his rumored ability to crawl through keyholes, carried seltzer bottles filled with gasoline and tar (the better to stick to burning surfaces) and stoppered with oil-soaked rags, while I humped on my shoulder a five-gallon jug of wood turpentine. Anyone who’d spotted us would have known exactly what we were about, but we were reasonably cautious, wearing dark rain slickers and balaclavas and keeping to the back alleys. As the Ice Castle was a virtually windowless structure, I assumed that the Worm would demonstrate his expertise by picking a lock on one of the side doors. Instead, having surveyed the Castle’s façade, he stepped over the road and addressed the barn-size portals facing Canal Street, its cobbles deserted in the hour or so before sunrise. His rationale was that opening those massive doors would draw the watchman, whom we would then take out of commission. So, in the predawn frost of that late-March morning, Morris spread the wings of his oilskin to reveal an array of tools hung in its lining. He invited Pretty to do the honors, but when the firebug wavered as if selecting an item from a tray of hors d’doeuvres, Morris barked at him impatiently, “The crowbar, codface!” Pretty removed the iron bar from its hook and thrust it unceremoniously at Morris, upon which the cracksman shoved the bar through the narrow space between the doors. He gave it a twist and, satisfied that the gooseneck had snagged its objective, raised it, releasing the latch beam that barred the entrance from the other side. In their heaviness the doors swung toward us so that we stepped back out of the way, surprised (at least in my case) that breaking and entering promised to be so free of obstacles.
But where was the watchman we’d expected to flush out? We made a deliberately unstealthy entrance into the icehouse, clunking up the incline and pulling the doors to, shivering from an arctic chill that took our breath. Still nobody came to greet us. In the stone-cold gloom Morris opened his coat again and removed from it a small bull’s-eye lantern, which Pretty lit with a storm match he struck on his stubbled jaw. Morris swung the lantern here and there like a signalman shedding light a few yards ahead of us along the locker-lined corridor. The little that was visible, however, made me all the more aware of what was obscured: the parapets of ice buttressed by produce crates in the lofts and galleries, the trusses and creaking collar-beams that propped up the sagging roof. But as familiar as I’d once been with every corner of the Castle, tonight the place seemed alien. There was nothing about it of the commercial or industrial facility; rather, it had a kind of austerity, like a magazine where winter itself is stored. If they shared any of my reverence for the atmosphere, my companions never showed it—Pretty peering with his pinball eyes from a face the texture of stucco, the Worm discoursing like the blowhard he was: “I read somewhere that potassium chloride don’t even need to be lit to start a fire…,” while Pretty, a traditionalist, disparaged the technology. I wondered what I was doing with this pair of trombeniks; why did I feel the need to prove myself to such as they? Morris continued waving the lamp about until I told him, “Stop it already, you’re making me nauseous.” “Who made you the boss?” he wanted to know. I sighed and said we should make a pass through the plant to confirm there were no civilians at large; not that we were especially worried about incinerating the innocent, but it wouldn’t do to have witnesses. And where, incidentally, was the watchman?
Making professional noises, Morris suggested we split up and reconnoiter, but I warned him that the icehouse was full of angles and blind passages; “I don’t want to lose you two,” I said, a touch disingenuously, and though they sniffed at my caution, we nevertheless set off down the central arcade together. Along the way I shifted the turpentine bottle to my hip, allowing a trickle to spill behind us like a thread we could follow back to where we’d begun. The lantern light darted like foxfire over the loins and flanks dangling in their lockers, the racks of bear and curly dog hides. In the middle of the factory the ice was stacked in blocks graduated in size from fifty to four hundred pounds, their seams outlined by whiskery