me busy long after retirement. You could say that’s one side of the coin. What Brad does, when they call him in, is the other side. Between the two of us, Holly, we nailed this, pardon my French, this shitbag. He’s been in our sights for years.”
Holly has finally taken a bite of her turnover, but now opens her mouth, allowing an unsightly shower of crumbs to fall to the plate and paper towels in her lap. “Years?”
“Yes,” Dan says. “Brad’s known since he was in his twenties. He’s worked on this with me since 2005 or so. Isn’t that right, Brad?”
“A little later,” Brad says, after swallowing a bite of his own turnover.
Dan shrugs. It looks painful. “It all starts to melt together when you’re my age,” he says, then turns what’s almost a glare on Holly. His bushy eyebrows (no faking there) draw together. “But not with Ondowsky, as he’s now calling himself. On him I’m crystal clear. Right back to the beginning… or at least to where I came in. We’ve arranged quite a show for you, Holly. Brad, is that first video cued up?”
“All ready, Grampa.” Brad grabs his iPad and uses a remote to turn on the big TV. It’s currently showing nothing but a bluescreen and the word READY.
Holly hopes she is.
10
“I was thirty-one when I first saw him,” Dan says. “I know that because my wife and boy had a little birthday party for me just a week before. It seems like a long time ago and it seems like no time at all. I was still on radio cars then. Marcel Duchamp and I were parked just off Marginal Way, behind a snowbank and waiting for speeders, not very likely on a weekday morning. Eating crullers, drinking coffee. I remember Marcel was ribbing me about some paperback cover I’d done, asking how my wife liked me painting pictures of hot women in their undies. I think I was just telling him that his wife had posed for that one when the guy ran up to the car and knocked on the driver’s side window.” He pauses. Shakes his head. “You always remember where you were when you get bad news, don’t you?”
Holly thinks of the day she found out that Bill Hodges was gone. Jerome made that call, and she was pretty sure he’d been choking back tears.
“Marcel rolled his window down and asked the guy if he needed help. He said no. He had a transistor radio—that was what we had instead of iPods and cell phones back in those days—and asked if we’d heard about what just happened in New York.”
Dan pauses to straighten his cannula and adjust the flow of oxygen from the tank on the side of his chair.
“We hadn’t heard anything except for what was on the police radio, so Marcel turned that off and turned on the regular one. Found the news. This is what the jogger was talking about. Go ahead and run the first one, Brad.”
Dan’s grandson has his electronic tablet on his lap. He pokes at it and says to Holly, “I’m going to mirror this to the big screen. One second… okay, here we go.”
On the screen, to somber music, comes the title card of an old-time newsreel. WORST AIR CRASH IN HISTORY, it reads. What follows is crisp black-and-white footage of a city street that looks like a bomb hit it.
“The terrible aftermath of the worst air disaster in history!” the announcer intones. “In a Brooklyn street lies the shattered remnant of a jet transport that collided with another airliner in murky New York skies.” On the tail of the plane—or what remains of it—Holly can read UNIT. “The United Airlines aircraft plummeted into a brownstone residential section, killing six on the ground as well as eighty-four passengers and the crew.”
Now Holly sees firemen in old-fashioned helmets rushing through the wreckage. Some are carrying stretchers to which are strapped blanket-covered bodies.
“Normally,” the announcer continues, “this United flight and the Trans World Airlines flight it collided with would have been separated by miles, but the TWA plane—Flight 266, carrying forty-four passengers and crew—was far off course. It crashed on Staten Island.”
More covered bodies on more stretchers. A huge airplane wheel, the rubber shredded and still smoking. The camera pans the wreckage of 266, and Holly sees Christmas presents wrapped in gay paper scattered everywhere. The camera zooms in on one, to show a little Santa Claus attached to the bow. Santa is