This is fairly typical in torched buildings, say Community Board 8 fire-committee members. “The buildings burn down, and the rent goes up,” says Lesold. Many of the fire committee’s meetings concern seemingly prosaic FDNY operational issues like “response time”—the duration between when a company gets a call and the time it arrives on the scene.

No issue, however, raises the ire of activists like the mayor’s assault on the fire marshal’s office does. It is a fire marshal who figures out how a fire started and whether it was set on purpose. By law, no fire can be certified as an arson unless a marshal files a report saying it is.

“This job is not for everyone,” says one marshal. But for the meticulous few who, through copious interviews and analysis of factors like “accelerant residue” and “burn patterns,” determine whether fire was the result of an “incendiary” process, the job has deep rewards.

Ed Burke, who was a Brooklyn firefighter and spent eleven years as a fire marshal, says that what’s going on at his old job is “unbelievable … You think it can’t get worse, then it does.”

“When you hear Chief Fire Marshal Garcia in front of the City Council saying arsons are not up, I just have to laugh,” says Burke. “Of course arsons are not up. How could they be up when only a fire marshal can call a fire arson, and there aren’t any fire marshals? Back in the late eighties, around the time of the Happy Land fire, there were something like 400 marshals. In the middle nineties, we had 292. Now we’re down to 80, and 20 supervisors. That means that at any given time, you’ve got 35 or so guys actually working, and two of those are Scoppetta’s bodyguards. And only eight of them are in the field.

The logic of arson is simple: “The buildings burn down and the rents go up,” says a fire activist.

“We investigated every fire, from a garbage can in a project hallway to a brush fire in Staten Island. Now we don’t. They stopped investigating all car fires until people started screaming. If you once looked at 1,000 fires and now you look at 500 or 250, that knocks out three quarters of your potential arsons right there. It’s sick what they’re doing with those numbers.”

Another marshal, still on the job, says, “The department keeps saying, ‘We’re doing more with less,’ but they never say exactly how much less is less. At night, when most of the fires happen, we have exactly four fire marshals working.

“Four! Four guys, in two cars, for the whole city!

“I am not a conspiracy guy, but you can’t help thinking they made a conscious decision to get rid of us. It bothers me, because those fires on Pacific Street were extraordinary. In almost every case, you had doors kicked in and gasoline spread so flames immediately made their way up the staircase. Staircase fires are terrible. You can’t get out, people panic. The fire at 1033, where people died—we were late on that one. It had to do with our pagers. They suck. The mood here is very, very strained. It’s enough to make you cry.”

It is also enough to make people wonder what exactly Mike Bloomberg has against the New York City Fire Department. A sweaty officer climbing out of a smoking Brooklyn manhole in the 102-degree August heat expresses the near-unanimous opinion: “Since Bloomberg showed up, we’ve gone from heroes to zeros. That guy has tried to screw us every way possible.”

A couple of mornings later, Bill Batson, Connie Lesold, and Holly Fuchs Ferguson held their weekly 5:30 a.m. vigil in front of 1033 Pacific Street. That’s when the fire that killed Sherrie Williams and the others broke out, so that’s when the fire committee pays its respects.

Attending vigils is a fire-committee duty. Only the night before, Lesold and Josefina Sanfeliú made their way to 103-15 169th Street in Queens. This was a bad one: five buildings burned, two dead. Marshals declared the fire an arson. Adding to the shock was the fact that the wood-frame houses had been demolished within 24 hours. Nothing remained but an acre of dirt, as flat as an Iowa cornfield, surrounded by a fence.

About 100 neighborhood residents holding candles assembled by the fence. Some said the fire was the result of a dispute between tenants and the landlord of one of the buildings. Whatever the reason, everyone agreed neither of the people killed, 83-year-old James Crocker and his son’s girlfriend, Alexandria Roberts, were involved. Again, the horror of arson’s uncontrolled, random criminality was manifest. If the quarreling parties had simply shot each other in the head, they’d be dead, sure. But everyone else would be alive, and the 50 or so displaced people would still have a place to live.