A wheezing groan of timber and steel, then a crash, like a sledgehammer on metal, as something structural gave way. Pellam jumped back to the edge of the fire escape, nearly tumbling over the railing and, as the cascade of orange sparks flowed over him, staggered downstairs.

He was in as much of a hurry as the escaping tenants – though the mission on his mind now wasn’t to flee the ravaging fire but, thinking of Ettie’s daughter, to find the woman’s body and carry it away from the building before the walls collapsed, entombing it in a fiery, disfiguring grave.

He opened his eyes and found the guard looking down at him.

“Sir, you a patient here?”

He sat up too fast and found that while the efforts of escaping the fire had left him sore and bruised, sleeping these past five hours in the orange fiberglass chairs of the ER’s waiting room was what had really done him in. The crook in his neck was pure pain.

“I fell asleep.”

“You can’t sleep here.”

“I was a patient. They treated me last night. I fell asleep.”

“Yessir. You been treated, you can’t stay.”

His jeans were pocked with burn holes and he supposed he was filthy. The guard must’ve mistaken him for a bum.

“Okay,” he said. “Just give me a minute.”

Pellam moved his head in slow circles. Something deep in his neck popped. An ache like brain freeze from a frozen drink spread through his head. He winced, then looked around. He could understand why the hospital guard had rousted him. The room was completely filled with people awaiting treatment. Words rose and fell like surf, Spanish, English, Arabic. Everyone was frightened or resigned or irritated and to Pellam’s mind the resigned ones were the most unsettling. The man next to him sat forward, forearms resting on his knees. In his right hand dangled a single child’s shoe.

The guard had delivered his message and then lost interest in enforcing his edict. He wandered off toward two teenagers who were smoking a joint in the corner.

Pellam rose, stretched. He dug through his pockets and found the slip of paper he’d been given last night. He squinted and read what was written on it.

Pellam picked up the heavy video camera and started down a long corridor, following the signs toward the B wing.

The thin green line hardly moved at all.

A portly Indian doctor stood beside the bed, staring up, as if trying to decide if the Hewlett-Packard monitor was broken. He glanced down at the figure in the bed, covered with sheets and blankets, and hung the metal chart on a hook.

John Pellam stood in the doorway. His bleary eyes slid from the grim dawn landscape outside Manhattan Hospital back to the unmoving form of Ettie Washington.

“She’s in a coma?” he asked.

“No,” the doctor responded. “She’s asleep. Sedated.”

“Will she be all right?”

“She’s got a broken arm, sprained ankle. No internal injuries we could find. We’re going to run some scans. Brain scans. She hit on her head when she fell. You know, only family members can be in ICU.”

“Oh,” an exhausted Pellam responded. “I’m her son.”

The doctor’s eyes remained still for a moment. Then flicked toward Ettie Washington, whose skin was as dark as a mahogany banister.

“You… son?” The blank eyes stared up at him.

You’d think a doctor working on the rough-and-tumble West Side of Manhattan would’ve had a better sense of humor. “Tell you what,” Pellam said. “Let me sit with her for a few minutes. I won’t steal any bedpans. You can count ’ em before I leave.”

Still no smile. But the man said, “Five minutes.”

Pellam sat down heavily and rested his chin in his hands, sending jolts of pain through his neck. He sat up and held it cocked to the side.

Two hours later a nurse pushed briskly into the room and woke him up. When she glanced at Pellam it was more to survey his bandages and torn jeans than to question his presence.

“Who’all’s the patient here?” she asked in a throaty Dallas drawl. “An’ who’s visitin’?”

Pellam massaged his neck then nodded at the bed. “We take turns. How is she?”

“Oh, she’s one tough lady.”

“How come she isn’t awake?”

“Doped her up good.”

“The doctor was talking about some scans?”

“They always do that. Keep their butts covered. I think she’ll be okay. I was talking to her before.”

“You were? What’d she say?”

“I think it was, ‘Somebody burned down my apartment. What kinda blankety-blank’d do that?’ Only she didn’t say blankety-blank.”

“That’s Ettie.”

“Same fire?” the nurse asked, glancing at his burnt jeans and shirt.

Pellam nodded. He explained about Ettie’s jumping out the window. It wasn’t cobblestones she landed on, however, but two days’ worth of packed garbage bags, which broke her fall. Pellam had carried her to the EMS crews and then returned to the building to help get other tenants out. Finally, the smoke had gotten to him too and he’d passed out. He’d awakened in the same hospital.

“You know,” the nurse said, “you’re all… um, sooty. You look like one of those commandoes in a Schwarzenegger movie.”

Pellam wiped at his face and examined five dirty fingertips.

“Here.” The nurse disappeared into the hall and returned a moment later with a wet cloth. She paused – debating, he guessed, whether or not to clean him herself – and chose to hand off to the patient. Pellam took the cloth and wiped away until the washcloth was black.

“You, uh, want some coffee?” she asked.

Pellam’s stomach churned. He guessed he’d swallowed a pound of ash. “No, thanks. How’s my face?”

“Now you just look dirty. That is to say, it’s an improvement. Got pans to change. Bah now.” She vanished.

Pellam stretched his long legs out in front of him and examined the holes in his Levi’s. A total waste. He then spent a few minutes examining the Betacam, which some kind soul had given to the paramedics and had been admitted with him to the emergency room. He gave it his standard diagnostic check – he shook it. Nothing rattled. The Ampex recording deck was dented but it rolled fine and the tape inside – the one that contained what was apparently the last interview that would ever be conducted in 458 West Thirty-sixth Street – was unhurt.

“Now, John, what’re we gonna talk about today? You want to hear more about Billy Doyle? My first husband. That old son of a bitch. See, that man was what Hell’s Kitchen was all about. He was big here, but little everywhere else. He was nothing anywhere else. It was like this place, it’s its own world. Hmm, I got a good story to tell you ’bout him. I think you might like this story…”

He couldn’t remember much else of what Ettie had told him at their last interview couple of days ago. He’d set the camera up in her small apartment, filled with the mementos of a seven-decade life, hundred pictures, baskets, knickknacks, furniture bought at Goodwill, food protected from roaches in Tupperware she could barely afford. He’d set the camera up, turned it on and just let her talk.

“See, people live in Hell’s Kitchen get these ideas. They get schemes, you know. Billy, he wanted land. He had his eye on a couple of lots over near where the Javits Center is today. I tell you, he’da brought that off he’da been one rich mick. I can say ‘mick’ ’cause he said that ’bout himself.”

Then, motion from the bed interrupted these thoughts.

The elderly woman, eyes still closed, picked at the hem of the blanket, two dark thumbs, two fingers lifting invisible pearls.

This concerned Pellam. He remembered, month ago, the last living gestures of Otis Balm as the 102-year-old man had glanced toward the lilac bush outside the window of his West Side nursing home and began picking at his sheet. The old man had been a resident of Ettie’s building for years and, though hospitalized, had been pleased to talk about his life in the Kitchen. Suddenly the man had fallen silent and started picking at his blanket – as Ettie was doing now. Then he stopped moving. Pellam called for help. The doctor confirmed the death. They always did that, he explained. At the end they pick at the bedclothes.