Hells Kitchen

his hand and he pressed the muzzle against Pellam’s face. Pellam, thinking how he’d never really trusted the trigger cogs in guns. They could be notoriously edgy. The little bantam leaned closer, whispered, “See, you get me that part in a movie, I can do my own fighting and everything. I don’t need no stuntmen. An’ I got my own gun too.”
    Pellam groaned.
    “Shoot him in the foot or knee or something, Jacko.”
    “Yeah. Fuck up his hand. Boom, boom.”
    Drugh seemed to be debating “Naw, he’s had enough. These fucking queers from Hollywood, they can’t take shit.”
    Drugh leaned forward once again, whispered, “What it is, that kid Alex you wanted to know about? He’s staying at the Eagleton Hotel on Ninth Avenue. Room 434.”
    Pellam mumbled something that Drugh took to be, ‘’Thank you,” though the phrase shared only one word with that expression of gratitude.
    Drugh gave him a friendly kick in the ribs as a farewell and then vanished with the others. “Hey, Tommy,” he said to Redhead, “you remember that scene in that movie I was telling you about? . . . What the fuck movie you think I mean? . . .”
    The door swung shut. Pellam spit the loose tooth from his mouth. It rattled around on the tile floor for what seemed like minutes before it finally spun to silence.

TWENTY
    It was just as a horde of bleary French tourists was checking into the tawdry hotel on the West Side that the elevator returned as summoned to the ground floor. And then it opened its doors.
    “Mon dieu!”
    The flaming liquid inside the car melted through its plastic container and spilled like a fiery tidal wave into the lobby.
    “Jesus!” somebody screamed.
    “Oh, shit . . .”
    The flames appeared almost magically as the liquid ran along the floor and ignited the carpet, the chairs, the gold-flecked wallpaper, the fake rubber trees, the tables.
    Alarms begin detonating with harsh baritone ringing—old-fashioned bells that make one think immediately of lifesaving systems vastly outdated. Screams filled the tattered halls. People began to flee.
    More frightening than the flames was the smoke, which filled the hotel instantly as if it were pumped in under high pressure. The electricity simply stoppedand, amid the palpable smoke, nighttime filled the lobby and corridors. Even the ruby exit signs grew invisible.
    And sounding above all of the screams and ringing and alarms was a frantic pedal tone—the howl of fire.
    The Eagleton Hotel was about to die.
    The flames consumed the cheap carpet and turned it from green to black in seconds. The flames boiled plastic as easily as it puckered skin. The fire ran up the walls, melting plaster like butter. The flames spit out smoke thick as muddy water and suffocated a half-dozen foreign guests trapped in an alcove without an exit.
    The flames kissed and the flames killed.
    “Merde! Mon dieu! Allez, allez! Giselle, où es tu?”
    In the downstairs banquet room, where three white jacketed busboys cowered, there was a sudden flash-over—the whole space grew so hot it ignited like one huge match head.
    Upstairs a young man, fully clothed, leapt into a brimming bathtub, thinking cleverly that this would protect him. Sickened rescue workers would find what was left of his body, two hours from now, in water still heated to a slow boil.
    One woman in a frenzy of panic flung open the door of her room and with the in-rush of oxygen an explosion engulfed her. The last scream she uttered wasn’t a human sound at all but a burst of flame popping from her mouth.
    One man fled from a searing wall of flames and hurtled through a fifth-floor window. He cartwheeled elegantly in silence to the roof of a yellow taxi below. The glass in the cab’s six windows turned instantly opaque as if coated with winter frost.
    Another man stepped onto a fire escape so heated by flames that the metal rods of the stairs melted through his running shoes in seconds. He climbed, screaming, on burnt, bloody feet to the roof.
    In rooms on the higher floors some of the guests believed they were safe from the fire itself; they noticed only a faint haze of smoke around them. They calmly read the in-case-of-emergency cards and, as those reassuring words instructed, soaked washclothes and held them over their faces. Then they sat down calmly on the floor to wait for help and died peacefully in the sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning.
    In the lobby, there was another flash-over. A sofa exploded in orange