drama for them tonight.”
While Elliot Freemantle was speaking, he was also observing shrewdly the progress of the legal forms, retaining himself as legal counsel for individual homeowners, which were now circulating through the hall. Many of the forms — at least a hundred, he estimated — had been signed and passed forward. He had watched ballpoint pens appear, husbands and wives bend over the documents to sign jointly, thus committing each family to payment of a hundred dollars. Lawyer Freemantle did some happy calculation: a hundred completed retainers meant ten thousand dollars for himself. Not a bad fee for — so far — an evening’s work, and in the end the total fee would be a great deal more.
While the forms were still circulating, he decided, he would continue talking for a few minutes longer.
As to what was going to happen at the airport tonight, he instructed his listeners, they were to leave that to him. He hoped there would be a confrontation with the airport’s management; in any case, he intended to stage a demonstration — within the airport terminal — which people would remember.
“All I ask is that you stay together and that you raise your voices only when I tell you.”
Emphatically, he cautioned, there would be no disorder. No one must be able to say next day that the Meadowood anti-noise delegation violated any law.
“Of course” — Freemantle smiled suggestively — “we may get in the way and cause some inconvenience; I understand that the airport is extremely busy tonight. But we can’t help that.”
There was laughter again. He sensed that people were ready to go.
Still another aircraft reverberated overhead, and he waited until the sound had died.
“Very well! Let us be on our way!” Lawyer Freemantle raised his hands like a jet-age Moses, and misquoted: “For I have promises to keep, with much ado before I sleep.”
The laughter changed to renewed cheering, and people began moving toward the doors.
It was then that he had noticed the portable p.a. system, borrowed from the Meadowood First Baptist Church, and instructed that it be brought along. Floyd Zanetta, the meeting’s chairman — virtually ignored since Elliot Freemantle eclipsed him in attention — hurried to comply.
Freemantle himself was stuffing signed retainer forms into his briefcase. A quick count showed that he had underestimated earlier — there were over a hundred and sixty forms, or more than sixteen thousand dollars’ worth of collectible fees. In addition, many who had come forward to shake his hand within the past few minutes, assured him they would mail their own forms, along with checks, in the morning. Lawyer Freemantle glowed.
He had no real plan as to what would happen at the airport, any more than he had arrived tonight with a fixed idea about how to take over this meeting. Elliot Freemantle disliked fixed ideas. He preferred to improvise, to get situations rolling, then direct them this way or that, to his own advantage. His freewheeling methods had worked once already this evening; he saw no reason why they should not do so again.
The main thing was to keep these Meadowood homeowners convinced that they had a dynamic leader who would eventually produce results. Furthermore, they must remain convinced until the four quarterly payments, which the legal retainer agreements called for, were made. After that, when Elliot Freemantle had his money in the bank, the opinions were less important.
So he had to keep this situation lively, he reasoned, for ten or eleven months — and he would do it. He would give these people all the dynamism they could want. There would be need for some more meetings and demonstrations like tonight’s because those made news. Too often, court proceedings didn’t. Despite what he had said a few minutes ago about legal proceedings being a base, any sessions in court were likely to be unspectacular and possibly unprofitable. Of course, he would do his best to introduce some histrionics, though quite a few judges nowadays were wise to Lawyer Freemantle’s attention-creating tactics, and curtailed them sternly.
But there were no real problems, providing he remembered — as he always did in these affairs — that the most important factor was the care and feeding of Elliot Freemantle.
He could see one of the reporters, Tomlinson of the
The crowd was thinning. Time to go!
10
Near the airport’s floodlighted main entrance, the flashing red beacon of the state police car died. The patrol car, which had preceded Joe Patroni from the site of the wrecked tractor-trailer, slowed, and the state trooper at the wheel pulled over to the curb, waving the TWA maintenance chief past. Patroni accelerated. As his Buick Wildcat swept by, Patroni waved his cigar in salutation and honked his horn twice.
Although the last stage of Joe Patroni’s journey had been accomplished with speed, overall it had taken more than three hours to cover a distance — from his home to the airport — which normally took forty minutes. Now, he hoped, he could make good some of the lost time.
Fighting the snow and slippery road surface, he cut swiftly through the stream of terminal-bound traffic and swung onto a side road to the airport’s hangar area. At a sign, “TWA Maintenance,” he wheeled the Buick sharply right. A few hundred yards farther on, the airline’s maintenance hangar loomed towering and massive. The main doors were open; he drove directly in.
Inside the hangar a radio-equipped pickup truck, with driver, was waiting; it would take Patroni onto the airfield — to the mired Aereo-Mexican jet, still obstructing runway three zero. Stepping from his car, the maintenance chief paused only long enough to relight his cigar — ignoring “no smoking” regulations — then hoisted his stocky figure into the truck cab. He instructed the driver, “Okay, son, push that needle round the dial.”
The truck raced away, Patroni obtaining radio clearance from the tower as they went. Once away from the lighted hangar area, the driver stayed close to taxi lights, the only guide — in the white-tinted gloom — to where paved surfaces began and ended. On instructions from the tower they halted briefly near a runway while a DC-9 of Delta Air Lines landed in a flurry of snow and rolled by with a thunder of reversed jet thrust. The ground controller cleared them across the runway, then added, “Is that Joe Patroni?”
“Yep.”
There was an interval while the controller dealt with other traffic, then: “Ground control to Patroni. We have a message from the airport manager’s office. Do you read?”
“This’s Patroni. Go ahead.”
“Message begins: Joe, I’ll bet you a box of cigars against a pair of ball tickets that you can’t get that stuck airplane clear of three zero tonight, and I’d like you to win. Signed, Mel Bakersfeld. End of message.”
Joe Patroni chuckled as he depressed the transmit button. “Patroni to ground control. Tell him he’s on.”
Replacing the radio mike, he urged the truck driver, “Keep her moving, son. Now I got me an incentive.”
At the blocked intersection of runway three zero, the Aereo-Mexican maintenance foreman, Ingram — whom Mel Bakersfeld had talked with earlier — approached the pickup as it stopped. The foreman was still huddled into a parka, shielding his face as best he could from the biting wind and snow.
Joe Patroni bit off the end of a fresh cigar, though this time without lighting it, and descended from the truck cab. On the way out from the hangar he had changed from the overshoes he had been wearing into heavy fleece- lined boots; high as the boots were, the deep snow came over them.
Patroni pulled his own parka around him and nodded to Ingram. The two men knew each other slightly.
“Okay,” Patroni said; he had to shout to make himself heard above the wind. “Gimme the poop.”
As Ingram made his report, the wings and fuselage of the stalled Boeing 707 loomed above them both, like an immense ghostly albatross. Beneath the big jet’s belly a red hazard light still winked rhythmically, and the collection of trucks and service vehicles, including a crew bus and roaring power cart, remained clustered on the taxiway side of the aircraft.
The Aereo-Mexican maintenance foreman summarized what had been done already: the removal of passengers, and the first abortive attempt to get the airplane moving under its own power. Afterward, he informed Joe Patroni, as much weight had been taken off as possible — freight, mail, baggage, with most of the fuel load
