Page 65 of Flight of Dreams

“You tried to go back to sleep.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Not if I wanted to keep my job. Which I do. As should you. So it would be really nice if you could stand up so I can help you to the shower.”

Werner has always known Max to be shrewd and intelligent and fiercely clever. So it’s no surprise that a small light goes off in his mind. It’s not enough to register the severity of the situation, but it’s a move in the right direction. Max slaps his wrist, looking for his watch. “What time is it?”

“Almost five.”

Max slumps at the news, relaxed. “So I’m not late for my shift?”

“Not yet. But you can’t go in looking like that. Shower. Coffee. Water. That’s what I was told you needed. And in that order.”

“Who told you that?”

“Wilhelm Balla.”

Werner has never heard such creative insults as what comes out of Max’s mouth at the sound of Balla’s name.

“Will you let me help you up? I can’t drag you all the way to the shower.”

Max considers this. Tries to stand. Wobbles badly. “I suppose so,” he says.

It’s something of a vaudeville act the way that Werner gathers the clothes and flashlight with one hand while keeping his friend vertical with the other, and even more impressive that he is able to get Max out the door and down the hall without falling over. If he’d not had so much practice with his father he would never have been able to pull it off. As it is, however, they barely make it to the shower without toppling over one another or crashing through one of the thin foam board walls.

“In you go,” Werner says, with Max draped over his shoulder as if he were a crutch. He gets the navigator situated as upright as possible beneath the shower nozzle, sets the clean clothes in a pile on the other side of the curtain, and turns the water on.

Max yelps and curses and stumbles backwards. The wall stops him from going ass over teakettle, but he swats at his face like a man being attacked by a swarm of bees. He tries to swipe the water out of his eyes but only succeeds in hitting himself.

“The rest is up to you,” Werner says. “Your clothes are here and I’ll be back in ten minutes. You might want to drink some of that water while you’re standing there.”

THE AMERICAN

The dog tag is missing. This realization is not new. He first discovered it was gone while at dinner last night with Captain Lehmann. The American had slipped his hand into his pocket, intending to pull it out with dramatic flair and set it on the table. He didn’t bother digging around. He could feel that it was gone. So he’d taken a sip of wine instead and allowed his mind the few seconds necessary to find a different course of action. He had given Lehmann the stewardess’s name as a boon, an act of good faith. Emilie Imhof. He’d spoken it with all the confidence of an informant, making it seem less like blackmail and more like charity by going first. So magnanimous of him. And in return? Well, his reward would come today. Lehmann had been skeptical, of course, and he wanted to test the American’s claim.

The tag is small. And the information engraved on it long since memorized. The American had simply requested pen and paper from Wilhelm Balla—it appears as though he’s stuck with the steward for the duration of the flight—then written the information down for Lehmann. He didn’t expect the captain to have a memory like his. Lehmann told him it will take a bit of time to collect the data. But he doesn’t mind waiting a few hours. It’s a reasonable sacrifice so long as he can move closer to his goal. The American’s real problem, and the thing that has kept him up half the night, is that the dog tag has fallen into the hands of a stranger. This is an unforgivable error on his part. Not just a miscalculation. A catastrophic mistake. The worst kind of misfortune.

Because the chance to kill the owner of that dog tag is the only reason he agreed to this mission. And he would sooner throw himself out the access hatch, onto the engine rotors, than miss it. But someone has his bartering piece. And if that someone is smart enough to figure out the owner’s identity and warn him, then many years of carefully planned revenge will be lost. And that is a scenario that the American simply cannot accept.

He’s on his feet pacing now, but he restrains the urge to kick the walls in frustration. The dog tag had been in his pocket at this time yesterday. He’d put it there in the morning, the cool weight of it seeping through his satin pocket liner into his skin, its bulk a necessary irritation. He had heard the small, metallic ping when he dropped his trousers onto the tile floor of the shower.

The American is still wearing yesterday’s clothes. He had thrown himself onto the berth fully dressed and lay there most of the night, fits of restless sleep enveloping him as he chased his thoughts in circles, like a mangy dog chewing its own tail. Fretting. Plotting. And the answer only comes to him now because exhaustion has filled the small wells inside his mind, poured itself into the hollows of his bones.

He lost the dog tag in the shower. Of course. Yes. An amateur mistake but there you have it.

He kicks his shoes off and lies back down on the bed. He crosses his hands over his chest and closes his eyes as though mimicking a corpse. The American sees it clearly now in this dream-like state as his limbs relax into the mattress.

He had shaken out his trousers before folding them. Years and years of military training had instilled this habit in him. He never wads his clothes into a ball and throws them in the hamper. He straightens and folds them along their crease lines instead. He sets them in orderly stacks and sends them to the cleaners.

The dog tag could still be in the shower, one part of his brain offers. This voice is the hopeful one, the one he has tried to systematically stomp to death over many years. He listens to it on rare occasions, but this is not one of them. No. The American is certain the dog tag was found. His job is to figure out by whom.

The art of extracting his own memories is something he learned from military interrogators. It was part of his training, albeit small, when they determined his particular gifts would be better used in other areas. His real job—not the one he performs for the advertising agency in Frankfurt—is to have conversations and repeat them to his handlers. He strikes up conversations and asks the right questions to the right people at the right moments. He finds his targets when they are unguarded. When they feel safe. In a bar or on a train or in a department store. He learns their secrets but almost never by force. His betrayals are acute and painful and personal. It’s a morally ambiguous career, to be sure, and not one that comes without consequence. But he is two decades in and has long since learned to justify the means and the ends and everything in between. He is not sorry for what he has done or what he is about to do. Usually it’s nothing personal, he thinks; this is what it takes to save the world.

So the American rewinds his brain and goes back over the day before. He begins in the shower, with that last moment that he had the dog tag, and he creates a mental marker of that moment when he shook out his trousers. He moves forward, one frame at a time, to everything that happened after that. Sneaking back to the cargo area. Watching the navigator and the cabin boy exit the ship. No. There’s nothing significant there, so he continues on. Paying the cabin boy to care for the dog. Breakfast. Watching Leonhard Adelt. His mind skitters a bit so he slows and carefully goes through his little monologue before the passengers. Gertrud Adelt entering the dining room. And there, like a flashbulb, he has it: damp curls hanging heavy against her chin. Pink skin warmed by the shower.

Gertrud Adelt was in the shower yesterday morning. Gertrud Adelt has the tag. This certainty comes to him at the exact moment that his mind officially surrenders to sleep. And because it is both a conscious thought and a dream it is tattooed into his memory. It will be his first thought upon waking.

THE NAVIGATOR