Mason tried the window without success. It had been locked or nailed shut too long and too well to surrender to a few tugs. He shined his flashlight through the glass, and could make out the top of the stairs outside the entrance to Pendergast's office. Unlike the window that had been boarded up from the inside, this window would let him in. He hoped the motion detector was at the bottom of the stairs and not at the top.
Mason pulled off his sweater and wrapped it around the hammer to muffle the sound as he broke the window. The glass splintered into several large shards that fell to the floor. Mason climbed through, crunching broken glass beneath his feet. He assumed that he had set off the motion detector, and began counting the seconds he had to grab the files, get out, and make up an alibi.
He left the ceiling light in Pendergast's office turned off, feeling less exposed in the darkness. The beam from Mason's flashlight glanced off something shiny in the center of the floor that Mason didn't remember seeing a few hours earlier. Dropping to one knee, he picked up a white, quarter-sized campaign button with the words Truman for Senator in blue. Tom Pendergast had been Harry Truman's political godfather.
Mason aimed his flashlight at the panel door to the walk-in closet, certain that someone had dropped the button on the floor while removing other more current political souvenirs. He traced the flashlight beam up to the lock he had broken when he was flattened by a blast that shattered the panel door, opened the floor like an earthquake, and dropped him into the barbershop.
He slammed into the outstretched barber chair, bounced off onto the floor, and crawled beneath the chair while fire and debris rained from overhead. The explosion was loud enough to scramble the eggs at the Egg House Diner, but Mason was deafened by the blast before his brain could register the sound. Though he was stunned, he understood how life turned on such small moments as bending down to pick up a button. Had he been standing, the panel door would have cut him in two when it blew out from the wall.
Mason ran his hands over his scalp and face, checking for wounds too fresh to hurt. He found a trickle of blood from a cut above one ear that was clotting in his thick hair. He pulled off his shirt to cover his mouth and nose against the acrid smoke that had enveloped him.
The initial wave of debris had settled into fiery heaps that fed flames as they raced up the walls to finish the work begun by the explosion. Mason staggered to his feet, giving a quick and futile pull to the steel bars covering the barbershop window. The glass had blown out into the street and the cold air tasted sweet even as it fueled the fire. Cars stopped on Main Street, and passersby stood in front of the People's Savings Building, pointing and screaming at him to get out in voices that he imagined more than heard. He agreed with their advice even if he couldn't find a way to take it.
The flames were on the verge of engulfing the outer walls of the building. Mason glanced up through the hole in the floor above and saw that the fire had eaten through the roof, obliterating the stars with billowing smoke. He could feel his clothes heating up as if they were about to spontaneously combust.
Gagging into his shirt, he made his way to the front door, cursing Shirley Parker and the bar that she had locked into place like a coffin nail. Any thought of escaping out the window the way he had come in vanished with the stairs that were crackling like seasoned kindling as the fire roared down on him.
Ducking to stay as close to the ground as possible, he stumbled down the hallway to the basement door. Covering the door handle with his shirt, he pulled the door open, yanked it closed behind him, and bolted down the stairs, grateful for the pocket of cool air in the basement. He leaned against the rough cement wall and slid down to the floor gasping and wondering how long it would take the fire to burn through the first floor and bury him.
His question was answered a moment later. The stairs to the second floor were directly overhead and collapsed into the basement, carrying the fire with it.
Mason jumped to his feet, looking around at blank walls that now glowed with a deadly orange like one of Dante's chambers. Smoke rolled across the ceiling, shrinking the empty basement that had been stripped of its contents like the other floors. In the far corner, he saw a half-open chest-high door and raced over to it.
Shirley Parker's body lay inside the entrance to a tunnel, propping the door open. Mason knelt alongside her, feeling for a pulse in her neck and wrist. Her eyes were open, unseeing and untroubled by the smoke. A dark stain above her left breast was still damp with blood. Mason now understood Norma Hawkins's certainty that Jack Cullan had been shot.
Crouching under the low ceiling, Mason felt his way through the unlit tunnel, counting his steps to gauge the distance. Fifty paces later, the tunnel ended against a locked door. Bracing his arms against the walls of the narrow shaft, Mason kicked at the door until its hinges surrendered. Mason stood up inside another basement where the lights had been left on.
Mason took a few deep breaths and went back into the tunnel, bent over and trotting until he reached Shirley's body. The heat and smoke from the fire rolled through the tunnel, though Mason hoped the flames wouldn't follow. He reached under Shirley's arms and pulled her body back to the other basement, closing her eyes and laying her down gently against the floor. There was no peace in her soft features.
The basement was filled with framed and unframed paintings, stacked against the walls. There were two stairways, one that led to the first floor and another that led to a door with a small window in its center. Mason walked wearily up the second stairway, and opened the door into the alley behind the barbershop. It took him a moment to realize that the tunnel had passed beneath the alley.
Looking to his left, he saw firemen running up the alley from Twentieth Street, carrying a hose. A fire engine blocked the entrance to the alley, its red and white lights cascading across the pavement. Two paramedics raced toward him from the south end of the alley, waving and calling to him. Reaching him, one put her arms around him to hold him up while another peered into his eyes.
"Hey, buddy!" one of the paramedics mouthed. "Are you all right?"
Mason answered, "Yeah," wondering whether the paramedic could hear him if he couldn't hear the paramedic. "There's a woman's body down mere," he added, not certain whether he was whispering or shouting.
He opened the door and pointed down the stairs. The paramedic who had been holding him up led him toward an ambulance while her partner went to find Shirley Parker.
The police had blocked off traffic on Main Street except for emergency vehicles. The spectators who'd been first in line in front of the People's Savings Building had been herded a safe distance away. Two fire department pumper trucks were pouring heavy streams of water into the burnt-out shell that had been Pendergast's office. Local television stations had dispatched live crews to the scene. Cops, firefighters, reporters, and rescuers did their dance.
No one noticed Mason and his paramedic escort when they first emerged from the alley and made their way to an ambulance parked half a block south of the barbershop. By the time the paramedic had persuaded Mason to sit down inside the ambulance so she could examine him, he'd been picked up on the media's radar. Reporters clustered around the ambulance jostling for an angle. Rachel Firestone squeezed through and sat down next to him. The paramedic started to order her to get out, but Mason said she could stay.
Mason's hearing was gradually coming back, first a dull roar of unfiltered noise, then a steady ringing like a flat-lined heart monitor, and then voices.