“Find Jack before he gets arrested and get him out of St. Louis. If he needs medical help, get it. Otherwise, bring him here if you can. Just don’t let him get arrested. We’re counting on you.”
Brad chuckled the way he always did before conniving to negotiate a trade; even Sam recognized the laugh. “How ’bout this? I help Jack and you stop Annie from signing the divorce papers.”
Sam tried to walk away from Clark, but he followed her. “I can’t stop the divorce but I can maybe slow it down a little. And don’t tell her we had this conversation. Bye.” She patted the handle as she hung up the phone.
Clark shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”
Sam bit both thumbs. “I wish there were a God and She’d work things out this way.”
“You mean sneaky?” Clark opened the door to the kitchen porch. “What are you going to do, hang out at Annie’s condo, wait for the mail, and shred her divorce papers before she sees them? Why are you Brad’s best friend?”
“She must have loved him.” Sam followed Clark outside. “You’ll have to gut it up, Clark, and let her go.”
He looked at her astonished. “Me? You gut it up and give it up. Sam, you’re getting desperate and she isn’t even thirty!” Clark headed into the backyard. Stars blazed in the summer night as if they’d never been extinguished by the storm. Sam came after him and together they dragged a fallen hickory branch away from the bay window.
She said, “I always believed in ‘the One.’ But you can wake up, you’ve been waiting for ‘the One,’ and your life is gone. Some Like It Hot? You think Jack Lemmon thought Joe E. Brown was the One? ‘Nobody’s perfect.’”
“Sam, listen to me: Joe E. Brown says, ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ and then the movie says, The End. Movies end, life goes on. You think Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon lived happily ever after?” Clark ambled off toward the Nickerson house.
“We sort of do,” she shouted after him.
He turned around, walked back to her. “Sort of…but look at us, a couple of old baby-boomers that thought America was going to give the whole world liberty and a great big free clinic. We thought everybody would just get along and go to good public schools and use good public transportation…”
Sam held up the two-fingered symbol. “Peace, baby. I still believe it.”
Clark blew her a kiss with his fingers.
She caught the kiss and brought it to her cheek. “Hey, if I suddenly go straight, Clark, you’re the first to know.”
“Sure.” He gestured at the Nickersons’ house. “Just want to grab Georgette’s cat.”
“Nobody can grab a cat. Leave her alone. She’ll get out of the tree when she’s ready.”
Clark yelled back. “How come you don’t take that advice about Annie?”
Sam called across the long black yard. “Tell me Annie’s okay.”
“Annie’s okay. This yard looks so different.”
“Yeah, it’s got trees lying all over it. I noticed that, Clark. Tell me she’ll find the One. I don’t care if he’s good-looking, homely, rich, poor, dumb, smart, tall, short—”
His voice came through the darkness, steady and slow. “Well, it’s better to love a short man than not a tall.”
“Oh God. No more puns. Top ten worst.”
Chapter 24
The Spirit of St. Louis
At this time, Annie, flying westward through the humid night, was less than fifteen minutes from St. Louis. She was talking aloud to the sleeping dog beside her, remembering numbers. Number games and word games had long been a way to pass the time while flying, a heritage from her father: “A is for Acapulco,” they’d played on the road, coming up with a different foreign city for every letter, “B is for Buenos Aires, C is for Calcutta.” She had loved to be praised for her quick answers. Now she repeated the “passwords” from the Hotel Dorado notepaper and from the inside band of her pink childhood baseball cap. The more she repeated them, the longer she’d remember: 362484070N. 678STNX211.
She said the two codes together. Each was an alphanumeric; joined, they made a combination of twenty numbers and letters that long ago her father had written down for some reason and now couldn’t remember but needed to know.
Nine digits followed by an N, then three numbers, then two letters. N678ST. She repeated it: N678ST. N678ST. Easy. It was an airplane identification code. It had to be.
And NX211. That was also an airplane’s ID number. Every plane in the United States had such an ID. It was federal law. The number painted on the side of the King of the Sky was, for example, NC48563. (The old designation, NC, she had once mistakenly thought stood for North Carolina.) A solitary “N” meant that the plane was registered in the United States. The N was always followed by alphanumerical characters of varying configurations, normally five of them. So N678ST would identify itself to air traffic as “November, six, seven, eight, Sierra, Tango.”
All right, then, one of her father’s passwords had to do with the FAA registry of two airplanes, either real or contrived. N678ST and NX211. She just needed to look up those numbers to find out to whom the planes belonged. But there were nine more numbers: Three, six, two, four, eight, four, zero, seven, zero. She broke them into combinations: There was something familiar about the final four numbers. Four, zero, seven, zero.
Her calculation was interrupted by the faint stutter in the engine again. But the gas gauge showed a quarter tank remaining. She checked the mixture but it was fine. All warning panels seemed to be working. Everything looked okay. Annie patted Malpy, who licked at her hand.
She was thinking about a remark made earlier by her father’s friend Rafael Rook during his odd phone call from Miami. “If it’s a password of Jack’s,” he’d said, “It will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—”
Four, zero, seven, zero. Annie flipped the numbers around as if she were looking at them in a mirror; something she recalled her father doing—he’d hold up a piece of paper to a mirror in a motel room in order to read it. She remembered how he’d done so once as he’d been smoking one of his long thin cigars. He’d puffed out smoke rings at her and said, like the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, “Whooooo aaaarrre yoouuuu?” Afterwards he’d set fire to the piece of paper in an ashtray.
“That’s it, Malpy.” Annie gave the dog a squeeze. “It’s zero, seven, zero, four. It’s the Fourth of July.” July Fourth, her (at least alleged) birthday. The rest of the numbers in the code were inverted as well. Three, six, two, four, eight. They should be eight four two—8:42, her time of birth—and six, three—6 lbs., 3 oz., her birth weight. She only recognized the numbers because her father had mentioned her birth certificate on the phone earlier this evening and she’d checked it. Had his mentioning her birth been a signal? But to what?
Annie was almost letting herself think that it was sweet of her father to remember her birth weight and the exact time of her birth, sweet that he had kept her birth certificate and then enclosed it with twelve thousand dollars in the blue suitcase he’d left with her in the Pilgrim Rest’s yard.
She stopped herself. What was she doing? Her father hadn’t remembered her. He’d left her there in his sister Sam’s front yard and vanished, just as he’d made up the passwords and then had forgotten what they were. Nothing stayed with Jack Peregrine. Nothing held.
Below Annie, the lights of St. Louis sprinkled the far horizon. The name of the city had always given her a good feeling because it was the city that had believed in Lindbergh, whose citizens had come together to raise the money to give him the plane the Spirit of St. Louis.
“St. Louis. Malpy, look!”
As Annie reached for her radio mike, abruptly, the propeller noise changed, then the Piper Warrior engine missed, spluttered. The warning lights came on and stayed on, the engine lost thrust and a sudden air pocket dropped the plane down through the pitch-black night.
The frame of the King rattled loudly, its wings jerking back and forth at a tilt, spilling A
nnie’s thermos of coffee. Gauges on the instrument panel quivered. The yoke shook in its socket. A small compartment door slapped open and closed. Malpy began to shriek, scrabbling at Annie’s arm to be picked up. “Okay, okay,” she told the dog. “Just take it easy.” She corrected but it was hard to keep the plane flying level again.
“Malpy, we’re in trouble.”
The exasperated air traffic controller at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport lost his temper when Annie described engine trouble and requested emergency landing priority. What the crap was she doing up there in that single-engine Piper in this weather anyhow? He snarled that it was a madhouse down here at STL and unless she was in a death spiral, she would just have to get in line. And whoever the Lt. D. K. Destin was who had called him with her ETA from Destin Airworks, in bumblefuck Emerald, North Carolina, wherever the shit that was, that man had the foulest mouth ever heard in this control room…Okay okay, just hang on. Circle. Keep circling.
She went into a holding pattern. To calm Malpy as she waited for further instructions from the air traffic control tower, she hummed, “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair…”
A memory of her father softly singing that song floated up from some long ago highway drive. “We will dance the hoochie koochie…” What in the world was ‘the hoochie koochie’? And why had he sung that particular song so often? What did St. Louis mean to him? Why did he want the Piper Warrior brought there after all these years?
As a child she had been always questioning everything, uncertain of Jack Peregrine, checking a compass that couldn’t hold true north. But with Sam and Clark, she’d found her bearings. And now, horribly, her father had brought that disorientation back into her life. Was his asking her to meet him in St. Louis just one more scam of his? Wasn’t it likely that his “I’m dying” was just the setup of another swindle?
When Trevor had scanned the FBI database for her father’s name, he’d found “John Peregrine” under “Confidence Men.” Jack was an “artist” of con art, that’s all. He tricked the gullible and greedy into handing over what money they had for an impossible means of making more.
Make another circle, the ATC radioed her.
Maybe this was some inheritance scheme of her dad’s to get Pilgrim’s Rest away from Sam. Or maybe he needed Annie’s help with a big con that somehow involved an airplane, a con of the sort that had made up her bedtime stories as a child. She’d heard dozens: How he planned to pass himself off as the illegitimate son of the current king of Spain, Juan Carlos I. How he planned to use her photographic memory to access data (like a human keystroke logger), in order to work out the biggest wire-transfer bank heist in history. How he planned to seed a gold mine in the mountain wilderness of Colorado or plant a fake Chagall in Boca Raton. How he planned to sell shares in a cure for aging, shares in the future, in possibility. All the stories were versions of the Queen of the Sea. Con art.
Her father had told Annie with reverence that the showman P. T. Barnum had once glued fish tails to monkeys and persuaded the public they were mermaids. That the swindler Count Victor Lustig (who worked the card tables on Atlantic crossings with Nicky Arnstein) had sold the Eiffel Tower to a reputable Parisian scrap iron dealer. That a larcenous midwesterner named Oscar Hartzell had made sane Americans believe they were descended from Sir Francis Drake and that the Drake millions still sitting in the Bank of England could be theirs. Seventy thousand of them had given Hartzell their hard-earned money to fight for their rights. The big con.
Make one circle, the ATC told her.
It was in him, Jack claimed, to pull off the big con. He could sell Mary’s milk, Buddha’s earrings, and Cleopatra’s suicide note. “Your daddy,” Jack would say grinning to Annie, tossing her in air, “your daddy understands. You sell people dreams they want to believe in. Remember that, darlin’. Tell people that life is what they dream.”
But Annie had developed a different take on life. Life was what you did, not what you dreamed. For years she had made up dreams about the mother she’d never met, dreams that were variations on the romances her father had told her. Her mother a sad princess, a dying star, a lonely heiress, a scientist who could save others but not herself. Always in these romances her mother’s life was incomplete until Annie walked into it. But her dreams weren’t true; deep down she always knew it and by Annapolis she’d given them up. You couldn’t dream a hundred push-ups in a field of frozen mud at Annapolis. You couldn’t dream a plane off the rolling deck of an aircraft carrier. You had to fly it.
You couldn’t dream a safe landing after your engine stopped firing, you had to keep your speed up; you couldn’t let your plane slip into a stall.
The gas gauge of the King of the Sky plunged to empty. Annie hit its glass cover but it didn’t move. She listened to the ATC’s instructions for her shortened clearance.
Suddenly a gust almost flipped the plane. She was close to a snap spin and knew she was in real danger. The engine was practically dead. Annie hadn’t flown the King in a long time. She sped back in time until she could hear D. K.’s voice beside her, talking her through the crisis. “Get the nose down. Listen to me. Not up, down, not up.” With the runway lights of the airport closing in, she fought against instinct, forcing the nose of the Piper lower and banking the plane into a glide less than a thousand feet above the concrete of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport.
Chapter 25
Dark Blue World
The air traffic controller was enthusiastically describing an amazing landing to a young VIP executive who’d asked to see him in the Control Tower. “We’re a nuthouse here at ATCT, it’s Fourth of July, whole corridor’s socked in. So in comes some Navy bimbo in a, get this, 1975 Piper single-engine! She blows in, tail of a tornado, circles, her engine’s conking out, I mean whacked. We gotta give her emergency clearance. Then this shitass 505 from DFW screws up, swings out on her runway, whap in the Piper’s nose. Jesus, this kid, I swear she lifts that damn Piper over the 505 on fumes and still puts it down like a dragonfly on a fuckin’ lily. Another sixty feet, she would have rammed the 202 to London. I’m on the floor popping digitalis like M&Ms. I should retire tomorrow. But how often you gonna see something like that? Welcome to St. Louis.”
The formerly dyspeptic air traffic controller shook hands with a tall young man with rich black hair and a trim black mustache, in an expensive black suit. The man tapped him on the chest. “Excuse me, sir. She wouldn’t like you calling her a bimbo.” He spoke in a Georgia drawl.
“Calling who?”
“The flyer, the naval officer in the Piper Warrior.”
“Jesus, you know her?”
“My wife. And I don’t think you want to be using that kind of language with a lady.”
“Your wife?”
“Lt. Annie Goode. She never used the Hopper.” The young man added wistfully, “Not even when she was on Connie Chung.”
The controller shook him by the arm. “What are you talking about? Was she on the news? Did she hijack that plane or something?”
“Annie, ha! Annie is totally by the book.” The young man introduced himself as Lt. Brad Hopper, U.S. Navy Reserve and president of Hopper Jets, Inc.
“Oh, you’re Hopper. Hopper Jets; yeah, we got your call you were okay with her coming in at your gate. But the message got screwed up. Anyhow we hauled her Piper over to Terminal E already, because—”
Brad shut him off smoothly. “I wanted to come on in and personally thank you for your cooperation. ’Scuse me, I’ve got to take this call.” He flipped open his cell phone. “Hi there, Sam! Yeah, I’m here. She just landed.” He listened for a long while. “Well, hell, you think that’s what Annie really wants? Okay, I’m with you, 100 percent, but I can’t be getting involved in anything that’s not, you know…But I want to help…Listen, I’ll make a phone call, I’ve got friends here. I’ll do it right now…I know, I know, I won’t say a word to her…What, here?…Damn it!…Okay, tell him to stay right where he is. I�
�ll call you back in ten. Just keep my name out of it.”
***
At the same time, down the corridor, Annie, holding over her shoulder the cloth carrier in which Malpy was squirming, phoned Pilgrim’s Rest and spoke to Clark, who was now in bed reading a biography of Thomas Edison.
Annie skipped over the details of her emergency near crash-landing and told him only that she’d arrived safely in St. Louis. The trip had been routine. No problem.
Clark let out a breath. “God knows what you mean by ‘routine,’ but okay, don’t feed Malpy seafood. Remember he’s allergic. Don’t give him coffee; keeps him awake. I don’t know where Sam is. She’s been running off every few minutes to talk on her cell phone ever since I got back from the hospital…I’m not sure what she’s up to. Maybe she’s in love…”
“It’s overrated.”
Clark said that only the young could be so sure. “By the way, Brad showed up in a jet at Destin’s, right when you were taxiing out.”
Annie had heard that news. “D. K. radioed me about it. I gotta say, it was nice of Brad to set up parking for me here on the Hopper lot.”
“He’s only nice for a reason.”
She noted that everyone was only nice for a reason.
“Brad came to Emerald to propose to you,” Clark warned. “He had an engagement ring in a box with a ribbon. I think Sam’s all for it. For a Lesbian, she’s obsessed with marriage.”
“Brad had a ring? You’re kidding?!” But she sounded a little uncertain as she added, “What do I need Brad’s ring for? I’ve already got a real zillion-carat emerald from Jack Peregrine, right?”
Clark made himself chuckle. “Yep, you’ve got a zillion-carat emerald.” He was wondering if she was thinking of going back to Brad. “Hey, maybe Brad’s got the same ring he gave you the first time. Didn’t you give it back to him when you caught him with Harmony?”
“Melody.”
Clark said, “He’s headed for St. Louis now.”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 19