The German woman spent most of the trip digging into an enormous carpetbag on her lap, bringing out packages wrapped in white tissue paper, endlessly unwrapping them to reveal one bit of junk souvenir gimmickry after another, then endlessly re-wrapping and replacing in the carpetbag and bringing out yet another. The constant rustle and motion didn’t seem to bother Bradford, who slept the entire flight away, his earlier tiredness having returned, reinforced by the heavy breakfast he’d eaten at Orly. Evelyn was too nervous to sleep, even if the rustling of tissue paper didn’t make her tense and irritable, which it did.
There was no trouble with the fake passports at the Stockholm end, either. And the two nondescript suitcases that went with the claimchecks the Orientals had given them contained only clothing, none of it of particularly good quality.
Their names were different on the passports this time. (Another point for Wellington being behind it, rather than China?) No longer Ann Thornton and Marshall Allan, journalists, they were now father and daughter, Richard and Clara Curtis, Bradford’s occupation given as ‘businessman’, her own as ‘teacher’. Their ages had been altered, Bradford’s to fifty-nine, Evelyn’s to thirty-four. It pleased her that twelve years could be subtracted from Bradford’s age without exciting comment, but troubled her that seven years could be added to her own. Though part of that would be possible because of the clothing she was wearing, this coat and hat, and another part would be the result of the strain she was under. But normally she didn’t look thirty-four, did she? It was a silly thing to worry about, under the circumstances, but she couldn’t help it.
Eleven A.M. in Stockholm, a sunless day in the middle of November. The cloth coat wasn’t warm enough as she walked across the windy open tarmac from plane to terminal, but inside it was warm, almost too warm, and she suddenly realized how tired she was. She’d lost a night somewhere. The clocks here said eleven, but according to her body clock, still attuned to the time at home, it was five o’clock in the morning and she hadn’t been to bed yet.
Exhaustion now hit her like the effects of a drug. She went through customs in a haze, and when at last she and Bradford stood together, their luggage on the floor beside them, in the terminal waiting room, all she wanted from life was the chance to lie down somewhere and sleep.
Bradford, who had slept the two hours of the flight up, plus the last half hour of the flight to Paris, seemed rested and ready to go now, looking around, saying, “I wonder what’s supposed to happen next?”
Evelyn didn’t know, and at the moment she couldn’t care. She knew she should try to think, make a decision, come up with some action she could take, but she was just incapable of anything, neither thought nor action. She could only stand there as though she’d been clubbed.
A man in a black chauffeur’s uniform approached, and touched his hat-brim with a two-finger salute, like the gray-uniformed man in Paris. Evelyn struggled to be awake, alert, ready to respond to danger. The man said, “Mr. Curtis?”
Evelyn was thinking, no, that’s somebody else, when Bradford said, “That’s right,” and then she remembered the new names on their passports. She was Clara Curtis now, and Bradford was Richard Curtis.
The man in the chauffeur’s uniform handed over an envelope, flat and white, legal size. “I was asked to give you this, sir.”
“Thank you.”
The man left, and Bradford smiled sidelong at Evelyn. “All very mysterious,” he said. He opened the envelope, studied the contents, and said, “Well, it seems we’re going to Denmark.”
“Denmark?” Anything would have been incomprehensible to her, in her current condition; Denmark was doubly incomprehensible.
“Yes, we’re taking a flight to Copenhagen that leaves at one fifty-five.”
“One fifty-five? That’s three hours from now!”
“They’re giving us time for lunch,” he said, obviously pleased, then suddenly frowned at her. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m tired,” she said, feeling stupid and cranky. “I haven’t had any sleep, and I’m tired. I don’t want lunch, I want to go to bed.”
“Didn’t you sleep on the plane?”
The vision of the tissue-paper German woman rose in her head, but she knew that had only been a peripheral problem, that the main thing had been her continuing tension, so all she said was, “No, I haven’t managed to sleep at all.”
“Well, let’s see if we can find you a room where you can rest a while. I’ll send someone for the terminal manager—”
She put a hand on his arm as he was turning away, smiled at him and said, “You can’t do that. We aren’t VIPs now, remember?”
“Oh.” Frowning, he considered the situation. “I’m afraid I don’t really know how to operate at this level.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “We’ll have some lunch, and I’ll feel better. Coffee, anyway.”
Relieved, he said, “Of course. That’ll set you up. Come along, let’s see what sort of dining arrangements they have for us common people.”
iv
It was becoming a nightmare, without even the blessing of sleep. First the flight east to Paris, the sudden change of plans, the shift to new identities and the shifting uncertain identities of the people suddenly in charge of them. And ever since, long pauses and apparently pointless traveling. The delay in Paris while they ate ‘breakfast’ though her body insisted it was only one o’clock in the morning and time not for meals but for sleep. Then the flight north to Stockholm, apparently unguarded and unsupervised, and the man in the chauffeur’s uniform, and the tickets to Copenhagen. As though they were on some sort of insane global scavenger hunt, following the clues toward...
Toward what? Toward some destination and purpose of Wellington’s, or toward Peking?
Lunch in Stockholm, a heavy meal that lay undigested in her stomach for hours afterward. She craved sleep, but she was afraid to go to sleep in the terminal — even if a place could be found for a non-VIP — for fear she would wake up and find Bradford gone again, this time for good.
But she couldn’t seem to sleep in any of the planes. Bradford took cat-naps or longer snoozes during the flights, but Evelyn’s nerves seemed rubbed raw the entire time she was aboard an airplane, German woman or not.
The time in Copenhagen, when they arrived, was three-thirty in the afternoon. Evelyn, out of a morbid desire to know just how badly she was faring, had set her watch back to Eastern Standard Time, and it was now nine-thirty in the morning, and she still hadn’t slept.
The contact at the Copenhagen terminal was a young lady dressed as a stewardess, though it was impossible to tell what airline she was supposed to represent. She handed over the inevitable envelope to Bradford with a plastic stewardessy smile — Evelyn bitterly resented the smile; it made her feel old — and this time the tickets were for an Icelandic Airlines flight to Reykjavik. In Iceland. Leaving at quarter past five, meaning another delay, this one of almost two hours.
There was no possible meal to eat during this layover, not by anybody’s watch. Bradford found some English-language newspapers and magazines for sale, laid in a supply, and the two of them sat down together unobtrusively on a bench. And now at last Evelyn did get some sleep, fitful and troubled, with her head on Bradford’s shoulder.
They were traveling, it seemed, in every possible direction. East from Washington to Paris, then north from Paris to Stockholm, then south again from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and now west from Copenhagen to Reykjavik. Was there a purpose for all this? And if there was, was it Wellington’s purpose or Peking’s?