Sole Survivor (25 page)

In the summer of that year, he joined the YMCA Youth Athletics Program: the boxing league. He was quick to learn, and the coach liked him, said he had talent. But in his first two practice matches, he continued hammering punches into opponents after they were sagging on the ropes, beaten and defenseless. He’d had to be pulled off. To them, boxing was recreation and self-defense, but to Joe it was savage therapy. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not any specific individual, but he
did
hurt people; consequently, he was not permitted to compete in the league.

Frank’s chronic pericarditis, arising from the rheumatoid arthritis, led to a virulent infection of the pericardium, which ultimately led to heart failure. Frank died two days before Joe’s eighteenth birthday.

The week following the funeral Mass, Joe visited the church after midnight, when it was deserted. He’d had too many beers. He sprayed black paint on all the stations of the cross. He overturned a cast-stone statue of Our Lady and smashed a score of the ruby-red glasses from the votive-candle rack.

He might have done considerably more damage if he had not quickly been overcome by a sense of futility. He could not teach remorse to God. He could not express his pain with sufficient power to penetrate the steel veil between this world and the next—if there was a next.

Slumping in the front pew, he wept.

He sat there less than a minute, however, because suddenly he felt that weeping in the church might seem to be an admission of his powerlessness. Ludicrously, he thought it important that his tears not be misconstrued as an acceptance of the cruelty with which the universe was ruled.

He left the church and was never apprehended for the vandalism. He felt no guilt about what he’d done—and, again, no pride.

For a while he was crazy, and then he went to college, where he fit in because half of the student body was crazy too, with youth, and the faculty with tenure.

His mother died just three years later, at the age of forty-seven. Lung cancer, spreading to the lymphatic system. She had never been a smoker. Neither had his father. Maybe it was the fumes of the benzine and other solvents in the dry cleaner’s shop. Maybe it was weariness, loneliness, and a way out.

The night she died, Joe sat at her bedside in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cold compresses on her brow, and slipping slivers of ice into her parched mouth when she asked for them, while she spoke sporadically, half coherently, about a Knights of Columbus dinner dance to which Frank had taken her when Joe was only two, the year before the accident and amputation. There was a big band with eighteen fine musicians, playing genuine dance music, not just shake-in-place rock-’n’-roll. She and Frank were self-taught in the fox-trot, swing, and the cha-cha, but they weren’t bad. They knew each other’s moves. How they laughed. There were balloons, oh, hundreds of balloons, suspended in a net from the ceiling. The centerpiece on each table was a white plastic swan holding a fat candle surrounded by red chrysanthemums. Dessert was ice cream in a sugar swan. It was a night of swans. The balloons were red and white, hundreds of them. Holding her close in a slow dance, he whispered in her ear that she was the most beautiful woman in the room, and oh, how he loved her. A revolving ballroom chandelier cast off splinters of colored light, the balloons came down, red and white, and the sugar swan tasted of almonds when it crunched between the teeth. She was twenty-nine years old the night of the dance, and she relished this memory and no other through the final hour of her life, as though it had been the last good time she could recall.

Joe buried her from the same church that he had vandalized three years earlier. The stations of the cross had been restored. A new statue of the Holy Mother watched over a full complement of votive glasses on the tiered rack.

Later, he expressed his grief in a bar fight. His nose was broken, but he did worse damage to the other guy.

He stayed crazy until he met Michelle.

On their first date, as he had returned her to her apartment, she had told him that he had a wild streak a foot wide. When he’d taken that as a compliment, she had told him that only a moron, a hormone-crazed pubescent boy, or an ape in the zoo would be witless enough to take pride in it.

Thereafter, by her example, she taught him everything that was to shape his future. That love was worth the risk of loss. That anger harms no one more than he who harbors it. That both bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate. That peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change. That friends and family are the blood of life, and that the purpose of existence is caring, commitment.

Six days before their wedding, in the evening, Joe went alone to the church from which he’d buried his parents. Having calculated the cost of the damage he’d done years before, he stuffed a wad of hundred-dollar bills into the poor box.

He made the contribution neither because of guilt nor because his faith was regained. He did it for Michelle, though she would never know of the vandalism or of this act of restitution.

Thereafter, his life had begun.

And then ended one year ago.

Now Nina was in the world again, waiting to be found, waiting to be brought home.

With the hope of finding Nina as balm, Joe was able to take the heat out of his anger. To recover Nina, he must be totally in control of himself.

Anger harms no one more than he who harbors it.

He was ashamed by how quickly and absolutely he had turned away from all the lessons that Michelle had taught him. With the fall of Flight 353, he too had fallen, had plummeted out of the sky into which Michelle had lifted him with her love, and had returned to the mud of bitterness. His collapse was a dishonor to her, and now he felt a sting of guilt as sharp as he might have felt if he’d betrayed her with another woman.

Nina, mirror of her mother, offered him the reason and the chance to rebuild himself into a reflection of the person he had been before the crash. He could become again a man worthy of being her father.

Nine-ah, Neen-ah, have you seen her?

He leafed slowly through his treasure trove of mental images of Nina, and the effect was soothing. Gradually, his clenched hands relaxed.

He began the last hour of the flight by reading two of the four printouts of articles about Teknologik that he had retrieved from the
Post
computer the previous afternoon.

In the second, he came upon a piece of information that stunned him. Thirty-nine percent of Teknologik’s stock, the largest single block, was owned by Nellor et Fils, a Swiss holding company with extensive and diverse interests in drug research, medical research, medical publishing, general publishing, and the film and broadcasting industries.

Nellor et Fils was the principal vehicle by which Horton Nellor and his son, Andrew, invested the family fortune, which was thought to be in excess of four billion dollars. Nellor was not Swiss, of course, but American. He had taken his base of operations offshore a long time ago. And more than twenty years ago, Horton Nellor had founded the
Los Angeles Post
. He still owned it.

For a while, Joe fingered his astonishment as though he were a whittler with an intriguingly shaped piece of driftwood, trying to decide how best to carve it. As in raw wood, something waited here to be discovered by the craftsman’s hand; his knives were his mind and his journalistic instinct.

Horton Nellor’s investments were widespread, so it might mean nothing whatsoever that he owned pieces of both Teknologik and the
Post
. Probably pure coincidence.

He owned the
Post
outright and was not an absentee publisher concerned only about profit; through his son, he exerted control over the editorial philosophy and the reportorial policies of the newspaper. He might not be so intimately involved, however, with Teknologik, Inc. His stake in that corporation was large but not in itself a controlling interest, so perhaps he was not engaged in the day-to-day operations, treating it only as a stock investment.

In that case, he was not necessarily personally aware of the top-secret research Rose Tucker and her associates had undertaken. And he was not necessarily carrying any degree of responsibility for the destruction of Flight 353.

Joe recalled his encounter the previous afternoon with Dan Shavers, the business-page columnist at the
Post
. Shavers pungently characterized the Teknologik executives:
infamous self-aggrandizers, think of themselves as some kind of business royalty, but they are no better than us. They, too, answer to He Who Must Be Obeyed.

He Who Must Be Obeyed. Horton Nellor. Reviewing the rest of the brief conversation, Joe realized that Shavers had assumed that Joe knew of Nellor’s interest in Teknologik. And the columnist seemed to have been implying that Nellor asserted his will at Teknologik no less than he did at the
Post.

Joe also flashed back to something Lisa Peccatone had said in the kitchen at the Delmann house when the relationship between Rose Tucker and Teknologik was mentioned:
You and me and Rosie all connected. Small world, huh?

At the time, he had thought she was referring to the fact that Flight 353 had become a spring point in the arcs of all their lives. Maybe what she really meant was that all of them worked for the same man.

Joe had never met Horton Nellor, who had become something of a recluse over the years. He’d seen photographs, of course. The billionaire, now in his late sixties, was silver-haired and round-faced, with pleasing if somewhat blurred features. He looked like a muffin on which, with icing, a baker had painted a grandfather face.

He did not appear to be a killer. He was known as a generous philanthropist. His reputation was not that of a man who would hire assassins or condone murder in the maintenance or expansion of his empire.

Human beings, however, were different from apples and oranges: The flavor of the peel did not reliably predict the taste of the pulp.

The fact remained that Joe and Michelle had worked for the same man as those who now wanted to kill Rose Tucker and who—in some as yet incomprehensible manner—had evidently destroyed Nationwide 353. The money that had long supported his family was the same money that had financed their murders.

His response to this revelation was so complexly tangled that he could not quickly unknot it, so dark that he could not easily see the entire shape of it.

Greasy fingers of nausea seined his guts.

Although he stared out the window for perhaps half an hour, he was not aware of the desert surrendering to the suburbs or the suburbs to the city. He was surprised when he realized that they were descending toward LAX.

On the ground, as they taxied to the assigned gate and as the telescoping mobile corridor was linked like an umbilical between the 737 and the terminal, Joe checked his wristwatch, considered the distance to Westwood, and calculated that he would be at least half an hour early for his meeting with Demi. Perfect. He wanted enough time to scope the meeting place from across the street and a block away before committing himself to it.

Demi should be reliable. She was Rose’s friend. He had gotten her number from the message that Rose had left for him at the
Post
. But he wasn’t in the mood to trust anyone.

After all, even if Rose Tucker’s motives had been pure, even if she had kept Nina with her to prevent Teknologik from killing or kidnapping the girl, she had nevertheless withheld Joe’s daughter from him for a year. Worse, she had allowed him to go on thinking that Nina—like Michelle and Chrissie—was dead. For reasons that he could not yet know, perhaps Rose would
never
want to return his little girl to him.

Trust no one.

As he got up from his seat and started forward toward the exit, he noticed a man in white slacks, white shirt, and white Panama hat rise from a seat farther forward in the cabin and glance back at him. The guy was about fifty, stockily built, with a thick mane of white hair that made him look like an aging rock star, especially under that hat.

This was no stranger.

For an instant, Joe thought that perhaps the man was, in fact, a lowercase celebrity—a musician in a famous band or a character actor from television. Then he was certain that he had seen him not on screen or stage but elsewhere, recently, and in significant circumstances.

Mr. Panama looked away from him after a fraction of a second of eye contact, stepped into the aisle, and moved forward. Like Joe, he was not burdened by any carry-on luggage, as though he had been on a day trip.

Eight or ten passengers were between the day-tripper and Joe. He was afraid he would lose track of his quarry before he figured out where he had previously seen him. He couldn’t push along the narrow aisle past the intervening passengers without causing a commotion, however, and he preferred not to let Mr. Panama know that he had been spotted.

When Joe tried to use the distinctive hat as a prod to memory, he came up blank, but when he pictured the man without the hat and focused on the flowing white hair, he thought of the blue-robed cult members with the shaven heads. The connection eluded him, seemed absurd.