room, she understood, had been waiting here, empty, running up a bill, perhaps for weeks.
“Do you have a passport with you?” he asked.
“Of course. It is the law.”
She showed him.
“I meant the other. You have dual nationality. This is important.”
“No.” She shook her head forcefully. “I am Polish only. That was an accident of birth.”
“A lucky accident,” he grumbled, and picked up a briefcase by the side of the bed. The man-she could no longer think of him as a tramp-pulled out a blue document, an American passport.
“Your name now is Joanna Phelps. Your mother was Polish, which explains your accent. You are a student at college in Baltimore. Remember all this.”
She didn’t take the passport, though she couldn’t stop herself staring at the gold eagle on the cover.
“Why?” she asked.
“You know why, Felicia,” he replied.
“I don’t, really… ”
His strong hands suddenly held her shoulders, shaking her slender frame. His eyes were fierce and unavoidable.
“What’s your name? What’s your name?”
“My name is Felicia Kaminski. I am nineteen years old. A citizen of the Polish Republic. I was born… ”
“Felicia Kaminski is dead,” he cut in. “Be careful you don’t join her.”
Stepping back, he said, “Do not answer the door to anyone. Eat and drink from the mini bar if you need something. I must-” he stared at the grubby clothes, hating them-“do something.”
He took new clothes out of one of the cases and disappeared into the bathroom. She looked at the second piece of luggage. It seemed expensive. The label bore the name Joanna Phelps and an address in Baltimore. Felicia opened it and found that it was full of new jeans, skirts, shirts and underwear. They were all the right size, and must have cost more than she earned in an entire month.
When he came out he was wearing a dark business suit with a white shirt and elegant silk red tie. He was no more than 40, handsome, Italian-looking, with a sallow skin, clean shaven, rough and red in places from the razor. He had dark, darting eyes and long hair wet from the shower, slicked back on his head, black mostly, with gray flecks. His face seemed more lined than she felt it ought to be, as if there had been pain somewhere, or illness.
He had a phone in his hand.
“In an hour, Joanna, we will go to Fiumicino,” he said. “There will be a ticket waiting for you at the first class Alitalia counter. You show them your passport, check in and go straight to the lounge. I will meet you there. I shall be behind you all the way. Do not stop after immigration. Do not look at me. Do not acknowledge me until we have landed and I approach you.”
“Where are we going?”
He considered the question, wondering whether to answer.
“First to New York. Then to Washington. You must know this surely. How else would one get back to where you live from Italy?”
She said nothing.
“Where do you live, Joanna?”
She tugged at the label of the case he had provided for her. “I live at 121 South Fremont Avenue, Baltimore. And you?”
He smiled genuinely. In other circumstances, she might have thought she liked this man.
“That is none of your business.”
“Your name is?”
He said nothing, but kept on smiling.
Felicia walked quickly to the second case, before he could stop her, and grasped the label.
It was blank. He laughed at her, and she was unsure whether this was a pleasant sound or a cruel one.
“So what do I call you?” she asked.
A theatrical gesture: He placed a forefinger on his reddened chin, stared at the hotel bedroom ceiling, and said, “For now, you may call me Faust.”
3
The jetliner glided out of the night to touch down at Washington’s Dulles Airport 29 minutes early and 47 minutes before Harold Middleton killed a cop.
As soon as the plane’s wheels grabbed runway, Middleton text-messaged his daughter.
She hadn’t answered his calls from Europe, and state, county and city police had been vague about protecting a young couple just because a frantic father called from Poland. The D.C. suburban cops seemed skeptical of Middleton’s promises that Polish badges and American diplomats would echo his alarm as soon as their chains of command argued out who should contact whom.
Middleton’s text-message read: GREEN LANTERN EVAC SCOTLAND.
GREEN LANTERN: His then-wife Sylvia had scoffed at his family code word system to prevent their toddler from being deceived by two-legged predators, but little Charlotte judged the plan cool, especially when Daddy let her make their secret code his (and thus her) favorite comic book hero.
EVAC: Charlotte was nine when the Pentagon Military Intelligence Unit where Middleton spent most of his career ran an evacuation drill. She adopted the word EVAC as a mantra, with significant shifts in irony as she roared through her teenage years.
SCOTLAND: When Charlotte got married, Middleton let her use his suburban house for the wedding’s staging ground while he rented another lonely room in a hotel near the Capital Hill garden for the marriage ceremony. Two nights before the wedding, father and daughter got drunk in the hotel bar as she introduced him to a hip single-malt Scotch. From then on, they called that hotel “Scotland.”
Told her what to do, thought Middleton. Where to go. That it’s really me.
If she got the message.
The seatbelt “ding!” launched Middleton into the plane’s aisle. Looping the shoulder strap on his soft black briefcase across his sports jacket kept his hands free. He didn’t know where the rest of his luggage was; didn’t care. His briefcase held his work, his laptop, iPod and toiletries airport security let him take onto an airplane, plus a paperback copy of Albert Camus’s
As Middleton was about to reach the plane’s door, a couple from first class barged in front of him. The woman, who may have looked great 10 years and a million scowls ago, clutched a battered jewel case to suspiciously firm breasts as she and her sad-eyed husband shuffled up the jet way ahead of Middleton.
Middleton heard the wife huff, “I still can’t believe that sister of yours thought she could keep your mother’s jewels from me just by going to Europe!”
The husband’s flat voice knew its own irrelevance. “We all make mistakes.”
They bumbled ahead to Customs, where a surgical-gloved guard carefully examined the jewel box’s glittering necklaces, bracelets and earrings, comparing them to a transit document the wife kept tapping with her crimson fingernails. When he was through, the first class couple trudged ahead of Middleton through the terminal.
Middleton’s jagged nerves keyed him into a detached hyper-vigilance he’d not felt since returning to the Balkans’ slaughterhouse. There, all he had to fear were the ghosts of strangers. Now he felt his own life crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
He smelled his fellow travelers. Damp wool scent of lived-in clothes. Deodorants’ metallic perfumes. Stale beer from the Englishman who’d tried to drown his fear of flying.
Middleton heard a child whine, and sobs from a Spec 4 soldier, who was all of 20 years old, as he marched toward a flight to Germany with connections to Iraq. An unseen CD blasted drums and crashing guitars: Middleton
