He was arriving on Good Friday, which was a few days before the Easter celebrations began. And fortunately, even though he hadn’t been able to obtain a decent airplane ticket, he did have a reservation at the Hotel Antico Doge in the Cannaregio district. The hotel had a gondola entrance and was appointed as though the proprietors expected a member of the House of De Medici to arrive and demand a room: gold leaf, velvet, silk patterned wallpaper, parquet floors, crystal chandeliers, all sorts of luxury. It had been built in the former palace of Duke Faliero, who was executed for attempting a coup d’état. The service was excellent; Goddard had stayed there twice previously, most memorably on a trip the previous year to assess the legitimacy of a “lost” piece of art by Titian.
The painting had proved a fake, but the trip had not been a complete loss. He’d met someone who had heard of a third Eternity Mask — an elaborately adorned ancient stone mask of unimaginable value. If the legends were to be believed, the Gods had forged the masks out of stone, spreading all seven of them — one for each continent — throughout the world, so that one day they might be joined together to reveal the path to true enlightenment.
Goddard wanted to stand up and stretch, but he was certain they would be arriving any moment. He checked his smart watch again, which had in fact automatically updated itself to local time. He recalled once again that the scheduled arrival time was at 9:05 in the morning, Venice time.
It was now ten forty-five a.m.
No, that couldn’t be right. He slipped his leather briefcase onto his lap and pulled out his smartphone to check the time. The phone and watch must have slipped out of sync somehow.
Ten forty-five.
That still didn’t seem right. His watch might have updated automatically, but his phone had been on flight mode, which prevented any updates from occurring.
He licked his lips, and then slid his briefcase back onto the floor. It struck something at his feet, which he bent over to pick up. His fingers brushed a heavy-bottomed glass. It was his empty cognac glass. It must have fallen while he was asleep. He grunted as he tried to twist his too tall body into an angle that would let him pick it up.
As he straightened up, he bumped into his neighbor’s knee.
“My apologies,” he said.
The man, who was both too tall and too wide for his seat, was asleep, head lolling against the seat back, mouth open and breathing heavily. Clearly, he hadn’t been disturbed.
Goddard checked the time again.
They should have landed nearly two hours ago.
In fact, if they didn’t land soon, he’d miss the auction.
He had moved heaven and earth to make it onto this flight. He couldn’t miss the auction. Could not. It was the opportunity of more than a lifetime. The first opportunity in three lifetimes!
Therefore, it couldn’t be ten forty-five.
If the plane had needed to be rerouted due to some issue, they would have announced it over the speakers, and he would have awoken. He was sure of it. A single cognac wasn’t enough to knock him out that firmly.
Goddard sniffed the glass, but he had drunk the cognac hours ago. Now the faint scent coming from the glass was more or less drowned out by the necessary smells produced by eight hours of being packed like sardines into the economy section.
The man next to him was still out, and the miniscule old woman just past him was more or less invisible, hidden by the man’s bulk, but she, too, appeared to be asleep. In fact, the entire cabin seemed to be under a hush. He looked out the window. Underneath him was clear sky and the wine-dark sea, or rather what he suspected was the bluish-purple of the deepest parts of the Adriatic.
Oh God, how I hate to fly!
He stretched awkwardly in his seat. The man next to him wore a titanium watch on his left wrist. With some luck, Goddard would be able to make out the position of the hands on the watch without waking the man. It was three-quarters-past the hour, all right, but he was having trouble seeing in what direction the hour hand was pointed.
Goddard leaned down — under the guise of tightening his shoe laces — so that he could get a better view of the watch.
Ten Forty-Seven…
“Good God!” Andrew said, his deep voice resonating jarringly throughout the cabin.
He turned, prepared to apologize for his outburst, but no one seemed interested.
The cabin creaked under a bit of light turbulence. It was a big, new aircraft, and he’d been hearing what sounded like a haunted house creaking and groaning around him the entire flight, which had prevented him from getting much sleep.
He couldn’t have slept that deeply.
Part of him raged that he hadn’t been awakened in order to hear about any changes in flight plans. Part of him questioned the situation. Something was fundamentally off about all this.
If nothing else, not only were all the people he could see asleep, but the entertainment screens on the backs of the seats were dark, and, in his experience, that never happened. The airlines like to keep ads running at all times.
He pressed the button on the bottom of the screen to call a flight attendant, and also to check the time.
The screen stayed dark.
His throat tightened.
He stood up. “Excuse me?”
The corpulent passenger next to him had slouched down in his chair so that his knees were pressed up against the seat back in front of him. He’d removed his seat belt as well. Goddard looked around. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet and still.
His pulse quickened. “Can someone please tell me what time it is in Venice?”
No response.
In fact, it wasn’t just the seats surrounding him in which the passengers appeared to be asleep…but all the seats he could see. Every screen dark, every head slumped over in its seat.
What the hell is going on?
He clenched his jaw and pressed the call button again. His screen remained unresponsive. Despite his cool, blank-faced exterior appearance, his heart was skipping more than the occasional beat.
Goddard had once had a dream that he’d been flying in an airplane and it had disappeared from around him, causing himself and the rest of the passengers — even the flight attendants and the pilots — to enter freefall. The flight attendants were still pushing their drink carts, and the passengers, tumbling end over end as the wind tossed them around, smiled and shouted things like, “Do you have that in diet?”
He had screamed himself awake.
I’m still dreaming, he realized.
He had fallen asleep after drinking that cognac and now he was having a nightmare in which he was late for the auction he so desperately needed to attend.
He suppressed a grin.
It was rare that he was aware of his own dreams at the time he was having them. Rudely, he climbed over the large man’s legs, not worrying whether he jostled or woke the man — he would disappear as soon as Goddard woke up. He shoved past the old woman next to him, a much easier task.
He wandered the aisles of the plane, smiling and nodding at the sleeping passengers.
Goddard could do literally anything he wanted. None of this was real. He tweaked the nose of a man with a priest’s collar, but other than that he resisted the temptation to interfere with any of the other passengers. Instead, he walked to first class and checked the cabinets. They were locked. He found a flight attendant dozing in her seat and took her keys out of her pocket, sorting through them until he found the one he wanted for the clearly-marked alcohol cabinet.