Melting the Snow on Hester Street Page 20

  ‘I do.’

  ‘They’ll be out in twenty minutes.’

  ‘I can’t really wait.’

  The boy considered this. He looked at Matz. ‘Trouble with bull you say?’

  ‘Big trouble.’

  ‘You gonna tell me what you did? ‘

  ‘Street meeting,’ he muttered vaguely. ‘There was quite a crowd … Police came in, broke it up …’

  ‘And?’

  Slowly, Matz shook his head. ‘Turned nasty.’ He indicated the door at the back of the lobby. It opened onto a narrow stairway. ‘Can I go up that way?’

  The boy shrugged, disappointed not to hear more. ‘Sure you can,’ he said. ‘Only if they catch you, don’t you go saying who let you in!’

  44

  He had been escaping his own arrest again. He had leapt from the back of a paddy wagon as they were carting him off to Mercer Street station. The others didn’t follow. He was on his own and he ran – desperate, instinctive – wild. He lost the pack without difficulty but there was one pursuer who wouldn’t give up. He was coming after Matz, whistle blowing, club waving, like his police career depended on it. Someone, an IWW member, perhaps, a worker, a supporter – whoever it was, they must have recognized Matz, because they passed him something heavy as he ran by. Not a rock. A brick. It was a large brick, and it was heavy. He could see the man’s face as he was pressing the weapon into his hand. Use it. It’s what the man had said. And Matz hadn’t hesitated. He’d taken the brick, the rock, the heavy thing, and kept running. And mid-sprint, his pursuer’s breath audible his ears, Matz had turned and hurled the thing – to slow the man down, no more than that; trip him up; stop him. But he threw the brick too hard and the man had been too close. It was all wrong. He knew it the moment it left his grasp. The policeman had dropped like a stone. Blood everywhere. The brick had landed with such force it had cracked open his skull.

  Matz stopped at once. He gazed down at the man’s limp body as the blood gushed from his head. He’d killed him. It was all Matz could think. Without his hat – dislodged in the chase – he didn’t look like a policeman. He looked like any other man: just a man, young and dying. And Matz had killed him.

  Several seconds passed. They were in an alleyway, one that Matz knew well. Matz, who knew every crook and cranny of the city, had led him down here to avoid the crowds, but in the intervening seconds, as the man at his feet rattled his final exhalations, a small group had gathered: three young men and a woman, perhaps? He couldn’t say for sure. But one of them shunted him – they told him to run.

  Run!

  Get the hell outta here!

  Go NOW!

  And so he did. He ran, until he was alone again. And when he stopped, he heaved the small contents of his stomach across the sidewalk. The man was dead. And when they found him dead they would know at once who had killed him.

  He needed to get a message to Eleana. She had to fetch the baby, and then, together – for he wasn’t leaving without them – they needed to get the hell out of town.

  45

  ‘Go on up there!’ the boy at the Service Gate was saying. ‘Surprise her! Nobody’s gonna notice you this late in the day. Hurry up now or the bell will go and you’ll be lucky you don’t get mowed down in the rush to get out of that hellhole!’

  Matz remembered it well. The Saturday quitting bell – the sense of exhilaration and freedom that came with the first chime – and then the mad stampede for the doors. Blumenkranz used to keep the doors locked to be sure no one slipped away early. There used to be a hint of sadism about the slowness with which he opened them at the end of the day.

  ‘Thanks,’ Matz stepped toward the stairs, but the sound of a siren approaching made him freeze … He waited, alert as a stag: listening, waiting. They couldn’t have followed him. It was impossible. He’d made a dash, zigzagged all the way here.

  The boy said, matter of factly: ‘Get up there! Get lost in the scrum! They’ll never find you.’

  ‘Thank you my friend,’ Matz said, starting towards the stairwell again. ‘I think I will.’

  ‘Not that way!’ the boy shouted after him, laughing. ‘Have you forgotten already? You’ll climb all the way up there – and you’ll find the door’s locked. Take the elevator. Here. I’ll call it for you …’

  Eight floors up, quitting time was imminent. The machines continued to whir but there was a restlessness in the noisy air. Machinists were wriggling surreptitiously into position, heads and necks still bent over their work, feet still pedalling, but bodies twisting impatiently towards freedom, ready for the quickest getaway. Pay packets had already been distributed. The week was done. The sun still shone outside the factory windows. Saturday evening and all of Sunday stretched ahead. The anticipation of so many aching, restless young bodies was palpable. ‘It’s the best moment of the week!’ Eleana yelled over the racket of their machines. Dora didn’t catch the words but guessed at their meaning. Reaching over her large belly into the central trough for another piece, another shirt sleeve, she nodded and beamed in reply.

  She had told Eleana during their lunch break that her husband, who made $24 a week, was taking her uptown for her birthday, to a real movie theatre, one with a piped organ the size of half a block, which blasted music beside a screen so large you couldn’t, according to Dora, see the whole of it all at once, ‘not without sweeping your eyes to the left and then to the right and then to the left again.’ He had bought her a new shawl, too. And he was taking her to dinner …

  Dora looked so happy it was impossible not to celebrate with her. Work would not be the same without her. But, Eleana reassured herself once again, they would still be friends. And maybe, one day, Matz would make enough money so that she could join her friend: maybe have another child; maybe an apartment to themselves. One day. Maybe. Imagining it made her happy enough. So she packed away the pinch of envy and returned her friend’s broad smile. Too late. Dora wasn’t looking at her. She was looking beyond, to the cutters’ tables in the far corner. A cloud had crossed her happy face. It was a look of profound irritation.

  ‘Damn it …’ she muttered. This would only add to the madness of the end-of-day exit scrum and delay the moment when they might finally be free of the building. ‘Why now?’

  In the cutters’ corner, beneath the long wire clotheslines, draped like bunting, beneath the long, high wooden table, buckling with discarded fabric strips, there curled a thin but unmistakable plume of smoke.

  Eleana followed Dora’s gaze, felt a similar rush of impatience at the sight which greeted her. The cutters weren’t supposed to smoke on the factory floor, but at the end of a long week nobody ever seemed to stop them. And now, a flick of their cigarette ash had caught onto something. Once again. It was not the first time. And there was going to be chaos.

  ‘At least we already have our wages,’ Eleana muttered, touching Dora’s sleeve. She was on the point of returning to her work. They would dock her pay if they spotted her looking up from it. But she hesitated, felt a shiver of unease. Already, the plume was filling out – not such a thin plume any more. It was definitely growing thicker.

  And, yes, in only a second, the smoke was spreading. There was a large box to the right of the cutters’ table, overflowing with fabric scraps. She could see now that smoke was coming from that, too.

  Cautiously, not wanting to be spotted shirking from the last few minutes of work, the two women twisted in their seats. Over the banks of still-humming sewing machines they could spy the tip of the flames: flames which seemed to be growing taller and bolder every second.

  Another fire, then. It was the third since Eleana had worked at the factory – and every one of them starting at the cutters’ tables. The cutters thought they were above the rules. They were above the rules. Matz had been no better. She sighed, irritated, and maybe a little nervous. But nothing more than that. Not yet.

  There were fire pails dotted around the room, always kept full of water. One of the cutters, Tomas, took th
e nearest and tossed its contents onto the flames. It had no discernible effect. The flames burned on unabated.

  ‘Dora,’ Eleana said, taking her foot from the pedal at last. ‘I think you had better get to the door … Get ahead … Don’t you think so? It’s probably nothing. It never is. But in your condition …’

  Dora stopped pedalling too, but she didn’t move. ‘If I stop now, Blumenkranz will be after me. Any chance he gets, he’ll be stealing money back out of my pay packet. For a few measly minutes? I don’t think so. They’ll get it under control. They always do. You go ahead if you want to. I’m staying right here.’

  In the far corner, the flames licked higher. Tomas began to move faster, with a hint of urgency now. He and another cutter – Eleana didn’t know his name – picked up more fire pails and poured more water onto the flames, still to no avail. The dousing only seemed to feed the flames, and they grew higher still. They licked around the wooden table edge and nibbled at the piles of fabric that hung loose over the tabletop.

  ‘Dora,’ Eleana said more insistently. ‘There’s going to be a rush, I’m telling you. It’s not under control. And you shall be stuck. You’ll be knocked to the ground.’

  Dora hesitated.

  ‘Darling – GO!’

  Slowly, the sewing machines around them fell silent; an eery quiet filled the room; the crackle of flames, the sound of coughing, a few murmurs of disquiet – irritation, confusion, a shout or two from the cuttters’ corner … The room had never been so still. And still, the flames licked higher and the girls sat tight, looking on. The cutters caused their silly fires: the cutters dealt with them. This fire was bigger than most, it was true. Even so. There was an assumption, growing weaker, that the men had it under control.

  So the flames expanded, and flared, and stretched, and nobody moved. They reached higher, and higher still. They caressed the flimsy tissue patterns, hanging like party bunting above the cutters’ heads. They teased at the paper and whipped at the wires, until the paper caught … And then somebody screamed. It was the first sign of panic. Smoke began to fill the room. From the bunting overhead flames began to fall, like fat raindrops. This was no ordinary fire. This was not like the others.

  The bunting – the wire of hanging patterns – ran the full width of the room and the flames could not resist it. They were leaping, racing, dancing from one paper sheet to the next. Then came the roar, sudden and unexpected. And in that instant, as if from nowhere, the room became a fireball. It was the moment – too late – when awareness and hysteria simultaneously took hold. Upstairs on the tenth floor, someone in Management rang the quitting bell at last, but in the panic, the thickening smoke, the soaring heat, its musical sound went unnoticed for the first and final time.

  Still the flames grew. Behind the cutters’ table, at the heart of the fire, a window cracked under the heat. A second later the pane exploded outwards, smashing glass onto the street eight floors below, and through the broken window came a small, lethal breeze. It didn’t cool the room. It fanned the flames.

  Another roar – another fireball, this one hurtling deeper into the open space. The cutters seemed to admit defeat. They stopped tearing at the flaming tissue overhead. They stopped reaching for water buckets – there was none left to reach. They dropped the fire hose, uncoiled but useless, since no water came from the standpipe . And they began to retreat.

  ‘We can’t control it!’ Tomas shouted, choking through the smoke. ‘Get out! Everyone – get out.’

  They were already trying. By then the fear had taken hold. Flames from the bunting had rained onto the scraps of fabric which lay everywhere in the room, and onto a wooden floor long-soaked in the oil that dripped daily from the sewing machines. The floor, the ceiling, the walls – nothing was spared; nowhere was safe: everywhere, there was fire.

  Into this, the elevator doors pulled slowly open, and Matz looked out.

  He had smelled the smoke. He had heard the screams, and the fists beating on the doors as he rose higher, but the vision that met him was worse than any he could have imagined. He attempted to move out onto the burning floor, but workers, surging to escape, knocked him back again; and so he fought, scrambling between them, slipping through the elevator doors just as they were closing. Behind him, thirty workers, piled one upon the other and packed into a space designed for half that number, made their lucky escape: in front him, an inferno.

  Matz stepped forward onto the burning floor, shouting her name.

  46

  In the heat, the thick black smoke, the screaming chaos, it was impossible to make out anything but the faintest outlines. Matz stood, for the briefest and longest second, stupefied by the horror, trying to think, trying to collect his bearings. There weren’t many ways to get out of the room, he knew that: two slim stairways, not wide enough for two people to pass, with doors – if they were even unlocked – that opened inwards, into a crowded and panic-filled room. There were two elevator shafts, and in the enclosed courtyard at the back of the building, a single fire escape, an external metal stairway that was partially blocked – always had been – by a jutting steel shutter on the seventh floor below.

  Beside Matz, the door to one of the two stairways remained tightly closed. Through the smoke, he could hear fists and feet beating helplessly against it: whether it was locked or unlocked, nobody could tell. The crush forcing itself against the door made it impossible to discover. Behind him, the second elevator juddered to a stop and the doors began to open; beneath him the smoky shapes of women, some on their knees, choking for breath. He reached for the one closest to his own feet, in danger of being trampled, and while the crowd rushed the sliding doors, he lifted her, and then another, and then a third, piling each one onto the shoulders of the passengers already inside. And then the doors closed and elevator was gone again.

  Shouts of frustration from the stairway beside him. The door had opened, but only an inch, and only for a moment before the force of the desperate crowd slammed it shut again. So it wasn’t locked.

  ‘ELEANA!’ he cried. Nothing. His voice died in the smoke.

  He stepped towards the stairway, approaching from the back of the knot of bodies; and somehow he pushed them back, one by one, making space until the door could swing open. ‘Calm! Stay calm!’ he pleaded, as they threw themselves into the stairway. ‘If you can stay calm, many more will get out. You will get out faster … ELEANA? … Has anyone seen Eleana? ELEANA!’ But they didn’t hear him. They certainly didn’t answer.

  At the far side of the room, Tomas led the way to the external fire escape. They could escape the fire by climbing around the steel shutter on the seventh floor and smashing a window below the fire, on the sixth floor. He climbed out, while the people watched. The shutter jutted out beyond the edge of the stairway. To get past it first he had to climb onto it, entrusting it with his entire body weight. As his second foot returned to the relative safety of the stair-rail, the shutter dislodged. He fell backwards his body spiralling until it hit the ground eighty foot below.

  And yet his friends and colleagues followed him. They couldn’t turn back into the room – behind them lay certain death. The next climber passed the shutter without stumbling. She smashed the sixth-floor window and escaped. Twenty more clambered afer her, and the word spread. An escape! More bodies piled onto the flimsy metal structure, many with their clothes already alight – they clambered on from the eighth-floor window, and from the ninth floor above it where the fire had spread. The stairs were overloaded and overloading more every second. People shouted warnings, but it was pointless. There came a growl, louder than the screams inside the building, louder than the raging flames. It was the sound of grinding metal. Their escape route was buckling. And yet still more piled on: forty, then fifty, clinging on tight, until, with a deafening screech, the stairway detached completely. It thundered onto the courtyard below, landing on top of what was left of Tomas and taking fifty flaming bodies with it as it fell.

  Inside, the fir
e raged on, the elevator cars came and went. And Matz continued to pack them high with bodies. He ventured into the room, calling everywhere for Eleana, lifting the bodies from his feet and carrying them back to elevators, piling them onto the shoulders of the people already inside.

  ‘ELEANA?’ he called, his voice half lost in the screaming, in his own choking lungs.

  ELEANA?

  The elevators weren’t coming fast enough, and by now the cables had warped in the heat, which meant they came slower still. And the fire continued to rage. It lapped from windows exploded in the heat. It devoured every chair and table, every piece of fabric. Nothing could withstand it. Nothing could stop it. The heat was unbearable. Escape seemed impossible.

  They stood at the flaming windows, looked down at the crowd below. And they began to jump. First one … And then another and then another …

  She collided with him, in the thick of it, as he was calling her name. No time to wonder what he was doing there. There was Dora under her arm, unable to stand. ‘Get her out, Matz,’ she cried. ‘Get her out!’

  On the street below, a large crowd had gathered and they were screaming as the burning bodies fell, one by one, two by two, sometimes holding hands and falling together. The fire patrols opened out their life nets to catch them, but the falling bodies came so thick and fast that they ripped the life nets to shreds; and soon, on the street, in a lagoon of blood, there lay a thick spread of young bodies. Mostly dead – but not all. From some of the bodies there came feeble, agonized moans and the patrolmen burrowed in among them while the bodies rained down, pulling survivors from the heaps …

  Eleana pushed Dora into his arms. He hesitated. He wanted to take Eleana too. It was Eleana he had come for, after all.

  ‘Get her out of here!’ Eleana ordered him. ‘She will die. The baby will die.’

  ‘Let me first get you out of here.’