New York - The Novel

her friend had shown her. She wondered if Pasquale liked to dance.
    It hadn’t taken her long to find out about Pasquale. As soon as Salvatore casually mentioned that they might be meeting a friend of his at the restaurant, she’d guessed he was up to something. As for Salvatore’s pathetic attempts to deny it, she’d soon dealt with that. When he confessed, she pretended to be angry. What she didn’t tell her brother was that she’d already noticed the young man looking at her, and she didn’t mind meeting him at all. But she told Salvatore that she didn’t know if she’d come with him or not, just to give him grief. She was smiling to herself as she went back into the building at the start of the afternoon.
    Saturday afternoons were always a little hectic. At the end of the week’s work, the shipping clerks would be running around trying to get all thefinal orders completed. As finishing time approached, the pay packets were given out. You couldn’t go before the final bell, of course, but some of the girls who had young men waiting for them were getting ready to make a speedy exit. As the bell went, and the power to the machines was cut off, everybody rose. But Anna wasn’t in a hurry. She took a little mirror out of her bag. Might as well make herself look nice before meeting the mystery man. She attended to this while the girls started moving toward the door. She was still sitting there when she heard something strange. Someone was shouting.

    From the statue of Garibaldi, there was a good view across to Washington Place. In summer, the leaves on the trees obscured it. But as Salvatore looked now, he could see the higher floors of the building clearly, and the sign—a triangle in a circle—that hung from the corner. He glanced at the watch Paolo had given him for Christmas.
    “It’s time,” he remarked to Angelo.
    “Will Uncle Luigi give me a hot chocolate?”
    “Sure.” Salvatore looked across at the building. Any moment now, the first girls would start coming out of the door. A young man strolled by, paused for a moment, to look in the same direction.
    And just then, a curious thing happened. There was a little popping sound. Nothing much, just a pop, from one of the windows up on the eighth floor. An instant later, a little puff of smoke came out of the window, and a tiny tinkle of glass could be heard from the street below. A horse standing there suddenly bolted with its cart. From above, smoke began to drift out of the broken window. A man ran across the street.
    The fellow who’d paused beside the statue set off quickly toward the scene, leaving Salvatore and Angelo standing there. Moments later, whistles sounded from a fire station. Then a cop on horseback clattered down the street and ran into the building. People were spilling out onto the sidewalks, and from the far side of the park, a fire wagon came clanging into view.
    “Stay here,” Salvatore told Angelo. “If Anna comes, wait for me.”
    When he reached the building, he checked first the front doorway, then the one around the corner on Greene Street. There was no sign of Anna. Moments later, a group of girls came out of the front entrance. He spoke to one of them and learned that they’d come down from the eighthfloor in the elevator. “The fire’s caught the boxes of cotton,” she told him. “They went up like they were kerosene.”
    “What about the girls on the other floors?” he asked. But she didn’t know.
    More and more fire wagons were arriving. You had to say, the speed of their response was impressive. Firemen—they seemed to be mostly Irish—were running hoses from the fire hydrants in the street, and taking them into the building.
    They weren’t letting anyone go in. All Salvatore could do was rush from one entrance to another, trying to get whatever information he could from the girls coming out, or chance words he heard from the firemen.
    The building’s own water hoses weren’t working, he’d heard, but the pressure in the hydrants was good. The fire had started on the eighth floor, which was now engulfed in flames, and the firemen couldn’t get past it. Somebody said there was a fire escape that went down the well in the center of the block. But it had collapsed. Some girls had managed to reach lower floors that way, but others were on it when it fell. Smoke and flames were pouring out of the upper windows now, on the Greene Street side.
    Salvatore saw people pointing up at the roof, and he ran