Hard Fall (6 page)

“Front desk,” this same young man said, chewing his words through a yawn. “How may I help you?”

“Could you scare me up a pair of pliers?” Kort asked.

“Pliers?” the front desk replied, somewhat surprised. “Is it anything housekeeping could help with, sir?”

“No. Just a pair of pliers. Can you get me a pair of pliers, please?”

“Maintenance would have a pair. Or housekeeping might. I'll check for you, sir. Should I send them up if I can locate some?”

“Yes, please. And call me if you can't. You'll remember to call me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kort waited by the phone expecting failure. It was his experience that problems ran in schools, like barracuda. No single problem was likely to kill you, but combined they could be deadly. Typically, when you least needed failure, it struck. For this reason, he always remained on alert.

To his surprise—and a good omen—a room service waitress delivered the pliers less than five minutes later. They were an aluminum alloy with green rubber handle grips. Kort sterilized them first by cooking them in the hot-water coffee maker provided for the room. After a ten-minute cook, he heated the mouth of the pliers with his butane lighter until the metal began to smoke. Then he allowed them to cool while he gathered his nerve.

The tooth had to come out. That was all there was to it. He had tried to make arrangements for it to be pulled professionally the following day, but he would no longer be here on the following day, so he had no choice. Rotten to the core, the tooth had to be extracted before he embarked on his train ride. The importance of the operation, and his relative isolation, forced the decision. Even so, he stood in front of the well-lit bathroom mirror, the pliers now cool and resting on a fresh towel, and stared at himself for several long minutes.

No one was asking him to do this, he reminded himself. Not anymore they weren't.
Der Grund
had been cut off at the knees. Out of a total of sixteen, only he and two or three others had escaped the bust. He had been disembarking an ocean liner in New York at the time he had heard about it. At that moment, he had realized both the jeopardy he faced and the freedom made suddenly available to him. Nonetheless, he had boarded the sleeper for Chicago, and on to Seattle, as planned. If he had his way, the operation would still succeed.

But that meant the tooth had to come out. Twice he picked up the pliers. Twice he placed them back down. He assumed there was a good possibility he might pass out during his attempt. He looked around. Hard objects everywhere. Not a good place to fall.

There would be blood as well. Perhaps a great amount, he wasn't sure. He cracked off the plastic wrap that sealed the cap to the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, wondering if he would find the strength to use it like mouthwash after the procedure. Infection remained his greatest enemy. Like it or not, the hydrogen peroxide seemed a necessity. Just the thought of it made him feel sick to his stomach. He and the pliers entered into a staring contest.

He carried them, the complimentary box of tissues, and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide into the empty bathtub, where he stretched himself out in a reclining position. He placed the bath mat behind his head as a cushion. He could pass out here. He could bleed here.

He hadn't noticed until that moment how ugly the shower curtain was. A very poor imitation of a pastel chintz, some of the color had apparently washed out of it, leaving only the worst of the orange and a morbid shade of purple fighting for visual dominance. To his eye, the purple won. It was just the kind of thing that belonged on the form letter left by the president of the hotel chain for customers' comments. He had to wonder if those things ever got read; he knew better than to think the president had ever seen the form itself, much less one properly filled out. He allowed himself several of these distractions. He spent a few minutes analyzing the work of the mason who had applied the shower's patterned tile, several more studying the bead of caulk that joined tub and tile. With the availability of such distractions diminishing, he faced up to the task before him.

The tooth had to come out.

Now.

He brought the pliers toward his mouth and stopped, remembering in an instant why he had begun before the mirror—he had to see what he was doing. He climbed out of the tub, moved his supplies back to the edge of the sink, and faced himself once again. Yes, this was better. Looking at himself. It made him feel stronger. He needed his strength. He could not allow himself to pass out—that was all there was to it. He had to maintain control.

He stretched his mouth open wide, adjusting his head so the greatest possible amount of light found its way to the impossibly red pulpy flesh at the back of his bottom row of teeth. The brown, rotted tooth there called to him in a pulsing, agonizing pain he had lived with for nearly two weeks.

He had bought the Anbesol for afterward, but now it occurred to him it might help beforehand as well. It was meant to kill the pain. He had plenty of that.

He opened this bottle, too, though its safety packaging was more contentious than that of the hydrogen peroxide. He planned the order of events carefully: Anbesol, extraction, peroxide, Anbesol. He repeated the words as a mantra, worried he might not think clearly once the deed was done.

Once and for all, the pliers rose to his mouth. The metal jaws still felt warm against his tongue. As they entered his mouth, he lost all sight of the beleaguered tooth, and resorted to a tactile exploration, where each wrong guess caused him enormous pain. The aluminum jaws nipped at his swollen gums. He forced his mouth open even wider, the pliers hard against his cheek, and gripped down onto the decay. His knees buckled as the pliers found purchase—he knew he had it now. Of this there was no doubt. His left hand went out to steady him. He pinched the jaws of the pliers tighter, counted quickly to three, and jerked straight up.

His scream, muffled by a diaphragm spasmodic from pain, and a hand stuffed into his mouth, died before penetrating the room's walls. The pliers, with their quarry, fell to the counter as he blindly found the hydrogen peroxide and tilted the bottle into his open mouth. This second scream had much more air behind it.

He spit out the pain into the sink and sagged down to his knees in agony, one hand groping for the Anbesol. He had to focus away from the pain. Away from his mouth.

The thought at work in his mind was whether or not the president of the company ever read those stupid forms.

Crumbling brick buildings of Washington, D.C.'s black ghetto crowded the potholed streets that ran down past gasworks and an electric substation to the polluted Anacostia River. Set back from the river's edge, looking like a twelve-story apartment complex, stood a government building, the upper floors of which housed the FBI's Washington Metropolitan Field Office. It was here, on the tenth floor, that Cam Daggett reported to work each day. Those who worked here called it Buzzard Point—the actual name of this spit of land.

The Hoover Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue, which the public had come to think of as the FBI, was, in reality, the administrative agency that set policy and oversaw the activities of 55 field offices, each with its own territory. Aside from a few laboratories, its function was almost entirely bureaucratic.

WMFO—or Buzzard Point—was one such field office. Because its territory included the “District” and surrounding suburbs, its investigations often assumed a national scope.

Six-foot-high gray-carpeted office baffles separated one squad from another, the contained office areas referred to by the agents as bullpens. C-3's bullpen contained nine desks—ten, including that of Gloria DeAngelo, secretary and den mother. Behind Gloria, another baffle worked to give privacy to C-3's squad chief. It was here that Bob Backman's desk sat empty.

A thin-boned woman of fifty-two, with straight black hair cut and curled at her shoulders, Gloria labored behind sad brown eyes and a rigid posture that helped knock a dozen years off the truth. She patted her hair self-consciously. At this hour of the morning, she and Daggett owned the place.

Gloria came over with a cup of coffee. “I can help you pack, if you want.” He recognized the words she had spoken, but they lost form inside his head, the edges of the consonants made round and smooth by his ruptured eardrum. He had learned quickly to answer the phone with his left ear, to try to keep people to his left when he spoke to them, and to consciously avoid talking loudly. Not only was his newfound deafness an annoying and occasionally embarrassing disability, but it was unnerving and disconcerting as well. All sound to his right had died, as if he were suddenly only half a person.

He hesitated. “I'm not moving, Glo. I turned down the offer.” Before she could object, he added, “Taking a promotion because of Backman's stupidity is not my idea of earning it. Pullman is next in command—he
has
to be bumped up. I don't.” He leafed through a stack of pink memos. “I'm off to Seattle this afternoon. The field office out there invited me to have a look at something.”

“Be reasonable, dearie.”

“Reasonable? If I take the promotion, then I lose my field status, and this investigation along with it. I move into Pullman's old job. They park me permanently behind a desk, Glo. Me? Leather-soled shoes and three-hour meetings? No thanks.”

“You're being selfish.”

“Undoubtedly. I'm reminded of that often enough, without hearing it from you as well.” He said it, and then regretted both the content and the tone. Not surprisingly, Gloria ignored the offense; she would not be swayed from her purpose. If Gloria was anything, she was determined. “You can't change what's happened.”

Bitterness boiled over—repetition had a way of doing that to him. “If you put a melody behind that, you and Carrie could sing it in harmony.” He tossed the memos onto his desk, suddenly more angry. Armchair psychology from an aging den mother he didn't need. The truth, he needed even less. “You'll be going through Backman's stuff. He was a secretive son of a bitch. If there's anything in there I could—”

“He isn't even in the ground yet, and you're picking at his bones.”

“I'm
not
picking at his bones. I'm trying to find a detonator Bernard may have built.” He checked his in-box and sorted through his memos. He tried a different subject. “What about Meecham's report?”

“There's a message here for you. He wants to meet with you at his office.”

“Today?”

“Yes. Right away. He said he would be glad to get you out of his hair.”

“He, and everyone else.”

“Aren't we pleasant.”

“Pleasant? I stay at home, I get the third degree; I come into work, it's déjà vu all over again.” He hoped he might get a rise out of her, that a little humor—even borrowed humor—might provide an opportunity for a truce. But his attempt went right over her head, which wasn't hard, given her diminutive height.

“It's
safer
behind a desk.”

“Do you and Carrie collaborate on these lines, or am I supposed to put this down to coincidence?”

“Can I help it if you're so damned consistent? So pigheaded? You're supposed to
listen
. You're supposed to learn something—not only from your mistakes but from other people's. Bob Backman didn't learn. If he had stayed behind that desk he'd still be alive.”

“Bob Backman was a fool,” he said soberly. Sadness, like the warmth from a strong drink, surged through him.

“Your son is in a wheelchair, I needn't remind you.” She was red-faced.

She shut up then, but her expression acknowledged it came too late. The words hung in the air like fruit flies. There was no getting rid of them. “No, you needn't,” he said, filling the resulting silence. The fruit flies flew into his eyes. He felt the welling of tears and attempted to fight them off.

It's not a dream, it's a memory, and though it comes down like a heavy curtain, it holds moving images like a projection screen. It's transparent enough that he can see through it to the boy beyond, the boy coming down the ramp; but substantial enough that he can't will it away. He knows that it's triggered by certain things: a smell in the air, a sound; for a while, just touching wool brought it on. But there seems no trick to get rid of it. No cure.

He's in the high school gymnasium the Germans have set aside for the identification of personal belongings. Most of it is now in clear plastic garbage bags marked with tags that indicate how far from the point of impact the item was found. The imperfection of the plastic clouds what's inside. After several minutes his eyes begin to hurt. The quantity of the belongings—the rows of clothes, bags, cameras, briefcases, papers, walking canes, baby strollers, golf clubs, computers—overwhelms him and he begins to cry. He's been crying off and on for the last three days. Sometimes it is simply the sight of a family that does it to him; sometimes it is something said at one of the briefings. He had seen a deer in a field the day before, and that had made him cry. He's vulnerable. He's not sure he'll hold up under the pressure. He worries he may start crying and not be able to stop.

Bag after bag; he pushes the plastic around to get a better view of what's inside. A doll, its head missing, holds his attention. Driving into town the morning after the disaster he had come across a dead woman in the very top of a tree, hanging by her feet. Her dress ripped off her, arms hanging down like she was diving into the water. Bloodless. It was his first impression of the disaster in an otherwise pastoral and richly German countryside. Now he wondered if the child who had mothered this doll had been mothered by that woman. They would figure it out eventually. But for now, all he can do is wonder.

Total number of survivors: four. All children, one of whom was his now paralyzed son. Like the three hundred and twenty-seven who had perished, all four children had free-fallen from sixteen thousand feet. All four had hit a bog to the west of the village. Still, it was anyone's guess how or why they had survived. One, who was in critical condition from a staph infection, had become the focus of the media: to survive a sixteen-thousand-foot fall, only to die from an infection picked up in a hospital.