Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Richard let him off the hook with an easy laugh. “For people who plan to do a lot of shopping.”

“Maybe.” Lemko handed Richard the papers he’d been toting around. “This is a boarding pass for tomorrow morning—9:40 departure, gate B25. There’s a voucher in here for airport parking if you need it, and instructions on how to keep track of your expenses. And I want you to know that if you need anything, you can call me direct at these numbers.” He produced a business card.

Richard started to leave, and Lemko grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him back around.

“Is there anything else I can do? Something I’ve overlooked? We can put you up at a hotel closer to the airport. I can send someone back to your apartment to pick up some things. Hell, we can sit down at the bar over there and have a drink.”

Richard took the business card and tucked it into the inside pocket of his overcoat. He extended a hand, for what reason he was unsure, and Lemko took it as his absolution, shook it vigorously. Richard could see in the lawyer’s face that he was deciding whether or not to pull him into a hug (despite the express prohibition of such personal interaction with a contact). He took his second hand and put it on top of their grip, keeping Lemko at a distance. “If I think of something, I’ll let you know.”

Lemko headed back toward security, and while Richard wanted very much to be out of his visual range, he instead found himself wandering into the newsstand. Meeting Cadence required at least some semblance of preparation. He grabbed a toothbrush and a travel-size tube of paste, some cinnamon-flavored gum. How much time had he spent at airports in the past four years? Were they all like this, incongruent? He’d landed in Florida somewhere at eight p.m. one night, and the only thing open had been the bars in the international terminal. Kansas City looked like Milwaukee, which looked like Memphis or maybe Nashville. The terminal in Bismarck, North Dakota, was built according to the same blueprints as the original terminal in Prague. Richard didn’t know if he could face another airport. He was supposed to get on a 9:40 a.m. flight to Dallas, pick up a six-year-old boy who was essentially a stranger, and explain to him that his mother was dead and that he would be coming to live with Uncle Richie.

The woman at the register repeated herself—“Will there be anything else?”—and Richard walked over to the shelves displaying all the junky Washington DC memorabilia—Redskins T-shirts and miniature monuments and paperweights in a heavy plastic that were supposed to resemble the lead-crystal paperweights of the Capitol dome that congressmen sometimes gave as Christmas presents in the days before ABSCAM and the Congressional Post Office scandal and the check-kiting scandal and the scandal with the boy interns and the one with the girl interns. He saw the perfect gift. A miniature license plate. He’d given his nephew seventeen of them, one from each state he’d traveled to in the past few years, but somehow never a Washington DC plate, and there was one at the bottom of the first row that spelled out GABE—not GABRIEL, but it would have to do—and Richard added it to his purchases. He would not arrive in Dallas empty-handed.

POLICIES AND procedures meant that Carol Nessen and Brad Lemko were expected to produce a written narrative accounting for their whereabouts in fifteen-minute blocks; their report would identify shortcomings in the notification process and point to potential improvements. The general counsel, an obsequious little bastard named Gullett, had already warned Nessen to make her recommendations detailed and specific. His management style mimicked whatever business book was in vogue at the moment. She could imagine hearing him even as she made notes for her report: Don’t identify a problem unless you can identify its solution. Nessen knew also that Gullett hated her because she was taller by a good six inches and had never worked airside, whereas Gullett took every opportunity to mention how he’d loaded baggage carts every summer of college.

Nessen hated Gullett because he covered her desk with inconsequential memos on policy and procedure, and because he wore his hair plastered to his head with Vitalis or VO5, some old-fashioned goop that smelled like the feet of senior citizens tarted up with lilac. And since the reports went to Gullett, it made sense to find Lemko, compare notes, agree on a strategy. Lemko was Gullett’s anointed successor, and if Nessen could get him to sign off on her ideas, she was golden too, if only by association.

With no standby pilot, a piece of defective equipment taken out of service in Cincinnati, and the East Coast bogged down under a winter storm stranding some 940 Panorama passengers in the Washington metropolitan area’s three airports, a morning flight back to Dallas was a long shot. Seating preference would be given to passengers paying full fare, so Nessen made arrangements for them at a decently luxe hotel in Pentagon City, just a five-minute taxi ride to the airport.

By 9:00 p.m. Nessen had retrieved the rental car, left it with the hotel valet. Lemko had seen Richard MacMurray off in a taxi and taken the Metro to the hotel, where he waited in the lobby for his partner. He stood to greet her, and the bellman who wheeled in their two bags stopped a few feet away.

“Don’t you even have a topcoat?” Nessen asked.

“In the bag there,” Lemko said, pointing to his suitcase. “Going to join the fire department?” he asked, giving her yellow rubber footwear an obvious once-over.

“They’re loaners from our friend the sergeant. Can’t do the job without the proper equipment, he says. Besides”—Nessen held up a small plastic grocery bag—“my shoes are ruined. It’s snowing. Note to self: more than one pair of shoes is required on each trip.”

They handled the business of check-in and reconvened in the hotel’s top-floor lounge. Nessen came loaded down with the policies-and-procedures binder and a laptop, looking entirely like a woman expecting to work.

“Wouldn’t you rather deal with all that”—Lemko used a tilt of his head to indicate the notebook, the laptop, the report—“in the morning?”

“I want to hit it while it’s fresh in my mind.”

Lemko sighed. “I don’t know that it will be any different. I keep thinking about how I’d explain what I did today to anyone who didn’t work for us. ‘What did you do at the office today, honey?’” he said in a pitch-perfect falsetto. “‘I knocked on doors and told people that a person they loved was dead.’”

“How else should it work? You want to call them on the phone? Send a telegram? A priest and a pilot, like in those old war movies?”

“It’s a horrible duty. You’re brushing your teeth in the morning and thinking that you’ve got this two-day swing to Buffalo but you’ll be back in time to drive little Benjy to soccer practice, and wham! ” he said, his flat palm making a solid thwack ing sound in a tiny bit of condensation on the bar top.

Nessen was older and, as such, felt entitled to play the role of a grizzled veteran. “You did good work today. It won’t feel like it, not for a while. But you have to trust that how we tell them is better than hearing it from the neighbor or watching it on television. If you can’t do that, then at least you can sleep knowing you put a human face on the faceless corporation.”

Lemko shrugged and gestured with his drink to the corner of the bar, where a duo—jazz guitar and stand-up bass—picked up their instruments. Nessen turned to watch them begin, hoping the music might offer some distraction. She was expecting a Christmas song for some reason, but they launched into something syrupy, a pop melody she couldn’t place. She felt pressed up against the very limits of language itself; what more could she possibly tell Lemko to make him—to make herself—feel good about the job they had done? She wanted to forget about the contacts and her plans and get drunk and half-lost in her favorite songs. Instead the guitar player vamped between two chords, and she realized she was waiting for the vocals to begin but hadn’t seen a microphone. The words were what had always been most important to her. The songs that transported her were always about the narrative. Now music that she had once loved, college-radio bands from Athens, Georgia, or the UK, floated in the background as she picked over organic produce at an upscale grocer’s on her way home from work. The hope of the future, four lads who shook the world, reduced to Muzak.