Shuttered Sky

restraining chair had popped open, leaving him in a naked state of release. He felt a weightless joy that stood out in such stark contrast to the bleakness of Birkenau. And he cried. He cried for the joy that came with the completion that Dillon had given him and he cried with sorrow for every life here that would neither be avenged nor restored.

“Go,” he told them without looking up at them. “Take anything you need. Do whatever it was you are meant to do. Just go.”

And then he turned from them, looking out over the ruins before him. “Yitgadal v’yitkadach sh’ mei raba.” Alone he recited the mourners’ kaddish, for all those here, and the millions of others whose bones and ashes were spread across the fields of Europe. The millions whose lives were sacrificed so the world could know the meaning of injustice.

* * *

Maddy had known even before Tessic did that their little endeavor ended here. She had been within Dillon’s field enough to know the instant his influence ceased. She had feared, at first, that he had died. But then he came out of that gate with Winston, wearing that beatific grin—an expression both leaden and weightless. Moses descending Sinai. One look at his face, and she understood. Whatever he was on this earth to do, whatever his so- called “purpose,” he had finally been primed. His will had triumphed over his power, and he had finally reined himself in. She found herself unexpectedly angered, but not for the same reason Tessic was. Maddy had always known that Dillon had a spark of something divine—but to see that spark kindle and her not be caught up in the flame—to be just another outsider like the rest of Tessic’s revival crew—it was too much to bear. The only thing that kept her from running AWOL right there was Tessic. Damn Tessic, crying at the gate of the camp after Dillon had denied him his final victory. Someone had to tend to the man.

Maddy had prepared Dillon’s way at Majdanek, then here, going before him like John the Baptist, preparing the way for the lord. And in doing so, it connected her again, making her more a fulcrum than a gear in Tessic’s grand machine of revival. It was heady and glorious. . . but in the end it wasn’t meant to be.

As she watched Dillon walk away from Tessic, away from her, she suppressed her own emotions, and filled her mind with the reality that it was over. It was all over.

I will not be a victim of this.

She had to find the opportunity here.

My life will not rise and fall with the coming and going of Dillon Cole.

Tessic would need someone to clean up this mess. He would need someone to dismantle his machine and assess losses. She had to look out for herself now. Her strength had always been in crisis control. Intui­tive improvisation in dire circumstance. Her only future now would be in Tessic’s organization, and if she succeeded in damage control and got Tessic out of this mess unscathed, surely she’d be set for life. Dillon be damned—she was tired of the big picture. Life larger than life left her depleted. It was time to enjoy the pleasures of being small, selfish and petty. Yet imagining herself as Tessic’s right hand in the world of arms manufacture only added to the chill of this horrible place.

They all followed in Dillon’s and Winston’s wake back through Auschwitz I, to the parking lot, and the waiting gauntlet of helicopters. Dillon and Winston went to one of the helicopters—not the lead one that had brought them here—that was for Tessic’s personal use. Instead they approached one of the support helicopters, but Ari, Tessic’s per­sonal pilot, began beckoning them back to the lead copter like a side­show barker.

“Come,” she heard him say, over the confusion that now rose in Tessic’s ranks. “Come, I take you where you want to go. Come.”

There was something markedly off about his overtures. Before this moment it seemed all Ari had wanted to do was fly Tessic around and get into Maddy’s pants. Hearing him now—feeling the way he pulled Dillon’s attention filled her with an unsettling vertigo. It was sensation strong enough to send her to intercept.

She reached Ari before Dillon and Winston did.

“You’re Tessic’s pilot,” she reminded. “You need to get him out of here. Don’t go volunteering your services without his permission.” Then he smiled at her—a grin that crossed well over the line from mischievous to lascivious. If the time were different she might have put him in the hospital for such a demeaning, objectifying look.

Dillon called from somewhere behind her, and she didn’t turn to look. “One of the other pilots will do fine,” he told Ari. “You take care of Tessic.”

Again that grin from Ari. He didn’t meet Dillon’s eyes—he ap­peared to turn his face away intentionally, but then maybe it was just the wind. Instead he kept his gaze fixed on Maddy. “I fly you then,” he said. “Fly you to the moon, like the song. This I will enjoy.”

“Get in there, start it up, and wait for Tessic,” she told him, dis­gusted.

He broke his discomfiting gaze. “Of course,” he said. “I was only trying to do the good thing.” He sauntered off toward his helicopter calmly, as if they weren’t standing at the mouth of Auschwitz in the middle of three hundred empty, idling buses.

When she turned, she bumped into Dillon, who had decided to offer her a single shining moment of his time before disappearing into the blue.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

“Same as you,” she answered. “We’ll all get the hell out of here. You don’t linger at a failed mission.”

“And then?”

“Sorry, that’s as far into the future as I’m willing to think right now.”

Dillon glanced back at a helicopter where Winston was already giving instructions to another pilot. Tessic had arrived and was nodding his approval. With Tessic’s carte blanche, the two of them really could have hitched a rocket to the moon if they wanted. But apparently they had another destination in mind.

“Winston and I have a date in Greece,” he told her.

Greece, she thought. Do I want to know what this is about? She decided that she didn’t.

“For someone who’s supposed to bring order, you left a hell of a mess.”

He kissed her. It was tender, it was sincere, and she hated him for it, because they both knew it was a kiss good-bye. She was now a part of his past, and there was no chair she could lock him in to change that.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll clean up.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. She didn’t know which of the hundred things both large and small he was sorry for, but it didn’t matter. He was what he was. As Drew had said, he was a star. Stars burn, stars blind. Stars trap lesser bodies in perpetual orbit. This was the way with Dillon. Space curved around his luminescence, keeping him forever at the center of her longings, and still a million miles away.

She watched as his helicopter ascended and the sound of its beating blades dissolved into the wind.

When she turned, she saw Ari still lingering, watching her. Tessic was already in the helicopter, but Ari didn’t seem to care. He took his time in the turmoil building around him smoking a cigarette.

“Do your job!” she told him. “Get Tessic out of here.”

He flicked his cigarette to the ground, tossing her another un­seemly grin, then got in the helicopter.

There’s something wrong about him, she thought in the back of her mind, but brushed the thought aside. After all, everything here was wrong, twisted, and schizophrenic. Isn’t that what was happening to the world? Minds and emotions were disconnecting everywhere—why should Tessic’s pilot be different?

Much later, she would regret that she hadn’t taken this bit of in­tuition more seriously.

PART VI -THE SHATTERED SKY

34. The Shell Of Atlantis