And as she stepped into the travel agency that morning, a new disquieting ingredient had been added to the mixture of anticipation and curiosity which had kept her awake for several nights already. She stopped just inside the agency’s glass door, looked around at the dozen or so preoccupied people who were distributed on either side of the service counter, and turned to her companion, a short and shapeless, mousey-haired girl of the type that is foredoomed by an unlucky shuffle of chromosomes to play a brief walk-on bit in such affairs as this, and thereafter to be painlessly forgotten by everyone except herself. To give her at least one instant’s clear immortality, let us at least record her name, which happened to be Enid Hofstatter.
“I hate to sound like a nut,” Vicky Kinian said in a low voice, “but I can’t get over the feeling that somebody’s watching me whenever I come in this place.”
Enid, who was not going to Europe or anywhere else, and who on this day of Vicky’s initiation into the Jet Set was on the verge of strangling on her own envy, blinked at her through smartly framed glasses.
“So what? Probably some handsome hunk of man has already spotted you as a fellow passenger and can’t wait till you’re on the plane together. Is that bad?”
Vicky showed with her grimace that she did consider it bad. Like most young women, from Los Angeles to the Eastern Marches, she harbored the deep suspicion that her hometown was inhabitated by the most boring specimens of masculinity on earth.
Within five minutes she had added the stapled booklet of tickets to the other vital papers in her purse. Then as she thanked the travel agent and turned away from the counter she was once more so overwhelmed by the sensation that she was being spied on that she swept her eyes over the entire room in the hope of spotting her phantom shadow. But the other customers in the office seemed fully involved with business of their own. She said nothing to Enid this time, and tried to convince herself that she had seen too many old Hitchcock movies on the late late show.
The two girls had scarcely left the place when a tall man in an inconspicuous blue suit stepped from the doorway of a store opposite, quickly crossed the street, and entered the same travel agency.
As he approached the counter the manager noticed him and raised a hand.
“Ah, Mr Jaeger!” The travel agent paused and glanced around the room, then leaned forward across the counter and held down his voice. “Miss Kinian was just here, getting her ticket.”
The tall man smiled. His smile, momentarily tempering the sharp line of a broad thin-lipped mouth, was more aggressive than charming — the kind of smile an ambitious executive might give to a subordinate. A fierce purposefulness was stamped in his sharp features and bluish-green eyes and reflected even in the closely cropped hair, which had once been a light blond and now, tempered with grey, was like polished steel.
“I know,” he said. “I deliberately avoided her so that she can be completely surprised. You have my ticket?”
His words were precise and clipped, with a trace of an accent which any American would have vaguely assumed was regional rather than foreign.
“Here you are,” the manager answered, producing a folder. “Flight 624 to Lisbon via New York.”
Jaeger took the multiple ticket from the man and flipped through its thin sheaf of leaves.
“And my seat is definitely next to Miss Kinian’s on the transatlantic leg of the flight?”
“Yes sir. The young lady should be bowled over when her godfather shows up right next to her. How long is it since you last met her?”
The customer tucked his ticket into his jacket pocket and returned the travel agent’s professional smile.
“Not since she was a tiny little girl,” he said. “But I was very close to her father. Until he died, you would have called us inseparable.”
If he had been as nervous or as sensitive as Vicky Kinian, he would have had the same psychic impression of being followed, and he would have been just as right. He would also have been thoroughly capable of doing something about it. But unfortunately for him, he was so preoccupied with his own pursuit that he never noticed the elderly gentleman with the white Vandyke whiskers and old-fashioned pince-nez, leaning on a heavy cane at the window of an adjacent bookshop, who turned slightly to observe his departure, looking rather like a benevolent Trotsky.
For Vicky Kinian, the first part of her trip, including a hectic sightseeing stopover in New York City, had been such a frenzied medley of re-claiming and re-registering baggage, of transfers between ramps and gates and buses and airports and hotel and taxis, that she was already in a state of somewhat dazed exhaustion when she emerged from the last human maelstrom of Kennedy Airport’s waiting rooms and once more entered the clean cool hyperinsulated interior of a jet primed for the takeoff for Lisbon, and perhaps the first answer to a mystery that had obsessed her all her life. She stepped into the pale blue tunnel of the plane’s fuselage prepared to collapse in her assigned seat and thank the fates for letting her be born in the wide smog-free spaces of the American Midwest.
“Vicky Kinian!”
The sound of her own name was so unexpected that for a couple of seconds it meant no more to her than the bump of a piece of hand luggage on the floor of the plane.
“Vicky! Is it really you?”
She stared at the platinum-haired stewardess in the neat grey uniform who was speaking to her, and then she and the other girl laughed with amazement.
“Freda Oliveiros! Who would’ve thought we’d have a class reunion like this?”
The stewardess, pretty in a brittle and slightly hard-featured way, led her down the aisle, talking all the time.
“Not me. I never did go much for that old-school-garter bit. But it’s good to see that you’ve made the grade — a cash customer on a flight like this!”
“Don’t be silly! I work in a filing-cabinet prison a lot harder than you do on this gorgeous thing. I just...”
Freda Oliveiros got a dirty look from her co-stewardess as a sudden influx of passengers began to clog the plane’s entrance.
“You’ll have to tell me all about it later, Vicky. Here’s your seat. I’ll drop by as soon as I can take a breath.”
Vicky’s seat was on the aisle. The place next to the window was already taken by a light-haired man in a blue suit. He gave her a pleasant nod as she sat down but did not say anything. She was glad of that. She had dreaded the possibility of spending eight hours or so as captive audience of some dimwit whose conversational kindling had been collected from the pages of a fifty-cent joke book.
Flight phobia returned briefly as the big jet lumbered through takeoff. Once it was safely airborne, Vicky’s fear evaporated, but her hands were still unconsciously gripping the armrests on either side of her seat so tightly that her knuckles were blotchy white. The man next to her noticed and she quickly loosened her fingers.
“Quite right,” her companion said in a cultivated, faintly accented voice. “I think the plane can stay up without our help now.”
For some reason his thin-lipped smile, showing teeth that were almost too white and perfect, disconcerted her.
“I needn’t pretend I’m not a coward about this,” she said with a nervous laugh. “This is only the second time I’ve ever been off the ground.”