CHAPTER 13

IN MIAMI WE FOUND A SMALL HOTEL, CHEAP AND SHABBY BUT conveniently located, and slept until past sundown. We got to the airport at a quarter to ten that evening. Rochelle’s plane was due in twenty minutes. There was no place to park.

“This is hopeless,” Julian said as we circled past the terminal for the fifth time. “I don’t want Rochelle to come and find nobody there. Why don’t I leave you off here and you go to the gate? I’ll be along in a little while. There’s got to be some corner of this stupid lot that isn’t full.”

A few seconds later he and the car were gone. I marched into the terminal, straight to the arrivals board. Flight 257 from Albuquerque, due at 10:04, would be on time at Gate 19. It was just before ten o’clock now.

I hurried down a long, white, fluorescent-lit corridor. I was sweating all over. Would Rochelle come off the plane bare-shouldered, in the same evening dress she’d worn the last time I saw her? I ought to be wearing a suit and my best shiny shoes, not a checkered short-sleeved shirt with suntan pants and sneakers. I should be holding a corsage for her. My date, for my first prom.

Instead I carried a hardcover edition of Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned, which Julian had lent me. Something to read in case the plane was late.

The area around Gate 19 was crowded. There weren’t any seats. I sat on the floor and leaned my back against the wall. A young Hispanic woman sat next to me, smoking. “Is everybody waiting for flight two-five-seven?” I asked her. She nodded without looking at me.

“May I have your attention please? United Airlines flight two-five-seven from Albuquerque, scheduled to arrive at ten-oh-four P.M., has been delayed. Currently anticipated arrival time is ten thirty-five.”

Well, that was a pity. Julian would certainly be here before Rochelle arrived. I wouldn’t need that corsage after all.

I opened The Book of the Damned and began to read:

A procession of the damned.

By the damned, I mean the excluded . . .

Yes. The damned are the excluded. The one lesson my idiotic school manages to teach. I’d learned it well, at the edges of conversations that didn’t include me, because I didn’t talk like the others or about the same things, and they knew it and so did I. Even Jeff. Now especially Jeff . . .

I snapped out of my reverie. Useless, this bitterness. The door from the runway was propped open, people filing in. The Hispanic girl stood in a corner of the gate area, passionately kissing a brown-skinned man with long, slick black hair. I got to my feet, brushed off my pants, wondering if I’d even recognize Rochelle when she came through the door. Twice I saw girls who I thought might be her. But they weren’t.

The line thinned to a trickle. Then it stopped. Plenty of seats now. I sat down; there seemed nothing else I could do. I went back to Charles Fort.

Battalions of the accursed will march, some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive . . .

The words had turned meaningless. I closed the book. A stewardess yanked at the door, and it swung shut. “Was this United flight two-five-seven?” I asked her.

She nodded. She hurried away. I wanted Julian to be here. Julian, I’d say to him. Rochelle must have missed her flight. How are we going to link up with her now?

But there wasn’t any Julian either.

 

I went back to the ticketing area. I couldn’t remember just where Julian had said he was going to meet us. The space around the ticket counters seemed darker than it had before, and a lot more deserted. I was puzzled. With so few people left in the terminal, there had to be parking spaces. What was taking him so long?

I wandered back and forth between the counters and the terminal doors, while a woman’s voice droned announcements over the PA system. One of these began, very gradually, to penetrate my awareness.

“Albert Bender, meet your party in the baggage claim area for United Airlines flight two-five-seven. Albert Bender, meet your party . . .”

Albert Bender?

The Bender of the three men in black? The Bender to whom Julian had been charging his phone calls? Bender had to be a common name. Surely there were Albert Benders in Miami, just as in Bridgeport.

“Albert Bender, meet your party . . .”

A few nights earlier, while Julian was driving, I’d asked about those telephone calls. He’d given a very long answer that made very little sense. I may have dozed off for part of it. But I remembered his saying, more than once: “I send a message. By using Bender’s name, I send a signal. You understand?”

I hadn’t understood. A signal for Rochelle? A message for Tom?

But maybe I was the one the signal was for. And it was being sent right now.

I ran for the escalator.

 

The baggage claim area for United Airlines was deserted when I got there. At the other end of the hall a large group of people, apparently passengers on a TWA flight that had just arrived in Miami, milled around and waited for their suitcases to appear. But the belt for United flight 257 wasn’t moving any longer. Only a few pieces of unclaimed luggage remained. Two dark-skinned men gathered the luggage onto carts and wheeled it off to some storage room. Both of them wore what I guessed was the uniform of the airport workers—black jacket and pants, black ties, black caps.

Cubans, they had to be. Refugees from Castro.

I bent over and examined the bags still on the belt. The light was pretty poor. But I could make out, on a tag attached by a small chain to the handle of one powder-blue suitcase, the name Rochelle Perlmann. There followed an address in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. A telephone number, with a Philadelphia area code.

I looked up. Through the plate glass window I could make out at least four taxis standing by the curb, presumably waiting for the TWA passengers. I could take the suitcase. I could get a cab to our hotel. I could wait there for Julian. Rochelle might have left a message for us inside the suitcase, explaining why she hadn’t been on flight 257. I picked up the suitcase. I began to walk toward the doors.

“Hey!”

I stopped and turned around. One of the baggage workers was walking toward me, grinning amiably. He was a tall, powerfully built man with a swelling stomach and a large pockmarked face.

“That your suitcase, kid?”

I looked down at the suitcase, still in my hand. “I think it is,” I said.

“Kind of a funny color suitcase for a fella to be carrying, wouldn’t you say?”

Again I looked at the suitcase, a bit longer this time. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess you might say it is.”

His grin broadened. He looked like he was about to laugh. I prepared myself to laugh with him.

“What’s your name, kid?”

He was at least forty years old. Yet I couldn’t shake the sense I was facing some loutish kid from my phys ed class, getting ready to gather his friends against me, to taunt me for their usual stupid reasons.

“Albert Bender,” I said.

“You got a claim stub for that piece of luggage?” came a voice from my left.

I turned to see the other baggage worker—small, wiry, snaggletoothed. I put the suitcase down and made a show of hunting through my pockets.

“I can’t—I can’t—can’t seem to find it,” I said. “I must have left it—”

“You must have left it on the plane,” the tall pockmarked man said. “Isn’t that right? You left it on the plane.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I left it on the plane.”

“Let’s have a look at that bag,” said Snaggletooth.

Neither he nor Pockface had a trace of a Cuban accent, or southern for that matter. Seen close up, neither of them had any Hispanic features besides their dark skin. The color had a strange artificial quality about it, as if they both had decided to stain themselves brown for some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom.

“Tag says Rochelle Perlmann,” Snaggletooth announced. “It doesn’t say no Albert Bender. Tell me, Al. What the hell you doing with Rochelle Perlmann’s suitcase?”

“Rochelle’s my sister,” I said.

“Your sister?”

“My sister. I’m picking up her suitcase for her.”

“Why can’t your sister pick up her own suitcase?”

I thought of telling them she’d gone to get the car and had asked me to bring the suitcase out to her. But then they might insist on my taking them to her or waiting with me until she arrived with the car. “She missed her flight,” I said. “I was supposed to come meet her, but she missed her flight. Seems like her luggage got on the plane, but she didn’t.”

“Thought you said you left your claim stub on the plane,” said Pockface mildly.

“I did? I said that? I—I—”

“Now it sounds like you weren’t on the plane at all,” said Pockface.

“I was—I was—I must have been confused. I got all flustered, I guess.”

“Flustered,” said Pockface. He seemed to consider this idea. “You’re a pretty nervous kid, Al,” he said. “You know that?”

“Where was your sister flying in from?” asked Snaggletooth.

“Albuquerque,” I said. “New Mexico.”

“We know where Albuquerque is,” said Pockface. “Been working at airports all our lives.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Snaggletooth, “is what’s a lady named Rochelle Perlmann doing being the sister of a guy named Albert Bender. How does that figure, Al?”

“She’s married,” I said.

“Married,” said Pockface.

“To Fred Perlmann,” I said. “In Philadelphia. About two years ago. Now she’s flying in from New Mexico, to visit—to visit the family.”

“Your family’s right here in Miami, huh?” said Pockface.

“That’s right,” I said.

“What’s your address?”

“Twenty-two-oh-eight Orlando Avenue,” I said.

This was the address of our hotel and the only Miami address I happened to know. Snaggletooth took a small notebook out of his pocket and, with a nasty snicker, wrote something down. I realized I’d just made one more mistake.

“What does your brother-in-law do?” Pockface asked. “For a living, I mean. Up in Philadelphia.”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“A Philadelphia lawyer!” said Pockface. He gave an odd snorting laugh. “It sure does figure. From his name, I mean.”

“He sounds like a gentleman of the Hebrew persuasion,” Snaggletooth said. “Am I right about that, Al?”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re right about that.”

“Tell me the truth,” said Pockface. “Doesn’t that bother you, just a little bit? Your sister marrying one of them.”

“No,” I said. “Why should it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Pockface. “Just, a lot of guys it would bother, that’s all. You’re a real liberal guy. I respect that.”

“It’d bother the hell out of me,” said Snaggletooth.

“Yeah, that’s you,” Pockface told him. “But Al’s not like you. He’s a liberal kind of guy. And he’s right about that too! The Jewish, they’re just like you and me. Isn’t that right, Al?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”

“Fuck that,” said Snaggletooth. “What I want is a closer look at that suitcase.”

“Good idea,” said Pockface. “Let’s all go down to our office, have better light to see by. Al can sit down, take a load off his feet. Don’t worry about the suitcase, Al, I’ll carry it. What’s that book you got with you?”

I handed him The Book of the Damned. He looked at the title as we began walking. It seemed mildly to surprise him. “Good book?” he asked.

“I think it is,” I said.

“The Book of the Damned. All about you, right?”

I must have stopped walking. Pockface pushed me gently on the arm to keep me moving down the long white corridor.

“Just kidding,” he said. “I’ll read the book sometime. Always looking for good books to read. That’s the way you broaden yourself, isn’t that right, now, Al?”