Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Pace’s brow knotted in a look of challenge. “Are you saying I can’t function as a professional without Mike? That I can’t… can’t continue working this story on my own?”

“No, Steve, not at all. I’m saying maybe that’s what you think.”

“What!”

Kathy offered no elaboration, letting words already spoken stand on their own. She could see Steve turning them over, rejecting and accepting, weighing and assessing.

“In other words, you’re suggesting my self-confidence about this story was inexorably tied to Mike’s availability to help me? That even when he wasn’t there, I knew he was available? And when I had to face his never being there again, I came apart?”

“What do you think?”

Pace shook his head. “That would make me the most selfish human being alive. It can’t be. I don’t miss Mike for the professional help I’ve lost… well, I do, of course. It’s ridiculous not to acknowledge that.” He got up and went to the big living-room window. “But that’s not all of it. Mike was special. He was my friend. It’s… a hard thing to describe.”

Kathy got up and joined him at the window. She put her arm lightly around his waist. “Let me put it this way,” she suggested. “If Mike had been alive at midnight last night and you’d come up with the Ken Sachs theory for some other reason than Mike’s death, would you have gone and confronted Sachs?”

Pace thought about it for a minute and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I probably would have called Mike.”

She nodded. “That’s what I mean. He was a sounding board, a test track, a trial run. And he was a friend. The pain of losing a friend is always acute. And if that friend is also your partner, your confidant, your pain is compounded by frustration. It’s obvious to me that most people would have lost control under similar circumstances.”

He turned and looked at her seriously. “You didn’t… when Jonny died.”

She hooked her arm through his and laid her head against his shoulder. “On the same day I lost Jonny, I found you again. And you’ve been for me what Mike was for you.” She paused, debating briefly whether to say more. She was talking again before she knew she’d made up her mind. “And even though I’ve had you this last week, I still lost control in my own way.”

“When?”

“Today, in the office, in front of Hugh.”

“What happened?”

“I began to cry. I couldn’t stop. That’s not like me. I was out of control.”

“Over Jonny?”

“No. Well, partly,” she said. “But not just Jonny.”

“Then what?”

“It’s complicated. Too complicated to go through now. I’m not even sure I understand it. What it boils down to, I guess, is maybe I’m too rigid. That’s what Hugh said. That I work never to let myself feel too much pain, so I have no yardstick by which to measure joy.”

“That’s pretty heavy.”

“But it’s true, I think. I try to be too much like my dad, and I consider myself a failure at times like these, when I can’t be that strong.”

“Hmm. Or maybe you’re trying to be too much like you think your dad is.”

Now it was her turn to be confounded. “A riddle?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You’ve always described your father as totally focused, a man who had little time to stray from the path he laid for himself. I saw some of that toughness the night I met him at your house.”

“True,” she said.

“Even that night, he didn’t grieve, and then he wouldn’t hear of you hanging around Boston to grieve after Jonny’s funeral.”

“Or when Joey died. Or Mom.”

“That’s what you saw… what he wanted you to see. How do you know what it was like for him when he was alone?”

She looked up at him, astonished. “I don’t know,” she conceded. “I don’t have any reason to think he was any different when he was alone.”

“But you don’t know.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Well, no, I don’t. I… I certainly can’t ask him.”

“No need to,” he said. “But a man as caring and loving and devoted as your father doesn’t lose a family member without pain. Consider the possibility that he chose to hide it from you—maybe as a way of easing your own anguish. He probably lets himself go when the children aren’t around to see it. I don’t believe he’d think any less of you for feeling the pain once in a while, too.”

“I feel like I’ve been psychoanalyzed,” she said.

“Me, too,” he replied. “And I feel better for it.”

“So do I,” she acknowledged. “Maybe we should do this for each other more often.”

He took the chance. “It would be easier if you lived here,” he suggested. “Sister Mary Margaret be damned.”

“Yes,” she said. “It would.”

The TransAmerica technicians had been all over the Sexton 811 carrying the registration number NTA2464. It was the aircraft’s first major inspection since she went into service, and everything appeared nominal. Neither the crews that flew her nor the mechanics who serviced her reported anything out of the ordinary. But given the nature of the questions being asked about the Converse engines, the technicians were paying particular attention.

“Man, I never get over the size of these things,” said an apprentice named Jason Mack as he handed a diagnostic tool to his partner, whose upper body had disappeared to the waist inside the left engine, where several cowling plates had been removed. The mechanic, whose name was Alan Gleason, was eyeballing engine components under the glare of a high-intensity light he held in his left hand. When he needed an instrument, he shouted his order back to Mack and held his right hand out behind him so Mack could slap the article into his palm. Mack had a full complement of tools and diagnostic equipment in a cherry-picker nuzzled up to the huge power plant.

“Watcha lookin’ for? Anything in particular?” Mack asked Gleason.

Gleason eased himself out of the engine compartment and turned to the younger man, who was trying to learn the trade. It irritated him that Mack wasn’t grasping concepts.

“You know what happened to the Sexton at Dulles?” he asked.

“Sure,” Mack replied defensively. “She crashed.”

“You remember why?”

Mack’s brow furrowed. “She took in a bird, I think.”

“And one of the turbine disks fractured.”

“Yeah.”

“That shuddn’tuv happened.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Gleason explained, “these babies are designed to take that kinda lickin’ and keep on tickin’.”

Mack shrugged.

“You read anything about the Sexton out in Seattle?” Gleason asked. “She was ours.”

“Inna newspapers or in company paperwork?”

“Both.”

“No.”

Gleason closed his eyes and shook his head. “Jesus,” he said. “You ever think about goin’ into auto mechanics?”

“Nope.”

“Too bad. Coupla months ago, we had a turbine-disk fracture on one of ours. Nothin’ bad came of it, but what do the combination of those things tell us?”

“Maybe,” Mack said hopefully, “these babies should be grounded ’til somebody finds the problem.”

Gleason laughed, reluctantly acknowledging his assistant had a point. “But until that happens,” he said, “we need to check the disks every time these planes come in for inspection. Understand?”

“Gotcha,” Mack said. “You find anything wrong with these?”

“Not yet,” Gleason replied, gingerly diving back into the Number One pod.

What he was looking for was there, but the only visible manifestation of the spreading fracture was on the side of the disk Gleason couldn’t see.