Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Pace was confused momentarily. “Before what?” he asked.

The controller hesitated again. “I saw smoke when the engine started,” he said reluctantly. “It wasn’t much, nothing very dramatic, the kind of thing you get when an engine is flooded, and even the new C-Fans do that. I thought about telling the captain, but I saw a member of the ground crew take a look at it, and I figured they had it handled. I figured if there was anything wrong, the cockpit crew would be told. I didn’t call them. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. I wish I’d called.”

Both men were silent for a few long moments. Pace was catching up his notes. Raiford waited quietly. When the reporter finished writing, he looked up, and the two men made eye contact. The sadness in Raiford’s eyes was palpable.

“Did you hear anybody on the flight deck say anything?” the reporter asked.

“Not that I recall,” the controller choked. “I was focused on that aircraft, and I don’t remember anything else. The FAA is collecting the ATC tapes now, and I guess if there’s anything on them, they’ll release it all eventually. I didn’t think to listen to the radio. I wasn’t thinking about anything but that jet. I couldn’t believe it was happening. All I could think was that somehow the crew would save the plane at the last minute, somebody would think of something to do…” Raiford looked away from Pace and asked the question he’d been avoiding all day. “How many were there?”

The query was oblique, but Pace knew what it meant. “On board, 333,” he replied softly. “It’s the deadliest accident in U.S. aviation history.”

“It’s deadlier than you know,” Raiford said.

This time Pace didn’t understand.

“It keeps getting worse.” Raiford sighed, almost overcome by emotion. He put out one hand to support his weight against the terminal wall and contemplated the floor again. “There was a small Cessna, a 172, I think, waiting near the end of Nineteen-Right to taxi across. I think at the very last minute he tried to blast his way clear, but the jet rolled right over him. Poor bastard. He saw it coming and couldn’t do anything about it. Whoever he was in there, he’ll have to be scraped up with a putty knife.”

Pace felt for the controller. “It wasn’t your fault,” was all he could think to say.

“How can you be so damned sure?” Raiford demanded. His eyes were dry now; a muscle jumped along his right jaw. “How do you know it wouldn’t have made a difference if I’d called the crew about that engine? You bastard! You’ll go back to your office and write your big story, then head out for a nice dinner, and maybe a roll in the sack. You’ll get a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow this will be a dirty little memory for you. Meanwhile, I got to live with it for the next twenty, thirty years, ’cause I’m not so damned sure it wasn’t at least part my fault. But then, I’m not a reporter. I’m not omniscient. Fuck you!”

Raiford spun on his heel and walked away, leaving the reporter standing alone in the shadow of the escalator.

For the second time that afternoon, Pace felt like a total schmuck.

The afternoon air over Washington was still and unseasonably heavy with humidity. But in the spongy glades of Theodore Roosevelt Island in the middle of the Potomac River channel, the air was cool on the skin and carried the earthy fragrance of generations of rotting oak and cottonwood leaves. The wild redbud were in bloom, the wild dogwood were trying to follow, and on the taller trees, the season’s new leaves showed bright green.

Two men met in a clearing, by the statue erected to pay homage to the President whose name the island bore. If the two had cared to and listened hard, they would have heard the sounds of traffic zipping along Rock Creek Parkway past the Kennedy Center and the Watergate complex on the D.C. side of the river, or along the George Washington Memorial Parkway on the Virginia bank.

But history, scenery, and sensory effects were not the reasons they were there. Their principal interest was privacy. With the tourist season still two months away, and considering most residents of the area neither knew nor cared about the island memorial, they counted on sharing the place with nothing more than a few birds and the mountain of bronze sculpted to look like a dead President. They were forced to wait to discuss their business until two young couples vacated the clearing, laughing and talking about cleaning up and doing Georgetown on a Thursday night. The men were uncomfortable passing time and making small talk, and the young people eyed them with curiosity.

“They probably think we’re gay,” the younger and taller of the two men suggested. He was one of the most imposing figures the other had ever seen: black, six-foot-five, lean, muscular, and possessed of a pair of brown eyes that could sear a soul. His name was Chapman Davis. He was an ex-college basketball point guard, held an MBA in government affairs, and served as chief of the minority staff of the Senate Transportation Committee. That was his public persona. Those who knew him well—and few did—would have written the resume differently.

“Digger” Davis: college basketball point-shaver and bribe-taker, small-time drug and numbers runner, loan-shark collector, and self-satisfied killer of a sadistic pimp and a crack dealer who liked to distribute samples on school playgrounds. He had been arrested for killing the pimp, but the gun he used disappeared from a police evidence room, and the charges were dropped. No charges were brought in the death of the crack dealer.

All this transpired in the space of four years, a lifetime’s worth of crime crammed between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three. He’d never been convicted of anything. He was kicked off Ohio State’s basketball team under suspicion of playing to undercut bookmakers’ spreads. The assistant coach who paid him $250 a week to do that was fired. Charges were filed against the coach but never against Davis. The only crime for which Davis ever was called to account was a minor drug possession in Youngstown, Ohio.

That was when he first met a lawyer named Harold Marshall, who defended him against the drug charge. Davis never knew who paid Marshall to take his case, and on those occasions when he asked about it, Marshall told him not to worry. David was acquitted.

Later, Marshall convinced Davis to return to Ohio State for his undergraduate degree and his MBA, and then talked him into joining his first campaign for the U.S. Senate. Marshall won, and rewarded Davis with a job on the Senate Transportation Committee, a position from which he rose quickly to Republican chief of staff.

Marshall occasionally alluded to Davis’s dark past, but he never disclosed how he’d learned the full scope of the problems or, for that matter, whether he cared. The subject generally arose when Marshall proposed Davis undertake some political deed abhorred by the young man with the new respectability. Marshall applied the pressure directly. “Your previous experience as an enforcer uniquely qualifies you for this,” he would say. Almost always the assignments were to the benefit of Marshall’s most important constituent, the Converse Aircraft Corporation.

One day Marshall confided to Davis that it was George Greenwood, then senior vice-president of Converse, who paid $500 a month for point-shaving during Davis’s short basketball career. The assistant coach was the conduit and kept half the cash for himself. It also was Greenwood who paid Davis’s legal bill for the Youngstown drug defense.

“But why?” Davis had asked, dumbfounded.

Marshall shrugged. “He saw in you someone he could use to good advantage, I guess. You’re not the only one. You’re just the only one on my staff. He also paid for your education, MBA included, and got me to offer you a job on the Transportation Committee.”