The Rossetti Letter (v5) (10 page)

A
JOLT OF
turbulence shook Claire awake. The cabin was dark, quiet, slumbering. She felt groggy and a little nauseous, the lingering aftereffects of some very disturbing dreams. No wonder, she thought as she looked down at the open book on her lap.
Common Torture Devices in Use in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,
she read.
The Spanish Inquisitors developed something they called the Pear, a metal instrument which was inserted into the…

Ugh, she groaned, closing the book and stowing it away. The seat next to hers was empty. Gwen had said something about getting a soda, but Claire reckoned she’d gotten up more than two hours ago. She removed her headphones—she’d fallen asleep listening to a Vivaldi concerto—and put them down on Gwen’s seat, along with her portable CD case. Then she stood up, stretched, and quietly walked to the forward galley, which was cluttered with the used coffee cups of the after-dinner service. A painfully bright overhead light bounced off a row of chrome microwaves and a stainless-steel beverage cart. There was no one in the galley or the aisle.

Gwen must’ve sat down in another seat—there were plenty of vacant ones—and stayed there, Claire decided. It wasn’t surprising that Gwen didn’t want to sit beside her the entire flight; no one could accuse them of bonding. Maybe once she’d sat down somewhere else, she’d fallen asleep. Claire scanned the nearest faces, but Gwen wasn’t in business class.

She knew, of course, that there was a perfectly rational explanation for Gwen’s disappearance, but she felt a dull ache in her stomach again. Exactly how do you tell a man that you’ve lost his daughter somewhere over the North Atlantic?

She ducked past the curtains separating business class and coach and slowly walked down the aisle, searching for Gwen’s uniquely colored hair. She reached the end without seeing her. The rear galley was empty, and in a worse state of disarray than the one up front. The drinks cart looked like it had been ransacked; empty soda cans and tiny liquor bottles littered the counters. A few flight attendants relaxed in the rows at the very back of the plane. Claire was stepping toward them, intending to ask if they’d seen Gwen, when the plane shuddered and lurched and she fell against the lavatory door. It opened inward with a thud and the surprised “Hey!” of the boy standing inside.

He wasn’t alone. Claire had a clear view to the bathroom’s mirrored wall, in which she saw the reflection of the boy’s narrow, plaid-shirted back, his closely shaved head covered with dark stubble, and Gwen’s dumbstruck, lipstick-smeared face.

Then Gwen saw her, too. Her eyes went wide. “Oh, shit,” she said. The door slammed shut. “Shit,” the boy muttered.

“Get out of there right now,” Claire hissed.

There was a flurry of movement inside. She was relieved not to hear any zippers zipping. At least they’d been fully dressed.

“Is that your mom?” asked the boy, his voice cracking.

“No,” Gwen replied. “But I better go.”

Claire stepped back as the door collapsed inward again and the boy appeared, brushing past her without meeting her eyes. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen, she noticed with relief. Then Gwen slowly extricated herself and stepped into the aisle.

“We were just talking.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence, just get back to your seat.” She’d almost ended with “young lady,” and was surprised by her automatic parental reaction. The desire to take the girl firmly by the arm, march her down the aisle in double time, and put her in her seat with a grim, “You’re grounded,” felt programmed into her DNA, the impulse was so strong. Of course the grounding idea probably wouldn’t be very effective, being, as they were, currently airborne.

She couldn’t imagine what her own mother would have done in the same situation, probably because her mother hadn’t had to face anything like this. As a teenager, Claire actually had been sweet, shy, and perfectly normal, a description that fit Gwendolyn Fry about as well as the jeans that were currently cutting off circulation to her pelvis. If Gwendolyn Fry was a perfectly normal teenager, Claire was going to have a tubal ligation the moment she got home from Italy. “Devil spawn” would be a more fitting description, she thought as she squeezed past her and sat down.

Gwen immediately launched into her defense. “He was just showing me his tattoo, that’s all.”

“I don’t want to know about it. Gwendolyn, this isn’t going to work out. We’ll be landing in Milan soon and when we do I’m going to call your father and tell him I’ll take you to Nice, or he can come to Milan to pick you up, but one way or another we are not going to continue traveling together.”

Gwen pondered this outburst with a thoughtfulness Claire hadn’t seen before, as if she were carefully weighing her options. “But if you do that,” she replied, “you won’t get to go to Venice. He’s only paying for your trip because you’re with me.”

The girl was right. Claire’s anger had made her overlook a rather important fact; she hadn’t thought beyond handing Gwendolyn back to her father. Her plane ticket would still be good, she supposed, but what about the hotel, the food, the other expenses?

“No me, no Venice.” Gwen smiled loopily and giggled, and Claire got a whiff of her breath.

“Have you been
drinking
?”

“Just a little rum and Coke. No biggie.”

“Oh, Christ,” Claire groaned.
No biggie.
She thought of something else she would do as soon as she got home: kill Meredith. Then she’d have her tubes tied.

Gwen opened up Claire’s CD case. “Still using the old technology, I see,” she said. “So, what kind of music do history teachers listen to?” Gwen flipped the plastic sleeves. “Vivaldi, Bach, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach. All ancient, just like I thought. Oh, look at this. The Beatles. Well, these guys are pretty old, too. They’re so old,” she snickered, “half of them are dead.”

“Not funny,” said Claire, snatching the CDs away from her.

The line for passport control at Venice’s Marco Polo Airport stretched the length of the terminal. Claire, with Gwen following wearily, took a place at the end. Up ahead—which seemed an endless distance from them, one filled with two hundred other travelers—were six Plexiglass booths, but only two were occupied by fresh-faced officials. They sat under interrogation-style lamps, heads solemnly bowed, as they carefully studied each passport.

“You’d think there would be more people working here,” Claire remarked to Gwen. “It’s high season in one of the most visited cities in the world.”

“Uhhhh,” Gwen replied, and burped.

Claire peered ahead impatiently. Gwen’s intoxication had caught up with her at the Milan airport. They’d spent a joyless hour in the women’s bathroom while Gwen was sick, had missed their flight to Venice, and had had to wait over an hour for the next one. Claire checked her watch. If they managed to get through this line in less than a half hour, she just might make it to the Biblioteca Marciana before it closed.

Ten minutes passed and they didn’t move forward so much as a foot. This is what Ellis Island must’ve been like, Claire thought, when it was filled with the huddled masses. At this rate she wouldn’t get to the Marciana at all that day. An entire day wasted!

Two people broke away from the line Claire and Gwen waited in and went to stand in the much shorter line in front of the passport-control booth marked EU. If they held European passports, Claire wondered, why had they waited in this endless line before moving over?

Perhaps they knew something she didn’t. Perhaps it was okay for non-EU citizens to go through the EU passport control when, as now, there was such a disparity between the two lines. And why not? Soon the EU guy would be sitting there with nothing to do. If you put your American passport in front of him, and it was clear that you were a law-abiding kind of person, he would probably stamp it and wave you through, wouldn’t he?

“Gwen, pick up your pack.” Claire lifted her carry-on onto her shoulder.

“Huh?” She was still in a stupor, which her lunch of cheeseburger and coffee had done little to ameliorate.

“Your pack. We’re moving.”

They walked across the terminal to the end of the other line. From here, Claire could actually see the face of the passport-control officer. He looked young and friendly. Surely he wouldn’t mind if they went through the EU passport booth. And this line seemed to be moving, unlike the other. She felt a little of her tension dissipate.

Gwen noticed the sign above the booth. “What’s the EU?”

“The European Union.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a group of European nations that have joined together because they have more economic and political power as a group than they had individually. It’s kind of like when the thirteen colonies became the United States of America. Now the countries in the EU have a common currency and, well, other stuff”—Claire didn’t want to admit that she was stumped about the other stuff—“like this special line at passport control, for instance.”

“All of the European countries are in it?”

“Most of them, I think.” Claire envisioned a map of Europe and started at the top left. “The UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.”

“You’ve forgotten Finland, Luxembourg, and Greece,” said the man standing behind them.

Claire turned. The possessor of the unmistakably English voice regarded them with a cool disdain, as if he were peering through a microscope at a dead insect. “You’ve also left out the ten countries that have recently joined, which include Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic,” he added.

His speech seemed more like a lecture than a friendly interjection, and Claire wasn’t entirely certain if she should be offended or not. She searched for a clue in his appearance, which was at odds with his manner. Perhaps he believed that superciliousness compensated for his lack of sartorial splendor. His brown slacks, green wool sport coat, and light blue button-down shirt appeared well-worn and quite possibly slept in, in addition to being a combination of hues agreeable only to the color-blind. In his left hand, he carried a saddle-colored leather satchel; in his right, a black umbrella.
That
was what was strange about him; the weather outside in Venice was, reportedly, eighty degrees and sunny, and he was dressed for London fog.

His face was pleasant enough, in an unremarkable sort of way. He had dark wavy hair, which apparently had not been combed or even looked at recently, for then he would have been aware that it was sticking up oddly on the left side. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and the hollows of his cheeks and his upper lip were marked by a blue-tinged shadow.

“Well,” Claire said, with a vague feeling that she had been put down or snubbed in some way, “you certainly are a font of useful information.”

“Thank you,” he replied. “However, as I am also quite certain that America is not a part of the EU, and as I can tell from your accent that you are an American, I believe that you’re in the wrong queue, and should be standing”—he pointed his umbrella at the huddled masses—“over there.”

For a moment, Claire was too stunned to reply. “But there must be two hundred people over there,” she sputtered.

“At least.”

“And you think we should move anyway.”

“We’ve already established that you are not a citizen of the EU.”

“That sign,” Claire pointed at the passport control booth, “does not say EU
only.
”

“You regard it as just a suggestion, do you?”

“It could be.”

“Well, isn’t that just like an American.”

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

“You Americans seem to believe that the entire world belongs to you. What the sign actually means is that no one but EU citizens are allowed in this queue, and that everyone else, including you, must go over there.” Again, he pointed the umbrella.

“Excuse me, but are you a customs official? Or in any way affiliated with the policing apparatus of the Italian state?”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you mind your own business?”

“Because the European nations have spent billions of dollars so that we can more easily cross the borders of our neighboring countries, in addition to ‘other stuff,’ as you so cleverly put it. If we let everyone else in the world use our border facilities, then there was little point in creating them in the first place.”

Gwen had witnessed their exchange with complete bewilderment. She nudged Claire and nodded at the passport booth. “That cost billions of dollars?”

“No. Shush.” Claire addressed the Englishman once more. “Since you seem to feel that we’re inconveniencing you, why don’t you take a place in the line ahead of us?”

“Thank you, I will.” He stepped forward and stood in front of them.

Claire fumed. “You know, a real gentleman wouldn’t have done that. Instead, if he felt that I was doing something unconventional, he would assume that it was necessary to bend the rules a bit in my favor, and that I was in need of assistance.”

He turned back to them. “Are you in need of assistance?”

“This girl”—Claire grabbed Gwen by the arm and pulled her closer—“is very ill, and she needs to get to our hotel as soon as possible.”