, he had never found it necessary to prepare a line of retreat.

  Now it was necessary but there was no line. He had no plan of action.

  “Wyn.

  He looked up, startled. Odd, for a moment he really hadn’t been there at all. He had been thinking, of New Orleans when he had been a young man. His father had forced him to work on the docks so he would learn early what the world was like and what it took for a man to hold his own in it. The experience had been invaluable, but he had never forgiven his father for it.

  Thelma started to say something to him, then stopped in mid-sentence, smiled, reached out and grasped his hand.

  He squeezed it, then drew back. He saw that she sensed his remoteness and was withdrawing. She turned her attention to Jenny instead. Jenny replied to her attempts at conversation in monosyllables. Odd, Leroux thought, we’re both retreating, each from a different reality.

  There was now a chill to the air in the Promenade Room and the faintest suggestion of stuffiness. Leroux sensed it first, probably because he was the least concerned with what was happening at the moment. The ventilation and heating system had been turned off, he realized, or at least the supply to the upper floors had failed.

  “Mr. Leroux.” Quinn Reynolds hurried to the table sudden alarm showing in her face. “Some of the diner’s‘ are trying to leave by the inside elevators. I’ve tried to dissuade them because I didn’t think it was safe, but they won’t listen.”

  It was like stepping out of a fog or coming up from a deep dive in a pool. This was something he could handle.