"Credit card companies don't do that."
Suzette shrugged. "This one did."
"Did you take anything else?" I asked.
"A couple of bank statements. Nothing crucial."
"You think bank statements and a credit card with no limit are 'nothing crucial'?"
The sleepy-eyed man behind the counter perked up a bit. Suzette glared at me. "Keep it down, Ms Accessory-Before-and-After-the-Fact."
"Unwitting," I said emphatically.
"I was kidding, Pearl. This is my aunt's. She's family. My family wouldn't prosecute me. Would yours?"
I winced. "I've never told you about my family, have I?"
"Tell me later." Suzette finished her coffee in a gulp. "We'd better check in."
There was no line at the desk. Suzette handed over our tickets and then both she and the man behind the counter waited while I dug around for my passport.
When people take a long time checking in at the airport, I always wonder why. Everything's on the computer. Even if you don't have a seat assignment, how long can that take? If most of the flights I've been on are typical, the only ones left are middle seats in the last two rows.
Our check-in took a long time, apparently because there were a lot of connections. The man kept shuffling slips of paper and stamping them, reshuffling them, sorting them into two piles, which he recombined and shuffled through again. That was what it looked like to me, anyway. Finally, I said, "How many times do we change planes?"
He looked up at me sharply, as if this were an especially stupid question. "It's complicated." His gaze slid to Suzette and then back to me. "You know you have to make your connections, right?"
"Right," Suzette assured him.
"There's no taking a later flight, no re-booking, or anything like that."
"We know," Suzette said.
"I've got to match up all the arrivals and take-offs so you can make those connections. Some of these windows don't stay open very long and the ones that do aren't always at the right time in the right flight path. And then there's the fact that there's two of you." He sighed. "I'm sorry, I must sound like a crabby old man. This kind of thing gets more complicated every day."
I wanted to ask why we couldn't just fly direct but Suzette was standing on my foot with a glare that said Shut up. The man finished shuffling and stapling and tucked a sheaf of coupons and boarding passes into each of the ticket folders.
"I've stapled itineraries inside each wallet." He shoved mine at me and opened Suzette's on the counter to show it to both of us. "You'll have plenty of time to make each flight-"
"What if we're delayed?" I asked, a bit belligerently. "Can you guarantee we won't be delayed?"
His look said he thought I was insane as well as rude. "Yes. From Berlin, you go to Rome, then to Morocco, and then to Johannesburg. There'll be a lot of turbulence on the flight out of Jo'burg. Don't let it scare you. Just finish your drinks early and keep your seatbelts on. After that, you have the layover." He closed Suzette's folder and slid it under her hand. "Bon voyage."
I looked at the itinerary inside my folder. " Johannesburg to Mombasa? I thought we were going to Madagascar."
"Don't mention Madagascar," the man snapped in a half-whisper.
"Thanks very much for all your help," Suzette said quickly, pulling me away. I wondered if the whole trip would be like this-me making people angry and her dragging me off before they took a swing at me.
Someone told me once that flying to London during the day rather than overnight made jetlag easier to handle. Or maybe I only dreamed that; I was a zombie. I gave up trying to tell what time of day it was as I marched through Heathrow behind Suzette. If I'd been even slightly more awake, I might have asked if we were going the right way. It seemed to be the long way; one hallway would let out onto a concourse which would take us to another hallway and then another. Occasionally someone in a uniform carrying a radio would wave us on. When I tried to stop and ask a woman in a maroon blazer a question, she told me to keep going, everything would be taken care of at The Desk. I could hear the capitals when she said it.
"I don't think there is a flight to Berlin," I said to Suzette as I shuffled down another hallway behind her. "We're actually walking there."
The hallway let out onto a concourse, smaller than any of the others and deserted except for a woman stationed at a counter in front of something that might have been one of those exclusive airline clubs, except there was no company name or logo. She reminded me a little of Jinx Gottmunsdottir, only a few decades younger and nowhere nearly as generously proportioned. I followed Suzette over and she greeted us with the restrained, professional smile people wear when they're not sure whether they'll have to let you in or throw you out.
"Is this The Desk?" Suzette asked.
The woman nodded. "Tickets, passports, and landing cards, please." She sorted, shuffled, and stamped, and sent us through a turnstile to a waiting room where the flight to Berlin was already boarding.
In Berlin, we debarked outdoors in the middle of what looked like a parking lot for airplanes and boarded a shuttle bus. Instead of getting off at the first stop with most of the other passengers, however, an attendant told us to stay on and we were ferried to another plane, much smaller than the one we had arrived in.
The flight attendant who checked our tickets as we boarded seemed more like a security guard. She pointed each passenger to a specific seat with an air that suggested she wouldn't look kindly on anyone wanting to switch places. I fell asleep before takeoff and didn't wake up till after we landed in Rome, which made me grouchy with disappointment-I'd hoped to get at least a glimpse of the city from the air.
Another shuttle bus took us to the next small aircraft. There were fewer passengers and no assigned seats. I had intended to stay awake but there was a long delay before takeoff. When I woke up, we were in a holding pattern over Morocco.
The shuttle bus waiting here was all but hermetically sealed against the heat and the windows had such a dark tint, it was practically impossible to see out of them. Tired, I leaned over to Suzette and whispered, "I'm exhausted. You go on, I'm gonna stay here and see when I can get a flight home."
"You are not." Suzette said, grabbing my arm in that Death Grip of Doom again. "You can't."
"I'll pay you back the airfare." I tried prying her fingers off me and couldn't.
"Pearl, you can't just bail. This is a trip for two. You're locked in." Suzette looked significantly at the uniformed man standing by the exit.
"Are you kidding me?" I started to get up and she pulled me down.
"Don't. He's armed." She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. "I'd have quit after Berlin. But we're committed."
"You can't force people to travel. It's illegal."
"It's not a matter of legal or illegal," said a firm voice. I looked up to see the guard standing over us. "You are in transit. You cannot leave a plane in transit. You stop when it stops." The bus came to a halt and he pointed at the exit door. It slid open to reveal the steps up to the next aircraft. "You haven't stopped yet."
The flight to Johannesburg was the longest and the one where sleep deserted me. The flight attendants looked as tired as I felt. I considered slipping one of them a note: Help, I'm traveling against my will. Seeing those morose faces, however, made me decide against it. They'd probably just tell me to be glad I was sitting down.
Someone had left a thick paperback book in the seat pocket in front of me. It seemed to be a thriller involving spies who had sex a lot but I couldn't be sure. It was in French, a language I'd had little acquaintance with since high school. Eventually, I got bored enough to try reading it and discovered that I could make out slightly more of the text than I'd expected but not, unfortunately, in any of the parts where the spies had sex a lot.