“I love you,” he said.
She smiled, kissed him back-her warm lips lingering for just a second-before pushing him toward the door. “Tell me that in Firenze.”
And then, with his backpack slung loosely over one shoulder, he ran into the Air France terminal. With no luggage to weigh him down, he headed straight for the first-class ticketing section and asked when the next nonstop flight to Chicago would be.
“Flight 400 is leaving in thirty-five minutes,” the clerk said, as David slapped his passport and credit card down on the counter.
“One ticket,” he said, “one way.”
“But I’m afraid,” she said, consulting her computer screen, “it’s full.”
“I’ll take anything. Coach, the cargo hold, you name it.”
She smiled nicely, but he could tell he had already made her nervous. And why wouldn’t he? There were scratches all over his face, he was dressed entirely in black, he hadn’t shaved, he was buying a one-way ticket. For all he knew, she’d already pressed the security button hidden beneath the counter.
“Listen,” he said, in the most reasonable tone he could muster, “my sister is very ill, and I have to get home. Can you help me?”
“Our next flight to Chicago,” she replied, her fingers clicking over the keyboard, “doesn’t leave until this evening, but if you wanted to fly to Boston, and connect there with…”
But by then David had already decided what to do, and taking back his passport and card, he loped down the corridor, studying the Departures list for Flight 400. It was already boarding at Gate 23. Dodging around the other travelers, he headed for the gate, but saw a long line of people already waiting to go through the security check- in.
And behind him, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a blue-uniformed cop in a white kepi following briskly in his wake. Another one was hustling to catch up.
He ducked into a coffee bar, then out again on the other side, and into the first men’s room he saw. He went to the last stall on the end, latched the door, and rooted around in his bag, pushing aside Auguste Linz’s journal and pulling out the silver garland. Quickly buckling the bag again, he slipped it back onto his shoulders.
Then, with a silent prayer, he settled the garland on his brow.
He waited, stock-still, but felt nothing. My God, he thought, had he done something wrong? It wasn’t working. Had Sant’Angelo and Ascanio deliberately failed to tell him something? And what if he got all the way to Chicago and found out that he was missing some crucial step with La Medusa, too?
But then, just as the panic was rising, he noticed something strange-a sensation like cool water being poured over the top of his head. He actually touched his hair, thinking it would feel wet, but it didn’t. It felt just the same. But the sensation continued, and it had descended to his face and neck, then his shoulders and chest. He kept patting himself, but his body was completely and palpably there.
And then he saw something strange. Reflected in the back of the steel door, he saw his own murky image- only his upper body was no longer part of it. As he watched in shock, the rest of him, too, began to vanish. He slapped at his thighs, feeling a surge of terror, but his thighs felt the blow, and his hands felt the flesh. Still, staring in amazement at the back of the door, he could see that his legs were also invisible.
And when he looked down at his feet, he watched as they, too, boots and all, disappeared. He stamped them on the floor-he felt the hard tiles, he heard the thump-but he couldn’t see anything there.
Nothing at all was reflected now, however blurrily, in the back of the stall door.
He could twitch every finger, curl every toe-they felt just the same as always-but he also felt weightless, the way he imagined an astronaut might feel in zero gravity. He reached out to touch the latch on the door and found it oddly difficult to do. Without being able to see his own limbs and watch where they were in space, he discovered that it was very hard to coordinate his movements. Even something as simple as unlatching the door took a concentrated effort, and he suddenly understood why Ascanio had resisted wearing the garland until the last moments of their mission. It was too easy to make a fatal blunder.
He had just stepped out of the stall when the two cops burst into the men’s room, and he froze in place. It was a long, narrow space and they moved quickly to check for feet under the stalls. Several were occupied, and the men at the sinks, seeing that something was up, made hasty departures.
With the end of his baton, one of the cops knocked on the closed doors and said, “ Ouvrez la porte, s’il vous plait. C’est la police.” The other, unfortunately, had moved to block the exit.
David stood, not four feet from the cop with the baton, holding his breath, as toilets flushed and the doors, one after another, obediently opened. Looking into the wall-length mirror, he saw the cop, he saw the row of stalls, but not a sign of himself. It was positively unnerving.
The cop glanced in each compartment, looking increasingly perturbed, before turning to his companion and saying, “ Ou est-il alle? ” He threw up his hands in confusion. As the other cop came over to see for himself, David slipped out the exit.
Zigzagging among the crowd, who occasionally reacted to his proximity with a sudden flinch or quizzical turn, he ran straight to the security check, where the line was even longer than it had been. But between the Medusa still hanging under his shirt and the garland and flashlight still in his backpack, he doubted he would ever be able to go unnoticed through the metal detectors. He scanned the people at the front of the line, and one of them was a teenager with his ankle in a cast and aluminum crutches under each arm. David slunk in right behind him, and when, predictably, the alarms went off, David scooted around one side of him and took off down the corridor.
Gate 23 was off on his left, but he could already see a flight attendant bundling up the tickets she’d collected, while the other was kicking loose the doorstop to the boarding ramp. He scooted past them-they both raised their heads at the errant breeze-and was halfway to the hatchway when he saw that that, too, was being closed.
“Hold it!” he shouted without thinking, and the steward stopped, looking all around to see where that voice might have come from, but it provided just enough of a delay for David to breeze onto the plane. The hatchway was pulled shut, and David breathed his first sigh of relief.
Looking into both cabins of the plane, however, he could see that the ticketing clerk had been right. Not a single seat was empty.
But then, how could he have sat in one, anyway, without somehow giving his presence away? All it took was someone hearing him breathe, or tripping over his invisible legs on the way to the bathroom. He couldn’t even hide out in one of the stalls without eventually drawing attention to the Occupe sign that never went out.
The plane taxied away from the gate, and then, to David’s anguish, lingered on the ground for what seemed an interminable time. He glanced at his watch, before remembering that he couldn’t see its face anymore. Several times, the pilot came on to apologize, and to explain that a storm front moving east had slowed down all traffic heading west. But David heard a lot of unhappy muttering among the passengers and crew before, having idled on the ground for at least an hour or two, the plane finally took off.
Once it had settled into its cruising altitude, he found as much of a sanctuary as he could-a corner of the little space between the front and back cabins, under the porthole window of an emergency exit. If he scrunched down with his knees drawn up tight, and his back against the vibrating wall, and stayed aware of any steward who occasionally came through to retrieve something from one of the storage bins, he just might be able to make it all the way unnoticed. He’d be stiff as a board when he arrived, but he’d get there.
The flight time, he knew, had been posted as nine hours. But he wondered, given the weather conditions, how much time it would really take.
There was no way he could call Sarah or Gary to see where things stood… but he knew that Sarah had said she would wait for him, and they had never let each other down yet. Wait for me, he muttered under his breath, wait for me.
Chapter 43
