The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [206]
Because you don’t trust her, came the answer from Rational Albert. But I love her and she loves me, replied Amorous Al. She said so. But Crosetti realized that part of the woman’s appeal was her utter weirdness, the proven fact that she might do anything. Even at this moment he had no guarantee that when he emerged from this bathroom she might not be gone and that he might never see her again. This thought prompted an acceleration in his toilette. Five minutes later, still damp but neatly dressed in the jacket, black jeans, and a flannel shirt, he emerged into the lounge, holding his carry-on (containing Bracegirdle’s lead pipe) and a padded envelope, which he had stuffed with flyers for tourist spots and sealed with tape. Carolyn was seated in the lounge. She had taken a shower and changed her clothes too, and her damp hair seemed darker than it had been.
He sat down next to her. “One more flight,” he said, “and this adventure is over.”
“I hope so,” she said. “I hate adventure. I want to be in a place where I can get up in the morning and see the same people and do pretty much the same thing every day.”
“Bookbinding.”
“Yes. I know you think it’s boring. I know you think that making movies is serious art and making books is like…I don’t know, knitting afghans. I don’t care. That’s going to be my life. I’m going to get my children and go to Germany, where I can study bookbinding, and I’m going to do nothing else but study bookbinding, and make books. That’ll be my life.”
“And what, I’ll come visit in the summer?”
She turned her head and made that pushing gesture with her hands. “Not now, Crosetti. I can’t hold any more stuff in me. Could we just, like, be together for the next couple of hours without devising contractual long-range plans?”
“Sure, Carolyn. Whatever you say,” he said, and thought, That’s what’d be printed on the outside of the package if our relationship was a product, like contents poisonous or highly inflammable. Whatever you say.
He walked a little distance away and called Mishkin in New York. Mishkin took the news in and said congratulations and that he’d have a car meet them at the airport.
Their plane was a Citation X this time, smaller and sleeker even than the Gulfstream, configured for six, with a closed-off partition in the rear where there were two bedlike lounges. Seeing these, Crosetti was about to suggest that here was an unusually comfortable way for the two of them to join the Eight Mile High Club but did not. The vibrations were wrong, as they so often were around Carolyn Rolly. He sighed, belted himself in, drank his champagne. The aircraft screamed, slammed him back in his seat, shot into the air at an aggressive angle. He felt the Most Valuable Portable Object crinkle against his spine. The envelope with the decoy ms. was lying on the seat next to him. He read a magazine for a while and then pulled his blanket around him and over his head. It was not the skimpy towel the commercial airlines gave you but a thick, full-size thing as used by the best hotels. He adjusted his seat to near horizontal and fell into exhausted sleep.
And awoke to the sound of clinking dinnerware and a delightful odor of cookery. The flight attendant was about to serve a meal. Crosetti sat up, adjusted his seat, and looked across the aisle. Carolyn was in the lavatory. He examined the padded envelope he had left on the seat. The tape was untouched, but careful inspection showed that one of the bottom corners of the envelope had been carefully pried apart and skillfully resealed by someone for whom neither paper nor glue held any secrets. He sniffed the edge and detected a faint acetone pong. She’d used nail-polish remover to relax the glue and then resealed it after, obviously, finding that the