30. Singapore – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

“Okay, say you didn’t do the sitting-together deal, like total coincidence. I’ll give you that one just to show I’m a team player. But I’m saying, why you asked me here?”

“There aren’t reasons,” Denise said, stiff. And scowled down, hiding her reasons, drawing a finger down the spine of her airplane reading, Stanford Wong’s Professional Blackjack. Then the plane picked up speed, forcing its way into takeoff, and Eddie lay back into the thrust, just frightened: just risking everything for this asshole mistake.

And he remembered benelia, his pretend all-healing grain: he saw a streaming mental banner with REMEMBER BENELIA printed on it in handsome gold. But old hags dragged it, through a wasteland of rotting stalks, it was a funeral march for Eddie’s heart. A uniformed monkey led the cortege, cradling a rusty horn. The instrument drooped in the hairy arms, dust ran from its dull bell . . .

Ten years. He’d got to know she’d be older, but not fucking old. Not, not the same shape. And yellow and baggy and the toadskin thing. Could he even get it up, you’d have to drink so much you’d be first principles impotent. And would she still take him gambling, NO, even if he played the homo card, NO. Go back to Ralphie’s House of Horrors, NO FUCKING NO. The suicide thing loomed, except he never felt like dying in planes, it was totally Murphy’s Law.

“At least we can give Kuala Lumpur a miss,” she said, with a polite effort, attending to business. “As we’ve met. I thought of the beach, because I have to teach you blackjack, and it makes no odds where. And, after all, our beach in Egypt.”

“FUCK that. Just, why you had that picture of my father in your briefcase?”