From their surprised, stilted greetings, Tom was left in no doubt that they all knew he was already halfway out of the door. But even that realization wasn’t enough to burst his happy bubble. Wherever he might be in a week’s time, he was here now.
He trailed into the office after Munro and took the seat he waved at, then pulled it up to the Formica desk where Munro clicked a laptop into life.
There was a grid map on the screen: the crash site showing clusters of numbered green blocks, wreckage spread in a rough fan-shape covering about four square miles. A simple depiction of what must already have amounted to thousands of man-hours picking through dirt and corn, bush and trees.
Munro leaned across Tom to fire up the laptop in front of him too. Another grid map, this one with red triangles spread over a similarly wide area.
Bodies. And parts of bodies.
‘How many’d you find?’ Tom nodded at the triangles.
‘There were seventy-eight souls on board. We got about two hundred and twenty bits so far. Thirty-four whole, or nearly whole, bodies, and the rest everything from heads and legs right down to dog food.’
Tom thought of Lucia and Louis and their mother in her little white gloves, waiting for news of Candice and Carlo.
Dog food.
‘There’s a bunch of trees here maybe a mile long, a quarter wide.’ Munro tapped the screen. ‘Chopper’s no good for that. Sure to be more in there but we haven’t had the manpower yet. I’ve asked the state police to lend a hand but they’re taking their time putting it together.’
Tom nodded his understanding of the daunting logistics of the operation. ‘You got the CVR?’
‘It gives us nothing. The pilots never knew what hit them.’ He touched a key and Tom heard the voice of a dead man passing the time of day.
‘… Jean. So I’m thinking, what’s the point of even going then?’
‘Too right,’ said the co-pilot.
‘You want to trim that a little?’
Tom listened to the tiny sounds that meant the co-pilot was adjusting the trim. The black box – the one that held the computerized records of every technical change in the plane – would tell them exactly what he’d done at that point. Whether it had made any difference.
‘So we didn’t go.’
‘You didn’t miss any—’
The voices were steamrollered by a huge, indeterminate noise. A mechanical roar – a cacophony too loud and confused to be interpreted by mere ears. Then, frantic but faint, as if they were already far from life, the pilots’ last words …
‘Oh fuck—’
‘Jesus. I—’
And then nothing.
However many times he listened to those recordings, they would never fail to affect Tom. What was most shocking about them was their very mundanity, the complete lack of foreknowledge in the pilots’ conversations, in their voices. Until the bad thing happened, there was just … ordinary life. He’d listened to hundreds of hours of cockpit voice-recorder sound and had never heard a flight-crew member say, ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ or ‘We’re all dead.’ Even when they knew it was past sensible, the pilots always kept trying, fighting, hoping. He’d never heard one take his mind off trying to pull out of a terminal dive to shout, ‘Tell Ruby I love her!’ Or ‘The safe deposit key’s in my sock drawer!’
Tom understood it. If the billion-to-one recovery manoeuvre paid off, then Ruby would only want to get married, and a new hiding place would have to be found for the key. It was human nature: men liked to keep their options open even as they plummeted towards oblivion at 500 m.p.h.
But, just once, he wished he could hear something astonishing on one of those goddamned tapes. Something that gave a clue to an awareness of the fact that a portal was opening up between life and death – between one reality and another.
‘My God – it’s full of stars!’ The line from 2001: A Space Odyssey was his fantasy CVR benchmark, but all he ever got was ‘Shit’, ‘Fuck’ and the ubiquitous ‘Pull up! Pull up!’
It was an undignified way to die. Confused, terrified – and with your always-useless last words recorded for the posterity of the inquiry room and transcribed in brutal black-and-white for The Orange County Shopper or Channel 2 Tampa’s Top-of-the-Hour News.
He realized Munro was staring at him and wondered what he’d missed. Munro repeated his question: ‘So what do you want to do, Tom?’
The guy was giving him a choice?
Tom felt the eyes of the other three investigators boring into him, no doubt just as amazed. He felt gratitude swelling inside him, like a brittle old seed dropped into water. ‘Anything you want. Just tell me what you need.’ He was astonished to find that he meant it. He owed Munro for this. Big-time. Sure, Munro thought he was the one repaying a debt, but Tom knew that, although he’d passed on the bolt via Pete, he could never have done what Munro was doing for him right now: treating him with respect, instead of like a rookie.
Munro nodded thoughtfully, swivelling slightly in his chair. Then he yanked open a drawer and took out a scuffed wallet. He peeled off two hundred dollars and handed it to Tom. ‘For starters, you can go back into Glenpool and get yourself some raingear. Come in and start fresh tomorrow.’
Tom took the money silently. He sincerely hoped Lenny Munro was going to punch him in the face next, or he was in serious danger of getting all misty.
‘When we find the fan disc, that’ll be the time you’ll really come into your own. But until then, just do what you think would be most useful. Let me know what it is so I know where you are if I need you.’
Tom nodded again, not trusting his voice, unable to look Munro in the eyes. Instead he fixed his gaze on the little red triangles. Some poor bastard would be out there now, trying to add to that map. Finding the bodies was the shit detail in air-crash investigation. Picking up arms, peeling scalps off asphalt, checking random shoes to see if they still contained feet.
Once, near Milwaukee, he’d stepped on an eyeball.
Tagging-bagging-and-flagging was an exhausting, soul-destroying attempt to identify flesh that used to be people. All enhanced by the constant reminder that some day, somewhere, someone was going to be picking your teeth off the freeway, pulling your flaking body from under the pier, covering their nose over your fetid, piss-soaked, bed-ridden corpse.
Tom looked Lenny Munro square in the face. He wanted to apologize for calling him a cocksucker. But what he said was: ‘I’ll look for bodies.’
*
The Holiday Inn had a laundry service. Tom stripped off everything he was wearing, bundled it up with every other item of clothing in his bag, and called for it to be taken away. When the maid came to his door, he paid for the full express service, including pressing, even though it was only for jeans and T-shirts. He asked what she could do with his All Stars, which were covered with mud, and she seemed quite confident about them, so he let her have those too. If there was a fire now, he thought, he’d have to escape in his new galoshes.
He showered, then threw himself onto the bed and slept almost instantly.