The Book of Air and Shadows

to join the Eight Mile High Club but did not. The vibrations were wrong, as they so often were around Carolyn Rolly. He sighed, belted himself in, drank his champagne. The aircraft screamed, slammed him back in his seat, shot into the air at an aggressive angle. He felt the Most Valuable Portable Object crinkle against his spine. The envelope with the decoy ms. was lying on the seat next to him. He read a magazine for a while and then pulled his blanket around him and over his head. It was not the skimpy towel the commercial airlines gave you but a thick, full-size thing as used by the best hotels. He adjusted his seat to near horizontal and fell into exhausted sleep.
    And awoke to the sound of clinking dinnerware and a delightful odor of cookery. The flight attendant was about to serve a meal. Crosetti sat up, adjusted his seat, and looked across the aisle. Carolyn was in the lavatory. He examined the padded envelope he had left on the seat. The tape was untouched, but careful inspection showed that one of the bottom corners of the envelope had been carefully pried apart and skillfully resealed by someone for whom neither paper nor glue held any secrets. He sniffed the edge and detected a faint acetone pong. She’d used nail-polish remover to relax the glue and then resealed it after, obviously, finding that the envelope was a decoy. He wondered what she would have done with the real thing, and what she thought when she discovered that he had created a decoy and left it out in plain view. Who could he have been trying to decoy but her? Oh, Carolyn!
    But he kept his mien agreeable when she returned, and they had a stiff little heartbreaking meal together, after which she went back to her seat. He watched
The Maltese Falcon
, memorizing yet more of the script, and as he watched he very much wished that she would ask him what he was watching, and he could invite her to watch it with him, and he would see if the character of Brigid O’Shaughnessy caught her conscience. But he feared another rejection more than he wanted to find out; in fact, he decided that he didn’t want to find out at all.
    At JFK they passed together through customs and immigration and when they left the terminal proper there was a dark-skinned man with a sign that read croseti standing in the exit lobby; and as soon as she saw it, Carolyn touched his arm and said, “Oh, gosh, I forgot something back in the customs shed.”
    “What did you forget, Carolyn? You just have that little bag.”
    “No, something I bought. I’ll be right back.”
    She whipped back through the doors and was gone. Crosetti went up to the man with the sign and introduced himself and the man said that he was Omar and worked for Mr. Mishkin, and had been instructed to drive Mr. Crosetti and Ms. Rolly to Mr. Mishkin’s residence. They waited there, with people rushing and brushing by them for half an hour and then Crosetti went back into the terminal and looked around, quite hopelessly, and returned and drove with the man Omar into Manhattan, slowly through the clotted traffic of the morning rush. Crosetti was not thinking at all clearly, the combination of jet lag and exhaustion both physical and emotional having reduced his brain to a barely sentient sludge, and so it was a good forty-five minutes (the limo then a quarter mile from the Midtown Tunnel) before he remembered to call his mother.
    “Albert, you found it!”
    “Mom, how did you…?”
    “Your friend was just here and told us the whole story.”
    “Just here?”
    “Yes. She came in a cab, hugged her kids for about ten minutes, and left in the same cab.”
    “What? She didn’t take the kids?”
    “No, she said she had some business to do first and promised that she’d send for them in a couple of days. Really, Albert, I mean they’re perfectly nice kids but I hope you don’t make a habit of-”
    “Did you get the cab number?” Crosetti asked.
    “I certainly did not. Why, were you thinking of asking Patsy to run a trace on the ride?”
    “No,” Crosetti lied weakly.
    “Yes, you were, and you should be ashamed of yourself. That’s dangerously near stalking, darling, and I mean she’s a charming enough woman but it’s also clear that she wants to pursue her own life and that it doesn’t include you.”
    Perfectly true, but not something a man needs to hear from his mother. Crosetti broke off the conversation with unnecessary gruffness and tried not to think of Carolyn Rolly for the remainder