IT WAS RAINING HARD when Maurice Babbit left his Inwood apartment at the northern end of Manhattan Island for the long subway ride to Queens. The kind of cold spring rain that had fat weathermen giggling about April showers and May flowers. If there was anything in this world that annoyed Maurice Babbit, it was April showers. Not that he gave a shit about May flowers, either, but water was a more potent enemy than beauty. Water put out fire. Or most fires. Nothing could put out his favorite fire. Nothing could put out napalm. It stuck to people like the slimy goo kids play with. Like wet burning plastic snot. In Nam, they’d assigned him to the “native ward” at the big hospital near Bien Hoa where he’d learned about napalm from tending injuries to the fried friendlies.
That was his own name: fried friendlies. If he’d had army buddies, they’d’ve loved that one. He didn’t. Didn’t have any buddies or anybody to talk about the fires with. Not until he got sent to jail. Not until he got himself put in a place where he couldn’t walk away. Poor Maurice. Life in Middleburg hadn’t prepared him for the army and the army hadn’t prepared him for the Clinton Correctional Facility.
The main thing about the army was they wouldn’t let him fight. He still didn’t understand it. They sent divisions of shit-scared babies into battle, while he carried slop in a hospital. If they had the slightest sense of what they were doing, they would have put a flamethrower on his back, a handful of incendiary grenades in his pocket and shipped him off to a platoon of tunnel rats. Shit, he would’ve paid them.
But they didn’t. (Was there anything behind their decisions? Any reasoning? Were they really as arbitrary as lightning bolts?) And it wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. Not unless he’d been killed. Maurice could have torched a million hooches and he’d still be hungry for a good blaze. He set plenty while he was in Nam; set them in the slums of Saigon where the houses were made of wood and cardboard so dry it burned like paper.
Afterward, after watching until the embers were black coal, he retained the images like individual photographs. Like stopping a movie to study the details of a particular frame. A woman running. A man slapping at his burning trousers (that one comical). Children crying or moaning or silent in the street. Maurice would take these pictures to the nearest whorehouse (never far away in wartime Saigon) and pass the night. Funny, he could remember every detail of every fire, but the whores, when he bothered to think about them, were a fuzzy parade of chirping dinks.
“You want fucky me now? You want me sucky you?”
Nowadays he carried his own napalm in one of those plastic lemons they sold in supermarkets. Carried it whenever he went out onto the dangerous streets of New York City. His own personal mixture of gasoline and soap. He had it with him now, in his pocket, and he caressed it as the subway tore south. If he popped the cap and sprayed his napalm on the old nigger sitting across the car, it would stick like glue. If she rubbed it, it’d spread all over her. If he lit it up, it would burn down into her flesh.
If Maurice could have had it his way, he’d’ve burned them all. It was bad enough to live in the slums of Inwood (he couldn’t go back to Middleburg; not after the fire that put him in Clinton) where every other Puerto Rican had a pocketful of dope. That the niggers coming onto the 1 Train as it passed through Harlem should make him feel like a faggot begging for mercy seemed like one of the injustices God reserved for assholes like Job. When they weren’t actually robbing people, they smoked weed and blasted that mindless music until it made his brain rattle. Then they stuck their feet up on the only empty seats and dared him to do something about it. Grinning that fuck-you badass grin.
Maurice didn’t like to be put down. He didn’t like that at all. When they fucked with him in the joint (and they did; they fucked with everybody), he’d burned one right in his cell. Charcoaled the black mother-fucker even blacker than he was born, with napalm he’d made out of turpentine from the woodworking shop. The turpentine had cost him five cartons of Salems and come by way of a hustler who didn’t give a shit if Maurice burned up his granny.
Maurice had gotten away with the fire, even though all the cons (including the snitches) knew he’d done it. Maybe the pigs didn’t have proof or maybe they didn’t give a shit. You couldn’t always tell with them. But the fire got the attention of Paul Ziff, an aging professional arsonist. In return for cigarettes and an occasional pint of jailhouse hooch, Paul had taught Maurice the art of fire. And the relationship of art to economics.
The train rumbled into the 145th Street Station and Maurice automatically scanned the incoming passengers. It was ten o’clock at night, prime time for the wolves to be heading downtown in search of prey. But except for a homeless bitch who’d make the whole car stink of piss, the other passengers were ordinary workers, and Maurice, his knapsack cradled against his chest, began to daydream about the day he’d flicked his BIC.
The job, he recalled, had been special from the beginning. He made fires that cleared buildings and fires that scared people; he made fires to destroy inventories and fires to destroy competitors. All that was old stuff and he could make his fires so that the insurance companies would have to pay. In spite of the suspicions of the fire marshals who thought every fire was arson.
But this time Maurices employer didn’t give a damn about the fire marshals and what they suspected. No insurance company was about to write a policy on a piece-of-shit tenement in one of the ravines near Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx. Not on the only one still standing on the whole block. Maurice’s employer (though nobody told Maurice) owned the block. He wanted the building gone.
Maurice was the subcontractor for the job. He never met the man who ordered it. But he was proud that the broker had chosen him. Of course, any building could be leveled if you brought enough gasoline or explosive to the task. But that would take hundreds of pounds of dynamite or thousands of dollars’ worth of C4. Fortunately, there were three families living in the building (as well as the usual assortment of squatters in the apartments that had already been emptied by smaller fires) and natural gas was still coming into the tenement. That would make the job easy and the reward Maurice got from watching the blossoming of his work especially great.
He was hoping for an explosion, but he knew he wouldn’t get that as soon as he walked down into the basement. The small windows were all broken and the gas would never build up enough pressure for an explosion. Too bad. But it wouldn’t interfere with the job. He went directly to the gas meter and shut off the gas between the meter and the street with a notched tool that had cost him a thousand dollars. Then he cut a two-foot length out of the pipe that led from the meter to the various apartments. When he turned the gas back on, it would pour from the pipe at full pressure and it would keep on pouring at several hundred cubic feet per minute until the gas company shut it off from the street.
The final steps were easy. The broker had made good on his promise that all dopers would be out of the basement. The junkies were the only ones who could fuck up the deal, because, sure as shit, there weren’t any straight people coming down to look for the fuse box. Not at night. Not in dope heaven. Maurice piled newspapers under the missing section of pipe. Soaked them with gasoline. Set a battery-operated alarm clock, its wires deliberately shorted, one hour ahead. It was crude, but it wouldn’t take more than a spark to get this one going. In fact, it was only a guess whether the alarm would go off before the gas reached a spark in one of the apartments above.
When he turned the gas back on, the stink of it was overwhelming. He tried to think of the smell as the flowering of his efforts. Not that he was stupid enough to hang around. He left immediately, then climbed the hill overlooking the single tenement (standing like the last tooth in an old lady’s mouth) and settled down to wait.
When it went off, it was just like firing up the stove a few seconds after the gas’d been turned on. That same sound. WHOMP! And then the flames instantly there, covering the first three floors and screaming upward.
Only a few people got to the roof and there was no place for them to go once they got there. No other roofs to run across and the fire was too hot to get a ladder anywhere near it. In fact, there was nothing the firemen could do except turn off the gas and it took them almost forty minutes to do it. By that time there wasn’t any more building and the little figures had already jumped. Maurice called it, “the job where I flicked my BIC.”
Despite his reveries, Maurice had made the transfer to the 7 Train and was cruising along the elevated tracks in western Queens. He wished that this fire, tonight, was meant to be as big as that one had been. But the broker didn’t want any damage. He wanted smoke and a fire that wouldn’t come back on the landlord. A scary fire for some shithead tenants. A lesson fire.
Maurice got off the train at 74th Street in Jackson Heights. It was eleven o’clock and the streets were pretty much empty, as they would be in a working-class neighborhood during the week. Usually, he got the creeps when he was out late at night. What with the neighborhoods where he mostly worked, it was a miracle if he even got to the project without some doped-out spook trying for his wallet.
But he wouldn’t have any problems here. The rain had everybody running for home. Maurice turned down a ramp leading to the basement door of the Jackson Arms, a six-story apartment building on 37th Avenue. The door was open, the lock already busted out. He peered into the dimly lit interior, listening carefully. As expected, it was quiet. He could feel the quiet closing in on him. Maurice was a professional and he didn’t let himself think about fires while he worked. Each job was a series of problems. Like a crossword puzzle. It was the first thing Paul Ziff had told him about setting fires for money. You had to separate the pleasure from the work.
This building, for instance, had been built after LaGuardia had become mayor and it had a fire retardant ceiling in the basement. Ordinarily, it would take an hour for the hottest fire he could set (but not as hot as “flicking my BIC” not that hot) to burn through. So the first problem was how to get the smoke up into the first floor apartment where the employer wanted it. Fortunately, the landlord had redone the heat and hot water pipes sometime in the fifty years since the Jackson Arms had been built and his contractor had been sloppy, as they all were. Maurice could see light filtering down from the apartment above. The pipes would be a tunnel for smoke. They’d be the only way for the smoke to get out of the basement.
None of this was a surprise, of course. Maurice had come a week before to check it out. If the pipes hadn’t been cut through, he wouldn’t have taken the job. But there were several bonuses that he hadn’t expected. There was a bed made of two old newspaper-stuffed mattresses on the floor directly beneath the target. Most likely, the janitor used it for afternoon naps and some squatter had taken it over. There was a pile of human feces behind the burners and a faint smell of urine in the dank basement air.
Mattress fires, Maurice knew, make incredible amounts of smoke, but very little fire. Which was exactly what the employer wanted. Just a smoky fire to wake up the tenant in the apartment above. A message fire.
Maurice opened his pack and placed four small candles on the floor, lighting them and making sure they were stuck firmly to the concrete. Then he dropped the cover: a dozen crack vials (empty, of course) and as many tiny envelopes around the mattress; a pile of burnt matches; three bent teaspoons, their bottoms blackened with soot; a dozen bottlecaps; a peanut butter jar of filthy water tinted pink with his own blood. As an afterthought, he placed two syringes (well-used spikes he’d gotten from one of the shooting galleries that infested Inwood), on the mattress as a little joke. Most of the plastic would burn away, but the needles would sit in the charred mattress. Waiting for a fire marshal’s investigating fingers.
Finally, he set a candle directly on the mattress and lit it, then repacked his bag. He checked every inch of the area he’d been through, walked it back and forth to the outside door, making certain he hadn’t dropped anything. Not a lost button or a busted shoelace or anything. When the candle flame reached the edge of the first newspaper, he was ready to leave, but he waited a few moments, until the black smoke rose in thick clouds toward the ceiling. Just to make sure.
He did have one regret as he walked to the subway. In a quiet neighborhood like Jackson Heights, he couldn’t hang around to wait for the firemen to show up. He consoled himself by remembering that there wouldn’t be much to see, anyway. No “fried friendlies.” No “flick my BIC.” Just a lot of smoke.