They turned to each other and she said, “You’re going to make it, David. I can feel it.”
David wished he felt the same way. Reaching out to her, he held her close, kissed her, and said, “Stay safe. I will come back as soon as I can.”
A cop waved his baton, urging them to move along.
“I love you,” he said.
She smiled, kissed him back—her warm lips lingering for just a second—before pushing him toward the door. “Tell me that in Firenze.”
And then, with his backpack slung loosely over one shoulder, he ran into the Air France terminal. With no luggage to weigh him down, he headed straight for the first-class ticketing section and asked when the next nonstop flight to Chicago would be.
“Flight 400 is leaving in thirty-five minutes,” the clerk said, as David slapped his passport and credit card down on the counter.
“One ticket,” he said, “one way.”
“But I’m afraid,” she said, consulting her computer screen, “it’s full.”
“I’ll take anything. Coach, the cargo hold, you name it.”
She smiled nicely, but he could tell he had already made her nervous. And why wouldn’t he? There were scratches all over his face, he was dressed entirely in black, he hadn’t shaved, he was buying a one-way ticket. For all he knew, she’d already pressed the security button hidden beneath the counter.
“Listen,” he said, in the most reasonable tone he could muster, “my sister is very ill, and I have to get home. Can you help me?”
“Our next flight to Chicago,” she replied, her fingers clicking over the keyboard, “doesn’t leave until this evening, but if you wanted to fly to Boston, and connect there with …”
But by then David had already decided what to do, and taking back his passport and card, he loped down the corridor, studying the Departures list for Flight 400. It was already boarding at Gate 23. Dodging around the other travelers, he headed for the gate, but saw a long line of people already waiting to go through the security check-in.
And behind him, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a blue-uniformed cop in a white kepi following briskly in his wake. Another one was hustling to catch up.
He ducked into a coffee bar, then out again on the other side, and into the first men’s room he saw. He went to the last stall on the end, latched the door, and rooted around in his bag, pushing aside Auguste Linz’s journal and pulling out the silver garland. Quickly buckling the bag again, he slipped it back onto his shoulders.
Then, with a silent prayer, he settled the garland on his brow.
He waited, stock-still, but felt nothing. My God, he thought, had he done something wrong? It wasn’t working. Had Sant’Angelo and Ascanio deliberately failed to tell him something? And what if he got all the way to Chicago and found out that he was missing some crucial step with La Medusa, too?
But then, just as the panic was rising, he noticed something strange—a sensation like cool water being poured over the top of his head. He actually touched his hair, thinking it would feel wet, but it didn’t. It felt just the same. But the sensation continued, and it had descended to his face and neck, then his shoulders and chest. He kept patting himself, but his body was completely and palpably there.
And then he saw something strange. Reflected in the back of the steel door, he saw his own murky image—only his upper body was no longer part of it. As he watched in shock, the rest of him, too, began to vanish. He slapped at his thighs, feeling a surge of terror, but his thighs felt the blow, and his hands felt the flesh. Still, staring in amazement at the back of the door, he could see that his legs were also invisible.
And when he looked down at his feet, he watched as they, too, boots and all, disappeared. He stamped them on the floor—he felt the hard tiles, he heard the thump—but he couldn’t see anything there.
Nothing at all was reflected now, however blurrily, in the back of the stall door.
He could twitch every finger, curl every toe—they felt just the same as always—but he also felt weightless, the way he imagined an astronaut might feel in zero gravity. He reached out to touch the latch on the door and found it oddly difficult to do. Without being able to see his own limbs and watch where they were in space, he discovered that it was very hard to coordinate his movements. Even something as simple as unlatching the door took a concentrated effort, and he suddenly understood why Ascanio had resisted wearing the garland until the last moments of their mission. It was too easy to make a fatal blunder.
He had just stepped out of the stall when the two cops burst into the men’s room, and he froze in place. It was a long, narrow space and they moved quickly to check for feet under the stalls. Several were occupied, and the men at the sinks, seeing that something was up, made hasty departures.