Hell's Gate (36 page)

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Mike, on the deck above, was now in an even greater crush. The fire had gone up through the boat, then spread fore and aft. The space left to the passengers was diminishing by the second, the fire advancing in leaps, sending a lick of flame through the deck, followed a few seconds later by a volcanic eruption. Driven mad by the heat and fear, some actually ran into the fire or cowered before it, letting it consume them. The stench of burning flesh, the terror and madness had some vomiting uncontrollably. Mike did what he could, trying to pass children to the front, fasten life vests, though he knew they were of little use. He found a few that seemed to be in slightly better condition, making sure that Josh and Emily got those. But the fire came on and the space left was becoming too hot to bear, forcing more over the side. He didn't notice the island they were headed toward until they hit it with a grinding crunch.

Within seconds there were boats of every description ringing the
Slocum
. Tugs, launches, a rowboat with a cop in it, a fireboat and pleasure craft from the Bronx Yacht Club all converged on her, some nosing against her side to take people off. But the fire still forced many to jump. A group of mothers and children went over the rail and Mike found himself pressed against it by the crowd behind. He saw that the bow was only twenty feet from the shore and was preparing to somehow climb down to Ginny, feeling sure that they'd finally find safety. Leaning out, he could see people on the deck below tumbling overboard through the broken railing where Ginny had been and was almost hit by someone jumping from the hurricane deck above. He tried to climb down, but with the children in his arms it was impossible.

He was forced over, hitting the water headfirst, striking more than one person who'd jumped before. The children slipped from his grasp. He surfaced, fighting his way through arms and legs, thrashing, grappling, punching. He was immediately pulled under by two women, who fought over him, dragging them all down in their hysteria.

Choking, he thrashed to the surface only to have a leg crash across his shoulder, driving him under again and nearly knocking him unconscious. But that jumper had fallen on one of the women and when Mike came up, he was able to wrestle the other one off. He had to practically beat her into submission to stop her frantic struggling, pulling her toward shore.

Then he saw Josh and Emily clinging to a woman, a body really, for she was just floating motionless. He swam to them and they tried to climb on his back, carrying him under again, small arms wrapped around his neck. Mike very nearly gave up then and sank under their weight, floating down to the river bottom. He was surprised to feel rocks beneath his feet, surprised that it was not as deep down as he'd thought. With a wrenching struggle and a push off from the bottom, he used the last of his strength to gain the surface, two pairs of arms and legs clinging to his back. Choking, he realized the woman had disappeared and struggled toward the shore with the children.

Mike found after a few strokes that he could stand and he let the children loose to scramble toward the rocky beach. Exhausted and spitting up water, he stood, hands on his knees, trying to regain his strength. He looked back at the
Slocum
and the surrounding river. The surface boiled, thrashed into foam by the drowning mass. The
Slocum
towered above, flames shooting skyward with volcanic intensity. Ginny was out there. He tried to call her name, but retched up a quantity of water instead. He dove back in and stroked out into the river. Almost immediately he had no choice, but to rescue the closest child, who lunged at him with a last desperate effort and grabbed his jacket, not letting go.

He dragged the child to shore and plunged back in again, his strength waning, but the drive to find Ginny overcoming his weakness. He pulled a woman in next but was forced to rest, so exhausted he could barely stand. He dove in once more, tortured by the screams of the drowning.

Countless times, Mike called Ginny's name, losing count of the lifeless bodies he swam past, sometimes turning them over to see their faces, in terror that it might be her. But there was no reply to his calls and no sign of her anywhere. Mike almost gave up while pulling a girl to shore who'd sunk her teeth into his collar and wrapped her arms so tightly around his neck that he could barely breathe. He was beginning to thrash, unable to stay afloat any longer, when his foot touched bottom and with a final surge he dragged the girl to the beach, collapsing on the rocks.

Slowly, the
General Slocum'
s decks started to collapse one on the other, trapping or crushing those still on board. Many were pulled from the water, or had jumped onto one of the tugs that braved the flames to get close enough. The thrashing of the waters faded and all who could be saved were either ashore or on the boats. An unreal stillness settled over the scene, the screams and cries dying away and only the roar of the fire left.

Mike vomited up water until his gut ached. He crouched on the rocky beach, his head in his hands. He heard a shout and looked up. There on the top deck, a boy of no more than six or seven could be seen climbing the flag pole, chased by the flames. Inching up, he managed to escape his fate for a few moments as the flagpole wavered and swayed. Mike watched in horror as people on the beach called for him to hold on though there was no possible means of rescue. With a groan from the survivors on the beach, the flagpole finally fell, pitching the
General Slocum'
s last passenger into the heart of the furnace.

47

WHITE SHOES. THEY were the first thing that registered in Mike's exhausted brain when he came to. He hadn't realized that he'd collapsed again, lying facedown on the rocky shore, his feet in the surf. The white shoes said, “Here! This one's alive!” and they were joined by another pair and another. They turned him over and pushed on his chest and put something under his nose that had him coughing and spitting up more water than he'd have thought possible.

“Where is this?” he managed to ask.

“North Brother Island,” the white shoes said. “Are you burned?”

“Maybe.” Mike couldn't actually tell. No part of him felt as it should. “Ginny!” The name burst out of him, a spasmodic reflex of despair and hope.

With help, he got to his feet, where he swayed and looked about at the shore. Dozens of nurses tended to the survivors or labored over the dying. Rows of bodies lined the beach in the surf. Doctors in white coats bent over the worst cases. Rescuers helped put people ashore, but more often carried bodies up the beach and over the seawall.

“Who are you? How'd you get here so fast? Where's Ginny? I had two children, Emily and Josh. Have you seen them?”

“We're from Riverside Hospital, sir, it's on the island here. Come, you've been burned.” They helped him up the shore and sat him on the grass with a crowd of other passengers, some wide-eyed with shock, some with blistered hands and blackened faces, some who just appeared wet. There were infants and children, mothers stiff with shock, grandparents lying exhausted, parents wandering, calling the same names over and over, but whatever their state or condition, their eyes told the same story. Mike didn't take the time to think what his eyes looked like, or if they'd ever stop reflecting the horrors he'd witnessed.

“Ginny,” he called and hauled himself to his feet. “Ginny!” He began the dreadful search, stumbling from one body to the next, one stunned passenger to another. He stopped for a moment behind a priest giving last rites to a dead girl of no more than four or five, her face composed as if asleep on the grass. A nurse nearby was covering the body of a woman with an infant clutched to her breast. Mike looked away and started to sob, the cries wracking his body, doubling him over with uncontrollable spasms. He stumbled away, unable to call Ginny's name any longer.

All over the lawn at North Brother Island, cries of joy at a relative found alive mixed with sobs of anguish over the dead. There was no sign of Josh or Emily, so Mike moved through the bodies, looking at each as they were brought in, sometimes jostled by desperate passengers, frantic for even the worst of news. It was clear that Ginny was not among the survivors there, but he clung to the hope that she'd been rescued by a boat and had found her way to another shore, another hospital. Doctors and nurses from Lincoln and Lebanon hospitals, from Harlem Hospital and Bellevue, hundreds of them had arrived within an hour. Countless vessels had plucked survivors from the
Slocum
or out of the river. Mike knew that Ginny could be almost anywhere. Still, he searched among the dwindling number of bodies being brought to shore and each time it proved to be someone else his heart gave a guilty leap of hope.

After many long, fruitless hours, Mike left the island with a group of other survivors aboard a tug named the
Massasoit
and was deposited at a pier at 138th Street, where a police wagon drove some to the nearest train station. Mike rode the train south, figuring he'd start at Bellevue, where the city morgue was located. Other passengers on the El cast uneasy glances at him, but he saw nothing, felt nothing. Not even the insistent throb of his burns broke through his fixated mind. He had to find Ginny, wherever she was and bring her home. Mike shuffled through Bellevue, checking the wards and morgue, then continued on, working his way uptown, hour after hour, checking hospital after hospital, to Harlem and to the police station at Alexander Avenue, where another man searching for his family told him a temporary morgue had been set up, then to Lebanon and Lincoln hospitals, where again he walked the wards and viewed the dead.

Everywhere he went he saw a steady stream of men searching for lost wives, children, mothers, relatives. They collected at hospital doorways, police stations, and piers, a desperate band combing the city for what they hoped they would not find. It was at the police station that Mike realized there was another yet to be found—the Bottler. He wasn't concerned with McManus. He'd heard the man's final scream, had seen the flames roar sideways out the lamp room door. No man could have lived through that.

Hours crawled by, Mike's remaining energy trickling away, drained by alternating hope and despair. He collapsed at Lincoln Hospital. It was well past eight, nearly ten hours after the first cries of “Fire!” A nurse revived him, rebandaged his burned hands, and put a salve of some sort on his face. She gave him a cup of strong, black coffee and a sandwich, which he gulped down, suddenly realizing he hadn't eaten in more than twelve hours. He resumed his trek, almost immediately running into a man searching for his family, who told him that a temporary morgue had been set up at the Charities Pier at Twenty-sixth Street, not far from Bellevue. Mike headed south again, riding the El, feeling like he was lost in a Coney Island house of horrors, unable to escape.

The Charities Pier was a cavernous, enclosed space, with a high, vaulted ceiling supported by spidery steel trusses. It was mobbed by upwards of ten thousand people. The line to view the dead stretched for blocks, but Mike didn't wait. He flashed his badge at one of the dozens of officers forming a blue wall around the pier and was admitted with a nod. The bodies were laid out in plain, wooden coffins, and elevated somewhat at the head for viewing. Two long rows stretched down the pier into the distance. Mike joined a group of fifty, the number admitted at any one time. Some visitors were nearly out of their minds. Women sobbed and fainted, one man went to three different coffins, sobbing uncontrollably, claiming they were each his wife. Mike had witnessed the police restrain two men who were driven mad with grief, watched woodenly as they were stopped from jumping into the river, one silent, the other screaming that he wanted to die and join his family.

Numb, Mike walked the long rows, his shoes splashing in water from the melting ice, that each body was packed in up to the chin, like fish at the Fulton Market. He saw Ginny in each dead face, sensed her presence among the hopeless searchers. He felt a strange, awful kinship with the people around him, like a family; a common thread binding them all in a bloodline of pain and loss.

Mike went through the line again. After a while the faces started looking the same, even the small girl who'd drowned clutching a kitten. Ginny was not there. But as he talked to other searchers he found his predicament was horribly common. Hundreds were still missing. Many men had been searching all evening, going to the same hospitals, police stations, and morgues he had, and like him still had not found their loved ones. And the Bottler was still out there; Mike hadn't seen his face among the dead. And if he was alive, the Bottler was probably looking for him as well. He'd have a score to settle if he still lived. Mike resolved to be more cautious than he'd been so far, hardly even noticing those around him. Mike stopped at the tables set up for the coroner's office, where death certificates were being filled out as fast as they could be written and bodies released to anxious relatives and harried undertakers. There were more than five hundred still unaccounted for he was told, but the search had been called off for the night. There would be no more recovered until morning. Mike went to Bellevue and slept in a chair for a few torturous hours. He could not imagine going home to his bed. It seemed a violation, a betrayal of trust. He had no right to be in a bed while Ginny was out there. Alone.

He was up again at five
A.M
. and ate a quick, bleary breakfast at a local shop that catered to nurses and orderlies. The
Slocum
was on everyone's lips, and in every headline. It was for Mike a continuing and inescapable nightmare. He hurried his meal and stopped in a store to buy a bowler. He still had the glasses he'd worn yesterday and although his fake beard was lost, his own had grown to a rich brown stubble in the last two days. If the Bottler was alive, he'd be searching for Mike and for McManus, too. Mike was determined not to be surprised again.