Back in France, Gluck received a letter twelve days later. The engineer had stuck his neck out and alerted a woman of his acquaintance — a little younger than Gluck (although thank god not too much), living in Spring Hill to the north of Tampa — who, like him, had recently lost a spouse, was just as eager as he to escape her solitude, and whose name was, why not, Valentine Anderson. After sacrificing an entire pad of letter paper, Gluck forced himself to write an acceptable reply before leaving on another trip.
This time he was going to study the site of a future bridge in Sicily, twenty years in the planning and potentially the longest suspension bridge in the world: although the bridge was at risk — situated in a highly active earthquake zone, fought over by architects, hated by local ferryboat companies, coveted by the Mafia — it would one day finally link that island to Calabria. When Gluck got home, he found another letter, with a stamp featuring some pelicans in flight that had been canceled in Palm Harbor and, inside the envelope, a photograph of Valentine Anderson that wasn’t bad.
They continued to correspond throughout the winter; then came the spring, which they both thought would be a good season for meeting at last. With this in mind, Gluck examined his travel schedule. He had planned to visit Yugoslavia, this time to attend, at the end of March, the inauguration of the Krk bridge, notable for possessing the longest concrete arch, a new world record he couldn’t pass up.
Once the mechanical-doll officers at Krk, in their starred caps and uniforms weighted with several rows of medals, had cut the ribbon for this new bridge, to the accompaniment of the national anthem, “Hej, Sloveni,”3 in a wind that set their chest medals waltzing and played havoc with the musicians’ hair, Gluck took time to admire the interplay of colors of the milk-white arch supporting its chalky deck beneath a Nattier4 blue sky before he went on home. During the month after Krk, Gluck had intended to visit the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which he’d never seen and, as it happened, was right in the state where Valentine Anderson lived, so that worked out not too badly.
He made an appointment with her to meet at the bridge on a May morning; they’d each arrive by opposite ends and could rendezvous in the middle. But no, after alclass="underline" maybe too complicated, meeting there. Fine, let’s say at the south entrance to the bridge. In any case that seemed a good idea, certainly a good time of year, because the weather would surely be very lovely the way Florida always is in May.
•••
In the early hours of the morning on May 9, all over Florida, the weather was not looking so lovely after all because a storm had sprung up west of the Gulf of Mexico and begun moving toward Tampa Bay. This disturbance was not exceptionally large, yet it had started producing in its travels enough lightning to make the meteorologists of the coastal stations worry about its electrical strength and decide to take basic precautions.
It was getting close to seven thirty. Captain Ray Bunter, an experienced harbor pilot, had therefore been sent out on his fifty-six-foot Skimmer of the Sea to escort the hulking Summit Venture, a bulk carrier built four years earlier in Nagasaki. Bunter’s job was to guide the cargo ship, designed as a phosphate freighter but sailing empty that day, through the dangerous waters of the bay but especially between the piers of the bridge between Saint Petersburg and Palmetto. As for this bridge, opened in 1954, it was a steel cantilever structure that answered to the name of the Sunshine Skyway even though the sun and sky, for the moment, seemed forgotten by land and sea.
On this bridge, among the stream of vehicles flowing from its northern entrance, a beige Oldsmobile was carrying a man and his dog without either of them noticing behind them, barely visible in the rearview mirror, the white Chevrolet with a black accent stripe. The Chevy, an Impala “bubble top,” was advancing to the beat of “One Step Beyond”—covered by the band Madness, 28th on the charts that week — on the car radio and in time to which, on the steering wheel, were tapping the polished nails of Valentine Anderson.
As for Gluck, disappointed by the lousy weather, he was waiting at the south end of the bridge. After flying into Orlando the day before, he had picked up his rental Caprice Classic at the airport, then headed down to Bradenton, where he’d stayed overnight at a Marriott. The darkness of that night was prolonged by that of the storm as Gluck, up early, reached the entrance to the Sunshine Skyway. He drove to some flat ground set up as a parking lot a hundred yards from the bridge and bordered by three shacks. He stayed in his car at first, watching the traffic through the murk; then the drizzle that had fallen since dawn deteriorated into pounding rain, sweeping across the bay in violent and erratic bursts of wind. Before leaving his car, Gluck turned up his coat collar and equipped himself with a hat and umbrella beneath which he made his way to one of the shacks, where he got himself coffee and a doughnut. After consuming these under the shack’s awning, he walked over to the south entrance of the bridge, carrying the umbrella emblazoned with the heat-bonded logo of the Marriott, and began to wait; the rendezvous would be there.
The way Captain Bunter saw it, the Skimmer of the Sea was on a routine piloting job. This was hardly his first freighter, no matter what its size. Matchless in his ability to blaze a trail for them in his light craft, he had always known how to guide vessels of the highest tonnage among the shoals of Tampa Bay and the winding bends of its channels. Meanwhile, on the deck of the Summit Venture, three men in slickers kept an eye on the marking buoys strategically set out by the crew of the pilot’s boat to show where the freighter should turn in the fairway.
With the sky gone black and the sea fading beneath the streaming heavens now raging rinforzando, visibility was approaching zero. The ship continued to advance, however, even though the man at the wheel no longer saw anything around him but a vast sheet of rain, while Gluck was having increasing trouble clearly distinguishing the lines of cars that, disappearing onto the bridge, passed those leaving it at a pace steadily weakened by the foul weather. Even the rumbling of car motors was fainter, now confused with that of the battering storm, and horns grew too discouraged to honk.
Through opaque glass furiously swept by long windshield wipers and weeping with condensation inside the cabin, Captain Bunter at his helm suddenly saw looming before him — out of nowhere, almost close enough to touch — a vast dark mass. It was a main pier of the Sunshine Skyway and, driven by winds and currents, he had come upon it much sooner than expected. The captain had time only to shout for engines full astern, but too late. Blindly following in the wake of the harbor pilot — who only just managed to skirt the obstacle — the Summit Venture plowed hard into a support piling of the southbound span. The bridge did not immediately react too badly: as the freighter rebounded slightly from the collision before stopping dead in the water, a few chunks of concrete and steel began falling around it, some of them crashing straight onto the bow, where they undertook to damage the sheathing and bash in the deck beams.
Shaken by the impact, the Sunshine Skyway at first kept shedding elements of its superstructure, with girders and beams plummeting and sailing heavily around the vicinity. These black shapes in the gray air were hardly recognizable, massive dark lumps no one had the heart to identify — or the time, either. The noise of their fracture and fall was not yet clearly discernable, amid the clamor of the churning waves and howling wind, but when the support pier began to collapse, it did so in a violent concert of erratic booms and snapping ruptures, vicious screeching and deep groans amplified by an avalanche of braces, traverse beams, spacers, pieces of metal as sharp as a guillotine blade and bolts the size of baby carriages.