The fumes lightened at the stairs leading down; the light was sullen orange.
Pedley felt his way toward it. He bumped into someone who seized his arm. “Other way! Exits over here.”
“Leggo.” Pedley broke the man’s grip. He plunged down the stairs, through a screen of heat that made his eyeballs ache.
The fire was there, in the costume storeroom. Coils of bilious yellow-green smoke crept along the corridor, writhing like a swollen python.
Pedley kicked open Doranne’s dressing room door. A livid sheet of flame puffed along the corridor, head high.
He dropped to his knees, crawled into the dressing room, fell flat across a pair of prone legs.
The angry clangor of gongs rose above the tumult as he slung the big man across his shoulder. It was George; the soft fabric of the treasurer’s expensive suit told the marshal that before his fingers, groping for the pulse, touched the man’s throat.
George groaned heavily as the marshal backed out into the corridor. Ten feet to his right the ancient woodwork blazed fiercely, with a continuous snapping like the cracking of twigs underfoot. Sparks fountained over him, stung the back of his neck savagely. He crawled toward the stairs.
Booted figures appeared through the murk. He shifted the deadweight on his shoulder, stood up, put out a hand to shove the heavy nozzle aside.
The nozzleman grunted through his smoke-mask. The hoseman behind him called hoarsely. “Any more down here?”
Pedley coughed out: “Might be— Look out— It’s worked into — the ceiling.” He slapped at a spark on his eyelid. He labored up the narrow stairs, his eyes streaming, and felt his way by keeping close to the canvas serpent out to the alley door.
A ladderman lifted George off the marshal’s shoulder, lugged the treasurer through the milling confusion of helmeted men, laid him on the sidewalk near the big pumper.
George moaned, opened his eyes. “Did she get out?” he croaked.
Pedley looked down at the smoke-smudged face, the singed blond hair. “Don’t know. If she hasn’t—” He called to a man in the white helmet of a battalion chief, “Need an L-pipe down there, Matty. It’s in the floor; those vent ducts’ll shoot it all over the building.”
The chief roared an order; men clumped hastily to the nearest hose truck. The chief walked carefully on the glare ice forming from coupling spray. “This one of those things, Ben?”
“Yair.” The marshal caught sight of Doranne huddling in a man’s overcoat by the hook-and-ladder, half a dozen other scared and shivering girls around her. Beside her, Val Kreston, in shirt-sleeves, stared up at the roof of the theatre. “Smelled like naptha. Started in the wardrobe.” Pedley searched the crowd for anyone who looked like Ted Wilter. Wilter had used cleaning naptha on the last store job.
The chief rumbled, “...get my hands on that—” as he sloshed into the alley.
Pedley went to the hose truck, found an emergency hand lamp. He opened the mask locker, found an extra, and splashed back to the stage door.
The chief halted him. “No good, Ben. I’m calling ’em out. It’s through to the sills. Minute they let go, the wall’ll sag.”
Pedley pushed past. “Only be a minute.”
Smoke and steam erupted from the stairwell as from the crater of a volcano, but there were no flames. The hosemen were backing up, dragging the canvas boa constrictor with them. He edged by.
The nozzleman swore. “You don’ want to go down there, Marshal!”
“You’re damn right.” But he went down, carefully, testing each tread before he stepped on it.
The low rumble of the two-inch streams, the hiss of cold water on hot metal, and a curious grinding sound filled the cramped corridor with an oppressive undertone. The mortar working in the brick walls, he thought. That was all he needed, a couple thousand tons of masonry to come crashing down through that charred ceiling.
He made it to the starred dressing room where he’d found George.
The air was clearer now, but plaster crumbled down from the ceiling like hailstones. The grinding had become a vibration which made the hairs on the back of his neck stiffen.
He found what he’d been looking for, just inside the door, where he’d tripped over George. A small Stillson wrench, a pipe-fitter’s tool. The handle had been painted a vivid green.
It took him less time to get back up the stairs. There was an odd sensation of daylight, backstage. The roof was burning, dropping fragments down past the platform where stagehands for half a century had handled the fly lines for scenery. The groaning was like steady, faraway thunder.
The alley was empty as he emerged into clean, cold air. A great shout went up from the crowd in the street. He splashed through a bombardment of cornice fragments, brick chips, mortar splinters, and plunged across the sidewalk as the wall came crumbling down.
A man from the Trib caught his arm.
“Boy, was that the luckiest moment of your life, Marshal!”
“Yair.” Pedley gazed at the eruption of steam, flames, smoke, and dust which pyred up out of the gutted theatre.
“Say, they say this was a firebug’s work.”
“Was.”
“You any idea?”
Pedley rubbed a spark blister. “Nothing official. But — there’ll be an alarm out for an ex-con by the name of Theodore Wilter in ten minutes. Just don’t quote me, buster.”
“How you spell that? Double-you, eye, ell, tee, ee, are?”
“Anyway you spell it, it’s cruddy, in my book.” Pedley looked for Doranne.
Neither she nor George was to be seen.
Chapter Four
Guilty!
The chimes sounded off with The Gang’s All Here. Doranne answered the door herself. The French maid must be on a day basis, Pedley thought. He said, “How’s George?”
“Lying down. I made him lie down.” Doranne looked drawn; there were lines of strain around her eyes; her voice sounded listless. “He says he feels all right. But after that bang on the head and everything, he might have something wrong with him and not know. I sent for our doctor. He ought to be here any minute.”
“Sense.” Pedley nodded. “Likely has a dose of smoke narcosis; doesn’t affect you for a few hours, then whammo! You’re drowning to death inside, with your lungs full of liquid. I wouldn’t know about the concussion; how’d he get knocked out like that?”
“The smoke blinded him. He ran smack into the door, looking for me. At least, that’s all he remembers.”
He held out the wrench. “I better show him this.”
She squinted, peering at the Stillson. “What is it? Where’d it come from?”
“Plumber’s tool. It was on the floor beside your husband when I picked him up.”
“You!” Her eyes lit up. “I thought it was a fireman. I mean one of the regular firemen. Oh! You saved his life. He’d have been suffocated down in that awful hole!”
“He might have been buried under a brick landslide.”
“You’ll never know how grateful—” Doranne’s eyes misted. She turned, with her hand on the knob of the bedroom door. “That thing! Does it mean somebody tried to kill him?!”
“Doubt if anyone’d use it for putting on makeup,” he said drily.
“Ted,” she breathed. “I... I told George about him.”
“Good deal. You’d have had to, sooner or later, anyway.”
“Have you caught him?”
“Not yet.”
A spasm twisted the placid features for an instant. “It must sound terrible to say so, but — I’m glad it’s over. If it is.”
“I know what y’ mean.”
“You don’t, though. Nobody could.” Doranne shuddered. “You won’t upset George too much? He’s had it rough. This’ll just about finish the show for the season, and there’ll be all sorts of lawsuits!”