Firefighters at the scene were under orders not to go inside. A building nearby had collapsed not long before and killed one of them. So the stray cat who lived in that garage went in herself, five times, once for each of her kittens. Brooklyn, March 1996, before dawn. The crew from Ladder Company 175 got there in about three minutes, hoses going, everyone shouting. David Giannelli heard something thin and high under all of it. He followed the sound to the lot next door and found three kittens pressed flat against a wall, fur scorched, ears singed. Then he heard it again, and two more turned up across the street. Nobody had to explain to Giannelli what had happened. The kittens were lying almost in a straight line, each one a little further from the fire than the last. She had been carrying them out one at a time. He found her collapsed in the empty lot. Her eyes were blistered shut, her ears and paws burned, and the fur on her face was gone almost entirely. When he put her in the box with her kittens, she could not see them. So she touched each one with her nose until she had counted all five, and then she passed out. They drove the whole family to the North Shore Animal League in Port Washington and put them in an oxygen chamber to help their lungs. Someone named her Scarlett, for the red patches in her coat. The smallest of the litter, a white kitten, died of a virus about a month later. Scarlett spent three months in treatment and came out of it missing her left eyelid, which meant eye drops several times a day for the rest of her life. More than a thousand people wrote in asking to adopt her, some from as far as Japan and the Netherlands. The shelter counted around 7,000 letters in the end. They picked Karen Wellen of Brooklyn, whose own cat of 21 years had died while she was recovering from a car accident. In her letter, Wellen said that if she ever took in another animal, it would be one that needed extra care. The four surviving kittens were adopted in pairs by families on Long Island. Scarlett lived another twelve years in that Brooklyn apartment. She died on October 11, 2008, and six days later her face went up on the Reuters sign in Times Square, 35 feet wide. She had started in a garage nobody was allowed to walk into.