by Henry Porter
Harland realised that Ollins had already talked to people at the UN.
‘You probably know that I’ve done a lot of things. Banking for a short time when I was young, British Foreign Service, Red Cross for ten years. I started out as an engineer – that’s what I studied at Cambridge and that’s how I can find my way around this subject.’
‘That’s a lot of different careers to cram into one life. You’re only in your late forties?
‘Forty-nine.’
‘The Foreign Service – that’s the diplomatic service, right?’
‘Yes, I just said that I knew Griswald in the diplomatic service.’
‘Were you hired by the UN to do this report?’
‘Not specifically. I came to advise about rapid relief programmes. Three years later, I’m still here. I’ll be ready to report in six or seven weeks. Then we’ll see what happens.’
‘And you were visiting Rockville in connection with this report?’
‘Yes, there’re a couple of companies down there that have large water interests. I’m trying to assess their current holdings and the extent of their ambitions.’
‘A kind of investigation, then?’
‘In the loosest sense, yes. It’s a case of tracking down who owns what.’
‘So you could make some enemies in this line of work?’
‘Not really, most of the material that interests me is in the public record – somewhere. It’s just a question of finding it and, as I say, establishing the plans of some of the big multinationals.’
He could see that Ollins was tiring of this line of questioning. He’d give it ten minutes, then make an excuse to get rid of them both.
‘So tell me a little more about the flight. Did you talk to anyone besides Mr Griswald?’
‘I said hello to Chris Lahmer and André Bloch. There were a few other faces I recognised – a man from UNHCR but I forget his name.’
‘Philippe Maas?’
‘Yes, that’s right. They were all sitting near each other. I assumed they’d been at the same meetings in Washington.’
‘So you can only put names to three or four people on the plane?’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s right. Is that important?’
‘Well, it’s like this. We have one unidentified body – a man. And we’re not even sure that we have the right toll yet, because we could have lost people in the water. It took a while to find you and it’s conceivable that other victims were washed out into the ocean.’
‘But surely there was a passenger list – a manifest of some sort?’
‘No. There should have been. But this was a private flight that didn’t cross any national borders so it was forgotten, I guess.’
‘Yes, but this man must have been missed by his relatives.’
‘That’s what we thought. But we’ve had no calls. The problem is that pretty much everything was burned. A few personal possessions escaped the fire – thrown out of the plane with you and Mr Griswald – and we are working on those. We may retrieve more material and there is the possibility of identifying bodies by dental records, jewellery and other possessions. It’s going to be a long operation. But you’re right, it is kind of strange that we haven’t gotten a call.’
All this time, Clark remained silent, occasionally checking that his tape was going round, but otherwise studying Harland benevolently.
‘What does that suggest to you, Mr Harland?’ continued Ollins.
‘I don’t know – possibly no one knew he was on the plane. Maybe he was a foreign national who would not be missed immediately by his family. But presumably if he was on the UN plane, he was connected to the UN in some way and someone – a secretary or a department head or people at one of the national missions – would notice his absence?’
‘Exactly the same thoughts occurred to us. It is odd. But look at it this way. If you’d been killed it might have been some time before anyone made the connection between the crash and your disappearance. Might’ve been a few days before anyone went back over your schedule and made some inquiries in Maryland and then put it all together. That’s why we need very accurate descriptions of the people you saw on board. Then maybe we can start to work out who he was. I want you to think about them all and make some notes for me. I also want you to go over the journey again and record anything out of the ordinary – the smallest detail may be of crucial importance to this investigation, as Mr Clark here will tell you. Think of the passengers, Mr Harland – what they were carrying, where they sat, who they talked to. Think about the behaviour of the crew, what the captain said to the passengers – everything. I know it may be painful for you at this time, but I’m telling you, we need some help here. We’ll talk again tomorrow and maybe you’ll feel strong enough to come out to the airport and look over the model of the plane we have out there.’
He looked to Clark who nodded and turned off his tape recorder. Both gave him cards with cellphone numbers. They took his number and address in Brooklyn.
‘Call us when you want to come out to the airport,’ said Ollins from the door with a brief, wintry smile. ‘And hey, don’t forget to bring those notes you’re going to make for me.’
With a sudden inward start, Harland realised that he had lost nearly three days. He phoned his sister, Harriet, in London and discussed staying with her family for Christmas. At the back of his mind he wondered how he was going to get on another plane so soon. But he was also certain that he did not want to spend the holiday in New York. Most of the UN would be shut down, with a lot of people returning to their home countries for a full fortnight. He said he would let her know in the next day or so. Then he talked to his office and told Marika what he would need in the way of clothes from his apartment. He asked her to get a new cellphone. His had been destroyed along with his briefcase.
After lunch he slid down into the bed and watched the sun descend behind a pearl grey shroud. It reminded him of the light over the Fens in England and the enormous cold skies of his youth. Harland tended to avoid introspection, but he knew there was now a before and an after in his life, divided by the few minutes when he was taken by the current and was certain he was going to die. He looked into himself without sentiment or fear and understood that his fortune at surviving might come with a penalty, an essential loss of confidence perhaps, like he’d suffered before when he was brought to another hospital bed, beaten so badly that the nurses at first hid their eyes from the sight of his injuries. That had taken a long time to get over, but he had managed it and he would this time too.
He closed his eyes and thought of Griswald and the party of people standing a little way off in the airport. It was a pretty typical UN crowd, with their cellphones and laptops. All of them good people, bubbling with brave initiatives, yet each in varying degrees mistaking furious animation for achievement. He tried to hold the scene in his mind. There were two or three groups of people, waiting to catch the minibus out to the UN plane. A few went outside the terminal building to smoke. The others stood in twos and threes inside. Something wasn’t quite right about the way he was remembering it; something was tripping him up. His mind’s eye moved across the groups, trying to pick up information. The young men both with computer cases. The woman in a long, black coat. Lahmer’s anorak with a fur-trimmed hood. A lot was missing.
He’d give some thought to it later. Now he would sleep. He drifted off, this time thinking not about the flatlands of his boyhood, but an empty square in a hilltop town in central Italy. The unbidden image haunted him only rarely these days.
Next day he woke early. Having nothing else to do, he went to get a pen and paper from the duty nurse down the hall. He was moving more easily now. The bruises across his back and chest were still causing stabbing pains when he breathed deeply, but his legs were less stiff and the mysterious neuralgic patches on his stomach and thighs, which had woken him in the first nights after the crash, had gone. He cadged some coffee and returned to his room.
Dawn was breaking with
a mustardy smear in the west. He sat down on the bed and noticed a small black bag. Marika must have dropped by with his things the previous evening. Inside there was a note from her, some of his own clothes, three hundred dollars in advance expenses, a new phone and a set of keys to his apartment. He smiled at her efficiency. He swung his legs onto the bed, and settled back on the pillows to write an account of the flight. He found he wasn’t able to add much to what he’d told Clark and Ollins until he sketched a plan of the interior of the cabin and placed some names in the little oblong grid of seats. He marked himself and Griswald facing each other in the two rearmost seats on the starboard side. He knew that Andre Bloch was a little forward from him and that he had sat down opposite one of the women. On the other side of the aisle to him, on the port side, was Chris Lahmer. Before they took off, he recalled that Bloch leaned across the aisle to show Lahmer something. They were laughing with the man from UNHCR – Philippe Maas – which meant he must have been facing Lahmer.
It was difficult to say what people were wearing, and even more so to recall what they had carried on board, something which was obviously of interest to Ollins. One of the passengers, maybe one of the younger men who had sat up front, had carried a suitcase on board. He remembered there was a fuss from the flight attendant about stowing it. He wrote it all down as dispassionately as he could and annotated a diagram of the seating with the names of the passengers that he could remember.
He focused again and again on the scene, trying to glean more detail. The sensation of the first impact came back to him, the terrifying lurch to the right which threw him against the cabin wall. He saw Griswald’s face again, contorting in a flash from the window. He held that image in his head and then let the paper slip from his lap and the pen drop to the floor.
The young man left the hotel on Tenth Avenue and 23rd Street early in the morning. His body was still on European time and he couldn’t sleep. He bent his head to the wind and trudged to breakfast at the cafe he’d used a couple of times since arriving. It wasn’t much of a place but it suited him fine because it was cheap and he had to watch his cash supply. There was also a table by the window which provided a good view of the intersection and the hotel entrance. He doubted very much that he had been spotted, but it was as well to be on the lookout.
He ordered from the waitress, a tired little brunette with too much eye make-up and an accommodating manner who seemed to be there at all hours. She was the other reason he liked the café. As she took down his order he thought how remarkably pretty she was – an exquisite pale face and beautifully shaped mouth that twitched nervously into a smile as she spoke.
When she had gone, he laid out the newspaper cutting which he had brought from England and examined the photographs of the sole survivor of the plane crash. The picture was given prime position on the front page, hardly surprising, given the starkness and drama of the image. That was what had caught his attention; what had held it was the inset of a small portrait of Robert Cope Harland which had been released by the UN following the crash. He realised at once that he had found the man he was looking for, which was why he’d packed a rucksack and had got on the plane within six hours of picking up the newspaper.
The waitress returned with the food and he laid the newspaper clipping aside. She made some comment about the picture and the crash and then asked where he was from. He told her Sweden. Was he on vacation? ‘Something like that,’ he said. He read the nametag on her breast – Shashanna – and remarked that he had never heard of anyone called that before. She said that she believed her father had made it up. Then she complimented him on his English and told him that he looked like he belonged in the city. That pleased him because he took pride in his ability to merge. She went away, darting a look over her shoulder.
He was calm, unusually so considering what he expected to happen in the next few days. He felt pretty pleased with himself, having obtained Harland’s address so easily. He wondered if they were usually so lax. After all it had been a simple matter to go to the UN as a tourist, buy the current United Nations handbook and look up a suitably impressive name, in this case the one belonging to the Assistant Secretary-General for External Affairs, a Dr Erika Moss Klein. Posing as her assistant, he called Robert Harland’s office and told them that the Assistant Secretary-General needed the address before the weekend. He said there was a package that had to be urgently delivered that evening. The woman, by now a little flustered but also charmed by his manner, gave it to him without a second thought.
Now all that remained was to decide on the approach. That was going to take a lot of thought. The actual words with which he was going to break this astonishing news had so far eluded him. He had made the speech several times in his head since seeing the newspaper photograph – it was all he thought about on the plane trip – but each version seemed hopelessly melodramatic and artificial. Thank God he had remembered to bring the identity cards with him. If all else failed they would surely persuade him that he wasn’t a crank.
He went over to a pile of newspapers on the counter and selected the news section of the New York Times. He wanted to see if there was anything more about the crash. The day before, the paper had said Harland was still in hospital but was expected to be well enough to leave by the weekend. As he flipped through the paper, he wondered if he should leave it a couple of days before going over to Brooklyn. No, he thought, he would try that day.
There was nothing more in the paper and he put it down. Shashanna took this as a signal that he was available for a chat. She offered him more coffee and asked his name. ‘Lars,’ he replied, thinking how much he disliked it. But Lars Edberg was the name on his Swedish passport and he had to live with it for the time being. There was no reason to tell this girl his real name.
‘What do you do, Lars?’ she said, perching on the side of the chair opposite him.
‘I’m in the music business.’ That wasn’t strictly true, but it had been. ‘I’m part of an outfit that publishes original music on the Net. In a way I guess it’s an anti-music business.’
‘Do you have a girl in London?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said. He thought of Felicity – Flick – who was ten years older than him and ran a successful flower business. She had picked him up in a bar, given him a place to live and asked no questions about his past.
‘Does that mean we can’t go to the movies tonight, Lars?’
‘I guess it does.’
The rejection registered in her eyes. He put his hand on the table not far from hers. ‘I have a lot on, Shashanna. Another time and we would go to the movies. But …’
She silenced him with her hand.
‘That’s okay,’ she said and rose from the chair.
He didn’t want to mess about with this girl and he had no time, but that wasn’t the point. The problem was the thing that he carried inside him, the heaviness of heart – the guilt – which, far from dissipating over the years, had grown and now occupied much of his being. Flick had somehow discerned this and devised a way of living which meant that this unspoken secret did not dominate their relationship. He was sure she knew that it was there.
3
GRISWALD’S MUSIC
As the car neared La Guardia, Harland remembered that he’d left the notes and diagram that he’d made for Frank Ollins back at the hospital. It wouldn’t matter. He could arrange for them to be faxed later when he returned to collect his things and to receive a final check-up.
The car dropped him off at the old marine terminal building. Harland was directed to a hangar that was plastered with temporary signs, warning that entry was restricted to the FBI and Federal Aviation Authority and Safety Board personnel. He rang the bell labelled VISITORS and looked across the black water of Bowery Bay towards the end of the runway where the UN flight had crashed. A medium-sized jetliner was landing, its wings visibly seesawing over the last hundred yards of its flight. Harland grimly watched for the puff of smoke from the wheels as it touched down. Then
he turned to find Ollins scrutinising him from the doorway.
‘When you’ve seen what’s in here,’ he said, gesturing behind him, ‘you realise what a helluva miracle it is that they don’t crash more often.’
Ollins led him into the vast cold space of the hangar in the middle of which lay the remains of the Falcon jet, crudely assembled into the configuration of an aircraft. The temporary lights erected around it gave the wreckage a stark, fossilised look. ‘See what I mean?’ said Ollins matter-of-factly. ‘It doesn’t take long to reduce several million dollars’ worth of sophisticated machinery to this. Just a matter of seconds.’
Harland said nothing. He was watching the accident investigators move round the plane. Each piece of wreckage was numbered with spray paint and here and there ribbons and tags were fixed to the twisted metal. Almost nothing of the plane’s original white and red livery remained, except on the tailplane and one of the three engines. The cockpit was unrecognisable, as was the starboard wing, although a light was visible on its leading edge. The fuselage was crumpled like an old beer can. The dull, inky-coloured metal reminded him of the clinker produced by the boiler in his childhood home.
‘What are they doing?’ he asked Ollins.
‘Determining the precise sequence of events at impact, looking for clues, selecting pieces of the wreckage for further analysis – that kind of thing. A lot will go away for further testing. Clark would tell you better than I can.’ He stopped. A hint of disdain passed across his face. ‘But Clark and his people already believe they’ve got this investigation tied up like a Christmas gift with a fancy bow on top.’
‘And you don’t?’
Ollins gave him the thin professional smile that Harland remembered often seeing in his colleagues back in Century House in London. It was an expression that came with knowledge and enforced silence.
‘The Safety Board no longer believes there’s a need for criminal investigation,’ Ollins said. ‘But I can’t hide from you the fact that there are unresolved issues here.’
