I calmly hung up the phone. My cocktail was evaporating to the ceiling, condensing, and drizzling back down into my highball glass.
I had dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie read: You will develop a pilonidal cyst. So I tried to see Dr. Pons back at the hotel, but the nurse said: "Dr. Pons got a hernia taking off his cowboy boots." So I packed my bags and took a taxi to Heathrow Airport.
When Pan Am hired Jeffrey Bower as a pilot for its London to New York flights, it was apparently unaware of his lifelong obsession with the kamikazes — the suicide fliers of the "Divine Wind," the self-immolating archangels of the Rising Sun who steered their bomb-laden planes into the decks of U.S. aircraft carriers.
Approximately midway across the Atlantic, Bower suddenly banked our flight into a terrifyingly sharp 360° turn, the centrifugal force of which separated the passengers' red cells from their leukocytes and platelets from their blood plasma. He then took the jet into a suicide dive, aimed at the QEII which cruised innocently below. The effect on the passengers as the plane dove towards Bower's target on the water was traumatic. Many hyperventilated. Others showed agitated motor activity: complex twirling movements, writhing, flailing. Eventually the cabin was filled with sounds of gagging, retching, shrieking, exaggerated laughter, and choking. Many people were sweating profusely, some were in the fetal position.
I struggled out of my seat and made my way to the cockpit. Bower had drugged the copilot and flight engineer. Utter madness blazed in his eyes.
"Bower!" I shouted at him. "You're going to kill us all! Stop this insanity — I beg of you!"
Bower turned to me momentarily with a look of complete contempt before returning his attention to the trajectory of the jet towards the unsuspecting luxury cruise ship. (As I look back on the incident, perhaps, again, I was projecting my own very negative feelings onto Bower, but my sense of his contempt seemed quite genuine at the time.)
I realized that there was only one thing left to do if we were going to survive. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the DePrancesco Diamond.
"Bower, listen to me. If you pull us out of this dive and promise to get us back to New York in one piece, the DeFrancesco Diamond is yours… $1.5 million, all yours."
Bower eyed the gem with considerable interest.
"$1.5 million?" he said.
I nodded.
"All mine?"
I nodded.
"It's a deal," he said, relieving me of the DeFrancesco Diamond that my mother had bequeathed to me.
He pulled the yoke back and pushed the throttle forward. The nose of the aircraft pointed up and we started to climb.
At the point that Bower pulled the 747 out of its kamikaze dive, we were so close to the QEII that I could read the mahjongg tiles held in the fingers of women on the recreation deck.
When we landed at Kennedy, the aircraft was surrounded by heavily armed police and special agents. But instead of seizing Bower as I'd expected, I was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder by destroying a cruise ship with a plummeting commercial aircraft, a federal offense. It was Bower's wiles and an unbelievable confluence of events that had successfully conspired against me. Apparently Olivia and her convict husband had been on the QEII, celebrating his unexpected parole. Bower and the federal authorities concocted a story that in a fit of jealousy, I attempted to bribe Bower with the DePrancesco Diamond to crash the plane into the cruise ship, killing the woman who'd jilted me and wasting her loathsome beau. Bower even produced a parachute and an inflatable rubber raft that he claimed I'd supplied him, enabling him to escape the aircraft well before impact.
At the nationally televised tribunal, Olivia betrayed me. She presented detailed testimony that I was "essentially a bilious individual," that "beneath a mask of jocularity, [I] had Schadenfreude written all over [my] face."
My attorney, Gary Knobloch, put up a feeble defense, calling only one witness, my old boyhood chum Joaquin Royal, who under cross-examination claimed that I'd taken advantage of his color blindness when we shared crayons in the first grade.
Each member of the tribunal delivered a personal denunciation before sentencing me to death.
Scientists now believe that each person's "expiration date" is encoded within his or her DNA. They've located the operative genes on the operative chromosome and deciphered the specific sequencing of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine that determine, from the moment of conception, an individual's life span. In other words, scientists are now convinced that it's possible to perform a DNA scan — something that will be as easy to do as a laser scan of the universal product code at the supermarket — and determine the exact date and time of day of an individual's death. The potential for abuse is enormous, of course. I remember speaking to a librarian who said that if a DNA scan shows that a person will die, say, on August 15th, and he or she wants to take out a book that's due on the 16th, then "we're just going to have to turn that person down." Well, I'd never had a DNA life-span scan, but it was obvious that my time had come.
As the date of my execution drew closer, there was trouble on death row. A convict was denied his last meal request — bacon and eggs over easy, rye toast, and fries — because it exceeded the cholesterol limits set by the President's Penal Lifestyle and Wellness Task Force.
Luckily I'd developed an unusually close relationship with the warden. Knowing how much I loved Mies van der Rohe, he had an electric Barcelona chair custom-built for my execution. And when the date finally came and I was led into the death chamber, I couldn't help but marvel at the delicate curvature of the X-shaped legs, the perfect finish of the plated steel and the leather upholstery, and the magnificent, almost monumental proportions that have made the Barcelona chair timeless.