The Count of Eleven (44 page)

For the moment he preferred not to examine what she meant. He bought drinks at the bar, on which the barmen left saucerfuls of change to encourage customers to do so, and searched for a No Smoking area in which nobody was smoking. The only unoccupied seats had no view of the announcement screens, but at least that gave him an excuse to be restless. As he came back from yet another wander past the screens, the public address system asked someone to return to the checkin desk. “Do they want us now?” Laura said.

“Is the flight boarding, do you mean? No movement yet,” Jack said, straining his ears so as to be ready if the call to the desk was repeated. The mumble of the crowd seemed to close around him, and he resisted the temptation to use the Count’s voice to demand silence. He drained the last trickle of a pint of bitter in an attempt to ease the dryness that was spreading through his mouth, and made for the screens again as soon as he reasonably could. Just as he saw that the gate for the flight to Heraklion had been announced, the public address system repeated its message. It was for someone he’d never heard of, and he hurried back to the family. “They’re calling us.”

Another walkway conveyed the Orchards to the boarding gate. Now that she seemed to be on her way, Julia was growing as excited as Laura already was. “Lucky for some,” she said as she caught sight of the number over the gate.

“For everyone who uses it, I hope.” Jack avoided looking at the lit 13 and gazed out through the plate glass. The aeroplane was on the tarmac, the staircases were attached to it, so why were the passengers having to wait? Here came someone in uniform towards him along the corridor, surely to check the passengers through the gate, but she strode past without even a glance at him. Of course the Count was invisible, but was Jack? He might soon know, because a guard with a radio at his belt was striding towards him straight towards him.

If Jack had kept hold of the briefcase he could at least have defended himself once he was out of sight of the family, could perhaps even have made his escape. He should have feigned illness, he thought with sudden agonising clarity: he should have insisted that Julia and Laura take the holiday while he stayed at home. Now the airport security had found the evidence and him.

The passengers crowded towards the gate, delaying the guard, though not for long enough to let Jack do anything meaningful. Julia and Laura came to him, and he saw the guard dodging them as though they had fended him off, except that he hadn’t been coming for Jack after all. “Hurry up, Dad. Everyone’s getting on,” Laura said.

The crowd was forming itself into a queue at the gate. As the Orchards joined it Jack saw the guard returning along the corridor, looking harassed. Jack had a not entirely reassuring sense of watching a mime of his own nervousness. He held his passport ready as the queue shuffled forwards, but the stewardess wanted to see only his boarding pass. He walked down a staircase onto the sunlit tarmac and up a wheeled staircase at whose top uniformed figures were waiting, and felt as if he’d passed the point at which anyone would want to check up on him.

There were five seats in each row. The Orchards sat together, Laura by the window, Jack by the aisle. He closed his eyes to rest them and then opened them. Passengers were stuffing items into the overhead lockers. When he opened his eyes again all the passengers were seated, and it was time for the plane to take off.

Stewardesses took up their positions in the aisles as if they were performing the umpteenth take of a scene and began to mime to a voice which Jack thought was recorded. They stretched out their arms on either side of them as he had for the body check, placed masks over their faces, modelled life-jackets, though drowning was the least of Jack’s worries, he found. Surely the plane was about to move. The stewardesses were advancing down the aisle now, glancing at passengers to make sure they were belted into their seats and had no baggage on their laps, no briefcase. The briefcase must be in the hold, the baggage handlers had finished loading; what was there to delay the plane?

“I think we’re waiting for someone to get on. This must be them now,” Laura said, gazing out of the window, and a hand took hold of Jack’s shoulder. “Excuse me, sir.”

He didn’t start there was no point and he managed not to let his sense of inevitability make his shoulders slump, but he felt as though his body had turned to stone as he lifted his face to the stewardess. “Are you sure it’s me you want?” the Count said.

“We were wondering if you would mind changing seats, sir. We’ve a lady with a babe in arms in smoking, and she’d rather not have it there.”

Jack was so thrown that he turned to Julia for reassurance. “Up to you,” she told him.

“I’m sorry, I must have mistaken the seat,” the stewardess said. “I hadn’t realised you were together.”

“I don’t mind changing,” Jack assured her, and stood up. The number of his seat 8C meant nothing in particular, after all. “Everyone’s on board. We’ll be taking off just as soon as we get clearance,” he heard her saying to Laura, and realised that his seat number had added up to eleven. “Which seat are you sending me to?” he said.

“I’ll show you, sir.” She led him towards the back of the cabin, to a trio of seats in the middle of which a tousled woman with a baby buttoned into overlarge rompers was sitting. “This gentleman says he’ll change with you.”

“Thanks,” the woman said distractedly to Jack, and waited while the wheezing man who occupied more than the seat next to her hoisted himself to his feet.

“I’ll be up and down,” he warned Jack. “Want the aisle?”

“You need it more than I do.” Jack squeezed past him as the stewardess carried the woman’s tote bag up the aisle. He snapped his seat-belt shut and gazed at the number of his seat: 29B. It didn’t matter, he told himself as the wheezing man crashed onto the seat beside him. The plane would move now, it would move when he’d counted eleven, it would move when he’d counted eleven three times. That much he managed silently before he felt his lips opening. “Actually, I wonder he mumbled, and pretended he hadn’t spoken; what kind of clown would insist on changing his seat because of the number? The plane began to inch forwards, and he felt as though it had been shifted by his refusal to believe.

It coasted for at least five minutes, then it halted. He could just see the top of Julia’s head over the seats in front of him.

All at once the sight affected him with a piercing sense of finality. He closed his eyes and clenched his fist around the clown’s head, and was holding his breath when the note of the jets rose sharply. A few seconds later the plane raced along the tarmac and into the air.

Suburban streets shrank into a maze, and Jack saw a police car speeding along a motorway, all its lights flashing. “Too late,” he murmured. The land tilted like a dish, spilling the police car out of his vision and showing him an elaborate pattern of fields and water which the sunlight set ablaze, then the horizon fell out of the sky and there were only clouds. A stewardess was distributing newspapers, but the soundless touch of clouds on the windows seemed to be inviting Jack to drift and dream.

His neighbour kept wakening him. Whenever he came back from the toilet the row shook, and his wheezing sounded like a puncture, as if the air pressure was about to fail. Eventually he said “I think it’s time I introduced myself.”

“Even more of yourself?”

“Inspector Wheezer of Interpol.”

“Pardon?”

“Je pense qu’il est temps que je m’ai introduit. L’inspecteur Ouiser d’lnterpol. J’ai etc sur vous pour quelque temps, Monsieur le Comte.”

“Oh merde.”

“Voulez-vous venir doucement, Monsier le Comte? While it’s hot.”

“What’s that?”

“I said, get it while it’s hot,” the man wheezed, and Jack discovered that a table had been folded down in front of him to support a plastic tray containing food in its hollows. He ate the bland meal and drank the quarter-bottle of wine Julia had paid for, then he gazed out of the window at an unbroken plateau of cloud until the monotonousness gathered on his eyelids. “Etes-vous pret, Monsieur le Comte?” Wheezer said.

“A vous batailler, oui.”

“Ou?”

“Dans le compartiment des bag ages

“II nous faut parler au capitaine.”

“Je 1’appellerai. L’avion peut venir sur pilote automatique,” Jack said, reaching for the button which would summon a stewardess, and woke up. His neighbour was expansively asleep and wheezing. Before they could pursue their adventure, a blaze of sunlight from beneath the plane disoriented Jack so much he had to waken fully. The mirror was the sea, and the plane was beginning its descent to Crete.

Some doubts had wakened with him. He had to keep reminding himself that Greek airport security was reputed to be the worst in Europe. When the plane came to earth with a bump and began to coast along the runway he saw passengers relaxing all around him. Soon he could relax too, he promised himself.

At last the plane dawdled to a halt and the stewardesses opened the doors. Jack followed Wheezer as he plodded down the rear staircase, which shuddered at his every step, onto the tarmac in front of the terminal building, a long three-storey concrete box the colour of a bone dried by the uncontested sun. Crowds stood on open balconies or straggled across the airfield, and it looked to Jack as if nobody would bother anyone unless it was absolutely unavoidable. He met Julia and Laura at the foot of the other staircase. “Dad, you smell all smoky,” Laura said, wrinkling her nose.

The immigration officer at the barrier inside the terminal flirted gravely with her and glanced at her parents’ passports. Beyond the barrier the passengers were gathering around a baggage carousel. The Orchards found a space near the belt which would produce the luggage from behind the scenes. Laura went to the toilet and came back, then Julia did while Jack stared at the plastic curtain which presumably concealed the baggage handlers. Soon people began to sigh loudly and fan themselves and light cigarettes. “Is this usual?” a woman behind Jack said when the carousel had remained immobile for a quarter of an hour.

“Something’s wrong,” said a man in a shirt like an illustration from a child’s first botany textbook.

“Maybe,” said his wife, wafting smoke away from her face with a frayed straw hat, ‘they’ve found something in the baggage.”

“Here comes another flight. That should get things moving,” the man said, flapping his shirt-front. A plane-load of passengers from London was converging on the immigration barrier. Their only effect, however, was to increase the hubbub and heat and smoke until it seemed to Jack that these elements had coalesced into a single oppressive medium, perhaps the very medium that was gumming up the works. He began to count eleven slowly, and then counted it again. He felt he’d repeated the count far too often by the time the belt crawled forwards and suitcases began to stumble through the plastic curtain. People stepped forwards to welcome their luggage, and the crowd thinned gradually until all the voices Jack could hear had London accents. Then Laura said “There’s ours.”

It was the smaller suitcase the one he’d checked in last. Of course their order of precedence could have been reversed between Manchester and Crete, but suppose the larger case had been flown to another airport by mistake? The longer it was in transit, the more liable its contents were to be examined. Julia lifted the smaller case off the carousel as he watched the parade of luggage pushing the curtain out of the way. The yellowing plastic slithered over a metal trunk and drooped, only to be raised by a pram stuffed with knotted newspapers, pursued by a suitcase which could almost have been Jack’s except that it didn’t bear a label in his handwriting. “There’s the other one,” Julia told him, and he watched listlessly as it tottered along the belt and fell on its side with a muffled metallic rattle from within. Why, it was his suitcase after all, minus the label. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, almost sprawling on the carousel in his eagerness to retrieve the case.

He was so exhilarated that he carried both suitcases out to leave them by the coach to which the courier directed him. “Apologies for the delay. The luggage carousel broke down,” she said into a microphone as she took her seat beside the driver. As the coach swung out of the rank with only inches to spare she bade her passengers good afternoon in Greek and tried to coax an echo out of them. She put on a tape of bouzouki music as the coach veered through the narrow shabby baked streets of the capital, and Jack was already in love with Crete. The vehicle climbed out of Heraklion and began to follow the coast road, beyond which the sea stretched to the horizon. Jack gazed at the blue water dotted with swimmers and decorated with ripples of tame fire, and thought he was almost safe.

Aghios Nikolaos was an hour and a half’s drive from Heraklion, and the hotel was five minutes’ drive out of the town. The hotel consisted of about a dozen buildings like blocks of sand two storeys high, half-embedded in a terraced hillside which overlooked a small beach. Young bare-breasted women were sunning themselves on recliners at the edge of the lazy waves or insinuating themselves through the transparent water, while further out a man was falling off his water-skis and being left behind by a speedboat. The coach reversed laboriously between the hotel and a taverna and halted with a heartfelt gasp of its air brakes, and the driver climbed down to release the Orchards’ luggage from its belly. They were the only remaining passengers on the coach. The courier ushered them into the reception area, a room displaying photographs of a gorge and notices reminding guests not to flush toilet paper and a library of old paperbacks on a shelf beneath the counter, and arranged to meet the Orchards the next day for a chat about tours. The porter gave them keys attached to metal coshes and carried their luggage to the second terrace up, where he unlocked 14 and 15. “Shall we go for a swim?” Laura said.

“Give me a chance to unpack, love.”

“I’ll deal with our case if you two want to go down to the beach,” Jack said. “I won’t be long.”

“Are you thinking of trying to swim, Jack?”