The Count of Eleven Read Online Free PDF Page B

they were filling with smoke. He might have asked to use the woman’s phone if she had one, but at least he was in a better position to keep the old man out of the shop. The phone at the other end rang twice, then twice, then twice again, and then an operator said “Fire ‘
    “Yes,” Jack said, and felt a sneeze growing imminent as a bomb at the end of a lit fuse. “Fire.”
    The operator had been saying police or ambulance?” and Jack wasn’t sure if she had understood him. “Fire,” he repeated, trying not to breathe for fear of sneezing.
    “Connecting you now,” she said in a tone which sounded to him exactly like a nurse reassuring a patient who hadn’t been told the worst. The lowest remaining shelf had started to warp above the heart of the fire, while several cases on the next shelf up were popping and sputtering. He felt as if both his sneeze and the shop were about to explode. Then a man’s voice said “What is the address of the fire?”
    “Where it lives, you mean?” Jack heard himself say, but said “Here. My shop. Fine Films in Rowson Street.”
    “What is the name of the nearest main road?”
    “I’ve just told you, Rowson Street,” Jack said, and sneezed enormously. The sneeze seemed to let more of the harsh stink of plastic into his head. “Udless you bean Vigdoria Road,” he spluttered. “Id’s off Vigdoria Road.”
    “What district?”
    The questions were a ritual, Jack told himself, designed to obtain all the necessary information in the shortest possible time. “Dew Bridod,” he pronounced as distinctly as he could.
    “What is on fire?”
    “Videos. Fide Filbs,” Jack said, and tried to clarify. “By shob.”
    “Thank you. We’re on our way,” the fireman assured him, and left him with a click.
    Smoke as well as flame was pouring up from the shelves to mass beneath the ceiling. Was it poisonous? Surely Jack’s unsteadiness was only an after-effect of his having been thumped on the head, and he would still be able to rescue at least some of the videocassettes except that he could see the old man and the woman from across the road talking animatedly outside the shop, and he was afraid she mightn’t be capable of dissuading the old man from attempting another incursion. He dialled again and spat towards the fire to clear his diction. “Julia. You’re home, thank God. Can you come over quick as you can? Emergency.”
    “I’m on my way,” she said, and he slammed the receiver into place and lunged behind the counter to take hold of an armful of cassettes.
    He’d become expert at this manoeuvre during his years of working at the public library. He would pick up several dozen books by pressing his hands against the covers at either end and lifting a rank of books nearly as wide as his arms could stretch, turn them from horizontal to vertical and support them with one hand while his chin rested on the top volume; that way he could use his free hand to file the books as he went from shelf to shelf. Now he stretched his arms wide and gripping the cassettes at either end of the shelf of comedies with his fingers, lifted the contents of the shelf towards him, turned them vertical, piled them against his chest, swung towards the door.
    He was carrying more than forty cassettes. He could do it if he had to, he’d only to remember not to press too hard with his chin and with the hand beneath the stack in case that caused the middle of the stack to bulge. He would have used his free hand to hold it against his chest, except that the shop door appeared to be creeping shut as a wind from the bay fanned the fire. Then flames raced upwards behind the topmost shelf and spilled over the ceiling above Jack’s head, and he was sure they were about to fall on him. He flung himself at the door, his free hand reaching to grab it before it could close, and six or more cassettes sprang sideways out of the pile he was carrying and smashed into the wall.
    The rest of the stack began to topple