Out of Orange (18 page)

My feelings for Phillip had blindsided me, being a lesbian and all.
I kept those to myself. But I slept with both Piper and Phillip that night. Piper and I became lovers, and Phillip became a much closer friend. Acting on his odd impulse when he did, he provided the perfect remedy to the senseless impasse Piper and I had reached. But I wondered about that. He had to have known Piper felt the same way I did or he was just lucky. In any case, I could finally see myself with Piper and the cats, happy in San Francisco.

I hadn’t really been in control of much in my life lately except this one thing. I had not jumped blindly into bed with a new partner, the moment Joan left me the first time. It felt like I had been fighting a rip tide for months and months, trying to keep my head above water. In the quiet aftermath of the morning, I watched the rising sun turn our curtains orange, then white, and then I fell deeply into a restful sleep somehow certain whatever came next was exactly as it should be. Piper and I had a real future together.

Zürich, Switzerland; Newfane, Vermont; and Brussels, Belgium
October 1993

O
UR MISSION WAS NOT A SIMPLE ONE
. We had to pluck the luggage we were to deliver to the United States from passengers who had flown into Zürich and who would fly back out of Zürich the same day without ever exiting the airport. The easy part of this operation was that we wouldn’t know who these passengers were we would be retrieving the luggage from, what flight they were coming in on, or what they looked like until we were inside the airport in Zürich.

Piper, still riding high on her first trip as a cash courier, had agreed to transport one of the bags we were picking up when we required one more body to get the job done. Of course, we didn’t actually believe the job was about to happen. But that would be it for her. We were lovers but no
Thelma and Louise
. She would not drive off a cliff with me, just go to the edge. Of course, she didn’t realize we were grooming her for a wonderful opportunity even for a Smith College graduate. Not that anyone would want to make a lifelong career of this, or be proud of what they were doing, but there had to be something meaningful and otherwise unattainable
in the collective experience of traveling the world under these circumstances.

It was ironic, but were it not for the ever-present threat lurking in my mind of Alajeh taking his grievances out on my sister if I quit, and having no sick days or reliable vacation, I might have loved this job. We could offer that to Piper and Garrett. If they accepted, Phillip and I would be almost free, though we would still be the ones who had to deal with Alajeh over the phone. He could never know about them. We would have to be ready to hop a flight in a heartbeat if something went wrong, and step in for them occasionally to give them a break. But that situation was a hell of a lot better than our current one. If there was no way out, we had to find a sane way to make it work until there was, and this might be it. But we had to get home from this trip first.

Phillip and I were instructed to fly out of Brussels on a specific flight to Zürich. Our friends (Piper et al.) would have to fly into Zürich right behind us on another flight. Alajeh did not want our recruits to see the recruits of the escort we were meeting. I’m not sure why, but the handoff from one group to another in the Zürich airport had to be done by Phillip and me. We were told to search our flight for another passenger. A fellow from Benin who would be wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and white leather dress shoes. Once spotted, I was to walk by said passenger, but not until the flight was in the air. I was to wipe my brow with two fingers when I had eye contact with said Yankees-cap-wearing fellow.

Phillip and I barely made it through the phone call with Alajeh without bursting out laughing. Phillip repeated bits of Alajeh’s hilarious detail back to him, especially the two-fingered brow wiping. He said he needed to distinguish this from clicking his heels together three times and repeating “There’s no place like home.” Alajeh missed the reference. Fortunately, Phillip could get away with shit like that and Alajeh wouldn’t pick up on the fact that Phillip was mocking him. But come on. It sounded like a plot from
Mission: Impossible
he was sending us on, not a simple smuggling operation.

We had already planned to head back home from Zürich. We
were so sure this operation would turn out to be a big bunch of bullshit. Alajeh overcomplicated things when he was lying. We had figured out that much about him, and this definitely qualified as overcomplicated bullshit. He was probably just creating busywork to keep us in limbo and poised to leap until he sorted out whatever the hell was going wrong in his empire. The last call erased all doubt about whether he was lying. The instructions were crazy.

Imagine our surprise when the white-leather-shoe-wearing, New-York-Yankees-ball-capped fellow walked onto our plane in Brussels. I panicked and scrambled to get a few of my personal belongings out of the garment bag that was not supposed to have any personal effects in it. I quickly transferred those objects to my purse and impatiently waited for the Fasten Seat Belts sign to go out after the plane took off. I stumbled out of my seat in a hurry the moment I heard the signifying ding. Of course, I got stuck waiting in the aisle while a fragile old lady made her trip to the toilet at a slug’s pace.

When I made my first pass by our contact, we moved so slowly I had time to confirm he wore the white leather shoes and not red slippers. My guy in the cap had his head resting against the lip of his window when I passed and he did not look over at me. In fact, he appeared to be sleeping. Surely, this was my guy. What were the odds of the wrong black fellow in a New York Yankees ball cap and white leather shoes being on the flight?

I helped granny into the bathroom and closed the folding door behind her. I wondered if she would be able to get the stiff doors open when I saw the Occupied sign light up. A flight attendant came up behind me and beamed a what-have-you-done smile. He was there to help the poor thing get back out if she needed assistance. I ducked into the other bathroom and fiddled around for a few minutes.

By the time I walked out, I was hoping to be trapped behind granny again. On the way back to my seat, I would be facing the guy I was supposed to signal. With granny in front of me, I would have more time to think of something to do if he really had nodded off. The flight was barely an hour long, so I had to get his attention
quickly before the sit-your-ass-down moment arrived and I fucked everything up.

I could see his eyes were closed as I approached, but I thought I saw him squint just a little, like he was peeking. I wiped my brow once, waited for some sign of acknowledgment, and got none. I did it again but a little more dramatically. Still no sign. I was about to pass him and lose my chance, so I started to reach over and his eyes shot wide open as he deflected my paw reaching to tap his cap. He didn’t say anything, but his look said plenty—something along the lines of
I saw you the first time, you moron
. I made my way back to Phillip, sat down, and buckled up.

“Did he see you?” Phillip whispered but didn’t turn his head to me to ask the question.

“Yeah! He saw me. It’s him.”

“No shit?” We sat quietly for the rest of the flight. Phillip did anyway. I was trying to remember enough of my recently relearned French to string a sentence together when I had to speak to the guy. I could ask him how he was, ask for my bill, where the toilet was, or if he wanted mushrooms in his omelet, but aside from that, I had forgotten everything. I sang children’s songs under my breath. A Valium would have been helpful; my nerves were a bundle of crossed wires.

Phillip looked at me like I was nuts when I got to the
“ding, dang, dong”
part of one song. The guy sitting across the aisle from me smiled. I think he thought I was challenged, because when the plane did land, he jumped up and grabbed my elbow to help me out of the seat. I didn’t care though; I was desperate, and “Alouette” and “Frère Jacques” cured my temporary amnesia.

The guy we were following was about ten rows in front of us and closer to the exit. By the time Phillip and I exited the plane, we caught a glimpse of him turning right down a hallway where passengers could go either left or right. We picked up our pace to match his about-to-miss-a-connecting-flight pace. But I couldn’t keep up without actually breaking into a run. I cursed quietly to myself, “Fuckin’ long-legged ass-wipe.”

“I’ll catch him. Just don’t lose me.” Phillip took the long strides his legs were capable of and I hurried along at my midget’s pace. I remember in first or second grade being absolutely outraged that the fifth-graders had as much time to get from one class to another as a first-grader. They had much longer legs. The distance between each of us was growing a little wider the farther we went. I took a last turn from one of the few arteries that spilled out into a big hub lined with duty-free shops and fast food and thought I had lost them.

I searched the crowd for either Phillip or the New York Yankees cap and found the second one first. The guy was leaning against the rail of a café right in the middle of the big hub. There were arteries similar to the one we had just traversed feeding into the hub from all angles and a bazillion people moving in every direction. There were the motorized carts one expects to see bussing passengers with crutches around in an airport, with little spinning yellow lights on poles, beeping at the pedestrians they were about to run over. The cops wore Bermuda shorts and rode bicycles, buzzing around in pairs and armed with big guns strapped to their backs. The guns were a little off-putting, but aside from that, it was just what one would expect in a big international hub.

I waited for two of these policemen to get back onto their bicycles and ride away before I approached my guy. I saw Phillip sit down at a bank of seats that randomly lined the edges of the area we were in. When I reached the fellow we had been following, I sat my bag down next to him and said nothing but “Please walk slower” in my best French.

“Pas possible.”
He snatched up his bag and took off in his maddeningly fast pace again. Phillip leapt up and tailed him, I tailed Phillip, and we navigated to another terminal, which felt like it was fifty miles away. My shins were burning and my legs were rubber by the time we finally came to a stop. This was the end of another makeshift artery and a smaller hub with a large circle of seats in the middle.

The escort sat down next to an Asian woman and I saw the familiar black leather garment bag next to her. My escort expertly wiped
his brow with two fingers. This was his signal to the lady; it indicated that whoever sat down after he got up would be trading bags with her. I nodded to Phillip and he readied himself with his bag to grab the newly vacated seat when our guy got up.

I hoped Phillip would sit still for a bit and give me a moment’s rest. He sat down the instant our escort got up. Phillip took his wallet out, looked at something very briefly, put his wallet away, and hopped right back up, grabbing hold of the new bag as he stood. He threw the new garment bag over his shoulder and walked back in the direction we had come from, leaving the bag he had come in with at the lady’s feet and me with the sprint walker from Africa.

My guy took off and I followed, praying we were not going far again, or if we were that I would not lose him. We did, but I did not. He wiped his brow again and sat down again, this time in a row of seats facing out of the airport windows and next to a fellow I assumed was also African. My guy got up and I took the seat in his place. I didn’t like having my back to the busy walkway. I couldn’t get a good look at my surroundings. So I just counted to ten and went for it.

I stood up with my new bag and nearly tripped over the bag I was leaving behind. Then I nearly collided with two of the cops on their mountain bikes buzzing by me. I froze in my tracks. They swerved a little, missed me, and kept on going. I walked away, leaving my guy behind. We were finished with him for a little while.

I ambled all the way back to the café in the middle of the first hub we had come to when we got off our flight from Brussels and landed in Zürich. I saw Phillip sitting in the café in the middle. He had scored a booth and was already sipping coffee when I sat down across from him, sliding my heroin-packed bag next to his at our feet.

“Wasn’t that a surprising turn of events?” I said, breathlessly, and reached for his pack of cigarettes on the tabletop.

“Un-fucking-believable.” He looked at his watch. “We have some time to kill. You want to stay here or go somewhere else and come back?”

“Not a good idea.” I couldn’t wait to get rid of the luggage we were now babysitting. We were in a good spot with the bags concealed under the table, and we were exactly where we should be. Edwin, Garrett, Donald, and Piper were due to arrive soon, and this is where they were supposed to find us. Not the café specifically, but every airport has a big central hub or an area where all the duty-free shops and restaurants are concentrated. Fortunately, we had told them to page us from the help desk. We could find each other that way if necessary. There were several areas like this in the Zürich Airport.

“I hope they find this place.” Phillip fidgeted with his spoon and moved around in his seat, trying to pull the garment bag as far out of sight as possible. “I could go see what gate they are coming into and meet them there.” He appeared to reconsider what he’d offered, possibly because of the look I shot at him when he posited leaving me alone with all the heroin. “No. I should stay here.”

“What can I get you?” our waitress, in her late forties, asked with a thick French accent.

Phillip dropped his spoon and held his shaking hand over his cup to keep her from pouring.

“No more?” She retracted her coffeepot-wielding appendage, already aimed at Phillip’s empty cup, and paused over mine. “Coffee?”

I flipped my upside-down coffee cup over on its saucer and let her fill it. I hadn’t looked at the menu, but if we were going to take up her prime real estate for long, I figured I’d better order something. Phillip ordered breakfast: eggs, bacon, and toast. It dawned on me that we were drinking coffee, American style. A little metal cream pitcher and an old style glass jar of sugar sat on the table. This must be what it feels like for an Asian to go out for Chinese in Cincinnati. The café served the same fare one would expect to find at a diner in Ohio, not in the Zürich Airport.

“I’ll have what he’s having, but the eggs over medium.” She didn’t write anything down and whisked away to the next table to take another order, and then another table. I watched her enter everything
into a computer terminal at once, then she started loading up a tray with all the various drinks people from three tables had ordered. “Hmm, do you have some cash handy?”

“Yeah! What do you need?” Phillip pulled his wallet out of his breast pocket and I remembered his having done the same when he’d picked up the first bag.