With the end of his baton, one of the cops knocked on the closed doors and said, “Ouvrez la porte, s’il vous pla?t. C’est la police.” The other, unfortunately, had moved to block the exit.
David stood, not four feet from the cop with the baton, holding his breath, as toilets flushed and the doors, one after another, obediently opened. Looking into the wall-length mirror, he saw the cop, he saw the row of stalls, but not a sign of himself. It was positively unnerving.
The cop glanced in each compartment, looking increasingly perturbed, before turning to his companion and saying, “Où est-il allé?” He threw up his hands in confusion. As the other cop came over to see for himself, David slipped out the exit.
Zigzagging among the crowd, who occasionally reacted to his proximity with a sudden flinch or quizzical turn, he ran straight to the security check, where the line was even longer than it had been. But between the Medusa still hanging under his shirt and the garland and flashlight still in his backpack, he doubted he would ever be able to go unnoticed through the metal detectors. He scanned the people at the front of the line, and one of them was a teenager with his ankle in a cast and aluminum crutches under each arm. David slunk in right behind him, and when, predictably, the alarms went off, David scooted around one side of him and took off down the corridor.
Gate 23 was off on his left, but he could already see a flight attendant bundling up the tickets she’d collected, while the other was kicking loose the doorstop to the boarding ramp. He scooted past them—they both raised their heads at the errant breeze—and was halfway to the hatchway when he saw that that, too, was being closed.
“Hold it!” he shouted without thinking, and the steward stopped, looking all around to see where that voice might have come from, but it provided just enough of a delay for David to breeze onto the plane. The hatchway was pulled shut, and David breathed his first sigh of relief.
Looking into both cabins of the plane, however, he could see that the ticketing clerk had been right. Not a single seat was empty.
But then, how could he have sat in one, anyway, without somehow giving his presence away? All it took was someone hearing him breathe, or tripping over his invisible legs on the way to the bathroom. He couldn’t even hide out in one of the stalls without eventually drawing attention to the Occupé sign that never went out.
The plane taxied away from the gate, and then, to David’s anguish, lingered on the ground for what seemed an interminable time. He glanced at his watch, before remembering that he couldn’t see its face anymore. Several times, the pilot came on to apologize, and to explain that a storm front moving east had slowed down all traffic heading west. But David heard a lot of unhappy muttering among the passengers and crew before, having idled on the ground for at least an hour or two, the plane finally took off.
Once it had settled into its cruising altitude, he found as much of a sanctuary as he could—a corner of the little space between the front and back cabins, under the porthole window of an emergency exit. If he scrunched down with his knees drawn up tight, and his back against the vibrating wall, and stayed aware of any steward who occasionally came through to retrieve something from one of the storage bins, he just might be able to make it all the way unnoticed. He’d be stiff as a board when he arrived, but he’d get there.
The flight time, he knew, had been posted as nine hours. But he wondered, given the weather conditions, how much time it would really take.
There was no way he could call Sarah or Gary to see where things stood … but he knew that Sarah had said she would wait for him, and they had never let each other down yet. Wait for me, he muttered under his breath, wait for me.
Chapter 43
When the Marquis di Sant’Angelo burst into the hospital room, trailed by a nurse pulling on his sleeve, Ascanio was just awakening from the anesthesia.
“You are all right?” the marquis said, leaning over his bedside. He had certainly seen him looking better, but he had also seen him looking worse.
“Monsieur,” the nurse was complaining, “these are not visiting hours, and the patient is still in recovery. You may come back when—”
But Sant’Angelo brushed her aside and clutched his dear friend’s hand. One leg was in a formidable cast, but all in all, Ascanio looked as if he would come through the ordeal intact.
“I’ll be fine,” Ascanio said, groggily, as he squeezed the marquis’s hand to reassure him. “But a fine pair we’ll make,” he added, gesturing at the marquis’s ebony walking stick. “A couple of gimps.”
“Not for long,” Sant’Angelo said. “The doctors tell me they got the bullet out fine, and you’ll be walking perfectly well in a few months.”
Ascanio nodded, and the nurse, after checking his blood pressure and offering him a sip of water through a straw, left the room, throwing one more murderous glance at the marquis.