Smoke in the Vault Corridor

I did not see what he took out of the cart. I saw the policewoman's face.

The tall one, with the braid, had been standing at my left shoulder for ten minutes with her hands folded, a gentle blank shape, like a bridesmaid. I had stopped seeing her. I was looking through the bars of the final gate at a custodian in gray, a gaunt man with a mop bucket, and thinking, absurdly, of my mother's kitchen floor. Then something crossed her face. It was a single flicker, no more than the passage of a bird's shadow across a window. Her mouth tightened. Her braid swung. And before I understood what she was reacting to, her hand had closed on the back of my collar and I was being thrown through the air.

I hit the wall. It was cold steel, and it rang. My shoulder went numb. I felt a knee in the small of my back and a flat palm pressed between my shoulder blades, hard, forcing me down, and the whole bright corridor spun and tilted and was a pale smear of floor, and I heard her voice above me, perfectly calm, at the exact pitch of a flight attendant describing an emergency exit.

"Down. Stay down. Stay down."

"What is—"

"Down, Ms. Ostrander."

Something struck the floor behind me.

It was a small hard sound, a tock, like a pebble dropped in a bucket, and then a second sound that I did not recognize, a rolling, rattling, hollow scrape, like a tin can pushed along a tile. I turned my face. I could just see it, past the heel of her shoe: a squat black cylinder, no bigger than a thermos, rolling down the steel corridor toward me with a slow wobble.

It rolled a yard. It rolled two.

The overhead lights flickered.

I saw them stutter, a fast white pulse like a heartbeat, once, twice, and on the third pulse the entire corridor went dark and then came back, changed. The air had thickened. A smell reached me, a dry acrid chemical smell, like a hot iron laid on a wet cloth. The cylinder stopped. Its end split with a small flat crack, and out of it came black.

It was not smoke, at first. It was like ink poured into water, a roiling filthy cloud that unfurled upward and outward in a silent slow-motion bloom. It touched the ceiling, and rolled along it, and came down the walls. In three seconds the end of the corridor had vanished. In five, the lamp above my head was a dull smear. And then, a heartbeat after the black, from somewhere farther back, came a second thing, a roar, a hiss like a punctured tire, and a white blast of vapor poured over the black and swallowed it, so thick and bright that it seemed to have weight, a wall of cold roaring cloud.

I could not see my hand. I could not see the floor.

I could not breathe.

…

The first breath was fire.

It went in like a handful of ground glass. My throat locked. My eyes streamed, tears pouring down my face in hot rivers, and I curled on the floor and coughed and coughed and could not stop, great retching barks that bent me double and seemed to turn my lungs inside out. It tasted of metal and burnt sugar. It stuck in my sinuses. I heard, somewhere beside me, the policewoman cursing, low and vicious, a string of syllables I had never heard a woman use, and a clatter, and the scrape of her gun coming out of its holster.

"Ostrander!" she shouted. "Stay on the floor! Cover your face!"

I could not answer. I pressed my sleeve to my mouth. I had the plastic evidence bag in my other hand, I discovered, clamped against my ribs so hard that the corner dug into my skin. Somewhere in the last thirty seconds I had taken it from the technician or he had pushed it into my arms; I could not remember. It was a clear bag with a stiff seal, and inside it was the envelope and the photograph. I held it. It was the only solid thing in the world.

Find the wall, I told myself. Find the wall. Find the door.

I was a copyeditor. I was a woman who had once stood in a classroom with a clipboard and a laser pointer. I had never in my life been shot at or gassed or pursued, and all of that fell away like a coat, and what was underneath was something I had not known I owned: a low hard animal patience, a refusal to die in a hallway.

I crawled.

I went on my hands and knees along the steel wall, with my left shoulder against the cold metal and my right hand clutching the bag to my chest. The floor was slick. I felt my palm slide through something wet. I went a yard, two. Through the blinding white roaring fog I could hear shouts, a man's, a woman's, a confused distant clamor of voices calling names, and under them a siren. A real one, an alarm, a deep pulsing electronic bray from the lobby side that hammered my skull. I thought: the gates. The gates have locked. Somewhere behind me I heard a deep slow clang, and another. They were closing, one after another, like the doors of a ship.

Where's the exit?

I had walked it. I had counted. Three gates in, a hundred and ten paces, a narrow passage, a door to the lobby. I turned my head and tried to read the dark. All I saw was white.

Then a hand closed around my wrist.

…

It was so cold.

That is the thing I remember first, before the strength, before the terror. It was cold the way a metal rail is cold in January, a dry bone-deep chill that went through the sleeve of my blazer and into the skin beneath. The fingers were thin. They circled my wrist with room to spare, like the wires of a trap. And then they tightened.

I screamed. I heard it from a long way off, a thin high shriek, swallowed at once by the roar of the smoke. I tried to pull away. It was like pulling against a steel cable. The grip did not slacken or shake. It simply turned, unhurried, and began to drag me, and I felt my knees skid on the floor and my weight go forward and the bag in my arms tug and tear.

"Give it," said a voice.

It was low and close, hoarse as a rasp on wood. It was right beside my ear. A breath came with it, hot and wet and carrying a smell I would have known in my grave, sweet and sour, rotted, oranges gone to liquor in a warm pocket.

"Give it to me, ma'am. Easy now. Nobody wants a fuss."

"No."

"It isn't yours."

"No!"

"It was never yours." The cough came, then, a rattling wet bark so close that I felt the spray on my cheek. The hand wrenched. Pain exploded up my arm, white-hot. I felt the bones grind. "Let go, little copy girl, and I'll leave you your fingers."

I don't know what I thought. I know I did not think. I know that in the middle of that cloud, with my eyes streaming and my lungs on fire and a skeleton's fist round my wrist, I remembered a gymnasium in the basement of Brightpath. A Saturday self-defense workshop, four years ago, two hours, led by a brisk blonde in a tracksuit who had said, You will freeze. Everybody freezes. So practice the one thing, over and over, until your body does it without you. She'd had us lie on mats in pairs. She had shown us a single motion, the simplest in the world.

I drew my knee up as far as it would go.

I drove it forward and up with everything I had, a hard, short, ugly blow, from the hip, into the dark where a body ought to be.

It landed.

There was a sound like a dropped sack. A grunt. A wheeze of air. And then a thin high rattling groan, not a shout, not a curse, a sound of pure astonished pain, and the hand around my wrist went slack for the length of a heartbeat.

I tore free.

I fell backward on the floor, scrabbling, kicking, with the bag crushed to my chest and a scream coming out of my mouth that I couldn't stop. And then there were arms around me. Strong ones, in a coat, with the smell of gun oil and hair spray, and the tall policewoman was dragging me backward through the white, her braid across my face, hissing in my ear: "I've got you. I've got you. I've got you, Ms. Ostrander, I've got you."

…

I saw him go.

I want to say that I saw it clearly. I did not. I saw a shape in the fog, a long thin gray shape, bent double and clutching at itself, like a tall bird that has swallowed a stone. It staggered. It coughed, great gasping barking coughs that I could hear above the siren. It swung one arm out and caught the wall.

The policewoman fired.

It was very loud, louder than anything I have ever heard, a flat deafening crack that rang in the steel and shook my teeth, and a dark spark flew from the wall a foot above the man's head. He didn't flinch. He pushed himself off the steel with the heel of his hand, and turned, and I saw a face in the white, a glimpse, a mask of gray skin and sunken sockets, and he ran.

He did not run toward the lobby. That was what I understood, afterward, that had surprised me. The lobby was the only way out, the only door I knew. He ran the other way, toward the blank steel wall at the end of the corridor, where no door was marked and no handle showed. I saw his shape against the white. I saw his arm flash out, and heard a small click, the sound of a latch, and a rectangle of gray daylight opened where there had been only metal.

A staff door. A panel flush with the wall, painted over, with no sign, hidden behind the last row of boxes. The door that every bank has, for the janitors and the repairmen, that is locked a hundred and sixty-five days a year and whose key hangs on a nail in one man's office. He had pushed it with his shoulder. It had opened as if it had been waiting.

He knew the building.

He went through it. The door swung. A gust of cold air poured through the corridor and tore the white cloud into streamers, and for the length of a breath I saw him clearly in the gap, silhouetted against the light: a tall stooped figure in gray, one hand at his belly, his empty glove dangling, stumbling into the passage beyond.

Then the door shut, and the smoke closed over the place where he had been.

…

I don't remember being carried out.

I remember pieces. A hand under each arm. The roaring in my ears. Bright cold light, and a cold wet wind, and the blessed scouring air of the street across my face. I remember falling to my knees on the pavement and being sick between my hands, and the policewoman, the short one, holding my hair. I remember that someone put a mask over my face, and the sweet flat taste of oxygen. I remember a fire truck. Strobe lights. Someone saying, No, ma'am, you're not hit, you're not hit, you're only gassed. I remember a voice saying, over and over, that was a smoke grenade, that was a commercial smoke grenade, nobody died.

I remember Mr. Adeyemi, standing by a lamppost with his gray suit torn from shoulder to cuff, one hand pressed to his bleeding forehead, saying to no one, in a wondering voice, "He asked if he could get past me. He said excuse me."

And I remember holding the bag.

I had never let go. My knuckles were white around the corner of it, and the plastic had cut a line into my palm. It was still sealed. The envelope was still inside, soft and yellow and nubbly, with my mother's blue handwriting facing up. Maren — open it yourself. The photograph lay under it, curled at the edge.

"Let go, Maren," said a voice. "I've got it. It's all right. I'm taking it now."

It was Dunleavy. His coat was spattered with soot. He had come across the street at a run, and his face was gray, and he was breathing hard, with his hand out. I looked at his fingers. I looked at the bag in my fist, and then I looked past him, past the fire truck and the knot of police and the boiling cloud still pouring from the bank's side door, to the gray van parked in the shadow of the dry cleaner.

The rear door was open.

My daughter was standing in it.

She had climbed down. She stood on the step of the van, small and straight in the cold, with her coat open and her hair blowing, and one hand lifted and pressed flat against the glass of the open door, the way a person stands at an aquarium. Her face was white. It was the white of paper, of milk, of a plate. Her eyes were fixed, not on me, but over my shoulder, on the smoking mouth of the alley. And as I watched, her lips parted.

"Not him," said June.