The Fire Fighter Read online

  Some Air Force men were singing around the piano. It was amazing how long they were allowed to wear their hair. The pilot officer seated at the piano had a cigarette clenched between his teeth and his hair flopped down over his forehead half-way to the keys. He wore no tie and the collar of his shirt was splayed out over his tunic lapels in the manner of someone basking in a summer deck-chair on Blackpool sands. He could play the piano all right though, Finlay thought. He looked about, but did not think he would see Rebecca Lange here tonight.

  As she had dabbed his eye and cooled his head and undressed him on her sofa after rejecting his feeble Friday evening advance, he had tried to salvage something, tried to assure her that his interest lay in more than just a swift sexual conquest, by committing her to another date. She had agreed to this, but said not until the following Thursday, when she would meet him at seven at Absalom House. As she slept and he watched, it seemed to Finlay a yearning eternity until the following Thursday. Either the delay signalled a fatal lack of ardour, or she was engaged in something that would genuinely occupy her for the better part of a week. So when he went through her bag, as she slumbered on into the small hours, he had been relieved to discover there a return train ticket to Edinburgh.

  He sipped good bitter and listened to the pilot officer at the piano play something full of choppy syncopation until his mates pressured him again into hammering chords anthemic, familiar; yet another of those tunes framed for the roar of their beery doggerel. They were drunk and Finlay envied them; not their intoxication, but what they must be feeling, as fighting men. Finlay was too intrigued by life to envy these men the risk they faced of dying. Nor did he envy them the manner of it. Fighter pilots most often perished in the bright agony of a burning cockpit. What he envied in these men was the intensity of life lived defiant and full, as death, patient and watchful, coveted them. He emptied his glass. He was ordering another when the Irishman walked into the pub.

  Finlay took him in the lavatory. He waited the half-hour until the Irishman weaved his way from the raillery at the bar towards the gents and simply followed him. He paused in the Irishman’s wake for a count of five and then swung open the door. The fellow was in full flow. He sounded like a dray horse pissing on cobbles. Smelled like it, too. All that was missing was the steam. He was whistling as he pissed. Finlay put the heel of his left hand at the base of the Irishman’s skull and straightened his arm with a snap that propelled the man’s face with a hollow thud into the iron cistern in front of him. Still holding the Irishman there, he landed two fast hooks with his right up into the man’s kidneys. Fair play, Finlay thought, he’s game, as the Irishman turned and tried to stiff-arm him with a sweeping blow. But Finlay was under it, sinking short, accurate lefts and rights into the Dubliner’s midriff. The man’s body was obdurate with muscle, but Finlay wasn’t hitting telephone directories. He took a step back and the Irishman dipped at the knees, his right hand reaching as he dropped. He was going for his kiltie blade. Finlay kicked as hard as he could and his right foot connected just under the Irishman’s descending chin. He had time to wish he was wearing boots and not brogues before his man realized he had lost this fight and hit the privy floor where he lay in a foetal ball.

  ‘There’ll be a next time, cunt,’ the Irishman said, from between the fingers curled around his face. The kick must have hurt him. His voice was slurred and foggy. ‘She’s got the clap, you know.’

  Finlay dropped down, dead-legging him in the meat of his thigh with a knee. The Irishman groaned and then sighed.

  Finlay got up and stood over him.

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘I was the one gave it to her.’

  Finlay said nothing. He gave the man a kick.

  ‘There’ll be a next time.’

  ‘Yeah. And next time I’ll stick that knife in your sock up your arse.’

  Finlay rinsed his face free of phlegm and sputum and settled in the armchair to Babcock’s gift of Scotch. It had been a full day and it was still only ten o’clock. He sat there mindful of bombs, alert to the silent telephone, more than half-expecting Babcock to knock and claim the company his whisky had bought and paid for. But Babcock didn’t knock and the time came, eventually, when Finlay knew that he would not, just as he knew that the siren would not sound, the telephone ring, the crump and shudder of bombs send him climbing on feet that would be drunken now, and uncertain, up the spiral of iron to the streets. The Germans were saving their carnage for another night. He hefted the weight, in the hand not occupied with his whisky glass, of the knuckleduster he had plucked from the Dubliner’s pocket prior to straight-arming him, as the man pissed. It was heavy and smooth, fashioned from brass and buffed to a dull, workshop sheen. It was a quite beautiful object, seductive to the touch, if you were ignorant of its function. Finlay tried to imagine Grey wearing one of these over his fist, creeping through no-man’s-land in dead of night, filthy with mud and the rank water of shell holes, boot polish smeared across his face as camouflage, leading a trench raid. But the image defeated him. He could connect an object like a knuckleduster with Grey only in some ironic context. As a paperweight on an antique desk, perhaps. He suspected dimly, drunkenly, that this prejudice worked to Grey’s advantage. The knuckleduster slipped heavily from Finlay’s fingers to the floor.

  ‘Please let Tom be alive,’ he said before descending into sleep. ‘Please, please, let Tom be alive,’ Finlay pleaded aloud. He must have been talking to himself. Jack Finlay did not believe in a God. And there was nobody in his cell with him to listen to his entreaty.

  He carried his grip from the Ministry building along Whitehall, across Trafalgar Square, to the Strand. In the gym off the Strand he punished his body on the apparatus and the mat until his muscles were defeated and any summoning of strength brought in response only dry retches from his belly.

  ‘You stink of drink, on top of everything else,’ White had said, when the rage had finally subsided.

  ‘I understand the men who fought in the ’fourteen-eighteen drank quite a bit,’ Finlay said.

  That made White blink.

  ‘Rarely drew a sober breath,’ he said. ‘Personally speaking. But you are hardly in the trenches now.’

  The pupils of White’s eyes blossomed, black, in acknowledgement of his crass mistake, but Finlay did not want to let the thing go.

  ‘I want to fight. All I want to do is fight. Evidently the job is easier this time around. I’d be more than happy to do it sober, sir.’

  ‘Go away,’ White said. ‘For God’s sake and the sake of your country, do what it is that you are best qualified to do. I cannot say that you will ever know the true value of the work in which you are engaged. Probably you will not. Such is the nature of modern war. But your work is not futile. Far from it. And you should have the humility to take comfort and even satisfaction in that.’

  Finlay turned to go.

  ‘Chief Fire Officer?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I doubt we could have accomplished what we did entirely sober. I doubt we could have got through it, frankly. I greatly regret that your father did not live to tell you something of it. If he had, then you would know.’

  ‘I regret it too, sir.’

  Finlay saluted, a genuine salute, a salutation, not a goading provocation, and he left.

  Nine

  The germans hit Mitre Street that night. Bombs were dropped on two of Finlay’s buildings, destroying them. Finlay arrived at the sites to look at craters lit by burning wood and drifts of paper debris, illuminating only vast strews of rubble. There were no bodies that Finlay could see. There were no fire crews, either, because the destruction had been sudden and complete and the fire crews were anyway engaged elsewhere. At Mitre Street, Finlay fingered flurries of floating ash away from his face and felt in his throat the familiar tightness inflicted by dust and destruction.

  A half-hour after Mitre Street, a second wave of bombers hit a third of his buildings. This time, it was incendiarie
s rather than high explosives, and it gave him a fight to engage in. By now, auxiliaries had arrived and there were pumps to play pressured water over the flames. The auxiliaries were willing. But there was no seat to the fire for them to attack. And the water pressure from their hoses was not sufficient to deprive the jelloid, sporadic, scattering fires of oxygen. They hit the fires with their hose jets and the effect was only to spread them further; to have them spit and scatter, antagonized, through the parched and brittle innards of the building, now exposed, by blast, to burn. Through guttering windows, Finlay saw flames embrace panelled walls and devour smashed furniture and the lathe of torn ceilings and then the oak joists protruding from every floor like so many shattered, combustible bones. There was not much smoke. But as the blaze gathered impetus the heat grew searing, light-bending, blasting water from hoses to steam in mid-trajectory. Men surrounded the building, their tunics drenched and filthy with ash, drying in the blast of heat and then threatening to smoulder and burn when their wearers tried to edge towards the blaze. There were men, too, fighting the fire from the floors of adjacent buildings. It was safer to attack from there, out of the reach of falling debris and protected from the incendiary rounds fired in stippling, ricocheting bursts from the machine-guns of the Messerschmitt fighters that had flown as escort for the raiding bombers. The fire fighters on top of their turntable ladders were totally exposed. Finlay had two crews in the sky and hoses from buildings across the street trained on them to prevent the men atop the ladders from bursting into flames. Above the roar of reaching flame there were odd, sporadic pops of noise, like rifle shots, as volatile objects exploded in the heat and sent shrapnel fragments of white-hot debris zinging into the night. There was a loud report and a commotion among three men manning a hose a few feet to Finlay’s right. They lurched for balance as one of them gurgled and fell and Finlay grabbed the ungoverned hose nozzle just as they lost all control of the jet. Order and aim reestablished, he looked at the man on the ground, who was dead. Something was buried in his neck, half-severing his head. It was red, not with blood, but with paint. It looked like part of the cylindrical cone of a fire extinguisher. Finlay recognized it as one of two with which he had recommended they equip each floor. He felt his hands blistering on the hose nozzle and signalled to the men holding the hose with him to retreat. They shuffled back carefully over the corpse of their colleague. Shrapnel impact had removed the man’s helmet and his hair was starting to smoulder. Finlay roared for a stretcher, eyes fixed on the still-strengthening blaze embracing the building in front of him, but no stretcher came. Long shots would not defeat the blaze, Finlay knew. But the heat was too intense for crews to get close enough really to attack the fire. Other buildings, all around them, were burning. There was a danger that the collapse of buildings would crush hoses, even branch hoses, under rubble. It was the worst fear of the men; to lose their weapon of water, surrounded, engulfed, by burning buildings; to be trapped, defenceless, by fire.

  ‘Foam?’ Finlay screamed at a leading fire fighter, who stumbled towards him out of careening heat.

  ‘Foam?’

  The man gasped and removed his helmet with fingers padded with blisters. He threw the helmet on the ground. If I spit on that thing, it will hiss, Finlay thought. But I will not hear the hiss for the roar of the fire we’re fighting. Reluctantly, he beckoned men away from his building. For whatever reason, there was no foam. The cause was lost, the risk urgent. He could sense mortar diminishing in heat between blasted bricks. The whole edifice was about to come down. Its collapsing floors would push buckling walls out towards his crews and they would be buried under tons of descending stone. There was no point in losing brave men to a lost cause. But brave they were, or merely inexperienced, and they retreated with a creeping, tenacious reluctance. Then the building perished with a deafening crump and Finlay saw two crews simply vanish into the melding, red-white brilliance of raining masonry. Finlay steadied the men on his own hose and then skirted the periphery of the blaze, directing each retreating crew within range to aim their hoses at the places where the missing men had been. With the collapse of the building, the impetus of the blaze was diminishing and with it, the heat. Fire crews, first sensing and then feeling this, got closer in a tightening circle about the high, huge cone of volatile ruin where the building had been. But the missing crews were gone, swallowed by hissing bricks and girders still white with heat and black, skeletal beams.

  ‘Lost,’ Finlay said.

  ‘Three down,’ said a voice to his left. ‘Two to go.’

  Finlay turned. It was Grey.

  ‘There’s a basement,’ Grey said. ‘I mean, there was. Do you think there is still?’

  ‘My mind’s on six dead men. Incinerated. Crushed.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Grey said. ‘We should try not to let their deaths be in vain.’

  The aeroplanes had gone. The raid was over. At least here, the fires were under control. Men were damping down now. But branches of hoses and perhaps some of the pumps as well had been crushed under the debris of other buildings and the jets of water were fitful and weak. Some of the mains had been hit and so not all of the pumps were being replenished. They were a long way from the inexhaustible water source of the river. Surrounding buildings still burned, taking the attention of the men, making them anxious and fearful of being trapped. Those that had not seen the deaths had by now heard about the casualties.

  ‘Pull them out,’ Grey said.

  ‘My men stay until the fires are extinguished. It’s our fucking job and we’ll fucking well do it.’

  Grey put a hand on Finlay’s shoulder. The epaulette had been torn from his tunic there. Steam was rising from the sodden cloth. Grey squeezed and then patted. His voice was gentle. ‘At best they will flood the basement. At worst, they will be trapped by the fires burning around us and needlessly die. Pull them out, Chief Fire Officer. Please.’

  Finlay skirted the building for a second time, seeking out and giving each lead fire fighter the instruction to withdraw. The order spread, as welcome as pestilence through the chain of command. Dirty, dishevelled, dull with fatigue, the men receded in reluctant clusters from the scene, gathering hoses, dismantling ladders, regrouping around their big Dennis appliances, seeking tea. The men, regular and auxiliary, were well drilled and unshirking in their dedication. It was all they could do to obey an order they considered so fundamentally at odds with their duty. There was fight and determination in these men. They were a bedraggled, weary lot. They were also a very long way from defeated.

  ‘Now what?’

  Grey nodded at the rough pyramid of ruin in front of them. The pile glowed and smouldered and spat. Small avalanches tumbled here and there down the general mass as it cooled, reluctant, volatile. Finlay tried to remove from his mind the sight of men perishing under a deluge of scalding stone. He estimated that their unrecovered bodies lay under ten or twelve feet of debris. They lay under coping stones, sections of concrete floor and reinforcing girders as wide as his waist. It was the girders, steel, contracting now as they cooled, that made their pyre so dangerous a ruin. But the dead men were covered by several tons of it. At least they had not been burned alive.

  Finlay looked Grey in the face for the first time. ‘The basement is intact. That’s why we’re looking at a hill and not a field of debris. That much you know, however clueless you find it convenient to seem. The ground floor of this building, or the ceiling of its basement, because they’re one and the same, is composed of twenty-seven inches of high-grade concrete strengthened by steel reinforcing rods with a one-and-a-half-inch diameter. Heat rises. But there will have been sufficient radiant heat to reach the rods.’

  ‘And what? Melt them?’

  ‘Nothing like. Just enough to put a bit of flexibility in the floor.’ He nodded at the unquiet pyramid. ‘That lot will have put a bit of curve on the basement ceiling. A bit of concave.’

  ‘Will it hold?’

  ‘I’m a fire fighter, Captain Gre
y. Ask a structural engineer.’

  ‘Will it hold?’

  Finlay looked and considered. ‘Probably. Depends on how many cracks there are in the concrete and the weight above those cracks. And then there’s the fact to consider that when those reinforcing rods cool, the metal will have turned to something more in the nature of iron than steel. And iron, Captain Grey, shares one of your own characteristics.’