Pellam leaned closer to Ettie Washington. A sudden moaning filled the air. It became a voice. “Who’s that?” The woman’s hands grew still and she opened her eyes, but still apparently couldn’t see too well. “Who’s there? Where am I?”

“Ettie.” Pellam spoke casually. “It’s John. Pellam.”

Squinting, Ettie stared at him. “I can’t see too good. Where am I?”

“Hospital.”

She coughed for a minute and asked for a glass of water. “I’m so glad you came. You got out okay?”

“I did, yep,” he told her. Pellam poured a glass for her; Ettie emptied it without pausing.

“I kind of remember jumping. Oh, I was scared. The doctor said I was in surprisingly good shape. He said that. ‘Surprisingly good.’ Didn’t understand him at first.” She grumbled, “He’s Indian. Like, you know, an overseas Indian. Curry an’ elephants. Haven’t seen a single American doctor here.”

“Does it hurt much?”

“I’ll say.” She examined her arm closely. “Don’t I look the mess?” Ettie’s tongue clicked, looking over the imposing bandages.

“Naw, you’re a cover girl, all things considered.”

“You’re a mess too, John. I’m so glad you got out. My last thought as I was falling toward the alley was: ‘no, John’s going to die too!’ What a thought that was.”

“I took the easy way down. The stairs.”

“What the hell happened?” she muttered.

“I don’t know. One minute nothing, the next the whole place was gone. Like a matchbox.”

“I was shopping. I was on my way to my apartment-”

“I heard you. You must have gotten back just before I got there. I didn’t see you on the street.”

She continued, “I never saw fire move like that. Was like Aurora’s. That club I told you ’bout? On Forty-ninth Street. Where I sang a time or two. Burned down in forty-seven. March thirteenth. Buncha people died. You remember me telling you that story?”

Pellam didn’t remember. He supposed the account could be found somewhere in the hours and hours of tapes of Ettie Washington back in his apartment.

She blew her nose and coughed for a moment. “That smoke. That’s the worst. Did everybody get out?”

“Nobody was killed,” Pellam answered. “Juan Torres’s in critical condition. He’s upstairs in the kids’ ICU.”

Ettie’s face went still. Pellam had seen this expression on her face only once before – when she’d talked about her youngest son, who’d been killed in Times Square years before. “Juan?” she whispered. She didn’t speak for a moment. “I thought he was at his grandma’s for a few days. In the Bronx. He was home?”

She looked heartsick and Pellam was at a loss to comfort her. Ettie’s eyes returned to the blanket she’d been picking at. An ashen tone flooded her face. “How ’bout I sign that cast?” Pellam asked.

“Why, of course.”

Pellam took out a marking pen. “Anywhere? How ’bout here?” He signed with a round scrawl.

In the busy hall outside a placid electronic bell rang four times.

“I was thinking,” Pellam said, “you want me to call your daughter?”

“No,” the old woman responded. “I talked to her already. Called her this morning when I was awake. She was worried sick but I said I’m not in the great by-and-by yet. She oughta wait ’bout coming and let’s see what happens with those tests. If they’re gonna cut I’d rather her come then. Maybe hook her up with one of those handsome doctors. Like on ER. ’Lisbeth’d like a rich doctor. She has that side to her. Like I was telling you.”

A knock sounded on the half-open door. Four men in business suits walked into the room. They were large, somber men and their presence suddenly made the hospital room, even with the other three empty beds, seem very small.

Pellam glanced at them, knew they were cops. So, arson was suspected. That would explain the speed of the fire.

Ettie nodded uneasily at the men.

“Mrs. Washington?” the oldest of the men asked. He was in his mid-forties. Thin shoulders and a belly that could use a little shrinking. He wore jeans and wind-breaker and Pellam noticed a very large revolver on his hip.

“I’m Fire Marshal Lomax. This is my assistant-” He nodded at a huge young man, bodybuilder. “And these are detectives with the New York City Police Department.”

One of the cops turned to Pellam and asked him to leave.

“No, no,” Ettie protested, “he’s my friend. It’s okay.”

The officer looked at Pellam, the glance repeating the request.

“It’s okay,” Pellam said to Ettie. “They’ll want to talk to me too. I’ll come back when they’re through.”

“You’re a friend’a hers?” Lomax asked. “Yeah, we’ll want to talk to you. But you aren’t coming back in here. Give your name and address to the officer there and take off.”

“I’m sorry?” Pellam smiled, confused.

“Name and address to him,” Lomax nodded to the assistant. Then he snapped, “Then get the hell out.”

“I don’t think so.”

The marshal put his large hands on his large hips.

We can play it this way, we can play it that way. Pellam crossed his arms, spread his feet slightly. “I’m not leaving her.”

“John, no, it’s okay.”

Lomax: “This room’s sealed off from visitors. Uh, uh, uh, don’t ask why. It’s none of your business.”

“I don’t believe my business is any of yours,” Pellam replied. The line came from an unproduced movie he’d written years ago. He’d been dying for a chance to use it.

“Fuck it,” said one of the detectives. “We don’t have time for this. Get him out.”

The assistant curled his vice-grip hands around Pellam’s arm and walked him toward the door. The gesture shot a jolt of icy pain through his stiff neck. Pellam pulled away abruptly and when he did this the cop decided that Pellam might like to rest up against the wall for a few minutes. He pinned him there until his arms went numb from the lack of circulation, his boots almost off the floor.

Pellam shouted at Lomax, “Get this guy off me. What the hell is going on?”

But the fire marshal was busy.

He was concentrating hard on the little white card in his hand as he recited the Miranda warning to Ettie, then arrested her for reckless endangerment, assault and arson.

“Yo, don’t forget attempted murder,” one of the detectives called.

“Oh, yeah,” Lomax muttered. He glanced at Ettie and added with a shrug, “Well, you heard him.”

THREE

Ettie’s building, like most New York tenements built in the nineteenth century, had measured thirty-five by seventy-five feet and been constructed of limestone; the rock used for hers was ruddy, a terra cotta shade.

Before 1901 there were no codes governing the construction of these six-story residences and many builders had thrown together tenements using rotten lathe and mortar and plaster mixed with sawdust. But those structures, the shoddy ones, had long ago crumbled. Tenements like this one, Ettie Washington had explained to John Pellam’s earnest video camera, had been built by men who cared about their craft. Alcoves for the Virgin and glass hummingbirds hovering above doorways. There was no reason why these buildings couldn’t last for two hundred years.

No reason, other than gasoline and a match…

This morning Pellam walked toward what was left of the building.

There wasn’t much. Just a black stone shell filled with a jumble of scorched mattresses, furniture, paper, appliances. The base of the building was a thick ooze of gray sludge – ash and water. Pellam froze, staring at a hand protruding from one pile of muck. He ran toward it then stopped when he noticed the seam in the vinyl at the wrist. It was a mannequin.

Practical jokes, Hell’s Kitchen style.

On a hump of refuse was a huge porcelain bathtub sitting on its claw feet, perfectly level. It was filled with brackish water.

Pellam continued to circle the place, pushed closer through the crowd of gapers in front of the yellow police tape, like shoppers waiting at the door for a one-day Macy’s sale. Most of them had the edgy eagerness of urban scavengers but the pickings were sparse. There were dozens of mattresses, stained and burned. The skeletons of cheap furniture and appliances, water-logged books. A rabbit-ears antenna – the building wasn’t wired for cable – sat on a glob of plastic, the Samsung logo and a circuit board the only recognizable part of the former TV.