Yevgeny for offering him the unrealistic hope that is the lifeblood of the desperate.
Then, perhaps taking pity, Tina tugged on his sleeve, muttering, “Come here.” She pulled him close and kissed him hard on the mouth. She tasted of chewing gum. Though he knew that it was pity, he would take it in lieu of anything else. They lingered for a moment; then she pulled back. “I mean what I said. You get your life straight, come back home, and I’m willing to give it a try. But here, you understand? Not in some other country with fake names. And we work on it with Dr. Ray.”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do, mister.”
He grinned. She had offered him a plan. “Give Stef my love.”
“You sure about that?”
“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “I’ll give it to her myself when I can stay more than a few hours.”
A brief smile joined them; then Tina jolted. “Oh! Take this.” She popped open the glove compartment and fished out the iPod he’d given her months before, with headphones and a car-lighter charger.
“No. It’s yours.”
“Please,” she insisted. “I never listen to the damned thing, and a few weeks ago I dropped it. Broke it. Pat got it fixed, but… look, all your music got wiped.”
“After Pat touched it?”
“Ha ha. He filled it before giving it back, but I still don’t listen. So, please, take it back. He filled it with seventies crap-you’d like it. Besides, I can’t really imagine you running around the world without it.”
He held it in his hand. “Thanks. I mean it. And don’t give up on the Olympics. The more I think of it, the better the idea sounds. Tell Pat to get those tickets before they sell out.”
“I’ll do that,” she said and let him kiss her again. Once he was standing on the wet sidewalk, she lowered the window. “One last thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Cut out the smoking, will you? You taste like an ashtray.” She winked and raised the window as she drove away.
He boarded a slow train, not worrying about the time. In the cool cloud of his hope-the better hope that she had offered him-he wasn’t in a hurry to do anything. There was always a chance, even for louts like himself. He would catch an outbound flight with his Tourist passport, and even hope that Drummond was keeping watch, and that this unscheduled visit with his wife would provoke his anger, and perhaps lead to a quick dismissal.
It would weaken Adriana Stanescu’s position with his father, but for the moment he didn’t care. He’d regained that lack of empathy that Tourism drills into you.
Who knew? Maybe by morning he’d be free.
When switching trains at Howard Beach, he gave the rest of his Davidoffs to a beggar, and at JFK he purchased a ticket to Paris with his Sebastian Hall credit card. He joined the line at the security check. In front of and behind him anxious travelers sighed and grunted as they removed their shoes and unpacked their laptops and undid their belts. Milo followed suit, though he carried no luggage.
Off to the left, propped against a thick column, a television was tuned to CNN. An urban night scene: A familiar-looking building was billowing smoke. He read the rolling newsfeed at the bottom of the screen. It was the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on the previous night. Protesters had broken in and set it ablaze.
As the line brought him nearer, he heard the commentator explain that the riot was in reaction to President Bush’s validation of Kosovo’s independence in Dar es Salaam. There was a sign: KOCOBO JE CPБJA. KOSOVO JE SRBIJA-Kosovo is Serbia. One protester had turned up dead in the building, overcome by the smoke of the fire he’d been setting. Milo hoped that Radovan and his mother were all right.
He passed through the metal detector and received his shoes and disassembled phone (which got an extrasuspicious examination from the X-ray operator), then continued into the international terminal, where he had a coffee to brighten himself up. He put the phone back together, but no one called, so he scrolled through the iPod’s playlist. It wasn’t a random selection of the seventies as Tina had thought, but the entire David Bowie discography, from his self-titled 1967 release until 2003’s curiously titled Reality. Not knowing where to begin, he put it on shuffle and soon found himself whispering, “Modern love…”
Not until he was at the gate itself did he begin to think something was wrong. It came to him via two faces. One man, he thought, was French… or Albanian. The conflicting nationalities seemed to find a shared home in his features as he looked back at Milo with a forced nonchalance. Then the woman-she was standing by a column, talking on a cell phone, gazing at the window near where Milo was sitting. Her face seemed entirely American to him. Neither carried any luggage.
Only two faces, but they did not belong. He saw that in the way they interacted with their surroundings, as if they had no interest in the plane that taxied to the gate. The verification came a half hour later, as he stood in line with the other passengers, shuffling to where the flight attendants checked passports and tickets. Milo’s attendant ran his ticket through the scanner, which gave back a disappointed tone. She tried it again with the same result, then directed him to the desk, where he was told that, unfortunately, the plane was overbooked. There was another flight leaving in two hours. Would he like to wait for it?
Milo considered protesting, but seeing the man and woman waiting among the now empty seats, he really didn’t care. That’s what hope can do to you.
“Sure,” he said. “I can wait a couple hours.”
Her smile showed that she appreciated his understanding.
As she worked on his new itinerary, he glanced back to see the woman lean down to speak to the man. Her jacket fell open to reveal the grip of a pistol in a shoulder holster. The man twisted in his seat to stare directly at Milo. He stood up. The ruse was over.
Milo thought, Drummond must really be pissed.
“Don’t worry about the reservation,” he told the clerk. “I’ll take care of it later.”
She was baffled. “What?”
He was already heading toward the couple, who met him halfway. The woman spoke.
“Come with us, please, Mr. Hall.”
The French-Albanian grunted his agreement, then followed him while the woman led the way through a locked door by a shop full of NYC caps and T-shirts and into the secret back corridors of JFK.
Unlike many of the guests these corridors were built for, he wasn’t pushed through with a hood over his head, and for that he was grateful. They took so many turns that, when they finally deposited him in a windowless room with an aluminum prison toilet in the corner, he had no idea where he was. They left him to think over his flaws. There were so many, he didn’t know where to begin. So he thought about Tina, but that inevitably drew him back to his flaws, and Dr. Ray, on whom the marriage now depended. The truth, which Tina had no way of knowing, was that their sessions would never truly work until Milo quit being so dishonest.
His dishonesty didn’t take the form of outright lies but of silence, and it was something Dr. Ray sometimes noted, saying, “Milo? Would you like to add something to that?” Milo would usually answer, “No, I think Tina covered it pretty well,” even when she hadn’t.
A case in point was Tina’s description of how they had met and fallen in love more than six years ago. The story had all the elements of high melodrama. Tina, eight months pregnant and single, in Venice for a last vacation. She meets an older man, a gentleman, who it turns out has stolen millions of dollars from the U.S. government. He brings her along to a meeting that goes disastrously wrong. Milo and Angela Yates, his partner, are there to arrest the man, and a teenaged girl is thrown off a high balcony to her death. Shots fired-Milo is hit twice-and the stress brings on Tina’s labor.
The convergence of all these events made the story absolutely unbelievable, but Milo had no argument with Tina’s retelling of those facts. They happened. It was during the mundane part of the story, the epilogue, that their versions differed. Tina woke in her Italian hospital room to find Milo asleep in a chair beside her bed and saw on the television that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. Milo woke up, and they watched together, and then…
“The event, it joined us in a way that nothing else could. Two strangers. We’d just been through a terrible moment together, and then we were witness to something even worse, grander. It tied us together forever. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. We fell in love at that moment.”
“Milo? Anything to add?”
