“Cuts into the profit, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” he said, “but that’s not the point. It’s a funny thing about sitting in the front of the plane. You’ve got more leg room, and the seats are wider, with more space between you and the person sitting next to you. You’d think that would be a distancing factor, but people in first are much more likely to get into conversations. In coach you sit there with your knees jammed against the seat in front of you, and trying to keep your elbows from pushing the other guy’s elbows off the shared armrest, and you crawl in a cocoon and stay there until the plane’s back on the ground.”
“But in first class you turn into Chatty Cathy?”
“Not on the flight out,” he said. “The woman sitting next to me had her laptop up and running, and she might as well have been in her office cubicle, the way she was all wrapped up in her work.”
“That’s a shame, if she was cute. Was she?”
“Not really. On the way back, well, I was still in first class, because it was simpler to just go ahead and book the whole flight that way. And the guy next to me started talking the minute we got off the ground.”
“This is when I get to relax,” the man had said for openers. “When I’m in a plane and the plane’s in the air. I never even think about crashing. Never even consider the possibility. Do you?”
“Not until just now,” Keller said.
“What I do,” the man went on, “is I leave my troubles on the ground. Because I’m up here and they’re down there, and while I’m here there’s not a damn thing I can do about them, so why carry them around with me?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Except,” the man said, “this is one of those days when I just don’t think it’s gonna work. Because I just can’t shake the thought that in two hours we’ll be back on the ground and I’m in the same pile of crap as always.”
The fellow didn’t look like someone who spent much time in a pile of crap. He was dressed for success in a dark pinstripe suit, his button-down shirt was a Wedgwood blue, his tie gold with dark blue fleurs-de-lis. Like Keller, he was wearing loafers; if they were going to make you take off your shoes at airport security, you didn’t want to have to untie them and tie them up again. Slip ’em off, slip ’ em on. Maybe you couldn’t beat the system, but at least you could try to keep up with it.
He was a businessman, obviously, and in his early forties or thereabouts. Keller guessed he’d played a minor sport in college-track, maybe-and had eaten well since then. He wasn’t jowly yet, but he was on his way. And he had the florid complexion of someone who’d either spent a little too much time in the sun-unlikely, in Detroit-or whose blood pressure might bear watching.
“I’m from New York,” he announced. “Yourself?”
“The same,” Keller said.
“Live in the city itself? Manhattan?”
Keller nodded.
“Me too. Moved back after the divorce.”
“I was never married,” Keller said, “so I never left. Manhattan, I mean.”
“Right. Name’s Harrelson, Claude Harrelson.”
“Pleased to know you,” Keller said, and then realized it was now his turn to say who he was. “Eric Fischvogel,” he said, supplying the name he was flying under, the name on the ID and credit cards he was carrying.
“Fischvogel,” Harrelson said. “German?”
There was a lot to be said, Keller sometimes thought, for false ID with a name like Johnson or Brooks, something simple and unremarkable. “It means fish bird,” he said.
“I figured out the fish part.”
“I think it means like a fish hawk,” Keller improvised. “In fact one branch of the family changed it to Osprey.”
“Really. Well, Eric, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Pleasure’s mine.”
The flight attendant came along with the cart, and Harrelson asked for a Bloody Mary. Keller thought about having a beer, but something made him ask for a Coke instead. She asked if Pepsi was all right, and he said it would be fine.
“I wonder,” Harrelson said, “what would have happened if you told her no, Pepsi wasn’t all right, and you had to have Coke. I mean, we’re at what, thirty-five thousand feet? It’s pretty much like it or lump it, wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s a point.”
Harrelson took a moment to work on his drink, then looked at Keller over the brim. “Eric,” he said, “mind a question?”
Which, Keller thought, was a little like asking him if Pepsi was all right, because how could he say no?
In any event, Harrelson didn’t wait for an answer. “Eric,” he said, “have you ever wanted to kill somebody?”
“Now that’s a hell of a question,” Dot said. “I thought all men talked about was sports and the stock market.”
“It shook me,” he admitted, “coming out of the blue like that. What I said was I supposed everybody felt like that from time to time. When some clown cuts you off in traffic, say. But we learn to suppress those impulses, and they pass.”
“That’s what you said?”
“Something like that.”
“Just who the hell did you think you were, Keller? Doctor Phil?”
“Well, I didn’t know what to say. But he wasn’t talking about getting cut off in traffic, or momentary impulses. He was serious.”
“My business partner,” Harrelson was saying. “We’ve got this little company, merchandising generic pharmaceuticals. We were both in the field, and I was a born salesman, and he’s the kind of guy who makes the trains run on time. We were both itching to go on our own, and we figured the two of us would be a good fit, Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.”
“And you were wrong?”
“No, we were absolutely right. We showed a profit the first year, and both our sales and our net have gone up every year since.”