The final meeting of the day was to preset strategy for dealing with (i.e., piano-wiring) the unions. The contracts were all in order, but the mechanics were the next ones out, and they were part of the Transport Workers Union, and that meant AFL-CIO and Crandall’s nemesis Lane Kirkland, and that meant hostage and holler tactics. Unbothered to look up, Crandall fired questions into the blue folder of Pat’s report. How many mechanics on disability? Overall liabilities are totaled on lines F and G? So what does AMR owe the pension in the next eighteen months? Break this out for over forty, and then over fifty, what’s that? Twenty-two percent of the cohort? And where does it factor the ’88 and ’89 cost-of-living adjustments? Finally he took off his glasses and held them up to the fluorescents and blew at the dust and smudges.

“So the number I need is at what age—if we bought out everyone—can I knock the teeth out of Kirkland’s jaw and divide the younger membership against the executive council?”

Pat slurped rather than sipped his drink. The Pharaoh Crandall relished this kind of corporate warfare. But gut too hard and what’s left? Pat worried. A bunch of junior mechanics, aging planes in disrepair traveling at five hundred miles an hour, horrific accidents, NTSB investigations, FAA penalties, and then bankrupting insurance premiums. But despite being chief actuary to the airline, Pat couldn’t bottom-line in his reports to Crandall the causation and cost of sticking it to the pinkos at the AFL-CIO.

“Pat, how’s Texas treating you? Did you buy any horses?” From the other side of the bar Reilly grinned like a joker, a cigarette pursed at his lips.

“I traded all my horses.”

“To the Injuns?”

“Something like that.”

Pat slid his empty rocks glass six inches toward his bartender.

“Good luck with this, Paddy.” Reilly poured Smirnoff heavy over the old ice and knocked on this third drink.

Pat gasped a bit at the strength of the martini. It was that ecstatic moment a drinker seeks, like the pins and needles after a sneeze, followed by a warm shudder.

Five years since Pat had left New York and the city did seem different. Sweeney’s was still hunkered down on the east side of Third Avenue between Thirty-Eighth and Thirty-Ninth, a half-out-of-the-way spot from the arteries that coursed toward Grand Central. No frills, just bottles and chasers, and a cast of shirtsleeves from the offices of the Daily News, Mobil Oil, and the Con Ed plant tucked behind Tudor City. It also drew the brass from Engine 21 and the scrubs from Bellevue (minus butterfly nets, as Reilly always joked). Plenty of Bronx and Queens Irish on turvy wooden stools below the typical bric-a-brac of Yankees pennants and road signs from County Monaghan.