Till We Meet Again (86 page)

Swede Castelli took Freddy to the airport. When the news had fallen on her, Freddy realized, in her grief, that Swede was the closest thing she had to family in Los Angeles … the one reliable constant in a world that had changed so quickly in the fifteen years they’d known each other.

“Listen, Freddy, try to get some sleep on the plane. You look beat,” he said as they approached the boarding gate. Freddy looked out through the glass to where the huge, four-engine Lockheed Constellation stood waiting out on the tarmac. An open van of baggage was slowly being unloaded into its baggage compartment.

“Swede, is there a bar in this place?” she asked suddenly.

“There’s always a bar in an airport. Shall we go find it?”

“Please.”

Freddy and Swede each downed a scotch in silence. “Another?” Swede asked. Freddy nodded agreement.

“Why are bar drinks so ineffective? They might as well be water,” she complained, as she finished the second drink.

“They’re probably half water to begin with, and then they put in all those ice cubes. You’ve got about one-quarter of a normal drink in that glass. Let me order you another. Then you can be sure of sleeping on the flight.”

“Good thought.”

Swede had never seen Freddy put away three drinks in a row, even in a bar, and never before eleven in the morning, as she was now doing, but he assumed that it was her way of dealing with her emotions.

Freddy drank somberly and quickly. It was going to be a long, draining trip, and she knew that once she was airborne she was going to be offered more drink and food than she would want, but she felt an unaccustomed need for the effect of whiskey right now. If only she weren’t traveling alone.

David, had he been able to leave his patients at a moment’s notice, would have been a sturdy traveling companion, but she had forfeited that possibility when she had told him that she was certain that she would never marry him, no matter how much time he gave her. He’d thought that her decision had been caused by the impact of his family treating their marriage as a given, expecting her to fit into their closely organized lives.

“Don’t you know that you could do anything you wanted? Don’t you know that I’d never let them try to make you conform?” he had asked her in great pain. It had not been that, she’d had to tell him, for she could have coped easily with the Weitzes, even if there had been many more of them, after her experiences as a sixteenth Baroness Longbridge-in-training. When she understood that her future was taken for granted, she realized that she didn’t love David
d’amour. Aimer d’amour
, “to love with love,” that French phrase, which means romantic love, was not the way she loved him. Yet Freddy did indeed love David, and always would. She loved him as a good man, as a great doctor, as a loving friend—but not romantically. He would be a wonderful husband—she knew it rationally—but Freddy’s gut told her that wasn’t enough. Still, she wished he were with her now. Perhaps he would have been able to make her understand why her father, in perfect health, should have died from something called a cerebral aneurysm, a condition the French doctor had said was a weakened spot in an artery in the brain, which could strike at any time without previous symptoms.

“We’d better get back,” Swede said. “They must have started boarding now.”

Freddy looked at her watch. “What’s the hurry? We have another ten minutes,” she answered with belligerence. “What are they going to do, leave without me?”

“How long since you’ve flown commercial?” he asked mildly.

“Years. I don’t even remember when.”

“If they’re planning to be on time, they just might leave without you. Come on, little lady, time to go.”

“Little lady?”

“That just slipped out, ma’am. It won’t happen again.”

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.” She took a peanut from the plate in front of her and chewed it thoughtfully.

“Freddy, will you get up? And get moving?”

“All in good time.” Freddy carefully gathered up her coat and handbag, checked inside it for her ticket, as if she hadn’t checked five minutes before, and finally followed him, lagging behind, Swede thought, like a child who was going to school for the first time.

Well, he didn’t blame her. Even if she were traveling for fun, it was one hell of a trip, but to take the first step on the road to your father’s funeral was rough. He hugged her hard at the gate and was astonished to feel how tightly she clung to him. Swede gave Freddy the flight bag he’d been carrying for her, and bodily pushed her out, past the ticket taker at the gate, onto the tarmac. She walked toward the Lockheed, a lonely, drooping figure in the gusty wind, moving as slowly as if she had all the time in the world, although she was the last passenger to board.

Freddy sat stiffly in a window seat toward the front of the plane, refusing to surrender her coat to the stewardess. She felt chilled to the bone. In fact she was shaking with cold, although she realized that it couldn’t be that chilly in the cabin. All around her she saw other passengers, most of them men, unbuttoning their jackets, loosening their ties and leaning back as they waited for the trip to begin.

Freddy discovered that she had two seats to herself. She rummaged in her flight bag for one of the books she’d brought to read on the endless trip. She fastened her seat belt, opened the book to the first page and read a few lines. They made absolutely no sense. She reread them carefully. There was nothing wrong with the words or the sentences. It was her mind that wouldn’t translate them into the beginning of a story.

Freddy closed her eyes, and listened intently to the sound of the engines as they started. There didn’t seem to be anything rough about their sound, she told herself. She turned
and craned her neck backward, peering out the window. The wing was placed too far behind her for her to see the propellers. She had to assume that everything was in good order, she told herself, she had to assume that the mechanics who had done the maintenance work on this plane had been precise and careful and hadn’t rushed through the job or neglected some small, not-quite-right detail that didn’t seem worth taking extra time to investigate. She had to assume that the pilot and copilot and flight engineer were all experienced, competent men who knew their jobs and did them thoroughly, who remembered at all times that their safety was as much at risk as that of their passengers.

She knew too much, Freddy told herself severely, as, unnoticed, the book fell to the floor. If she didn’t know all the things that could go wrong, she couldn’t worry about them. That was why doctors weren’t supposed to operate on members of their families. That was why lawyers didn’t represent themselves in court cases. God, she needed a drink.

Freddy opened her eyes and saw that the stewardesses were strapped into their seats. The plane was still on the ground, poised at the end of the runway, while in the pilot’s compartment the crew was going through the checklist for takeoff. In her mind she followed it, step by step. As the great machine began to gather speed for its takeoff run, she thought,
Too soon, too soon!
There hadn’t been enough time spent on the checklist, she was certain of it, but there was no one she could tell. She wanted to scream it out loud at the top of her lungs, scream at the stupid oblivious attendants, at the passengers who didn’t know the danger they were in, scream until the takeoff was aborted and the checklist was run through again.
Too soon!
But they had already taken off. Below them the ground fell smoothly away and they were circling into the departure pattern. The angle of the turn was too steep. Far, far too steep, dangerously too steep. A stall could happen at any second at that angle, didn’t the cowboy who was flying this plane know that? The plane straightened out and started to climb to cruising altitude. Too quick a climb, much too quick a climb, what the fuck was his hurry, didn’t he know that his angle of attack was too high, Freddy thought frantically. What kind of people did they let fly these things? What kind of training did they have? Probably some kid, some hotshot kid—all the older captains were being retired, she’d heard somewhere—some kid who hadn’t
been in a war, who hadn’t enough hours in this particular aircraft to know what he was doing.

The seat-belt sign was turned off and she rang for a stewardess. “Could you bring me a double scotch, no ice, please?”

“Of course, Mrs. Longbridge. Is there anything else I can get you? Magazines, newspapers? It’s an honor to have you aboard. We’ll be serving lunch soon. I’ll bring you a menu with your drink.”

“No, thank you, just the drink.” Shit! The damn woman knew who she was, Freddy thought, trying to make her fingers unclench around the arms of her seat. There was sweat trickling down her sides under her blouse, the roots of her hair were soaked, but she was still too cold to think of taking off her coat. Her heart was beating heavily, she couldn’t manage to take a deep breath, and she felt as if she were about to be airsick for the first time in her life.
There was no air in here!
That was the trouble. Damn it, no air. No wonder she couldn’t breathe. The big plane was totally sealed from the outside world, without any oxygen except for the pitiful stream that whistled down from the vents above the seat. How could they expect people to sit for hours without fresh air? God, she’d give anything to be able to punch her fist through the porthole and let some good clean air into this tightly sealed crate with its hideous interior, too big to be a flyable plane, too small to carry its weighty cargo of human souls.

The plane lumbered heavily through the sky, its four engines making a noise that sounded horribly wrong. Something was caught somewhere, in one of the hundreds of vital parts, each one of which she could visualize and name, something was caught that must be freed or they were doomed.

Freddy rang again for the stewardess.

“Yes, Mrs. Longbridge?”

“I have to speak to the Captain. It’s urgent.
Urgent.”

“I don’t know if he can come back to speak to you right now, but I’ll go forward and ask him.”

Years passed as Freddy listened for the defective engine, her eyes screwed shut so that she could hear better. There it was—a choke, a gasp, a hiccup, something any pilot would hear for himself, except one who didn’t know what to listen for.

“Mrs. Longbridge?”

Freddy looked down at the pair of polished black shoes, at the blue uniform trousers. “Captain?”

“Yes, ma’am, what seems to be the trouble?”

“There’s something wrong with one of your port engines. Can’t you hear it?”

“No, ma’am, Mrs. Longbridge. They’re all functioning perfectly. I just checked.”

Was he deaf as well as dumb, Freddy asked herself furiously and peeked up at him. A man in early middle-age, without question a senior pilot, unmistakably competent, weathered, in charge. She didn’t need more than a swift glance to tell her that. She would recognize the look of a man like that anywhere.

“Sorry, Captain. I guess I’m hearing things.” She forced a laugh. He mustn’t guess, he mustn’t guess, she thought. It was too shameful.

“No problem, Mrs. Longbridge. We’d be delighted if you’d pay us a visit up front, after lunch, if you like.”

“Thank you, Captain. I’ll probably be sleeping.”

“Anytime. Just let the stewardess know if you change your mind.”

When her lunch was served, Freddy waved it away and asked for a blanket, a pillow and another drink. She must try to relax, she told the tiny crazed animal that was eating into her brain, a burrowing, tunneling animal, fleeing from a thousand dangers in a nightmare panic. But it was worse when she closed her eyes, she realized. When her eyes were open she could see people eating lunch with gusto, and as long as she could concentrate on them the plane would not fall from the sky, because if they were about to die, they wouldn’t be eating, would they?

Freddy gave a sudden gasp of pure terror. The plane entered a cloud without warning.
Danger, there was danger here
.

Suddenly as the plane plowed deeper into the dirty whiteness, the lost memory of the minutes before her crash impaled themselves in her mind. She had checked her altimeter and seen that she had enough height to land on Catalina. But she had not radioed an airport tower in the neighborhood to find out if there had been a change in barometric pressure since her takeoff from Burbank. Any novice pilot would have known to take that utterly necessary step, given the lapse of time from takeoff and the changes in altitude she’d made
while flying. Any pilot, any pilot at all, except one so cocky, so angry, so fed up with the world, so sure of herself, that she forgot to take the most elementary of precautions. If she could forget something so basic, so could that well-seasoned captain she had just talked to, so could the most senior pilot of any airline in the world, on the wrong day, in the wrong mood. There was no safety anywhere.
She must not scream!

25

A
FTER Paul de Lancel’s funeral, the hundreds of people who had followed his coffin on foot to the village church returned to Valmont to pay their respects to his widow and his children. By midafternoon the last of them had finally gone, and Eve and her daughters sat down together, exhausted by the obligation to respond to so many saddened words, so many grieving faces, yet badly needing the comfort of being with each other.

Bruno stood beside them throughout the difficult day, his eyes cast down, his commanding, aquiline face serious and unreadable, a dark male presence who shook the offered hands and answered the words of condolence with precisely the degree of solemnity that the friends and neighbors of Paul de Lancel would expect. Delphine and he had greeted each other briskly but absently, as if they were the most distant of relatives. Their last interview, on the night of General von Stern’s dinner party, was vivid in both their minds, but Delphine was so accomplished an actress, and Bruno so polished in deception, that each might have imagined it had been forgotten, although some things are never forgotten, as they were well aware. Never forgotten, never forgiven, never discussed.