Self Condemned (44 page)

The two reporters looked up. They were French Canadians, he noticed. Affie’s head had a deep scar, reaching down to the left eye. One of the reporters pointed to the scar. “Looks as if someone had hit her on the head,” he said.

“It does,” René said. Almost automatically he said to himself, “She must have got that while snooping. She must have had her eye at a keyhole … and someone came up behind her.” — Aloud, he said, “This was the manageress.”

The two reporters opened their notebooks.“The manageress?”

“Yes,” René answered. “Mrs. McAffie.”

René crossed the road to observe the progress of the fire. He had to pick his way among the fire engines, which entirely blocked the roadway: but he found a path, stepping on and over hoses, shouted at by firemen, who would have him choose some other route. The irritation of these men increased as they noticed him shaking with laughter.

He was thinking, “To be lying in the snow. Dead.” Perhaps he was dreaming. Here was something that was not in conformity with a waking reality. It was what was absurd in himself, that suddenly he had been confronted with. Sudden death presents its card with a leer. He thought now that he had seen a smile on Affie’s face. He could not be sure of this but he thought he had. She had understood the Absurd. So it was that he found himself doing what the firemen thought he was doing; it was a convulsion of meaningless mirth.

He had now reached the other side of the road, and stood gazing up at the flaming edifice.

There were groups of people standing all along the sidewalk, and gazing up, as he was. The two who were beside him were talking, and one of them was telling the other how he had telephoned to a friend the other side of the river. This friend had informed him that a huge cloud of smoke was spreading all over the city. René moved along until he was actually in front of the hotel. The noise was formidable, there was the throbbing of the engines, the firemen shouting to one another, the excited talk of the spectators, in addition to the roaring and crackling of flames, and occasional crashes inside the burning building, and less frequently, though more disagreeably, outside. A section, for instance, of burning wood and masonry fell almost on top of the men manipulating a fire escape: for several fire escapes were still feeling their way on the sides of the hotel, watching for guests who might still be there and seeking to escape. The fireman kept people at a distance, and René was already as near as he could get without protest. The fireman passed him, and asked a woman who was standing in her porch if she had some old socks she could give him. He held up his hands, both of which were becoming useless with frostbite. He followed her into the house, and came out a little later with his hands bandaged.

The noise, the glare, the clouds of smoke, the roaring and crackling of the flames, this great traditional spectacle only appealed to him for a moment. But he could not help being amazed at the spectral monster which had been there for so long, and what it was turning into. It was a flaming spectre, a fiery iceberg. Its sides, where there were no flames, were now a solid mass of ice. The water of the hoses had turned to ice as it ran down the walls, and had created an icy armour many feet in thickness. This enormous cocoon of ice did not descend vertically, but swept outwards for perhaps fifty yards, stopped by the wall of the house of the
Friseur
; half submerging the beverage room in its outward progress. The flames rising into the sky seemed somehow cold and conventional as if it had been their duty to go on aspiring, but they were doing it because they must, not because they had any lust for destruction. These were the flames that still reached up above the skyline of the façade. But a new generation of fiery monsters, a half-hour younger, appeared behind them, a darker red and full of muscular leaps, charged with the authentic will to devour and to consume. And there were dense volumes of black smoke too, where fresh areas were being brought into the holocaust.

But René believed he could see a still fresher group of flames, which must be sprouting out of the annex. He moved farther on, where he could see the annex. It was still quite intact, but there was a very active flame which he felt sure was feeding on the first timbers of the annex. Two streams of water began playing on it, and it grew shorter and paler, but it did not disappear. He heard someone saying that the fire marshal was in the backyards upon which their windows looked, and that he believed the annex could be saved. They were fighting the flames in the corner, attempting to stop them at that point. He could see a dark group near the centre of the white strip where the backyards were.

“Well there it is,” René summed up for himself, “a bonfire, a very large bonfire. Every Murphy bed, and every settee had a latent flame in it, as the stuff of a bonfire. As we lived in our apartment, in our wonderful crapulous Room, we were kept away from chaos and dissolution by its strong walls and orderly shapes. But it can all be set a match to, and daemonic nature appear from nowhere and eat it up.”Then he thought of war. “War is so respectable. The rulers, the firebugs, dare not do more than kill a few million people. Theirs is a hypocritical destruction, it takes them years to go round bumping off small packets at a time. How much better it would be if they summoned a few million people to the Sahara and destroyed them all within twenty-four hours by poison gas or some quicker exterminator. But no; they must pretend. They must say that it is a very holy cause that they are serving, and fool around for four or five or six years. Fire is not frivolous and hypocritical, it is not human. The hotel will not be there tomorrow morning. Instead of it there will be a beautiful iceberg. What a pity that dear Affie could not have got herself embalmed in the ice.”

René did not return to Mrs. Waechter’s the same way. He circled round past the groceteria. As he walked warily along, he reflected what a handicap it was, from the standpoint of the Fire, that there was no wind. The whole place would have been burned down long before this if there had been a good wind. It was completely windless, and a really beautiful moonlit night, if one had any time for beauty.

When at last he reached the door of the annex, he saw that the fire had not been stopped, as anticipated, but had its teeth in the beginning of the annex. It was already filling the street with smoke, and smoke as well as water was now coming out of the annex door. As he was looking at the door, the young Russian came out of the smoke, coughing and patting his eyes with a handkerchief. He had only taken a step or two when another man who had also come out of the smoke loomed up behind him, and seizing the hand which held the handkerchief, fixed on the wrist a manacle, with almost as little trouble as if this had been a prearranged scene. The two men were now fastened to one another, but as if coming to life the young Russian hit the other in the face with his free hand, and they both seemed to slip and fall to the ground, kicking, struggling, and shouting. But another man appeared from nowhere, and bent down over René’s ex-neighbour, whom he hit with something. It was difficult to see what. The next thing René saw was the two men dragging and carrying the young man to a waiting car, which was parked beyond the disabled car of the “Kid.”

So the “Toronto Kid” had at last had to leave his apartment, as the police had foreseen. Had he been obliged to leave his treasure trove, or whatever it was, up there in the smoke, or had he got it in his pocket, or tied round his waist, or in the lining of his hat? Or had the women …? But René had been so busy watching the capture of the “Kid” that he had turned from the annex door, from which, as he now saw, the two women had also emerged. They stood at present, wailing and weeping, in the custody of two detectives, who kept their eyes very closely upon them, especially, of course, upon their hands. But this was a rapidly moving scene; and it was hardly a minute before a car drove up and the two women were pushed into it. The men jumped in behind them, and as the car door was banged to, the car was already under way and disappearing in the wake of the other one. The people in the street all seemed to be shouting, and it was not certain if they were shouting for anything more than pleasure at seeing three people pinched, or anger at the thought that one day the same men might find some excuse for pinching them.

XXII
HAD I THE WINGS OF
THE MORNING

F
or the remainder of the night René and Hester attempted to rest, but the noise of the fire itself, and the noisiness of those putting it out, and those looking on, made this very difficult. The fitful rest they did, however, manage to obtain, made them, by nine in the morning, fresh compared with most people in the immediate neighbourhood. To gloat over the destruction, Mrs. Waechter related the high spots; how a fireman on the ice cap over the beverage room had been killed by the collapse of a wall, and how the bodies recovered were said to number twenty. “How lovely!” René exclaimed, and Mrs. Waechter thought what a brute he was. Only Apartment 27A and its immediate neighbours remained to be burned into unrecognizabiity. The Fire Brigade felt in honour bound to prolong the agony of these four or five remaining apartments. As a slight wind had sprung up, this was demonstrably impossible.

After an excellent breakfast they went outside, and almost the first person they met was Bessie (“another nitwit”): she appeared to be mooching round in the hope of meeting Mrs. Plant. The wind made it ferociously cold and they invited her inside.

What Bess obviously hoped was that with the insurance money Mrs. Plant would acquire another hotel, and that
she
would be the manageress, now that Affie was gone. They both felt Bess had grown in stature because of this opportune demise. She was at present in the running (she felt) for managerial status, and, meanwhile, she had become the sole transmitter of gossip, and bearer of news.

The latter function she exercised immediately. The following are a few specimens of this. Would the insurance company pay up? This was her first line. The hotel had been secured by Mrs. Plant by means of mortgages: she had been in the habit of boasting that she had never paid a penny for anything. She would refer to this as “The modern way.” But the insurance companies had become notorious for their scepticism, wriggling out of payment wherever they could. They were not such “suckers” as their English opposite numbers. — When asked by René on what these sceptical companies would base their refusal to pay, she stared with the crafty innocence of a slum child through her hideous steel spectacles, “Oh, I don’t know.” She appeared to be as sceptical as were, according to her, insurance companies. Bess said the account of Affie’s death in currency (though from what mint this story came she had been unable to discover) was that she had gone back into a part of the hotel where the fire was quickly gaining ground, to fetch her cherry fur. But that story did not agree with the position in which her body had been found. “Where was that?” René had enquired. She, with a mock-innocent craft, answered, “It was not far from you. It was just beyond the door of Mr. Martin’s apartment. And that was early on — there was no fire there then.” René confirmed that he had seen her body in Balmoral Street, at a relatively early stage of the fire. “Where did you see her?” Bess enquired. “Not far from Lafitte’s hotel!” he told her. And Bess exclaimed, “Ah. Right over there!” She was full of information about the goods and valuables lost by the majority of the guests, and the people who now were penniless and with nothing left but the clothes they stood up in. These destitute fire victims were resolved to get the money out of Mrs. Plant: “But what hopes!” chanted Bess.

“Will they get nothing, then?” said René. But Bess knew the law regarding innkeepers’ liability in the case of fire. It seemed as if the law had been drawn up by innkeepers themselves or their personal friends. For, Bess assured them, in Canada, innkeepers were exempt from any claim for loss of damage to goods caused by fire.

When asked as to whether she had managed to save all her belongings, Bess tended to be obscure: but René concluded that all this meant was that she had lost nothing, but did not care to be so utterly without a grievance. Katie and Bess had been lodged in a small apartment adjacent to the kitchen, in the extreme rear of the hotel proper. The two maids only had to carry their belongings the length of the ground floor of the annex, and there was the street.

Asked if Mr. Martin was as elusive as Mrs. Plant, Bess did not seem to like that question. She appeared to become quite unusually cagey.

“Well,” said Hester, “I last saw Mr. Martin when
you
(nodding at René) were down below, looking for the case that was in store. As I stood outside the annex door, Mr. Martin appeared, moving effortlessly down the cataract on the stairs. His expression was at once mild and stern. Turning at the bottom, he descended into the cellar, the way you had gone!”

“When I was down there in the furnace room!” René said, astonished. “Well, he never got as far as the furnace room.”

“There are apartments down there,” Hester reminded him. “I suppose he went into one of them.”

Bess offered no suggestion, but appeared to catch sight of something out of the window. And the subject of Mr. Martin dropped.

Bess said she must get on with her search for Mrs. Plant.

They told her to come in and see them again: when they left they would leave their new address with Mrs. Waechter. Bess looked so prosperous and so Canadian in her outdoor clothes, but her personality, no clothes could transmute. She remained indelibly the small Scottish skivvy, with her morning greeting of “Another Nitwit!”

That day they went on foot to a neighbouring boulevard, where there were two or three apartment hotels. It was a long street, nearly half of which was in the French-Canadian quarter, and its hotels were spoken of as swarming with Peasoup prostitutes, or at the best very liable to be that. But after the Hotel Blundell such personalities as they encountered did not suggest a knocking shop. At the Laurenty the executive and service staff were French Canadian, and seemed quite decent people. It was settled that they should move in on the following day.