“Can you take your seat, please?” asked the flight attendant.
“No,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t.” She clicked her tongue and checked their boarding cards, then she led him back up to the front of the plane and pointed him to the empty seat in first class. “Looks like it’s your lucky day,” she told him. “Can I bring you something to drink? We’ll just have time before we take off. And I’m sure you need one after that.”
“I’d like a beer, please,” said Shadow. “Whatever you’ve got.”
The flight attendant went away.
The man in the pale suit in the seat beside Shadow tapped his watch with his fingernail. It was a black Rolex. “You’re late,” said the man, and he grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all.
“Sorry?”
“I said, you’re late.”
The flight attendant handed Shadow a glass of beer.
For one moment, he wondered if the man was crazy, and then he decided he must have been referring to the plane, waiting for one last passenger. “Sorry if I held you up,” he said, politely. “You in a hurry?”
The plane backed away from the gate. The flight attendant came back and took away Shadow’s beer. The man in the pale suit grinned at her and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll hold onto this tightly,” and she let him keep his glass of Jack Daniel’s, while protesting, weakly, that it violated airline regulations. (“Let me be the judge of that, m’dear.”)
‘Time is certainly of the essence,” said the man. “But no. I was merely concerned that you would not make the plane.”
“That was kind of you.”
The plane sat restlessly on the ground, engines throbbing, aching to be off.
“Kind my ass,” said the man in the pale suit. “I’ve got a job for you, Shadow.”
A roar of engines. The little plane jerked forward, pushing Shadow back into his seat. Then they were airborne, and the airport lights were falling away below them. Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him.
His hair was a reddish gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish red. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes. The suit looked expensive, and was the color of melted vanilla ice cream. His tie was dark gray silk, and the tie pin was a tree, worked in silver: trunk, branches, and deep roots.
He held his glass of Jack Daniel’s as they took off, and did not spill a drop.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what kind of job?” he asked.
“How do you know who I am?”
The man chuckled. “Oh, it’s the easiest thing in the world to know what people call themselves. A little thought, a little luck, a little memory. Ask me what kind of job.”
“No,” said Shadow. The attendant brought him another glass of beer, and he sipped at it.
“Why not?”
“I’m going home. I’ve got a job waiting for me there. I don’t want any other job.”
The man’s craggy smile did not change, outwardly, but now he seemed, actually, amused. “You don’t have a job waiting for you at home,” he said. “You have nothing waiting for you there. Meanwhile, I am offering you a perfectly legal job—good money, limited security, remarkable fringe benefits. Hell, if you live that long, I could throw in a pension plan. You think maybe you’d like one of them?”
Shadow said, “You must have seen my name on the side of my bag.”
The man said nothing.
“Whoever you are,” said Shadow, “you couldn’t have known I was going to be on this plane. I didn’t know I was going to be on this plane, and if my plane hadn’t been diverted to St. Louis, I wouldn’t have been. My guess is you’re a practical joker. Maybe you’re hustling something. But I think maybe we’ll have a better time if we end this conversation here.”
The man shrugged.
Shadow picked up the in-flight magazine. The little plane jerked and bumped through the sky, making it harder to concentrate. The words floated through his mind like soap bubbles, there as he read them, gone completely a moment later.
The man sat quietly in the seat beside him, sipping his Jack Daniel’s. His eyes were closed.
Shadow read the list of in-flight music channels available on transatlantic flights, and then he was looking at the map of the world with red lines on it that showed where the airline flew. Then he had finished reading the magazine, and, reluctantly, he closed the cover and slipped it into the pocket.
The man opened his eyes. There was something strange about his eyes, Shadow thought. One of them was a darker gray than the other. He looked at Shadow. “By the way,” he said, “I was sorry to hear about your wife, Shadow. A great loss.”
Shadow nearly hit the man, then. Instead he took a deep breath. (“Like I said, don’t piss off those bitches in airports,” said Johnnie Larch, in the back of his mind, “or they’ll haul your sorry ass back here before you can spit”) He counted to five.
“So was I,” he said.
The man shook his head. “If it could but have been any other way,” he said, and sighed.