Raymond Szabo

Raymond Szabo is 47 and has been night cargo supervisor at Valkyr Air for twelve years. He was born in Newark, the son of a Hungarian welder and a seamstress, and came to the airport at 35, after two hardware stores that closed and a marriage that did not last. He started stacking boxes on the graveyard shift and rose because he was the only one who knew by heart what each flight brought and where each package was going.

He lives in a two-room apartment in Ozone Park, Queens, four flights up above a laundromat. He buys ground coffee on the corner, keeps the kettle always hot and stores half a dozen cans of beer in the fridge that he rarely opens. He sleeps by day, with the curtain drawn and the radio low, and wakes in the late afternoon to eat dinner standing up, looking at the street. The neighbors only ever see him in a jacket, coming or going.

He is 47 but looks older: pale skin, deep dark circles, black hair combed back with brilliantine, long sideburns, a thin mustache he trims with too much care. He wears a brown shirt with a wide collar under a blue nylon jacket with the company badge. He is too friendly for someone who works at night: he offers cigarettes and coffee to everyone, speaks softly and answers like someone who has rehearsed the answer in the mirror.

About the terminal, his account is that of a man who knows the building like the back of his hand. He says the shipment that vanished was money coming back from Germany, that every shipment sleeps there a night or two and that this is no secret to anyone on the shift. About the night of the robbery, he claims he was in bed, with a fever, and only learned what happened from the radio, at six in the morning. He adds, unasked, that the gate guard leaves the booth on fight nights and that the company is the only one that doesn't know.

Raymond knows that a night supervisor is the first name the police write down when the vault turns up empty. When the detective accuses him head-on, the smile vanishes at once: he recalls his twelve years with the company and says that without proof he has nothing more to say. It may be the pride of a man who gave his life to a shift nobody wants. It may be a man who rehearsed everything except the next question. The detective will have to decide which.