uniform out of the tail of his eye, and he rejected her, realizing that stewardesses, like nurses, were something a man made do with in strange towns when there was not time to seek women.
'Veblen had a phrase for that.' Her voice was like a flow of warm honey.
Surprised by erudition in a stewardess, he closed the book on his lap and looked up into the calm, amused eyes. Soft brown with harlequin flecks of gold. 'The phrase would apply equally to Mimi in the last act.'
She laughed lightly: strong white teeth and slightly petulant lips. Then she checked his name off a list on a clipboard, and walked aft to deal with other passengers. With unabashed curiosity, he examined her taut bottom with its characteristic African shape that lifts black women to so convenient an angle. Then he sighed and shook his head. He returned to the Riemanschneider study, but his eyes moved over the pages without the words getting to his brain. Later he took notes; then he dozed.
'Shit?' she asked, her lips close to his ear.
He woke and turned his head to look up at her. 'Pardon me?' The movement brought her bust to within three inches of his nose, but he kept his eyes on hers.
She laughed—again the harlequin flecks of gold in the brown eyes—and sat back on the armrest.
'You
'No. I didn't say it. I asked it.'
'Does that go along with coffee, tea, and milk?'
'Only on our competitors' lines. I was reading over your shoulder, and I saw the word 'shit' with two exclamation points on your notepad. So I asked.'
'Ah. It was a comment on the content of this book I'm reviewing.'
'A study of scatology?'
'No. A shoddy piece of research obfuscated by crepuscular logic and involute style.'
She grinned. 'I can stand crepuscular logic, but involute style really makes my ass tired.'
Jonathan enjoyed the raised oriental corners of her eyes in which a hint of derision lurked. 'I refuse to believe you're a stewardess.'
'As in: What's a girl like you doing in...? Actually, I'm not a stewardess at all. I'm a high-jacker in drag.'
'That's reassuring. What's your name?'
'Jemima.'
'Stop it.'
'I'm not putting you on. That's really my name. Jemima Brown. My mother was hooked on ethnic lore.'
'Have it your way. So long as we both admit that it's clearly too much for a black girl to have a name like that.'
'I don't know. People don't forget you if your name is Jemima.' She adjusted her perch on the armrest, and the skirt slipped up.
Jonathan concentrated on not noticing. 'I doubt that men would forget you easily if your name was Fred.'
'Goodness me, Dr. Hemlock! Are you the kind of man who tries to pick up stewardesses?'
'Not normally, but I'm coming around to it. How did you know my name?'
She became serious and confidential. 'It's this mystic thing I have with names. A gift of sorts. I look at a person carefully. Then I concentrate. Then I check the passenger list. And
'All right. What do people call you when they're not hooked on ethnic lore?'
'Jem. Only they spell it like the jewel kind of gem.' A soft gong caused her to look up. 'We're coming in. You'll have to fasten your safety belt.' Then she moved aft to deal with the less interesting passengers.
He would have liked to ask her out to dinner or something. But the moment had been lost, and there is no social sin like poor timing. So he sighed and turned his attention to the tilted and toylike picture of New York beyond the window.
He saw Jemima briefly in JFK terminal. While he was hailing a taxi, she passed with two other stewardesses, the three walking quickly and in step, and he remembered his general dislike of the ilk. It would not be accurate to say that he put her out of his mind during the long drive home to the North Shore, but he was able to tuck her away into a defocused corner of his consciousness. It was oddly comforting to know she existed out there—like having a little something keeping warm on the back of the stove.
Jonathan soaked in the steaming water of his Roman bath, the tension of the past few days slowly dissolving, the cords of his neck unknotting, the tightness behind his eyes and in his jaw muscles melting reluctantly. But the knot of fear remained in his stomach.
A martini at his bar; a pipe in the basement gallery; and he found himself rummaging around in the kitchen for something to eat. His search was rewarded with some Danish biscuits, a jar of peanut butter, a small tin of kimchee, and a split of champagne. This gastronomic holocaust he carried to the wing of the transept he had converted into a greenhouse garden, and there he sat beside the plashing pool, lulled by the sound of the water and the brush of warm sunlight.
Little drops of perspiration tingled on his back as he began to doze, the vast peace of his house flowing over him.
Then suddenly he snapped up—an image of surprised eyes with white dots of mucus had chased him out of a dream. He was nauseated.
Getting too old for this, he complained. How did I ever get into it?
Three weeks after the discovery of the abandoned church had added to his need for money, he had found himself in Brussels attending a convention and squandering Ford Foundation money. Late one wet and blustery night, a CII agent dropped into his hotel room and, after beating about the bush, asked him to do a service for his country. Recovering from a good laugh, Jonathan asked for a fuller explanation. The task was fairly simple for a man with Sphinx training: they wanted him to slip an envelope into the briefcase of an Italian delegate to the convention. It is difficult to say why he agreed to the thing. He was bored, to be sure, and the hint of fiscal return came at a time when he had just located his first Monet. But there was also the fact that the Italian had recently had the effrontery to suggest that he knew almost as much about the impressionists as Jonathan.
At all events, he did the thing. He never knew what was in the envelope, but he later heard that the Italian had been picked up by agents of his own government and imprisoned for conspiracy.
When he returned to New York, he found an envelope waiting for him with two thousand dollars in it. For expenses, the note had said.
In the ensuing months, he performed three similar messenger jobs for CII and received the same liberal pay. He was able to buy one painting and several sketches, but the church was still beyond his means. He feared that someone else would buy his home—he already thought of it as his. The danger of this was really rather remote. Most of the Long Island religious groups were abandoning traditional churches in favor of A-frame redwood boxes more suited to their use of God.
The climax of this work—a testing period, he discovered later—came in Paris where he was passing the Christmas vacation advising a Texas museum on purchases—attempting to convince them that small paintings could be as valuable as big ones. CII set up an assignment, a simple matter of introducing damaging material into the notebooks of a French government official. Unfortunately, the mark walked in while Jonathan was at work. The ensuing battle went badly at first. As the pair grappled and wrestled around the room, Jonathan was distracted by his attempt to protect a Limoges shepherdess of rare beauty which was in constant danger of being knocked from its fragile table. Twice he released his hold on the Frenchman to catch it as it toppled, and twice his adversary took the opportunity to belabor his back and shoulders with his walking stick. For many minutes the struggle continued. Then suddenly the Frenchman had the statuette in his hand and he hurled it at Jonathan. With shock and fury at the wanton destruction of a thing of beauty, Jonathan saw it shatter against a marble fireplace. He roared with rage and drove the heel of his hand into the rib cage just below the heart. Death was instantaneous.
Later that night Jonathan sat near the window of a cafe on the Place St. Georges, watching snow swirl around scuttling passersby. He was surprised to recognize that the only thing he felt about the episode—other than
