Eph stood very still at the open doorway. The lights from the taxiway shone through the tinted cockpit windshield, illuminating the flight deck. The system displays were all dark.
Jim said, “Eph, they’re saying to be very careful.”
“Tell them thanks for the expert technical advice,” said Eph before moving inside.
The system displays around the switches and throttles were all dark. One man wearing a pilot’s uniform sat slumped in a jump seat to Eph’s immediate right as he entered. Two more, the captain and his first officer, were seated in the twin chairs before the controls. The first officer’s hands lay curled and empty in his lap, his head drooped to the left with his hat still on. The captain’s left hand remained on a control lever, his right arm hanging off the armrest, knuckles brushing the carpeted floor. His head was forward, his hat resting in his lap.
Eph leaned over the control console between the two seats in order to push up the captain’s head. He checked the captain’s open eyes with his flashlight, the pupils fixed and dilated. He eased the man’s head back down gently onto his chest, and then stiffened.
He felt something. He sensed something. A presence.
He stepped back from the console and scanned the flight deck, turning in one complete circle.
Jim said, “What is it, Eph?”
Eph had spent enough time around corpses not to be jumpy. But there was something here … somewhere. Here or nearby.
The strange sensation passed, like a dizzy spell, leaving him blinking. He shook it off. “Nothing. Claustrophobia, probably.”
Eph turned to the third man inside the cockpit. His head hung low, his right shoulder propped up against the side wall. His jump seat harness straps hung down.
Eph said aloud, “Why isn’t he belted in?”
Nora said, “Eph, are you in the cockpit? I’m coming to you.”
Eph looked at the dead man’s silver tie pin with the Regis Air logo. The nameplate over his pocket read REDFERN. Eph dropped to one knee before him, pressing his thickly gloved fingers against the man’s temples to raise his face. His eyes were open and down turned. Eph checked his pupils, and thought he saw something. A glimmer. He looked again, and suddenly Captain Redfern shuddered and emitted a groan.
Eph jerked backward, falling between the two captains’ chairs and against the control console with a clatter. The first officer slumped against him, and Eph pushed back at him, trapped for a moment by the man’s limp, dead weight.
Jim’s voice called to him sharply, “Eph?”
Nora’s voice held a note of panic. “Eph, what is it?”
With a surge of energy, Eph propelled the first officer’s body back into its chair and got to his feet.
Nora said, “Eph, are you all right?”
Eph looked at Captain Redfern, spilled onto the floor now, eyes open and staring. His throat, though, was working, bucking, his open mouth seeming to gag on the air.
Eph said, wide-eyed, “We have a survivor here.”
Nora said, “What?”
“We have a man alive here. Jim, we need a Kurt isolation pod for this man. Brought directly to the wing. Nora?” Eph was talking fast, looking at the pilot twitching on the floor. “We have to go through this entire airplane, passenger by passenger.”
THE OLD MAN STOOD ALONE ON THE CRAMPED SALES floor of his pawnshop on East 118th Street, in Spanish Harlem. An hour after closing and his stomach was rumbling, yet he was reluctant to go upstairs. The gates were all pulled down over the doors and windows, like steel eyelids, the night people having claimed the streets outside. At night, you don’t go out.
He went to the bank of dimmers behind the loan desk, and darkened the store lamp by lamp. He was in an elegiac mood. He looked at his shop, the display cases of chrome and streaked glass. The wristwatches showcased on felt instead of velvet, the polished silver he couldn’t get rid of, the bits of diamond and gold. The full tea sets under glass. The leather coats and now-controversial furs. The new music players that went fast, and the radios and televisions he didn’t bother taking in anymore. And there were, here and there, treasures: a pair of beautiful antique safes (lined with asbestos, but just don’t eat it); a suitcase-size wood-and-steel Quasar VCR from the 1970s; an antique 16mm film projector.
But, on balance, lots of low-turnover junk. A pawnshop is part bazaar, part museum, part neighborhood reliquary. The pawnbroker provides a service no one else can. He is the poor man’s banker, someone people can come to and borrow twenty-five dollars with no concern as to credit history, employment, references. And, in the grip of an economic recession, twenty-five dollars is real money to many people. Twenty-five dollars can mean the difference between shelter or homelessness. Twenty-five dollars can put life-prolonging medicine within reach. So long as a man or woman has collateral, something of value to borrow against, he or she can walk out of his door with cash in hand. Beautiful.
He trudged on upstairs, turning out more lights as he went. He was fortunate to own his building, bought in the early 1970s for seven dollars and change. Okay, maybe not for so little, but not for so much either. They were burning down buildings for heat back then. Knickerbocker Loans and Curios (the name came with the shop) was never a means to wealth for Setrakian, but rather a conduit, a point of entry into the pre-Internet underground marketplace of the crossroads city of the world, for a man interested in Old World tools, artifacts, curios, and other arcana.
Thirty-five years of haggling over cheap jewelry by day, while amassing tools and armaments by night. Thirty-five years of biding his time, of preparation and waiting. Now his time was running out.
At the door, he touched the mezuzah and kissed his crooked, wrinkled fingertips before entering. The ancient mirror in the hallway was so scratched and faded that he had to crane his neck in order to find a reflective patch in which to view himself. His alabaster white hair, starting high up on his creased forehead and sweeping back below his ears and neck, was long overdue for a trim. His face continued to fall, his chin and earlobes and eyes succumbing to that bully named gravity. His hands, so broken and badly mended so many decades before, had curved into arthritic talons that he kept permanently hidden behind wool gloves with cut-off fingertips. Yet, beneath and within this crumbling facade of a man: strength. Fire. Grit.
The secret of his interior wellspring of youth? One simple element.
Revenge.
Many years before, in Warsaw and later in Budapest, there was a man named Abraham Setrakian who had been an esteemed professor of Eastern European literature and folklore. A Holocaust survivor who survived the scandal of marrying a student, and whose field of study took him to some of the darkest corners of the world.
Now, an aged pawnbroker in America, still haunted by unfinished business.
He had good soup left over, delicious chicken soup with kreplach and egg noodles, that a regular had brought him all the way from Liebman’s, in the Bronx. He put the bowl in the microwave and worked at his loose necktie knot with his gnarled fingers. After the beeping, he carried the hot bowl over to the table, pulling a linen napkin—never paper!—from the holder and tucking it snugly into his collar.
Blowing on soup. A ritual of comfort, of reassurance. He remembered his grandmother, his bubbeh—but this was more than mere memory; it was sense, a feeling—blowing on it for him when he was a boy, sitting next to him at the rickety wooden table in the cold kitchen of their house in Romania. Before the troubles. Her old breath stirring the rising steam into his young face, the quiet magic of that simple act. Like blowing life into the child. And now, as he blew, an old man himself, he watched his breath given shape by the steam, and wondered