I sat up in bed, irritated, momentarily thinking I was back with my husband, one of whose less endearing habits was smoking in bed. However, the acrid smell in no way resembled a cigarette.

“Roger!” I shook him as I started scrambling around in the dark for a pair of pants. “Roger! Wake up. The place is on fire!”

I must have left a burner on in the kitchen, I thought, and headed toward it with some vague determination to extinguish the blaze myself.

The kitchen was in flames. That’s what they say in the newspapers. Now I knew what they meant. Living flames enveloped the walls and snaked long orange tongues along the floor toward the dining room. They crackled and sang and sent out ribbons of smoke. Party ribbons, wrapping the floor and the hallway.

Roger was behind me. “No way, V.!.!” he shouted above the crackling. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward the front door. I seized the knob to turn it and drew back, scorched. Felt the panels. They were hot. I shook my head, trying to keep panic at bay. “It’s on fire, too!” I screamed. “Fire escape in the bedroom. Let’s go!”

Back down the hail, now purple and white with smoke. No air. Crawl on the ground. On the ground past the dining room. Past the remains of the feast. Past my mother’s red Venetian glasses, wrapped with care and taken from Italy and the Fascists to the precarious South Side of Chicago. I dashed into the dining room and felt for them through the smog, knocking over plates, the rest of the champagne, finding the glasses while Roger yelled in anguish from the doorway.

Into the bedroom, wrapping ourselves in blankets. Shutting the bedroom door so opening the window wouldn’t feed the hungry flames, the flames that devoured the air. Roger was having trouble with the window. It hadn’t been opened in years and the locks were painted shut. He fumbled for agonizing seconds while the room grew hotter and finally smashed the glass with a blanketed arm. I followed him through the glass shards out into the January, night.

We stood for a moment gulping in air, clinging to each other. Roger had found his pants and was pulling them on. He had bundled up all the clothes he could find at the side of the bed and we sorted out the leavings. I had my jeans on. No shirt. No shoes. One of my wool socks and a pair of bedroom slippers had come up in the bundle. The freezing iron cut into my feet and seemed to burn them. The slippers were moth-eaten, but the leather was lined with old rabbit fur and cut out the worst of the cold. I wrapped my naked top in a blanket and started down the slippery, snow-covered steps, clutching the glasses in one hand and the icy railing in the other.

Roger, wearing untied shoes, trousers, and a shirt, came hard on my heels. His teeth were chattering. “Take my shirt, Vie.”

“Keep it,” I called over my shoulder. “You’re cold enough as it is. I’ve got the blanket… We need to wake up the kids in the second-floor apartment. Your legs are so long, you can probably hang over the edge of the ladder and reach the ground-it ends at the second floor. If you’ll take my mother’s goblets and carry them down, I’ll break in and get the students.”

He started to argue, chivalry and all that, but saw there wasn’t time. I wasn’t going to lose those glasses and that was that. Grabbing the snow-covered rung at the end of the escape with his bare hands, he swung over the edge. He was about four feet from the ground. He dropped off and stretched up a long arm for the goblets. I hooked my legs over one of the rungs and leaned over. Our fingertips just met.

“I’m giving you three minutes in there, Vic. Then I’m coming after you.”

I nodded gravely and went to the bedroom window on the second story. While I pounded and roused two terrified youths from a mattress on the floor, half my mind was working out a puzzle. Fire at the front door, fire in the kitchen. I might have started a kitchen fire by mistake, but not one at the front door. So why was the bottom half of the building not on fire while the top half was?

The students-a boy and a girl in the bedroom, another girl on a mattress in the living room-were confused and wanted to pack their course notes. I ordered them roughly just to get dressed and move. I took a sweatshirt from a stack of clothes in the bedroom and put it on and bullied and harassed them out the window and down the fire escape.

The fire engines were pulling up as we half slid, half jumped, into the snow below. For once I was grateful to our building super for not shoveling better-the snow made a terrific cushion.

I found Roger in front of the building with my first-floor neighbors, an old Japanese couple named Takamoku. He’d gone in for them through a ground-floor window. The fire engines were drawing an excited crowd. What fun! A midnight fire. In the flashing red lights of the engines and the blue of the police cars, I watched avid faces gloating while my little stake in life burned.

Roger handed me my mother’s wineglasses and I cradled them, shivering, while he put an arm around me. I thought of the other five, locked in my bedroom, in the heat and flames. “Oh, Gabriella,” I muttered, “I’m so sorry.”

XVI

THE PARAMEDICS HUSTLED us off to St. Vincent’s hospital in a couple of ambulances. A young intern, curly-haired and exhausted, went through some medical rituals. No one was badly hurt, although Ferrant and I both were surprised to find burns and cuts on our hands-we’d been too keyed up during our getaway to notice.

The Takamokus were badly shocked by the fire. They had lived quietly in Chicago after being interned during World War II, and the destruction of their tiny island of security was a harsh blow. The intern decided to admit them for a day or two until their daughter could fly from Los Angeles to make housing arrangements for them.

The students were excited, almost unbearably so. They couldn’t stop talking and yelling. Nervous reaction, but difficult to bear. When the authorities came in at six to question us, they kept shouting and interrupting each other in their eagerness to tell their tale.

Dominic Assuevo was with the fire department’s arson unit. He was a hull-shaped man-square head, short thick neck, body tapering down to surprisingly narrow hips. Perhaps an ex-boxer or ex-football player. With him were a uniformed fireman and Bobby Mallory.

I’d been sitting in a torpor, anguished at the wreck of my apartment, unwilling to think. Or move. Looking at Bobby, I knew I’d need to pull my wits together. I took a deep breath. It almost didn’t seem worth the effort.

The weary intern gave exhausted consent for the police to question us-except for the Takamokus, who had already been wafted into the hospital’s interior. We moved into a tiny office near the emergency room, the hospital security-staff room, obligingly vacated by two drowsing security guards. The eight of us made a tight fit, the investigators and one of the students standing, the rest in the room’s few chairs.

Mallory looked at me in disgust and said, “If you knew what you looked like, Warshawski. Half naked and your boyfriend no better. I never thought I’d see the day I’d be glad Tony was dead, but I’m thankful he can’t see you now.”

His words acted like a tonic. The dying war horse staggers to its feet when it hears a bugle. Police accusations usually rouse me.

“Thank you, Bobby. I appreciate your concern.”

Assuevo intervened quickly. “I want the full story on what happened tonight. How you became aware of the fire, what you were doing.”

“I was asleep,” I explained. “The smoke woke me up. Mr. Ferrant was with me; we realized the kitchen was on fire, tried the front door and found it was on fire, too. We got out by the fire escape-I roused these kids, he got Mr. and Mrs. Takamoku. That’s all I know.”