Due Preparations for the Plague (33 page)

Lou is waiting at the Port Authority terminal, watching for the Washington bus. She waits at bay number 5. She is bracing herself, preparing herself, in case Samantha is not, after all, on board. This would not be a new script.

The bus arrives. She cannot see in through the dark-tinted glass. She has to wait. Most of the passengers are black: mothers with sleepy children in their arms, old women struggling with bulging soft-sided bags, young men with shaven heads and jeans so loose it seems a minor miracle that the pants stay up.

And then Samantha appears at the top of the steps and Lou feels vertigo. She feels stuck in the zoom lens of a camera that is fixated on a white-faced child at the top of a chute. The child turns back to look inside the plane. She does not want to leave. Somebody pushes her. Helter-skelter, limbs cartwheeling, she hurtles toward Lou.

“Lou,” Sam says, hugging her. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m just—I’m not,” Lou protests. “I’m just happy you’re here.”

“Lou, this is Lowell. Lowell, this is my aunt.”

Lowell is carrying what Lou at first takes to be a baby in a blue canvas sling. He wears the sling low, against his heart, and cradles the infant with his arms.

“Do you have your car?” Sam asks.

“No. You told me not to.”

“Right,” Sam says. “Right. I forgot I said that. It’s good you don’t have it. But we need to get out of sight as quickly as possible. Can we take a cab direct to your place?”

“Sure,” Lou says, slightly dazed. “By the way, someone called and asked for you today.”

Lowell and Sam look at each other.

“Uh-oh,” Sam says. “Who called?”

“Well, I don’t know. They didn’t leave a message.”

“How did they ask? What did you tell them?”

“It was a man. Very pleasant. He said—let me think now … I’ll try to get this exact … He said, ‘I’m trying to get in touch with Samantha Raleigh and I understand that you’re her aunt.’

“And I said, ‘Yes, I am. But she doesn’t live in New York.’”

“Then what?”

“Then he said, ‘I know that, but she isn’t answering at her Washington number. I’m a close friend and I need to reach her urgently. Do you happen to know where she is?’

“I said, ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t. Would you like to leave a message?’

“And then he hung up.”

“On second thought,” Sam says, “we won’t go to your place.” She takes a deep breath. “Let’s get coffee here in the concourse.”

As soon as they are installed at a bistro table, Sam excuses herself. “Phone book,” she says. “Won’t be long.” She finds a Bell booth and a telephone directory and flips to the yellow pages. She makes a call.

“Okay,” she says, back at the table. “I’ve reserved a room at some nothing little motel near JFK. Lou, can I ask a very big favor?”

Lou purses her lips, half affectionate, half amused. “Is this a new trend? Asking permission to ask big favors?”

“Would you be able to fly to Paris today?”

Lou blinks. “That’s a … whew! Well. That certainly sets a new benchmark. Your visits are never humdrum, Sam.”

“Just for a couple of days,” Sam says.

“Oh well,” Lou says. “Piece of cake.”

“We’ve got some videotapes we have to get out of the country. Lowell’s father was murdered for them.”

Lou makes a helpless gesture with her hand. “When you put it like that,” she says dryly, “how can I refuse? Let me think. Let me think … I’d have to call the college and the gallery. Make arrangements. I suppose I could do it.”

“Could you make the calls after you get to Paris?”

“Sam, honestly.”

“I’m serious. In case your phone’s tapped. Or can I make them after you’re gone?”

“It’s not the sort of thing that a call from a stranger can arrange, Sam. But I suppose I could call from Paris, or e-mail the department. Claim emergency.”

“I love you,” Sam says. “Take a cab to your apartment, pick up your passport and toothbrush, and then meet us at the Flyaway Motel near JFK. I can explain everything now, or later at the motel, whichever you’d prefer.”

“I think you’d better explain now,” Lou says.

“Okay. Then we’ll need another round of cappuccinos.”

At security, Lou shakes Lowell’s hand.

“I won’t sleep till you call us from Paris,” he says.

“Forget Paris,” Lou says. “I won’t
breathe
till I clear security here. Till I’m on the plane with the tapes.”

They have all agreed that in spite of the risks—which are considerable—the tapes should travel in Lou’s carry-on bag.

“Checked baggage can end up
anywhere
,” Lowell says.

Sam is scribbling a number on a piece of paper. “Here it is. Call as soon as you get to your gate.”

“First time I’ve ever seen the point of those things,” Lou says. She has just bought a Nokia at an airport boutique and given it to Sam. “My nerves will probably transmit signals to it.”

“Call when you get to Paris too,” Sam says.

“I will.”

“Look after yourself, Lou.”

“That’s supposed to be my line,” Lou says.

“This time I’ll be the one waiting and chewing my nails. Bit of a switch, huh?”

“Might do you good.”

“As soon as you can,” Sam says in a low voice, “hole up with a VCR and watch the tapes. As soon as you can do it safely, I mean.” She frowns, and her hands move about, searching for words—adequate words—in the air. “By safely, I don’t just mean … I’m not only talking about the tapes themselves. You need to … you have to prepare yourself, Lou. It’s rough going.”

“Got you,” Lou says.

“I think you’ll need some hi-tech help too. I think the VCR system is different in Europe. I don’t think you can watch our tapes there.”

“I’ve got friends from art-school days,” Lou says. “Someone’s bound to be in electronics.”

“Maybe someone will have media contacts. If you can get the word out in the French newspapers—”

“I’ll play it by ear.”

“And Françoise should see them. You’ll know why when you read the stuff in the first cassette case.”

“Okay.”

“’Bye, then.”

“’Bye.”

Lou turns back to wave from the entrance to International Departures. The automatic doors close behind her.

She puts her bag on the scanner belt. She walks through the metal-detector archway and submits her body, passive, with outstretched arms, to the attendant’s wand, and goes to retrieve her bag.

“Ma’am, I’ll need to check through that, if you don’t mind.”

“No problem,” Lou says. She wants to sound nonchalant, but her voice cracks. She sounds as though she has a chest cold.

The attendant unzips the bag and pulls out, one by one, a plastic sac full of toiletries, a hair dryer, underwear, panty hose, two skirts, two sweaters, six videocassettes.

“You raiding Blockbuster?” he asks, eyeing her sharply.

“Family videos.” Lou’s laugh sounds fake in her own ears. “Visiting relatives for the weekend.” She warms to the risky thrill of invention and knows the secret of brilliant lying is in the details. “Found a cheap flight on Orbitz,” she says.

The attendant frowns. “Relatives in Paris?”

“My sister and brother-in-law are there for a year,” Lou says. This, she thinks, is a kind of displaced truth; moved on thirteen and a half years and turned back to front.

The attendant opens each cassette box. “What’s this?” he asks, frowning, lifting the folded wad of paper from cassette case number one.

“It’s a …” Blizzards of words, none of them helpful, pass through Lou’s mind:
documents, holograph will, shopping list, film commentary
… “It’s … uh … family letters,” she says desperately. “To preserve them, we—”

“We’ll have to run all these through the scanner again, ma’am. Something magnetic caught our eye on the first run through.”

Lou holds her breath as the tapes, one by one, are fed into the black machine.

Nothing happens. No bells ring. No warning light flashes.

“Okay, ma’am,” the attendant says. “Sorry for the delay, but better sure than sorry, eh? We’ve had plastic explosives hidden in videotapes.”

Lou realizes that her heart has been beating very loudly and fast. She walks to her gate. Twice, en route, she bumps into people. At the gate, she finds a pay phone at the extreme edge of the waiting area. She dials the cell-phone number. “I’m through,” she says. “I’ve still got them with me.”

On the plane, she remembers Christmas Day and desolation. She remembers danger and Virgil Jefferson, cabdriver, and a small gleam of hope.
This is your year. I got the gift of reading signs, and I know it.

Françoise will be waiting at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Sam will be waiting for Lou’s call.

Amy has the puck and Lowell holds his goalie-padded legs close together. Jason slides toward Amy with blithe disregard for risk to bones. He tackles his sister and both tumble and their skate blades screech against the ice. Jason skids into his father and the puck crosses an imaginary line.

“Goal!” Jason calls triumphantly. “Daddy, I got a goal!”

“Hey, Wayne Gretzky!” Lowell says, scooping his son into his arms. They spin in a victory circle and Lowell’s skates shoot off from underneath him and they fall in a snowsuit-padded heap on top of Amy. They all laugh and pick themselves up.

The skating rink is in Rowena’s backyard and Lowell himself has just made it. He is proud of this. He has followed the Home Depot instructions (
Make Your Own Ice Rink
) to the letter. The temperature is five degrees below freezing and so the crucial ingredient is a given. Apart from that: simple as ABC. Lowell has constructed the outline with vinyl edging and the children have contributed the flooding of the enclosure with the garden hose. Nature has done the rest.

“Lowell!” Rowena calls from the back porch. “Telephone! Long distance.”

“Be back in a minute, kids,” Lowell calls. He runs to the house.

The receiver feels clammy to the touch. Lowell thinks, irrationally, of dead people holding it.

“Yes?” he says, tense.

“Lowell, it’s me. Sam.”

“Anything new?”

“Yes,” Sam says, excited. “Françoise knows someone who writes columns for
Libération
and she knows someone at Radio France. Lou is meeting with the
Libération
guy as we speak.”

“When will we know?”

“As soon as she does. In a couple of hours, I hope. I told her: I don’t care what time of day or night it is, call me. She’s pretty confident. And Françoise says once there’s something in
Libération, Le Monde
will be onto it in a flash. And then Reuters and AP will pick it up, and you’ll be reading about it in the
New York Times
.”

“I don’t know,” Lowell says. “It sounds too easy. You shouldn’t even be saying this on the phone until we’re sure.”

“You’re underestimating a French reporter on the trail of an irresistible story: corruption in American Intelligence. Blind spots. Incompetence. Cover-up.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Did you go back to your apartment yet?”

“Not yet. Haven’t been able to bring myself to see it again.”

“So where—?”

“Rowena lets me sleep on the couch in the basement.”

“Is that a good sign?”

“It’s good to be with my kids. Other than that, it’s not an anything sign, really. I have to find my own place, and it sure won’t be that ransacked apartment. Think I’ll even send Rowena to get my stuff. Bad vibes there.”

“If Lou and Françoise pull this off …” Sam says. “And don’t forget, Lowell. They may have torn your apartment to shreds, but you saved the tapes. You got them out of the country. You did that, Lowell. And Françoise will set them loose on the world.”

The children of Salamander, Lowell thinks with amazement. The guardians of the family’s Rosetta Stone. The successful keepers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“I want to meet Françoise,” he says. “I want to take my children to Paris to see their aunt.”

“
I’m
going to Paris,” Sam tells him. “Remember I told you I’d applied for a research fellowship? Well, I got it. I’m going.”

“When?” Lowell asks in dismay.

“As soon as Lou gets back. Lou says I can stay with Françoise.”

Lowell closes his eyes. People leave, he reminds himself. That is what people do. They leave and they never come back. They are never around.

“How long will you be gone?”

“I guess I’ll play it by ear, but I think I’ll stay all spring and summer. I want to get as far as possible from Washington for a while. And I haven’t been back …” She takes a long shuddering breath. “I haven’t been in Paris since I was six. I’ve got ghosts to lay.”

Me too, Lowell thinks.

“Maybe I’ll see you there,” he says. “Maybe I’ll visit with the kids.”

“I’d like to meet your children,” Sam says.

“I’d like my children to meet you.”

Into the silence that hovers, Sam says cautiously, “I’ll miss you, Lowell.”

Through the window, Lowell sees the sun glint off his ice rink. His radiant children skate through a pool of light. “I’ll miss you too,” he says.

“I hope you
do
visit. I hope you do bring your children to Paris.”

“I will.”

“I’ll call as soon as I get word we’ve hit the press.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Lowell says. “Samantha?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m glad you were such a pain in the neck all last summer.”

Sam laughs. “I’m very good at being a pain in the neck. Lifelong specialty.”

“You just never quit,” he says.

“Plain stubborn, I guess. Willful, my Grandfather Raleigh used to say. Pigheaded.”

“That’s what got us into this and out of it again.”

“Cross your fingers on the getting-out-of-it bit.”

Lowell hears the
thonk
of feet still wearing skates on the back porch. “Got to go,” he says. “Playing hockey with my kids.”

“Take care then,” Sam says. “See you soon.”

“I hope it
will
be soon,” Lowell says to the hallway as he hangs up.

“Hope what will be soon?” Rowena asks.

Lowell takes a deep breath. “Rowena, this weekend I’d like to take the kids to Washington to see their grandfather’s grave.”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Rowena says.

“I’m not asking you, I’m informing you,” Lowell says. “I have legal visiting rights, remember.”

They stare at each other like duelists, and Rowena’s glare gradually softens. “Take good care of them then,” she says.

“We’ll call as often as you want.”

Rowena smiles and shakes her head in wonder. “Whoever tore your room apart did you a favor,” she says. “For years you’ve been like my third child. You wore me out. And now you’re Amy and Jason’s father.”

“If you want to come with us …” he says.

She shakes her head. “You’ll be fine with them, Lowell. I know you’ll be just fine.”