It was enough to make him want to come back here as he’d said he would, to follow some of Holden’s advice and find part of his future with them, people whose past he’d also partly written. He doubted it would happen like that though, suspected that in the end he’d find himself unable to take that path, opting for the obvious one instead.
He’d go to Athens, sort things out with Naumenko, get his life back into operational mode. And for all his week of introspection he’d probably just slip back into the shadows like he normally did, taking the easiest route, just as he had two years before, leaving the girl behind in the sleet darkness, avoiding the truths she might have had to impart, returning to what he already knew.
Suddenly Ed cut in on his train of thought, tentatively, as if waking him. “JJ, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.” He looked like he meant it too; perhaps the wound of Bostridge’s death was showing itself again, the fear that he might be sending someone else to his death.
“I know I don’t,” JJ said casually, “but it’s what I do. It means no more to me than”—he tried to think of something and said finally—“than boarding a plane.”
“But you’ll still buy your own ticket,” Ed said, smiling, JJ smiling too in acknowledgment.
“I’ll still buy my own ticket.” That was it, as if deciding when to fly determined everything else that followed, as if the difference between life and death was all a matter of choosing the right airline, the right flight, the right destination. It was how people kept going, by believing it was all that simple.
15
How close had they come those two years before? What additional factor would it have taken for the pilot to have lost control, for the plane to have come flailing out of its climb, tearing itself into scrap, burned bodies flung over the frozen hinterland of the airport?
The plane had never been in danger, that’s what Aurianne had said and always stuck to. He thought about it though. Every time he flew he turned it over again, not out of fear, more out of curiosity, the curiosity of a bystander with no great stake in whether he lived or died.
It was out of his hands, that’s what appealed to him. This plane that he was sitting on now, waiting to take off in a calm night sky, could explode like others had before it, scattering him and everyone else into the ocean, reducing their lives to debris to be picked from the water with seats and suitcases.
It was almost a comforting thought, the prospect of his reputation and his history and all the unwritten killings ahead of him, dispersed in the inky water of the Atlantic, leaving behind only the body of a venture capitalist, somebody with two parents, a sister, no other connections.
“Oh God!”
JJ turned to look at the woman next to him, gray haired, early sixties, somebody’s grandmother. He’d been conscious of her, tense and uneasy, and now the plane was taxiing and she’d felt the need to let someone else know how nervous she was. She smiled apologetically but JJ put his hand on hers where it clenched the armrest and fixed her gaze. “This plane won’t crash,” he said, quiet, forceful.
“I know, it’s silly of me.”
“No it isn’t. Planes do crash and any rational person has every right to be afraid. But this plane won’t; it’s not how you die, it’s not how I die. Trust me.” She looked transfixed for a moment or two, mystified, enchanted, the placebo effect of his words taking hold of her like a prophetic truth. She nodded then and leaned back with her eyes closed, her hand relaxing beneath his.
JJ relaxed too as the plane began to pull underneath him. He’d meant well but was left bemused by how easy it was to make someone believe she’d live forever. And maybe it was a spell he’d cast on himself too, a belief that he’d never take a bullet, a stubborn underlying resistance even now to the reality of what he was flying into, a reality he knew better than he pretended.
Twenty minutes or so into the flight the woman opened her eyes again and said, “Thank you so much.”
“It was nothing,” replied JJ, turning to her.
“Oh it was though.” She stared at him again. “I could see in your eyes that you know about these things.”
“More than I care to,” he said, smiling. They talked on and off then throughout the flight, between the movie and sleeping, JJ finding himself surprisingly expansive about Vermont and the Copley. And when they arrived in the harsh haze-filled sunlight of Athens she thanked him again, like he was the only reason she was still alive. It made him feel good, to know that if it all went wrong he’d done at least one worthwhile thing in the final days.
It was late afternoon by the time he arrived at the hotel, a place he’d never stayed before, as obvious as it was on the city landscape. He showered, ate in his room, ventured in the evening down to the bar, a place with plenty of red leather chairs in classic styles, like some garish seventies attempt at an English club.