Lionel Shriver - The New Republic

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.

Grateful for a task with so much time to kill in the Lisbon airport, Edgar cashed a traveler’s check and got change for the pay phone. To smooth logistics, he really should have contacted this Nicola person from New York, but he’d put the call off. It was a bit embarrassing, acting on Wallasek’s assumption that she must have a key to Saddler’s house because she was one of his known floozies.

“I see,” said the woman, once Edgar had haltingly explained his business; her accent vaguely English, at least it wasn’t the ram-it-down-your-throat variety. “So you’re Barrington’s replacement .” She sounded both mournful and bemused.

“I’m supposed to move into—” Edgar scrambled to avoid Saddler’s name, whose mention from the first had seemed to constitute a torment—“the house on Rua da Evaporação. No one at the Record had a key. I can always stay in a hotel tonight and bring in a locksmith tomorrow. But my editor thought maybe …”

“I do have a key,” she admitted gravely. “When do you arrive?”

“Tennish, tonight.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, and she did sound incredibly sorry, though perhaps most of all that the phone had rung and it was just another visiting journalist. Nicola had answered, Hello? with breathy anticipation; her subsequent downshift of timbre recalled Angela’s, on realizing it was only Edgar. “I’d have liked to have met your plane. But a few odds and sods are coming over this evening, and leaving my guests would be rude. Not that I won’t be tempted.” A small laugh, minor key. “After all, the members of our incestuous set run into each other every day—”