Aphrodite

33

Justin and Deena sat on one side of the table in a corner of the Harrison restaurant in Tribeca. They both faced away from the door and kept their heads bowed as much as possible.
“Chris’s father started Jordan’s,” Justin said as he munched on the restaurant’s curry-spiced french fries.
“Jordan’s the stores? The office-supply stuff?”
“When we were in college, we got completely bombed one night and Chris actually wrote their TV ad line: ‘The law of supply and demand: You demand, we supply.’ ”
“They’re everywhere, those stores.”
“That’s right. Chris is always traveling. He and his entire real estate department are always flying around the country. For my wedding, his gift to me and Alicia was the company plane. It flew us down to the Virgin Islands.”
“The Virgin Islands is one thing, but we’re going to fly across the Atlantic on a tiny, little private plane? I don’t know about this. It feels too much like Snoopy flying on top of his doghouse.”
A voice behind her said, “It’ll be a little more comfortable than Snoopy’s doghouse. And it’s not exactly a tiny, little plane.”
Chris Jordan slid into a chair on the opposite side of the table.
“It’s all worked out,” he said. “You leave in four days from Teterboro—it’s right across the river in Jersey. The pilots’ll fly you to London and wait for you there. You’ve got them for up to a week.”
“Jordy …” Justin said.
“Yeah, I know, you don’t know how to thank me.”
“That’s right.”
“First of all, it’s almost enough just knowing that you’re fatter than I am. But if you really want to thank me, you can have dinner with us when you get back and this is all over.”
“What happens at dinner?”
“You mean, like, do I make you paint my living room or stand on your head for twelve hours? No. It’ll be like the old days, that’s all. You’ll come out to Southampton and sit around with me and Jenny and we’ll drink very good wine and—God, I hate this kind of male-bonding crap, but I’ve missed you.” When Justin didn’t say anything, just looked suddenly uncomfortable, Chris said, “Yes, Jay, I understand it won’t really be like the old days. It can’t be. Not with what happened to Alicia. What I mean is, it’ll be like the old days …except it’ll be new days. Nobody wants you to disappear again.”
Justin shook off his melancholy and nodded. “You drive a tough bargain,” he said. “But I guess I can put up with spending a whole night with you.” He glanced over at Deena and jabbed his thumb in her direction. “Besides, she’s never seen me beat you at pool.”
“I’ve been practicing,” Chris Jordan said. “You’re gonna lose your entire salary.” The waiter brought over another round of beer. The three clinked glasses and Jordy said, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Actually, there is,” Justin told him. “We have to stay out of sight. We need a place to stay until we get our passports.”
“Same old Jay.” He drank half his beer in one gulp. “To the old days,” he said. “To the new old days.”
Four days later, they were on the Jordan’s company jet flying across the Atlantic.
Jordy’s driver picked them up at 7 p.m. and took them to Teterboro Airport, to the Jet Aviation terminal. There they were led on board a dark blue Gulfstream III with the slogan jordan’s: you demand, we supply written across it. The inside had six leather swivel chairs and two built-in sofas. The trim was burl maple, and much of the interior fabric—carpets and sofa coverings—matched the deep blue of the exterior. There were two pilots, who introduced themselves before the plane took off as Dreux and Buddy, and a flight attendant named Katerina who smiled and said she was at their disposal. After serving them coffee, Katerina pointed out the DVD player, the videotape player, the videogame player, and the CD player. She showed them where the wine was kept and said there was lobster, cracked crab, and omelettes whenever they wanted to eat. Justin said that they would probably sleep most of the way but he thanked her profusely. All three crew members made a point of saying that they loved flying for the Jordans, and Justin made a point of saying he’d be sure to pass it along.
There was no security—no metal detector, no bag search—flying noncommercially. There was a checkpoint a quarter mile before the terminal where a guard asked for passenger ID and the flight number for the plane. After that, the driver stopped the car a few feet from the runway, a Jet Aviation employee appeared, took their luggage, and put it on the plane, and as soon as the two passengers were ready and comfortable the plane took off.
Deena was asleep soon after the plane left the ground. She hadn’t slept much in the four days they’d spent in Jordy’s Manhattan apartment, waiting for the ID documents to arrive. She was nervous about the impending trip and had now been apart from her daughter for a long enough time that she was suffering from child withdrawal. Justin had asked her not to call Kendall because of the danger of phone taps. She was missing the little girl and that made her edgy. So did being around him, Justin knew. Over the four days they’d spent shut in the apartment, not wanting to risk being seen wandering the city streets, Deena had been polite and thoughtful and they’d had long, intimate conversations. He learned more about her first marriage, which was brief and never very satisfying. She talked a great deal about Kendall, about being a single parent. She told him about her broken hearts and her insecurities and the fact that she once wanted to be an actress but she didn’t have the ego or the confidence. He did yoga with her for two hours each day and he knew he was stronger, already getting into the kind of shape he should be in. They slept in the same bed, but as soon as they got physically close to each other her discomfort was obvious. By nature she was a toucher but she made no move to touch him during this period. He sensed her guilt. And her desire. But he could also sense her fear. She was afraid of him now or, rather, she was afraid of what he was capable of doing. So he never forced the issue. He made sure she understood how much he cared for her and he decided that was all he could do. After that it was up to her.
On Jordy’s plane she sat next to him rather than across from him. Deena didn’t like to fly and Justin was glad that he could be beside her, holding her hand, taking care of her in some way. When she began to doze, her head dropped onto his shoulder and her arm wrapped around his chest. For the two hours she slept, he did his best not to move or breathe so she could rest undisturbed.
When she woke up, her eyes opened slowly. She felt him against her and she smiled. Her hand squeezed his—
And then she remembered. He could see it on her face and he could feel it in the tension in her hand. She tried not to be too obvious but soon her head was upright and her hand was in her lap. And soon after that she was sitting across from him.
Justin didn’t sleep at all during the overnight flight.
He knew what was going to happen when he arrived at his destination, knew that the violence of his dream was about to cross over, irreversibly, into real life. He did not want to lose the reality he was in—the luxury of the plane, the peace and silence surrounding him, the softness and the beauty of the woman sitting near him. He wasn’t ready to give that up yet. It was going to disappear, all on its own, soon enough.
At some point in the middle of the night, Justin eased himself out of his leather seat and walked to the small bathroom at the rear of the plane. He splashed some cold water on his face, wiped himself dry with a color-coordinated blue towel. He started to open the door to return to the main cabin, stopped, leaned down to rest his hands on the rounded porcelain sink. Justin forced himself to look in the mirror, let his eyes lock into the eyes that peered back at him from the glass. He knew how much he’d kept frozen inside in the years since Alicia and Lili had died. Knew how much of himself had died with them. But, for the first time in years, he acknowledged how much of himself was still left.
He reached out, his fingertips grazing across his reflection.
In the glass he saw the man he’d been and the man he was. He didn’t have to see the man he was about to become. He knew.
Private jets fly into Luton Airport, slightly north and just west of London and Heathrow. When they landed at Luton it was ten o’clock in the morning. Their bags were removed from the plane as they were greeted by a customs inspector who came on board, asked them a few perfunctory questions, and then welcomed them to England. They took a courtesy van to the airport’s Hertz Rent-a-Car and used Justin’s new driver’s license and credit card—he was, while he was in England, someone named Lee Scheibe; Deena was Virginia Donnaud—to rent a small but surprisingly powerful Ford. It took him about ten minutes to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road. Deena did her best not to scream or curl up with her eyes shut while he banged into a median divider and made a right turn directly into oncoming traffic. After a lot of horn honking and some serious sweating, he began to get comfortable behind the wheel. Eventually, he found the M25, followed the signs that said to the west and, after stopping for a quick pub lunch of shepherd’s pie somewhere outside of Oxford, they found themselves, several hours later, in Devon. He steered the car off the highway and along lovely, idyllic back roads until they came to the small thatched-roof, Brigadoon-like town of Lower Wolford.
As he drove out of the town, Justin passed several of the landmarks Alfred Newberg had finally told him about and managed to write down: the sign that advertised a home built in the 1630s that was now a cozy B-and-B, a wildlife preserve, an antique store with a sign in the shape of a rocking chair. Eventually, after winding their way onto the desolate and magnificent moors, they came to an ancient and inviting pub. The sign posted out front said that they served the best hot chocolate in the world and also announced that the fire burning in the fireplace had not been allowed to die out since 1846. Justin pulled the car over to the side of the road across the street from the pub. He looked across Dartmoor, to a hilltop perhaps a mile or two away. At the top of the rugged hill was a stone building that Justin knew to be an early-sixteenth-century castle. He also knew that the castle had, over the past thirty years or so, been modernized and refurbished to the cost of tens of millions of dollars. He knew there were state-of-the-art laboratories set up in one wing and the plushest of living quarters, with luxurious amenities befitting a twenty-first-century billionaire, in the others. Justin squinted up at the castle for one more long moment, then stepped out of the car, opened the trunk, and unzipped the small suitcase that Dreux, the pilot, had taken on board and told the customs people belonged to him. Justin reached into the middle of the bag, underneath several shirts, and pulled out his gun. He felt around for a pouch, found it, untied it, and pulled out the bullets he’d stashed there. He loaded the gun and tucked it into the front of his pants. He went around to the passenger side of the car, asked Deena if she wanted a hot chocolate. Even at this time of year, in the middle of the afternoon, it was cold in Dartmoor. The dankness in the air chilled to the bone, although the sun was out and shining. Deena said she wouldn’t mind a hot chocolate—it sounded good. So they went in and sat by the historic fireplace, and while Deena talked about the beautiful countryside and the charming barroom, Justin Westwood thought about the castle on the hill and how that was where he expected to find Douglas Kransten and what he was going to have to do when he found him.