Page 75 of Faking the Heat

The alarm goes off.

Not my pager. Not the shrill personal chirp on my belt that means somebody three miles from here is having the worst day of their life. This is the building. This is the Hilton’s own system, every horn on every floor going at once, and the sound of it in a ballroom with a fourteen-foot ceiling is a physical thing that arrives in your chest before your ears.

And here is what happens in a room containing five hundred firefighters when a fire alarm goes off.

Nothing, for about a second and a half.

Then every single person in that room lifts their head at exactly the same angle, and I watch five hundred faces perform the identical calculation, and I know what they are all smelling, because I am smelling it too, and it is not the lilies.

It is in the building. It is in this building, right now, and it is somewhere under us.

Jake is beside me before I have turned around. He has already put his scotch down on somebody else’s table.

“Kitchen,” he says. “Or the laundry. It came up the shaft.”

“Yeah.”

We look at each other for exactly as long as it takes, which is not long at all, and then the evening is over.

Here is the joke, and it is a good one, and nobody in that ballroom is laughing.

There are five hundred professional firefighters in this room, and not one of us has a single piece of gear. No turnouts. No SCBA. No helmets, no hooks, no radios. We are wearing wool dress uniforms and patent leather shoes and gold braid. We are the most qualified and the worst equipped room in the state of Illinois, standing on top of a working fire in evening wear.

So we do the only thing the uniform is actually good for tonight, which is that people believe us when we tell them where to go.

It moves faster than a civilian crowd ever does, because two thirds of the room already knows the drill and starts running it without being asked. The Chief is on a chair by the band with his hands up. Somebody has the house phone. Somebody else has the service corridor doors open. Within ninety seconds there is a chain of men in navy blue standing at every exit of that ballroom like bollards, turning five hundred people in gowns toward the stairs.

I get Mandy as far as the top of the north stairwell.

“Go down and keep going,” I tell her. “All the way to Michigan and then across it. Don’t stop in the lobby, the lobby’s going to fill.”

“What about,”

“I’ll find you.”

She looks at me for half a second. And here is the thing I will think about later, at three in the morning, sitting on the bumper of a rig with my hands shaking: she does not argue. She does not ask me to come with her. She reaches up and straightens the collar of my jacket, which does not need straightening, and she says, “Okay. Go.”

Then she goes down the stairs with four hundred other people and I go the other way.

The next hour is not heroic and I want to be extremely clear about that, because that is not what this is.

There is no burning building to run into. There is a laundry chute on the second sub-level that has been quietly making a very bad decision for about twenty minutes, and a kitchen exhaust run that is doing an efficient job of taking the smoke somewhere it should not be going, and the actual firefighting is done in eleven minutes by an engine company from Fourteen who arrive in full gear and do their job properly.

What the rest of us do is move people. That is the entire job tonight. Two thousand rooms above us and a ballroom below, and a lot of people in a lot of stairwells, and about a hundred of them are elderly donors and city councilors and a woman in a wheelchair on nine whose elevator is now a coffin-shaped box we cannot use.

Gear comes off the first-due rigs. I get a coat that is not mine and a radio that is, and by the time the second alarm comes in I am standing in the northeast service door on Michigan with a chalk mark on the frame and a running count in my head, which is where a lieutenant belongs and not one step further in.

Three hundred and eleven. Three hundred and forty. Three hundred and sixty-two.

The street is a mess of light. Four engines, two trucks, the ambulances staged down toward Delaware, and the whole guest list of the Chicago Fire Department Annual Ball standing on the far pavement in ball gowns and shirtsleeves, watching their own service work.

Which is how I come to be counting heads out of a stairwell when I see Derek Marx cross Michigan Avenue toward Mandy.

He has his coat over his arm. He is not hurrying, because he has never hurried at anything in his life. He goes across four lanes of blocked traffic between a ladder truck and an ambulance and he walks straight to where she is standing on the far curb in a red dress with somebody’s blanket around her shoulders, and he stops about three feet from her and starts talking.

And I cannot go.

There are still people coming down that stairwell. I can hear them. There is a probie on the door with me who has been on the job for eleven weeks and a hundred and some guests still above the fourth floor and I am the ranking officer standing in this doorway, and if I walk off this door to cross a street then this door has nobody on it.