Winter at Death's Hotel (50 page)

“The commander must be the last man out.”

***

Marie hurried to lead Louisa toward the staircase. Above were the ladies' dressing and rest rooms. A glance had told Louisa that the lines to the first-floor conveniences were impossible: her stomach was heaving, her mouth salty. “Hurry!”

“Here, now, you can't go up there!”

The cop at the stairs held out his arms to stop them. “No admission!”

Marie looked up the stairs. “Well, you let
her
in!”

The cop looked around. An elderly woman was coming down.

Louisa dodged around the policeman and started to climb, digging her stick into the thick carpet and pushing herself up. It was astonishing how much of her hurt, especially her abdomen and back! Below her, Marie was screaming rather operatically at the policeman, who had taken hold of her. Louisa went on without pausing, driving herself to get somewhere that she could be sick. Even after everything, she couldn't bear the idea of being sick in front of other people. Only a few feet now—there was the door to the ladies'—another step—another…

She put her hand on the doorknob and pulled. The door swung toward her and she rushed in. Her first breath told her something was wrong—
smoke
—but she was focused on her nausea, reeling from it, holding her mouth closed with her left hand. She crossed the anteroom and tore open the door to the toilets.

Heat blasted out at her. She backed. The ceiling of the large inner room seemed in flames. In a far corner, the flames were hurling themselves into a square opening as big as a chair seat.

The
tunnels—it opens into the tunnels…

She turned away and vomited. That was quick, over; she felt dizzy but cleansed, weak. Aloud, she said, “That old woman.”

She hobbled out, slamming the door behind her, hurrying to the top of the stairs. She looked over the crowd of heads for the dark hat the woman had worn, realized that it was Ethel's hat.

“Stop that woman! That woman—it's Galt…!”

A male voice in the crowd shouted, “Fire! The hotel's on fire!”

A woman screamed.

Somebody was pointing at her. No, at something behind her. Louisa turned. The mezzanine was in flames. She tried to run, almost pitched down the stairs. A man dashed out of the crowd and up the stairs. It was nobody she knew; she tried to fight him off. He scooped her off the stair and carried her down, and she was screaming and pummeling him and it was only when a knot of women formed around them and she was put down that she stopped. He was young; he looked pained, puzzled.

“She was violated,” one of the women said. “We'll take charge now.”

The deputy chief was shouting from Reception, but the mob in the lobby had stampeded toward the doors. A policeman there had had the wit to open both of the big bronze doors and hold them open with the help of a kitchen cook, and the mob poured out into Twenty-Third Street.

Louisa heard the bells of more fire wagons. She was being hurried along with the crowd. Marie had reappeared, but the women who had rescued her were being jostled away from her; two of them panicked and ran, as she could not. All she could think of was Galt—that he had escaped, dressed as a woman in Ethel's clothes; that he could be any of the women around her; that she would meet him face to face, see that ferocity, the knife…

She was aware of policemen behind her, then of a knot of them with Roosevelt at the head. He was bellowing instructions about letting “civilians” go out first. “We must be the last! It's our duty, boys!” He had soot on his face and he had lost his glasses, but Louisa had a glimpse of a face that looked transfigured with delight.

The hotel guests tried to gather in the street but the traffic had no sympathy for them. It was New York: the tramcars and the carriages and the hurrying foot traffic had to get through. Some of the mob darted across and stood on the far side of the street to watch the hotel, but then the fire wagons were there, hose companies and ladder companies, big horses, men in rubber coats and peaked hats, men with axes and brass nozzles the size of cannons.

“Outta the way! Make room—get outta my way…!”

Louisa was pulled along the pavement by somebody, then abandoned to the pressure of people behind her. She reached the corner. Barricades had been put up there, bright yellow and white with FIRE DEPARTMENT in black letters a foot high. The traffic had to stop now—two tramcars had been stalled on the other side of Fifth Avenue; carriages and wagons were being detoured into Fifth Avenue. Policemen were everywhere out here, whistles in their mouths, arms moving, human semaphores that signaled only
Keep
moving! Keep moving!

When it was more or less sorted out, most of the guests were in a cordoned-off part of Madison Square near Fifth and Twenty-Third. It was as if the police and firemen knew that the guests and the staff would be morbidly driven to watch their hotel burn. They were contained in a ring of uniformed policemen; the ostensible reason was that they had yet to be interrogated. But it was cold, and morbid curiosity or not, many of them shook fists at the policemen and shouted that they were being held prisoner.

***

The slowness of the ride up Fifth Avenue maddened Arthur. His flowers were wilting; his plans for luncheon were ruined. He told the driver to stop talking. He swore at the traffic. When they had to stop at Twenty-First Street and the driver told him that the police wouldn't let them go on, he was outraged. “Why the devil can't we?”

“Fire. One a the hotels. Not my fault, so don't get on your high horse wit' me. Go shout at a copper. That'll be two dollars and forty cents.”

Arthur wanted to jump out of the carriage and tell him to go to the devil for his money, but he was a gentleman and an agreement was an agreement. He paid and got down and started trying to work his way north. The driver's words, “fire in a hotel,” had frightened him. What if it was the New Britannic? What if Louisa was in the hotel—unable to get out—
his
Louisa…

An astonishingly large crowd was gathering. It was as if nobody in New York had anything to do but watch fires. His flowers were wrecked in the first hundred feet; he had trouble keeping hold of his satchel. Seeing only worse ahead, he gave it up and backtracked, hurried east on Twenty-First Street to Fourth Avenue and turned north again.

The crowd was smaller here, but everybody in it was moving north, fortunately the direction he wanted to go—all except one old man, white hair hanging down all around his head under a peculiar old hat. He was fighting the tide. When Arthur was in his way and couldn't move fast enough, he bumped straight into Arthur, who caught himself and stepped back and said, “Do watch where you're going!” But as he said it he saw the old man's face, deadly white, prematurely lined—with pain, the doctor in him thought; he knew that look. The old man coughed; Arthur saw a bright crimson spray. He tried to dodge, and somebody bumped into him from behind; he let himself be carried along for several steps, trying to turn to see the man.

But the old man had lurched on. Arthur looked down and saw drops on his trousers and one shoe. He knew what it was.
Blood. Arterial or lung, from the color. I should go after him—it's my duty as a physician—
But he thought of Louisa, trapped in a fire.

He looked after the old man, but the hat had disappeared behind taller bodies and better hats.
My
place
is
with
my
wife.
But he knew he taken an oath to heal…

Arthur went on and reached Twenty-Second Street. A remarkable number of policemen seemed to be in his way now.

He was an object of immediate interest to them. Where was he going? What was the satchel for? Who was he?

He was passed to a senior roundsman, to a sergeant, to a lieutenant.

“You can't go to the New Britannic, Mr. Doyle. It's the one that's on fire.”

“But my wife's there!”

The lieutenant had read some of his stories. He was sympathetic. He apologized for the trouble and said it was because of the Butcher, which made no sense to Arthur. They were interrupted by another policeman, who said excitedly that they'd just found Foley with his throat slit and a woman's dress and hat thrown over him, so what now?

The lieutenant swore and turned Arthur over to an ancient of days with orders to take Mr. Doyle to Madison Square to find his wife.

Arthur trudged along behind the old bull. All his plans for reconciliation with Louisa were spoiled, but that was unimportant now. Where was she? If she was still in the hotel, what would he do?

***

Louisa, perhaps because she had gained status—half heroine, half pariah?—was in the front row of the watchers. She was shivering from cold. A fireman carrying a stack of folded blankets draped one over her shoulders without a word and moved on.

Fire hoses were shooting water on both the Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street sides of the New Britannic. A separate cluster of hoses was drenching the annex, which was not on fire yet. Windows on the fourth and fifth floors of the hotel had broken or were breaking, and smoke was drifting out. The fire, however, was not yet as dramatic as the ones they could have seen any night at one of the melodrama theaters.

She watched the smoke curl into the windless air. The smell was all over the square by then. A dozen ladders were up against the walls, and firemen were climbing up as others climbed down on other ladders, seemingly at random. As she looked, a flicker of flame showed, and she thought,
My
old
rooms.
But she couldn't know that.

Roosevelt had set up what he called his “command post” outside the barriers that held the hotel people in, where he could watch the fire and catch the eye of the press. Journalists had settled on the north-east corner of Fifth and Twenty-Third; moved back by the firemen, they had shifted as if by magnetic attraction to the spot where Roosevelt waited.

She heard Roosevelt say that he had “thrown a ring of steel” around the area to prevent the escape “of a criminal guilty of monstrous crimes. He cannot escape us!”

She had told a policeman about the old woman who was not an old woman but Galt, wearing old Carver's hair and Ethel's clothes. He had said he would report it.

The flames showed in three windows in the third story now. Abruptly, they belched out over the street. The crowd groaned.

Then sparks were rising from the roof, and the darker smoke that was rising over the hotel became dull red on its underside. The sparks seemed to explode upward and the flames leaped to devour the penthouse and eat their way into the sky. A fireman shouted, “The roof's going—get them out!”

“Burn,” she murmured aloud.

More sparks and fire flew into the sky. The crackle and roar were thunderous.

“She's going!”

The roof fell in with a violence they could feel through the ground. The crowd gasped. Released, more flames exploded upward. Windows on the lower floors smashed inward as air rushed to feed the fire above. The brick walls seemed to shudder; the ground under their feet trembled; the futile streams of water turned to steam and were swept away.

Louisa watched the roof collapse. Louder now, she growled, “Burn.
Burn!
”

That was the way Arthur saw her when he at last fought his way through the crowd. She was standing between two policemen, staring at the remains of the hotel. She looked small to him, pitiful, bedraggled, limp. But she was
alive
; she hadn't been burned to death; she was his Louisa, his wife, his Gentle Touie.

He went to her and dropped his satchel and the crushed and broken flowers and put his arms around her. “Louisa, my darling—Louisa—there, there, little woman,” he said, “Arthur is here.”

He was astonished when she started to scream and beat him with her fists.

I wish to notice particularly Bill Massey, my editor, who was both the impetus for this book and its guiding spirit.

I am also indebted to a number of books: foremost, Luc Sante's marvelous
Low
Life
, a study of New York's dark side; and Edwin C. Burrows's and Mike Wallace's massive
Gotham
, a history of New York to the end of the nineteenth century. Three period guidebooks helped me:
Baedeker's United States 1893
(reprint, 1971); Charles Hobbs & Co.'s
Street
Directory
and
Map
of
New
York
City
, 1892; and M. F. Sweetser's and Simon Ford's
How
to
Know
New
York
City
, 1893 (ninth edition). F. C. Clark's
Vices
of
a
Big
City, An Exposé of Existing Menaces to Church and Home in New York City
, 1890, (from Sante's bibliography) was useful for its house-by-house details of “dives and disorderly houses,” as was Jonathan Ned Katz's
Love
Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality
for its pages on Paresis Hall. Several works were invaluable for period slang: John Ayto's
Oxford
Dictionary
of
Slang; A Dictionary of Americanisms
, ed. Mitford M. Mathews, 1951 edition; and H. L. Mencken's
The
American
Language
(fourth edition with supplements, abridged, 1973). Nancy Bradfield's
Costume
in
Detail
was useful for matters of dress. As well, I looked into Edmund Morris's
The
Rise
of
Theodore
Roosevelt
and Pierre Nordon's
Conan
Doyle: a Biography
, but neither of the books is responsible for what I did with—or to—their subjects.