Sleeping in Flame (12 page)

"God, I completely forgot about where we're going."

Maris was looking out the window and turned to me, smiling. "What do you mean?"

"To the airport. You know. Nicholas."

"Yes, I know. Someone told me they haven't replaced the glass windows yet. You can still see the bullet holes."

"That's not very reassuring, is it?" I put my hand on her knee. She covered it with hers. "I've always liked going to airports before. They're exciting and make me start dreaming as soon as I get close and see the planes taking off and landing."

"Walker, I've got to tell you one thing about this trip: I'm an absolute chicken when it comes to flying. The worst." She reached into her handbag and took out a small pharmacy bottle.

"What's that?"

"Valium. Real strong ones. I took a couple before we left, so if I pass out halfway across the Atlantic, you'll know why."

The bus drove up the ramp to the departure section and stopped. I looked at Maris and took a sad deep breath. "I really ain't looking forward to going in there."

"Me either. Let's do it fast and get it over with."

Unfortunately, there was a long line at the check-in counter and we had to wait. Maris asked if I'd mind staying with the bags a few minutes while she went to buy magazines.

Looking around after she'd left, I noticed there were security police everywhere, "Kobras," in berets and battle dress, carrying stubby gray Uzi machine pistols that looked like strange plumbing fixtures under their arms.

What disturbed me most was that these men looked at everyone and everything with completely attentive, suspicious eyes. They trusted no one. And they had probably been told not to. It reminded me of a friend who'd been in Vietnam and said when he was there, everyone was suspect. He'd watched a child hand a bouquet of flowers to the driver of an American troop transport truck and then run away. The truck blew up seconds later.

Maris returned looking as if someone had hit her. "I had to look.

Walker, there really are bullet holes all over the windows downstairs! It's unbelievable. One of the soldiers told me there was a shoot-out over there on the escalator."

She pointed off to the left. I told her I wanted to take a look.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. If I see it, then maybe I won't think about it so much. My imagination is my worst enemy these days."

I walked across the floor listening to the sounds of excited travelers, the P.A. announcing flights to everywhere. A typical day at the airport. The same sounds Nicholas would have heard as he stood at the El Al counter waiting to check in. I looked for that counter but then thought better about really finding it. What did I expect or want to see there? Chalk outlines of the bodies on the ground? Old bloodstains? The shot-out windows would be enough.

The escalator Maris had pointed out was built next to a steep staircase.

I started down those stairs because I wanted to come across the windows at my own speed. If I didn't like what I saw, I could turn around and go right back up.

Seeing those bullet holes would be final proof the attack had actually happened and Nicholas was one of the victims. Otherwise, his death for us was only a composite of news reports and hysterical phone calls, a service at the

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Steinhof church, and dropping his widow off at the door of a crematorium.

I descended the stairs slowly, holding the rail for support. There was an overhang in front of me, so I'd counted fifteen steps before the windows began to come into view. I went down two more before noticing the woman passing me on the right, moving fast down the metal steps of the escalator.

She wore a full-length fur coat and sunglasses and had the kind of perfect mood hair that comes with long hours in the chair at the best _Friseur_ in town. She jingled when she moved because of all the jewelry she wore. The jingling was distracting, so I stopped to have a look at her. She had that fast purposeful walk and straight-ahead glare of an important person in a big hurry.

_Beep-beep_ -- out of the way for a Hard Charger!

She suddenly stumbled and fell face forward onto the sharp edge of the moving steel step. I grabbed for her instinctively but was too far away.

Jewelry clanked hard against metal, then a quiet, thicker sound -- skin and bone hitting. She flailed her arms, cried out, somersaulting down one step after another, hitting and rolling. Her coat and skirt flew up, legs spread helplessly. She was wearing peach-colored panties. There was a small purple bruise inside one thigh.

I ran down some stairs, trying to catch up, but by then she was in a heap at the bottom. Her hair was already being sucked into the grate at the foot of the escalator. She lay unmoving as the stairs tore her scalp off.

I heard a scream and unconsciously stuck my arm out to the right. It hit something and I grabbed on to it. Looking quickly, I saw I'd caught the woman by the arm as she was stumbling.

The _same_ woman who'd just fallen! She

steadied herself and smiled gratefully at me. Horrified, I looked at the bottom of the escalator.

No one there. I'd seen everything take place before it happened. Stopped it before it continued.

"Thanks so much! It's these damned high heels. I always have so much trouble walking in them.

Thanks again." She gave another smile and, standing still, moved slowly down the rest of the way.

I sat down right where I stood, put my hands to my head, and shook like a dog in a bad thunderstorm. Nicholas's death, the old women at the cemetery, Rednaxela, saving this woman from her future . . . I had to tell Maris everything now. I had begun to run out of luck.

"Hey, you, get up! Let's go. What're you doing there?"

Looking up, I saw a Kobra checking me out with both disgust and suspicion. He gestured with his gray Uzi for me to get going.

For dinner we were offered a precise square of mysterious-smelling beef or mysterious-looking chicken. The stewardess had the face of a woman who'd once come in third in the Miss North Dakota contest. To her dismay, both of us declined the meals and returned to our conversation.

I don't like the taste of alcohol, but halfway through the flight I was vaguely drunk on scotch and feeling much more relaxed.

Maris knew it all now. It isn't often in life that you come clean with another person, but I'd tried.

What good was it to leave anything out? How could she make suggestions if left in the dark about important, albeit frightening or embarrassing, details?

I looked for some answer on her loved face. From past chats, I knew she liked to think things through before giving her opinion, but my impatience showed too clearly in the way I kept rattling the ice in my glass.

She looked at the glass, then me. "I have my tarot cards here. I'll do a reading for you now if you like, but I'd still rather not. This isn't the place for it.

"The best thing to do is call my brother Ingram when we get in. I was going to anyway, but this is all the more reason to. Remember I told you he's a disc jockey in L.A.? He has this cockamamy talk show in the afternoon called

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'Off the Wall' where he interviews every kind of weirdo and lunatic you can imagine. It's funny and odd, but over the years he's met them all -- good and bad. I'm sure he'll know someone you can go see. Maybe a really astute palmist or astrologer."

"That's good, but what do you think of all this, Maris?"

"I think it's something to worry about. You have to find out what's happening. If you knew someone strange and mean like Luc, it might be a very elaborate practical joke. It's the kind of joke he liked to play."

"Seeing a woman's future? Looking exactly like a dead man? That's no joke, Maris. It's God!"

"True."

"I'm glad you're calm about it. It makes me feel better."

"I'm calm because there's nothing we can do this minute, ten miles above the earth. Plane rides scare me and I'm just in the middle of praying we get there. Once we've landed we can figure out

. . . Oh, forget it."

I sat up and looked at her carefully. "What were you going to say?"

"I was thinking about how magical these last months have been. How we met, how fast we fell in love. But then there's the other magic too --

Nicholas's death, your friend Rednaxela, Moritz Benedikt . . . It's really a strange time for us."

"Nicholas's death was magic? That's an odd word for it."

"I don't think so. Magic means mysterious _and_ supernatural. We both know he shouldn't have died. Why he died is the mystery. My God, everything is so strange these days.

"You also said something before that isn't true: You're running out of luck? No way! We have each other now. The only two important things in life

are real love and being at peace with yourself. You've got one of them. I think what's happening is balance. If you get one, you lose the other. Or it diminishes. You have the love, so you have to lose some peace. It's standard physics: For every action, there's an equal and opposite --"

"-- Reaction. But you can have both. Loving someone brings you peace."

"Nope. It makes life interesting and alive, but it doesn't bring much peace."

The first thing I do whenever I return to a town I know is eat a favorite meal there. In Vienna it is _melange_ and a _Töpfen golatschen_. In

Los Angeles it is a chili cheese dog at Pink's. Within hours of landing in California, we were sitting at an outdoor table in eighty-degree January weather eating America's best with her brother Ingram.

They looked so alike: tall, topped with thick black hair, eyes set wide apart, lips round and perfect as a dark coin. Ingram (Maris called him "Inky") was thin and dressed in typical L.A. wear -- T-shirt with the name "Meat Puppets" across the front, baggy/fashionable pants, sneakers. He talked fast, but his hands never moved except to bring the hot dog to his mouth. I kept imagining him at a radio microphone with those still hands, fielding questions from guys selling real estate on the Lost Continent of Atlantis (once it rose). Maris was his best audience and their closeness was self-evident.

After they'd caught up on each other's lives, she told an abbreviated version of our story. His eyes went back and forth between us, and he asked many questions, some of them alarmingly personal. He knew Luc, and angrily kept repeating he'd warned her about that asshole.

"Don't be obnoxious, Inky. I warned you about a couple of your friends, but you didn't listen either. Two of them tried to kill you. I only had Luc."

That made him laugh. He reached across the table and tried to take her bottle of cream soda.

She pulled it back and shook her head. It was one of those games brothers and sisters play until the day they die and enjoy every minute of.

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"Everything is good between you two?"

"Wonderful. But, Inky, there's something important you can help us with."

While Ferraris and low riders roared by a few feet away, she told him about the "magic" of our last months. This time he asked no questions at all, which made me skeptical. But then anything was possible in his world, including people who talked to Pluto. When she was finished he nodded his head and said more to himself than to us, "Venasque."

"What's that?"

"It's a man. A shaman. He teaches people to fly."

The studio gave us a sunny apartment off Wilshire Boulevard with a couple of long porches and bougainvillea flowers growing everywhere. It was such a pleasure to wear light clothes again and go out of the house without a coat on.

Weber Gregston's company, "Black Lion," gave us a car and the news that shooting would begin for me in a few days. Weber was making a thriller/horror film called _Wonderful_ based on three paintings by Eric Fischl. He'd written it together with one of the most famous novelists in America. No one outside the production knew much about the film because it was a closed set and people involved were keeping their mouths shut. The script arrived in the hands of a woman who looked like a prison guard.

I was set to play a professional killer named Mr. Pencil. Although the part wasn't difficult, it was peculiar. While Maris and her brother spent an evening out, I read the script first as an actor and then again as a screenwriter. Both ways it was macabre, perverse, original. Weber was still riding high on the success of his last film, and I'm sure that was the only reason why a major studio agreed to finance _Wonderful_.

That was also the night I called Venasque for the first time. From the first he was garrulous and friendly. The tone of his voice sounded as though he was grateful for someone to talk to. Ingram must have filled him in on my

"problem" because the shaman asked for details on the way the woman had fallen down the escalator stairs, the color of the women's faces in the graveyard, how to spell "Benedikt," my birth date.

"And you're here to make a film?"

"Yes. We'll be staying about two weeks."

"It'll have to be longer."

"Why?"

"Because if we work together, it'll take a whole day to drive to the mountains. Then we'll be up there a minimum of a week, another day to drive back . . . I'd say give yourself a good ten days just to be sure."

"Can you help me, Mr. Venasque?"

"I can teach you to fly. That's the first step."

"What do you mean, _fly_? Really, like a bird?"

I almost heard him smile. "Birds don't fly, Mr. Easterling. They live.

Part of their way of living is to travel off the ground. But ask a bird how he does that and he'll look at you funny. The same when someone asks you how to walk. Put one foot in front of the other. Sure, that's the mechanics of it, but how do you _walk_? Or find the right balance to ride a two-wheeler bike?

You do it. You find it. I can teach you where it is in you."

"And you do this with anyone?"

"Anyone who can pay."

"How much is it?"

"A thousand dollars."

"That's not much to fly."

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"It's not such a hard thing to do. If you're not satisfied at the end, I'll give you your money back."