“Have to keep one in the pipe and the hammer back all the time,” I said.
“No other way to be ready,” Stanley said.
“Does it come with a holster?” I said.
“If you pay for one it does.”
“How much?”
He told me. We haggled. I got nowhere.
“Take American Express?”
“No.”
“Any other credit cards?”
“No.”
“Take a check?”
“Nope.”
“How does cash sound?” I said.
“That’d work,” he said.
I added two boxes of two hundred thirty-grain ammo and told him I’d be back up with his money in a week. He shook his head and mumbled obscenities, then he watched quietly as I loaded a magazine, inserted it into the pistol, jacked a bullet into the chamber, and put on the safety. I ejected the mag, topped it off and slid it back home. I already had a shoulder holster at the house I thought would fit so I chose a hip rig I could half hide inside my waist when I needed extra concealment.
We bade each other a fond farewell. As I walked to the door he told me not to be a stranger. A few minutes later I was on the Interstate on my way North to Orono. I had the metal shaft and both pieces of aluminum sheet in the bed of the truck and the new pistol on my hip.
14
I had three years of pre-med as a non-matriculating student at the University of Maine at Orono before switching to ROTC and pursuing a military science degree. Unfortunately, my studies came to a screeching halt when war broke out in the Mideast and I left to join what amounted to a foreign legion. Still, the place held special memories for me. Here is where I met the first of my ex-wives, tasted my first beer, and first met Rick Blaine of the Café Americain and Searcher Ethan Edwards. These two men, and a few others of their ilk, Atticus Finch, Jake Holman, and Will Kane, to name three, helped me negotiate manhood without the aid of a central father figure.
UMO was a utilitarian-looking college with a lot of red brick and very little ivy-covered pomp and circumstance. The general facade resembled that of a nineteen sixties military training facility, all business. Bennett Hall, the physics building, was a standout in this regard.
I parked at the south end of the campus, locked the doors and walked past the Student Union and across the commons to Bennett. I had the new pistol strapped to my right side and carried the two aluminum sheets of metal in a Filene’s paper bag. The metal shaft hung over my shoulder. The campus, usually dead before seven thirty in the morning, was even more desolate because of the Christmas vacation. I saw three people on my walk to Bennett, and two of them were groundskeepers.
Bennett Hall was quiet as a mausoleum and I could hear the squeaky rubber soles of my hiking boots echo off the walls. I could also hear the subdued hum of a machine. It sounded otherworldly, like a spacecraft engine, if such a thing had existed.
I knocked on an open door and entered a cluttered office filled with three desks, three file cabinets and two large blackboards. Robert Wasserman was at one of the desks hunched over a calculator and a notepad.
“Hang on a sec, Grande,” he said, without looking up. “I’m right in the middle of something.”
Wasserman was not your typical physics grad. He stood 6” 4” and looked like somebody had filled his skin with bowling balls. If you didn’t find him at Bennett trying to solve life’s mysteries on a blackboard, you would likely find him lifting free weights at the school gymnasium. To call him an obsessed overachiever was like calling the Oasis of the Seas just another cruise liner. Robert was a strange combination of unrelenting curiosity and narcissistic egomania, which obviously gave him the impetus to wear nothing but Tony Lama cowboy boots, tight jeans, a western shirt and a cowboy hat – even though he hailed from a tenement in North Jersey about fifteen minutes drive from the George Washington Bridge.
I moved a pile of books and papers off a chair at one of the other desks, sat down and waited for Robert to finish. The bag sat on the floor at my side; the metal shaft straddled the arms of the chair.
“Shit,” he said after a good five minutes of punching numbers in the calculator and scribbling in his pad.
“Problem,” I said.
“It didn’t work out.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “It’ll go. I know it will. I just missed an operation.” He looked up and saw what I had brought. “Oh, cool. Are these the fragments?” He reached out for the metal shaft and immediately did half a dozen curls with it. “Light.”
“Maybe I should have brought you the rear axle off a dump truck,” I said.
“I could use it,” he said. “Stade tell you I’m training for the next Ironman?”
“Must have slipped his mind,” I said. “Good luck with it.”
“It’s not for a while, and I have a ways to go. I need to gain another fifty pounds of muscle.”
“Another fifty pounds and you’ll have to buy your clothes at Moss Tent.”
“Yeah, it’s been kind of an issue.” He looked at his biceps, which threatened to rip his shirtsleeve at the slightest provocation. He liked looking at his biceps.
“So,” he said, focusing his attention on the metal shaft in his hand. “You want to know what this is.”
“And this,” I pulled the two aluminum pieces out of the bag and handed them to him.
“They’re aluminum. I can tell you that without doing a single test.”
“Ahem, we sort of figured that, Robert.”
He stared at the shaft, did a few more curls.
“You didn’t have to bring the whole thing,” he said. “All we needed were a few molecules.”
“Ah well, my molecule slicer was in another coat. And . . . unfortunately, I’d left that in another universe.”
“Touché.” He got up with the samples and left the room. “Follow me,” he said over his shoulder.
We walked down the dimly lit hall to the lab. Robert unlocked the door with a key he had hanging around his neck. The source of the persistent hum was here, a plumbed and insulated cylinder with pressure or vacuum gauges and red, green and yellow start, stop and standby buttons. The box stood from floor to ceiling and had an airtight door on it similar to what would be found on a submarine.
“It’s a T-V chamber,” Robert said as he walked by.
“Satellite or cable?” I said.
“Thermal Vacuum,” he said. “I’m testing satellite parts for NASA.”
Robert walked to the windows facing the commons. He placed my samples on a table that supported some very specialized equipment and got to work inspecting the sheets very closely. I looked at the tabletop and knew I was looking at precision lathes, grinders and polishers.
“Are we going to use a mass spectrometer?” I said.
He looked at me as if I had just asked for the keys to the cyclotron.
“Well, yes,” he said. “Of course. First I want to see them under the electron microscope, which means I have to polish and etch three very, very, very thin samples.”
“That sounds labor intensive,” I said.
“My raison d’être,” he said.
“How long will it take?” I said.
“Depends on the other stuff I have going on. A few hours anyway.”
I watched him work. He took notes on some scratch paper while he punched the keypad on a micro-grinder or lathe, logging his every move. He had amazingly delicate hands for such a big man, and he was meticulous with every step of the process. I was standing a few feet behind him, stretching and craning my neck a little to look over his shoulder. It was then I had my epiphany: If I didn’t get the hell out of the lab in the next three-seconds I would keel over and die from boredom.
“By the way,” I said. “Have I thanked you from the bottom of my heart yet?”
“You have not.” His face was about two and a half millimeters away from the machine. I think he was mind-melding with it.
“H
ow about I come back at noon with some lunch?”
He stood straight up and stared out the windows, scratching his chin, apparently deep in thought. I assumed the gears in his head were calculating pi out to seven decimal places.
“Two cans of solid white tuna in water. Two protein shakes. Four hard-boiled eggs. A chocolate protein bar,” he said, then leaned back over the table and resumed his intricate work, oblivious to my presence.
“No roughage?”
“Fine, bring me an apple.”
“Atta boy.”
I walked out of the lab, shut the door behind me and left the building. My samples were in good hands. If Robert Wasserman couldn’t figure out what they were, I might as well toss them back to Davy Jones.
15
I couldn’t bring myself to order four hard-boiled eggs at a diner so I went to the grocery instead. I bought all the ingredients for Robert and got myself a turkey, Swiss cheese and roast beef on pumpernickel with light mayonnaise, horseradish and lettuce and tomato. We cooked the eggs in the autoclave back at the lab. Robert used a calculator to determine exactly how long it would take and then continued to make half a dozen perfectly cooked hard-boiled eggs. I had bought a half dozen thinking he would save two for later. I was wrong. He ate all six eggs and the two cans of tuna and the protein shakes and the nutrition bar.
Robert brewed some coffee in the lab using a Bunsen burner and a large glass beaker. He mixed regular roast with a fine ground espresso and boiled it for ten minutes. Then he strained the grounds through a fine mesh screen I hoped and prayed hadn’t been used previously for nuclear waste. We drank our coffee in his office and talked about what he learned about my metal fragments.
“I’m guessing it’s a very high quality aluminum alloy,” he said.
“Guessing?” I said. “You?”
“The sample has been seriously corroded,” he said. “I take it this came out of the ocean.”
“It did.”
“That explains it. My guess is that it was alloyed with zinc and it’s the zinc that’s completely corroded away. That’s why your samples seem so soft and light, porous, like a sponge. This stuff is just about gone.” He held a piece up to the early afternoon sunlight shining through the window. “Anybody else testing this might have only been able to tell you it was aluminum. I think I can tell you more.”
“I’m listening.”
“Seven-thousand-seventy-five aircraft aluminum, possibly dating back to World War II. They made Japanese airframes out of this stuff.”
“Are you telling me I found a Zero off the coast of Maine?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “What I’m telling you is that it could be any number of planes dating all the way back to the Zero. However, I think you can safely rule out a Zero.”
“Then the sheet metal I brought could be part of a wing or tail.”
“Could be skin off the fuselage,” he said.
“And the other piece,” I said, “considering its size and length and what you just told me . . . could be part of a wheel strut.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “I don’t know much about the different aircraft models and such, but given the piece is very much intact, I mean, it doesn’t look too busted up, you might be able to find out what it came from.”
“Airplane history buff ought to help,” I said.
“Exactly. Isn’t there a big museum near you?”
“The Owls Head Transportation Museum. It’s ten minutes from my house.”
“Well, there you go. Maybe they have detailed schematics of planes. You could sit at a computer and shuffle through pictures and drawings until you find what you’re looking for.”
“I can’t wait.” I took the bag with my metal fragments and the wheel strut from Robert and headed for the door. “I owe you one, Doctor Roberto.”
“See, that’s why you never finished college. You don’t have the patience for the critical research, the minutia.”
“Hey, Braniac,” I said. “I graduated the school of hard knocks, Magna Cum Laude.”
He smiled and turned back to his desk and the problem he was working on when I first walked into his office. “They say experience is the best teacher,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But the tuition can kill you.”
16
If I hurried back I could get to the Transportation Museum before closing and introduce myself to the curator or one of the staff. I’d been there many times in the past, even paid to go up in one of the B-17s that visited and took part in an air show a few summers ago. What a treat that was. I flew in the same type of plane my father piloted over France and Germany.
I got to the museum after dark at fifteen fifteen, a.k.a., three fifteen in the afternoon. After I explained myself to the receptionist she phoned the curator and he came out to meet me. His name was Warren Post and he looked to be in his mid-sixties. He wore tan slacks with a blue Oxford button down shirt and a blue blazer. The pin on his silk tie was a small enameled American flag with gold trim. Very tasteful. His cuff links had the Strategic Air Command shield on them.
We introduced ourselves and I asked him if he could take a moment to come out and look at the aluminum wheel strut I had in the back of the Rover. He said he’d be more than happy to oblige. When we got to the parking lot and he saw what I was driving he seemed very pleased.
“Oh, I know who you are now,” he said. “You own Scara, and before that, Emperor, the two whale watch boats used to run out of Rockland. You used to be captain of the pilot boat.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Have we met before?”
“We met through a mutual friend, Steven Maitland, at his wife’s funeral. I was the guy admiring your Rover. My family and I went out with you on your boat more than once. It was great fun. We saw tons of whales.”
“Of course,” I said. “I remember now. You drove that old Studebaker to the funeral.”
“A-yuh, that was mine.”
“You still have that car?”
“Sold it here at auction two years ago. An offer I couldn’t pass up. You ever think of selling your Rover?”
“I’m not sure I can part with it yet,” I said.
“Don’t blame you,” he said. “I miss my Studie.”
We got to the truck and I opened the back to show him the strut. He reached in and picked it up without any worries about getting his clothes dirty. “Let’s take it inside, get it into the light,” he said.
We sat at a tool bench inside a massive machine shop and pawed through old operations and maintenance manuals of vintage airplanes. The piece I had brought sat all by its lonesome about six feet away.
“I hope I’m not keeping you from anything,” I said.
“Nope,” he said. “The wife is at a baby shower for one of her friend’s daughters, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
“This is a lot easier than I’d thought it would be,” I said, thumbing through a P-38 Mustang manual. “I was afraid I’d have to spend days in front of a damned computer to get this info.”
“You may still. I can’t guarantee I’ll have the right manual here.”
“Well, whether I have to do the computer thing or not, it’s great being here surrounded by all this history. For some reason, while I’m here, I don’t feel like the world’s passing me by. I get on a computer and my head hurts from having to sift through all the meaningless crap.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s no avoiding them anymore.”
“Very true,” I said.
“Aha!” he exclaimed, “what do we have here?” He held a three inch thick brown manual in his left hand. “I think I found it. Grab the strut and follow me.”
We walked through the main lobby to the floor of the museum. There were all kind of antiques in this area, including vintage motorcycles, cars, trucks, tractors and airplanes from World War I and World War II. None of these seemed of interest to Post. With the step of a twenty-year old he bounded out
the back door of the museum and across the tarmac to a hangar on the other side of the runway. He was ten years my senior and I had a tough time keeping up with him.
Post used a key from a massive key ring on his belt to open the door to the hangar. We stepped inside to a blackness so compete it sucked the breath out of you. I heard some fumbling along the wall next to the door and then a triggering of a switch. A breaker snapped then another and another and then the hangar filled with light. Sitting in the middle of the hanger, in a partial state of reconstruction, was a forties-era DC-3.
Post had the maintenance manual in one hand and the strut piece I had brought in the other as he walked briskly to the plane.
“It’s not quite the same but you’ll get the idea,” he said bending over to hold the salvaged strut next to the one on the plane. “Yours, I believe, came off a Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando. Passenger or cargo, military or civilian, it’s impossible to say. This here strut,” he said pointing to the one on the plane, “is on a Douglas C-47 Skytrain, a variation of the DC-3 built for military operations during World War II. We hope to have it restored by the end of next summer.”
He stood up and handed me the maintenance manual. “Here,” he said. “See for yourself.”
I took the manual and examined the page with the schematic of the Commando’s retractable landing gear. It depicted a wheel with a right and left hand single strut design, whereas the DC-3 in front of us had a double strut design. I still couldn’t see the match with Post’s conviction.
“Are you sure about this?” I said.
“Look here,” he said and pushed the salvaged strut almost under my nose. “You thought this was intact but it’s broken and corroded, here, and here.” He pointed to the two corroded sections. “It sort of fools you into thinking it’s a solid, straight piece of aluminum, but it’s not. It’s part of the right wing wheel strut of a taildragger airplane.”
“Taildragger?” I said.
“Also called tailwheel, as opposed to tricycle landing gear, where you have one nose wheel and then wheels under each wing. The tailwheel gear has wheels under the wings and one wheel under the tail. Like the C-47 here and most of our other planes. They didn’t even have tricycle gear until sometime in the thirties.”
Calamity (Captain Grande Angil Mysteries) Page 7
