"It's all so stupid," murmured Kelly, through hands covering her face as she sobbed.
"Cerberus," Pitt said quietly, barely audible above the cheering outside. "Someone-I don't know who yet-is going to Hades to meet him."
25
After the children's bumps and bruises caused from being knocked around during the fight with the Red Fokker and its unknown pilot were tended to by paramedics, they were reunited with their parents. Pitt stood by a grief-stricken Kelly as the body of her friend Mary Conrow was carried from the plane to an ambulance. After the police cordoned off the airplane, Pitt and Kelly were escorted to police cars to be taken to the nearest precinct for questioning.
Before he was led off, Pitt walked around the old Ford trimotor, amazed and saddened at the amount of punishment she had endured. Yet, she had miraculously hung in the air until he set her down safely in the Sheep Meadow. He studied the bullet-ripped tail section, the neatly stitched holes in the upper wings, the shattered cylinder heads on the two Pratt & Whitney engines, still crackling from the heat and emitting light swirls of smoke.
He laid a hand on the fender over a landing wheel and murmured, "Thank you."
Then he asked the po
lice officer in charge if they might stop by the wreckage of the Fokker before heading for the precinct. The officer nodded and motioned to the closest police car.
The red Fokker looked like a crumpled kite as it lay embedded in a huge elm tree twenty feet off the ground. Firemen, working from a ladder on a fire truck, were standing under the wreckage, staring up at the mangled plane. Pitt exited the police car and walked under the plane. He stopped and stared at the engine that had been torn from its mountings and was lying partially embedded in the grass. He was surprised to find it wasn't an updated, modern engine, but an original Oberursel 9 cylinder that put out 110 horsepower. Then he stared up into the open cockpit.
It was empty.
Pitt looked into the branches of the tree and then studied the ground beneath the plane. A leather flying jacket, along with a helmet and goggles, its lenses smeared with streaks of blood, was the only trace of the pilot.
Almost miraculously, he had vanished.
While Kelly was being interrogated by police officers, Pitt was allowed to call a local aircraft-maintenance company and arrange for the trimotor to be disassembled and trucked back to Washington, where he would have it repaired and reconstructed to her previous pristine condition by aircraft-restoration experts. Then he called Sandecker and reported on the situation.
His calls made, Pitt calmly sat at an empty desk in the precinct and worked on the New York Times crossword puzzle until he was called. He and Kelly embraced as she left the office where four detectives were waiting at a scarred oak desk that showed its age by the number of old cigarette burn marks on its surface.
"Mr. Pitt?" asked a small man with a thin mustache. The detective was coatless and wore narrow suspenders.
"That's my name."
"I'm Inspector Mark Hacken. My fellow detectives and I would like to ask you a few questions. Do you mind if we record the session?"
"Not at all."
Hacken made no offer to introduce the other three men in the room. None looked like the police as depicted on TV. They all appeared like ordinary neighbors who mowed their lawns every Saturday.
Hacken began by asking Pitt to talk about himself briefly, explain his job at NUMA and tell how he came to bring his old aircraft to the Disabled Children's Air Show benefit. The other detectives asked an occasional question but mosdy took notes, as Pitt described the flight from the moment he'd taken off with the disabled children from Gene Taylor Field until he'd landed on the Sheep Meadow in Central Park.
One of the detectives looked at Pitt and said, "I'm a pilot myself, and I hope you realize you could go to jail for your antics, not to mention losing your pilot's license."
Pitt gazed at the detective with a faint trace of a confident grin. "If saving the lives of fifteen disabled children makes me a criminal, so be it."
"You still might have accomplished that by not turning off the river and into the city streets."
"If I had not turned onto Wall Street when I did, we would have surely been shot down and crashed in the river. Trust me when I say there would have been no survivors."
"But you must admit, you took a terrible chance."
Pitt shrugged indifferently. "Obviously, I wouldn't be sitting here if I hadn't taken the gamble."
"Do you have any idea why the other pilot would risk a million-dollar aircraft, load it with antique operational weapons and attack an old plane full of disabled kids?" asked Hacken.
"I only wish I knew," said Pitt, sneaking past the question.
"So do I," said Hacken sarcastically.
"Do you have any idea who the pilot was?" Pitt asked in return.