8

Cruising altitude, 28,000 feet.

A little bumpy getting up, not much taste for conversation with all the jostling to and fro. But once the cloud bank of New Jersey had been cleared and the sun shone bright upon the wings, good old Rajiv Patel got talkative again. All three kids had slipped into the same three seats they’d sat in on the journey out, Rajiv right next to Eddie in the pair of seats facing the cockpit door, Vi immediately behind him over his shoulder facing aft, and way in the back, just like yesterday, slumped Alex the Mute, Alex the Lump. Who must have blown a vocal cord from overtaxing it in Ben’s office on those sixteen syllables he’d managed to expend; so he was quiet as a dormant mouse for the duration, while Vi read a while and dozed, and Rajiv stayed wide awake and talked.

Vi had a fresh new People Mag to read, along with an Us, an Enquirer, and a Star. Bought them at the Monmouth Mall, along with a phony ostrich leather purse with not-quite matching belt, a couple of mock-designer dresses (emphasize the ‘mock’), and two pairs of primo pre-stressed jeans. Rajiv had handed her some fifties to spend, but Eddie saw fit to leave a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills on the limo seat to keep her occupied while the papers were being signed. Better than having her grab a taxi back and run up to the office while the deal was getting done. Christ!—If Benny caught a glimpse of blond-haired Vi and went into another fit of funk in memory of sainted Liz, the way he’d done the last time he’d seen a perky twenty-something girl like her up close—No, too much business to be done this summer: A week without Benny at the helm, and they’d be way too far behind.

So Alex sat incommunicado, as usual, Vi leafed a little through her trashy magazines—getting the latest scoop on which celebs were having deviant sex and how often and with whom. But in no time at all, she was dozing again with her neck contorted toward the headrest, and the two of them—Eddie and Rajiv—were for all intents and purposes alone and free to talk in privacy. Which they consequently did. Thus:

Eddie: “So—let me ask you, Rajiv: What exactly did your buddy Alex mean by what he said back in the office—do you know?”

“What he said? Like the stuff about Mr. Atherton? Like getting a picture, you mean?”

“Yeah; I guess he meant Ben. He’s pretty cryptic in his speech, your colleague Alex is, wouldn’t you say? He doesn’t talk a lot, and when he does get something out, it’s kind of hard to tell exactly what he means.”

“Not for me, it isn’t. I understand him well enough.”

“So tell me then: What the hell was he getting at?”

“About the picture, right—is that what you’re asking, Mr. Parker? Well, I’m pretty sure he meant just what he said. He wants Mr. Atherton to send a picture in for him to try and get a match. I think—between you and me—” Rajiv whispered, though there was no need at all for him to whisper; neither Alex nor Vi were in the least little bit attentive to their conversation—“I think Alex wants to show him how terrific our program works.”

“Well, hell, if a plain old picture’s what he’s asking for, just pick up any business magazine and there’s probably a photo of Ben in there. I mean, I can send you some publicity shots if you want, but all you need to do really, is pick up a Business Weekly or maybe the Economist for the past few months. Ben’ll be in there, guaranteed—And, by the way, pal, no more of this ‘Mr. Parker’ foolishness, OK? Call me Eddie. Shit, even the kids who park my car in valet call me Eddie, so I’m not gonna tolerate any of those ‘Mr. Parkers’ from an up-and-coming billionaire like you.”

“OK, sure, then, Eddie it is. And I’ll do what you say about the pictures, Mr.— um … Eddie. I’ll pick up some business magazines tomorrow, but … honestly” (whispering again) “I think what Alex was really asking for was a picture of Ben when he was young—when he was, like, around our age—like me and Alex’s age. That’s kinda what we’re used to working with in our data base for matches, so….”

“Ben at your age?” Eddie interrupted, laughing wryly. “Oh hell, Rajiv—that ain’t gonna be happenin’ any time soon, pal. Can’t be done. No fuckin’ way.”

“It can’t? But….” Rajiv shook his head in manifest puzzlement. “So—I’m kinda confused here—Doesn’t he like the pictures taken of him when he was young?”

“Like ‘em?—LIKE ‘em!” Eddie laughed right out loud. “Christ! There’s nothing to like. He doesn’t have any pictures of him when he was young like you two genius kids. Even if he tried to come up with a picture from back then, he couldn’t. No, you’re gonna have to use something recent—like I said, the magazines are best—That’s all, though—There’s not a single picture anywhere of Benny when he was a kid.”

“But…. You’re not serious, right? There’s gotta be something you can get us. I mean—Everybody’s got pictures from when they were young.”

“Not Ben; not a thing, not a single image that I know of. Nothing from his high school years, nothing from his junior high school years. Maybe his folks have some baby shots, though I doubt it, if he ever got into their closets to weed them out. No, there’s really nothing left, Rajiv—I mean nothing—Ben’s pretty thorough when he sets his mind on something, and when he set his mind to burn those pictures, I’d bet a million bucks to twenty that he burned them all.”

“Burned them! Wait a minute, Eddie—You’re telling me he—what?!”

“You heard me, kid. After Lizzie got killed….”

“Hold on, Eddie. Back up a second, will you? Killed? You said she died, but you never said she got killed. You never really told me what happened to Ben’s girlfriend. So—what did?”

“Didn’t I tell you?—No, I guess I didn’t. It’s not a lot of laughs for me to talk about, I guess. So—You sure you want to hear the grisly details? It’s not the kind of thing that’s gonna brighten up your day.”

Rajiv’s swarthy eyes widened perceptibly:

“Hey, now I do. You can’t just start a thing like that and not finish up.”

“OK, so fine then; don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Eddie took a long, deep swig of the beer he had opened after take-off. Then he swiped a dab of Roquefort from the cheese tray that Matthew the fill-in pilot had set out for them just after the flight had leveled off, spread it on a cracker, popped it in his mouth, washed the semi-masticated mouthful down with another ample swig of beer, and finally:

“OK then, Rajiv, here’s the grizzly tale of Bennie’s woe: So—Lizzie and Ben—I might have told you already, they met in high school—tenth grade, I think it was—or maybe eleventh—things get a little hazy after thirty-something years. Anyway, they met at a dance—in the high school gym it was. I was there when they met, I was looking on across the room, but it’s hard to remember the exact circumstances of the thing that long ago. What I remember, though, is how Benny was afterward. He was in love from the moment—from the second, the instant—that he met her…. I mean, she was a gorgeous little thing and all; you can understand his attraction. But this wasn’t just attraction—this was love—I’m telling you, the guy was star-struck, head over heels, as they say, right from the moment that he met her. He asked her on a date and she said OK—I wasn’t right there with him when he asked her, so I’m telling you stuff that Benny told me later—Probably she said more than just OK about the date—Lizzie was just as gaga over Ben as Ben was over her.

“So there’s the preface to the story in a nutshell—they were in love as much as any two people I’ve ever known have ever been in love. Eleventh grade, twelfth grade, then when Benny went away to college—he finished Princeton in three years and then he got a full-ride scholarship to Wharton in Philly to study business—So from either place, wherever he was, they arranged things so that he came home or she drove out to see him nearly every weekend for the whole school year. They were inseparable, Rajiv—totally inseparable. They spoke alike, they thought alike. You can’t imagine how the two of them kind of blended into one. I’ve never seen anything like it ever since in all my life. It’s hard even to describe. I don’t know—ask any of the kids who knew them back then and they’ll tell you the same as me. Love. You can’t imagine how much the two of them were in love. It was.… I don’t know, it was….”

Eddie stopped and dug a knuckle into the corner of each eye; then he took another swig of beer to wet his mouth, but kept his silence for a full minute or maybe more, to the point of evident discomfort for Rajiv, until the young man finally prodded:

“So what happened, then, Eddie? I get it with the relationship between them; I understand—But you said she died. You said she got killed, right? So what happened then? How did Ben’s girlfriend finally die?”

Too much, too fast. Eddie—poor Eddie—he’d been pushed too much and way too fast. For once, Rajiv had overstepped his bounds without quite realizing how sensitive their conversation had become to the man beside him in the comfy leather seat. Eddie wasn’t angry, just unduly stressed, and thus he blurted out abruptly, with a harshly quaking voice:

“She got murdered is how she died. Son of a bitch! Some freaky asshole killed her is how she fucking died—OK?”

That was it. Eddie couldn’t talk anymore for a while—for quite a while, as things turned out—and Rajiv was too polite, too intuitive, and a wee bit overly shell-shocked as well, to dare disturb him. Rajiv turned backward in his seat to see if any of the other ears aboard were tuned-in to the question and the outburst therefrom, but there were none. Vi was sleeping deeply, the sleep of the contented shopper with her coutourier requirements sated utterly for the next few months. Alex was back in his dream world once again, clutching the laptop to his chest, thinking about the next stage of his Great Endeavor: Now that he’d have the cash in hand, he was going to hire a building full of staffers, have them email each of the users of the site who’d logged their photos in, and get personal questionnaires filled out.

Here was the lucky break he’d dreamed of since the website first was launched: Personalities, interests, hobbies; then health issues as well: Was facial morphology linked to other factors more profound? He’d bought an old book on phrenology from an eBay seller a couple of months ago, and it had got him wondering: dolichocephaly, brachycephaly, nasal shape, aural shape, interpalpebral aperture, width of mouth, fullness of lips—are they related to other factors in a person’s behavior and potential? Could they predict future issues as to length of life and health and intellect?

From his previous findings, it was probable that sixty-eight percent of the users would respond. And since the site had logged in thirty-six million people to date and—no, scratch that—six-hundred-and-eighty-thousand, five-hundred-fifty-two more just yesterday, so adding three more days since the last full census, that made, right at the moment—as of this morning anyway—thirty-eight million, nearly thirty-nine. So, figuring sixty-eight percent of that, he’d likely get responses from….

Alex was a quiet one, all right, but his brain was always hard at work.