Читать книгу The New Republic - Lionel Shriver - Страница 12

Thanks to the edifications of Dr. Henwood, Edgar copped only a few Zs. Bleariness sapped any incipient curiosity about Portugal. Drained and weaving, Edgar was at a loss as to why anyone ever went anywhere besides to bed. He was equally at a loss to explain the purpose of sending passengers through a security check right off the plane, when they’d been through security right before boarding. What were they frisking for, stolen headsets?

At immigration, the dark, petite woman at the desk was brisk but polite, affording Edgar a flickered smile. But once she’d examined his ticket, her cordiality iced over. “You are flying on to Barb-a?” she asked frostily, planting a hook in the word.

Edgar nodded feebly. Immigration always made him feel sneaky.

She stabbed at her computer, attacking keys as if mashing an invasion of ants. “What is the purpose of your visit, please?”

“I’m covering Barba for the National Record.” Hitherto Edgar had enjoyed repeating this assertion in the hopes that it would begin to resonate plausibly to himself, but just now it sounded like a transparent cover for unspeakable wickedness.

“You have documents of this position?”

Edgar rubbed his moist forehead. “I—might, my assignment was last-minute, just—let me check.” Stooping, Edgar scrambled through his carry-on. He should have asked Wallasek for a letter of introduction. Maybe Guy had at least scrawled Saddler’s address on letterhead stationery. Meanwhile, at the next desk, Henwood was flourishing such a snowstorm of papers that the immigration clerk raised a hand to make him stop.

“What is so interesting to Americans about Barb-a?” Edgar’s inquisitor asked stiffly as he splayed books with incriminating titles on the floor. “Much of Portugal is beautiful—Lisboa, O Porto, Algarve. Your newspapers never send reporters to these places. Barb-a is ugly and poor and the people are ungrateful … ressentidos.”

Edgar found the paper; no letterhead. “What can I say? Americans like to read about folks who are—” frantic to ingratiate himself, Edgar grabbed the dictionary from the floor—“mau.”

She didn’t seem impressed with his Portuguese. “You have no documents? Wait one moment, please.” The woman marched off behind a partition, heels hitting the polished floor as if shooting rivets, her ass switching the tight navy skirt. By the time she returned he’d at least scrounged a copy of his prized New Republic article.

“See?” Edgar fingered the byline. “That’s me.”

She squinted. “This is not about Barb-a.”

“I’ve never written about Barba in my life.”

She melted a degree, but rejoined, “Then why you start now?”

“This was the only job I could get!”

Barba-as-desperation-move won him one degree more, but the slight thaw only loosened a floe of tremulous emotion. “I would not put my foot in that latrina for the last job on earth!”

Passengers in line grumbled; only three stations were open.

Recovering herself, the official grilled Edgar about where he planned to reside, entering his new address on Rua da Evaporação into the computer, but making no move to stamp his passport. You have friends in Cinzeiro? You have contacts in the SOB? Edgar fell all over himself denying any such unpalatable acquaintances, adding gratuitously, “Creeps. Dirtbags. No sympathy whatsoever.” The lady eyed him with jaundice; terrorists probably shoveled this shit all the time.

“How long you are planning to stay, Senhor—” she checked his passport—“Kellogg?” Nobody ever seemed to remember Edgar’s name.

“I can’t say. I’m filling in for someone else. He disappeared. He might come back. Barrington Saddler.”

Bingo. Thus far Edgar had been flicking a Bic at this woman’s glacial demeanor, and finally he’d blasted her with a blowtorch. Her eyes went gooey, her head assumed a fetching tilt, and her smile was positively human.

“You know—Barrington?”

“Yes,” said Edgar. “Yes, indeed. Bear and I go way back. Whenever he’s in New York, we do the town. ’Til five a.m., getting kicked out of bars. We’re thick as thieves. Couldn’t be tighter. See?” He shoved the scrap scribbled with Saddler forward. “Bear’s address.”

The functionary touched the paper with a kleptomaniacal expression, as if having to restrain herself from jotting down the phone number. “Disappeared … Is true, I hear something of this months ago.” Her olive brow rumpled; her lips pouted with worry. The woman’s transformation recalled the sitcom spinster who unpins her hair and removes her horn-rims: voilà, a pretty dishy broad. “I am concern. Barrington come through here many times. Sometimes,” she admitted shyly, “he let others go first so he pass through my station. We always have joke. I hope nothing bad happen to him, sim?”

“That’s my first assignment: find out what happened to our friend Barrington. Make sure he’s all right.”

Bam. The stamp.

“Adeus. You find Barrington, tell him Isabel say hallo. Be very careful, senhor.” She even waved.

Because he’d been headed for Barba, Edgar hadn’t been allowed to check his luggage through to his destination, unlike passengers headed anywhere else in continental Europe. Immigration had taken so long that at least his bag was already bumping around the belt, but re-entry into the airport after customs mandated another security check, and yet another at the entrance to Departures. X-rays, hand-frisk, ticket-check, every time.

At the gate itself, Edgar was consternated to confront another queue for another security check. This time, they took his luggage apart piece by piece—riffling every book, unwinding ten feet of dental floss, squeezing the toothpaste up and down and insisting he dab Cool Mint Crest on his tongue. They depressed the PLAY button on his microcassette, and Edgar’s test recording echoed down the corridor: “This is Edgar Kellogg, your caped correspondent in Big Bad Barba, interviewing yet another SOB freedom-fighter in shit-hot shades.” Oh, swell.

After that, they were naturally suspicious when his portable printer wouldn’t light up, and just try explaining that an appliance doesn’t have a battery and needs a converter to work on European current to troglodytes whose entire English vocabulary comprised “open please” and “turn on.” By the time he’d hooked up the converter with lots of hand-signals, the security staff had poked and pried at his Bubblejet until they broke the tabs off his paper feeder.

His flight was already boarding, and all his remaining worldly possessions were spread out over three square yards of table. Stuffing and muttering, Edgar didn’t have time for all the ingenious wedging that had taken him an hour on West Eighty-Ninth Street, and he had to ask for a plastic bag for the overflow.

Beyond security, another interview: had he accepted any packages, had his luggage been out of his sight at any time, did he pack his own bag? Edgar had answered these same questions half a dozen times already and his replies were getting testy. Any minute boarding would close. Meanwhile the same cautions about tending to your luggage crackled incessantly over the intercom. Posters plastered around the gate gaily advertised the Telefone Confidencial, just in case en route to Cinzeiro after peanuts you had a larkish impulse to rat out your SOB buddies on the credit-card phone.

But when Edgar wheeled from the desk to board he couldn’t stop himself from shrieking, “You cannot be serious!” Right before the Jetway was another security check.

Edgar hurled his carry-on, laptop, and plastic bag onto the belt.

“Turn on, please.”

“Look!” Edgar shouted. “I have booted up my computer ten times on this trip and the goddamned battery’s running out! Now just shove the fucking stuff through, because my fucking plane is taking off!”

Another official oozed up from the shadows, and his better English was ominous. “There is some problem, sir?”

“Fuck yeah, there’s a problem!” Edgar knew he shouldn’t curse, but toadying at immigration had left him determined to reestablish his manhood. “You just searched my luggage down to the skid marks on my boxers. What’s next, a particle separator? How could I possibly have slipped a Stinger missile in my carry-on in the last twenty feet?”

“Sir, you have just threatened the airline. You will have to come this way, please.”

They did a full body-cavity search, and he missed the plane.

One of Edgar’s contacts at US Air, a Lee & Thole client, had shared confidentially that much of modern airline security was theater, often a front for jaw-dropping laxity behind the scenes. They made you sample your toothpaste with everyone watching, but postal freight was routinely loaded unscreened. Despite showy pawing of passengers’ Tampax and Trojans, any sleazebag with the wit to wear a brown technician’s coverall could waltz on and off airplanes as he pleased, and most security violations were arranged through corrupt caterers or bribable baggage handlers. Trying to think with the nimble opportunism of his new occupation, Edgar wondered if he might get an exposé out of today’s fiasco.

For now this wasn’t good copy but bad life, though the two seemed often to go hand in hand. Edgar had nine hours to kill before the evening flight, and sitting was uncomfortable; his asshole was sore. Edgar hoped idly that staging scenes in airports signaled that his apprenticeship to the larger-than-life was getting off to a smashing start. Yet a little voice murmured in the back of Edgar’s head that Barrington Saddler would never have arranged matters so that some sadistic joker was shoving a Latexed index finger up his backside. More likely that crowd would be refolding Saddler’s slacks so the creases aligned while scrambling to arrange his free upgrade to first class.

That little voice. It had a British accent.