Vertical Burn (19 page)

41. EMILY CORDIFIS

It was a modest little house in Wedgwood, a quiet neighborhood north of the University of Washington. Erected on a small hillock in a neighborhood of identical houses on similar hillocks, it consisted of a tiny living room, a tinier kitchen, two small bedrooms, and a single bath. Finney had been here so many times he knew where the girls had buried their pet turtles in the backyard.

Bill Cordifis and his bride had purchased the home the year after he’d joined the fire department, which meant they had been there thirty-five years at the time of Bill’s death. The thought precipitated a sudden picture of Bill Cordifis’s charred body, his arms stumps, the fat on his torso boiled off, his face blackened to the bone, Nomex bunking coat burned as brittle as tissue paper. Finney hated that these images of Bill’s last few minutes ambushed him everywhere: in line at the grocery store, driving on the freeway, dancing last night with Diana.

“Hello?” Emily Cordifis gazed at him like a wobbly animal that had been grazed by a car, her elegant outline blurred by the screen door. “Oh, it’s you, John. I guess I forgot you were coming. I’ve been cleaning.”

“May I come in?”

“Of course.” She unlatched the screen door and swung it open. “I don’t know where my manners are. You’ve read the report, you said?”

“I’ve read it.”

“Good. I’d like to hear your thoughts.”

She led him around the corner into the small kitchen. He set the report on the table. “Coffee?” she asked.

“Thank you, but no.”

The phone rang and she spoke over her shoulder as she moved toward it. “Have a seat. This won’t take a minute.”

Finney sat at the chrome-and-Formica kitchen table, the pale light from the window cascading in over his shoulder. The house had always been filled with the smell of coffee and nicotine, though now that Bill was gone, the odor of cigarettes had faded.

Hanging up the phone, Emily Cordifis turned to him and said, “Sure you won’t have some coffee?”

“Okay. It smells wonderful.”

Emily wore a simple black pullover and trousers that ended at mid-calf. She filled two cups and sat across from Finney, folding her hands on the tabletop. The afternoon light from the window emphasized the lines in her face.

“G. A. has been good about this. I know Bill had high regard for him. He’s answered all my questions and been patient, but for some reason I still can’t grasp what happened. Bill went here. Bill did this. I hear the words, but I can’t see the picture.”

She was lucky, Finney thought; he could see the picture.

“The bottom line is I’m to blame. I tried to get him out. I failed.”

“But you had a broken shoulder.”

“Collarbone. Doesn’t matter. I should have saved him.”

Her unblinking eyes stared at him. He could tell she was determined to be the best listener she could be, and that she’d vowed not to cry. He could tell she didn’t blame him. It was the immediate and unquestioning nature of her unspoken blessing that made it worthless to him. She gave it not as if she’d carefully considered all the opposing arguments and come down on his side, but as if she had no choice.

“To understand what happened at Leary Way, you need to understand how Seattle fights fires. You probably know most of this already, but I’ll start at the beginning.”

He told her that less than ten years earlier the department had adopted an incident command system that had been and still was in widespread use across the country. The idea was that no matter what the emergency, large or small, the structure of command for handling it would be the same. Instead of having everyone on the fire ground swamp the IC with information, division and sector commanders would be appointed so no one person had more than seven people reporting to him, optimally no more than five. The incident commander would label himself so as to distinguish that incident from others taking place in the city.

Captain Vaughn called himself “Leary Command.”

“Even though they were both captains, Bill had been senior to Vaughn, and by rights could have claimed the post of IC for himself when we arrived.”

“But he didn’t do it?” Emily asked.

“No. If there was action anywhere, Bill wanted to be there. He split the crew and we went in.”

Finney had to marshal his thoughts before he continued. In contrast to his own mental health, which he realized was spiraling downward like a maple seed, each time he saw Emily he was stunned at how much more significantly recovered she was than the last time he’d seen her. He admired her strength and wanted to tell her so.

Instead, he said, “Visibility was hampered from the minute we went through the door. Bill sent one member to get a fan. Had she been allowed to set it up, the air in the building would have cleared in short order—”

“That was such a huge building. The news made it look like an airplane hangar.”

“Still, those fans would have cleared it out in a matter of minutes. They’re pretty amazing. Without fans, you’re talking about searching a building in twenty to forty minutes. With fans, in five.”

“So why did Vaughn take them down?”

“He was following rules. The rule is to not put up a fan before an engine company gets a line on the fire. Trouble was, without the fans, they couldn’t find the fire. Bill did what worked. He knew most of the folks outside telling us we couldn’t use fans were people who hadn’t crawled into a fire in years.”

“Okay. Fine. Bill made a call. Vaughn countermanded it. But if Bill had seniority, why didn’t he tell Vaughn to go fly a kite?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mentioned a woman firefighter. Bill’s said a few things over the years . . .”

“Moore is one of the best firefighters in the department. I’d put my life in her hands.”

“Would you really?”

“In a heartbeat.”

“That’s good enough for me. Can you go on?”

“The system requires a lot of people to set it up adequately, and we didn’t have them. Each incident has a base area where rigs park. One person is in charge of setting that up and making sure rigs don’t block the streets. Then there’s a staging area where firefighters and equipment are gathered and where crews wait to receive assignments. Another person is in charge of that. The fire building will have division commanders, probably four of them, and if need be, the division commanders will assign sector commanders under them.”

“How was Bill faring when you went back in the second time?”

“Why do you ask?”

“He would come home after you guys had a fire and lie on the couch all day. Totally bushed. I’m wondering . . . did you ever think about not going back in with that second bottle?”

Finney had to think about how he was going to word this.

42. LIKE TAKING A NAP

“To be honest, Bill and I didn’t think about anything except finding those victims.”

“That was just like Bill.”

“Yes, it was. While we were inside on our first bottles, Engine Thirty-five showed up and then Engine Ten and Engine Five. Engine Ten ended up taking a line inside the warehouse. We saw their line, but we never saw them. Twenty-two’s crew got a supply line from a hydrant to their rig and followed Ten’s inside with a secondhand line. They never found any fire either. Thirty-five’s showed up at the north side of the building, where a large volume of black smoke was pouring out the windows and rolling down the street. Visibility was so bad they were afraid they’d crash into another rig if they continued driving, so they stopped right there, assuming they were at the location.”

“Without any other units, where did they think everybody was?”

“Good question. The incident commander didn’t hear the announcement that they were at the location, but the incident commander from another fire going on at the same time mistakenly believed they’d arrived at
his
fire. He told them to take hand lines to the front of his building and wait for a second crew who would help them hold the exposures. Nobody caught the mistake.

“Thinking they were at the front of the building, Thirty-five’s crew stood with a dry line for almost twelve minutes while the fire continued to build. There weren’t any exposures to protect, and although they couldn’t see anybody inside, they thought fire crews were working their way through the building from the other side and that the IC was telling them not to push the fire onto those crews. They tried to get a clarification of their instructions, but channel one was completely jammed, three separate incidents using it by that time.”

“I thought your fire was on channel two?”

“It was. They were on the wrong channel. Meanwhile Ladder Five arrived and went to the roof, where they opened two holes on the older buildings. They found no fire and stalled two chain saws in the hot tar on the roof and then an XL-98. That’s a rotary saw. By the time they were brought down to help with the search, they were exhausted, and even though they’d cut three good-sized holes with their axes, the building still wasn’t venting.

“Three more engines arrived. Engine Six. Engine Seventeen. And Engine Twenty-one. They were put to work laying supply lines to hydrants and taking hose lines into the interior from the south side of the warehouse, where they had almost no chance of reaching the fire. By now there was more smoke buildup, and the holes Ladder Five had cut earlier in the roof were beginning to produce flame.

“By this time the crew of Engine Thirty-five was frantic. The officer, a firefighter acting as a lieutenant, took matters into his own hands and entered the building with his team. Soon after, Engine Twenty-four arrived and went in behind them. This was the correct side from which to attack the fire, but it was too little too late. By now, the old, wooden buildings were raging. Engines Thirty-five and Twenty-four got less than thirty feet inside the door.

“Meanwhile, Bill and I searched the warehouse and started on our second bottles. We made our way across the courtyard and into the older buildings to the north. Eventually we found the room the band rehearsed in. That’s where the wall came down on us.”

“You must have thought you were about to die.”

“I didn’t think either one of us was going to die.”

“Not even when you were wandering around?”

“I don’t remember all of it. My recollection is that when I ran into Reese and Kub I told them exactly where to find Bill. The problem is, when you’re that tired and you’ve taken as much smoke as I took, just about anything can come out of your mouth.”

“They said you didn’t give directions. But like you said, the smoke and . . .”

“I don’t think anybody found the door we’d used. On the north side in the older buildings they finally knocked down some of the fire and searched there, too, but they were on the wrong side of the fire wall. Then when the roof started to collapse, they called everyone out. Flame had gotten into the warehouse by then and ignited hot gases that had been collecting near the ceiling.”

“So they pulled out and watched Bill die?”

“If they hadn’t, they would have lost more people. Bill wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“No.”

“Anyway, judging from the time line and the amount of smoke, Bill died before they pulled out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Nobody’s sure. His last radio transmission was at zero-three-fifty-one. They pulled everyone out at zero-four-oh-two. I don’t think he lived to see four o’clock.”

Emily’s eyes watered over for the first time. “A fire wall? What’s that?”

“An extra-thick wall built into a building to keep a fire on one side or the other. A paint company, say, might use it between the warehouse and office. It was an old wall, put in there God only knows how many years ago when the place sold lumber. It was a two-hour wall—built to keep flame out for two hours. The biggest portion of the older buildings was put up in 1919, added onto later. Bill and I entered that section on the east side of the wall. Chief Reese and his partner were the only ones on our side.”

“I just . . . can’t help thinking how . . . horrible it must have been.”

“If it’s any help, Milt Halpern got trapped in a fire a few years ago. Fourteen-hundred-degree temperatures down to the floor. He got tired and couldn’t move, and then he lay down. He said it was like taking a nap. He got burned pretty good, too, but he didn’t feel it. You wear those bunkers, you get cooked. It’s different from what you’d think.”

“What happened to Milt?”

“A firefighter just happened to be standing fifteen feet away in a doorway, blacking out the room with a two-and-a-half. A guy named Gary Sadler. He spotted Milt and dragged him out.”

“He didn’t feel anything?”

“Like taking a nap.”

The phone rang, and as Emily stood up to get it he wondered what it would be like to lose a spouse of thirty-five years. He was hurting, but he didn’t have to give away Bill’s fishing tackle or find a home for his hunting dogs. He didn’t have to figure out what to do with Bill’s tools or his shotguns or his fire department uniforms. Or the folded flag from his coffin.

“Okay,” Emily said, hanging up the phone. “Why didn’t Reese and Kub find him?”

“It was a big place. Lots of smoke. Reese says they searched until the fire chased them out.”

“How far away was Bill when you met them?”

“About seventy-five feet.”

“I suppose they searched as long as they felt they could.”

“That’s my understanding.”

She looked at him with her wide doe eyes. As she walked him out of the house, Emily Cordifis detoured into the room Bill had converted to a combination den–sewing room after their youngest daughter moved out. “Some papers I found. Mostly department stuff. I haven’t really had the heart to sort through them. I would appreciate it if you would return anything that needs to be returned.”

He took the envelope from her, and said, “Emily I have to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

“I was lost.”

Emily stepped forward and, without uttering a word, kissed Finney’s cheek. “Of course you were. Who wouldn’t have been? John? Next month would have been our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. The girls and I have decided to hold a celebration of his life, and we want it to coincide with our anniversary. Everybody’s going to be here. Marion, the whole gang from Station Ten. G. A. Montgomery. Chief Reese has promised to make a speech. Say you’ll come. It wouldn’t be complete without you.”

“I’ll be here,” he said, though he didn’t know how he could ever celebrate with that bunch. Anyway, he’d probably be in jail by then. He kissed her brow and left.