is imprinted on my brain, up to the final one in Iraq. They kept showing us maps and flight paths on TV.”
For some reason, this makes Samantha feel giddy. The room tilts. She closes her eyes and grips the arm of the sofa because a curving hall of mirrors seems to be sloping away from her and at the far end, very tiny, she can almost see her mother with a baby in her arms.
“It was horrible,” her aunt says. “Just watching and watching, completely helpless. It was horrible.”
“Was it?” Samantha cannot keep an edge of anger from her voice, and something else too, a low buzz of excitement which her aunt detects and which Samantha will not let go. Like a terrier, she works at her aunt’s growing agitation. “Was it, Lou?” she needles. She never says Aunt Lou, only Lou. She watches her aunt the way a cat watches: tense, ready to pounce.
“Sam,” her aunt says. She sounds very tired. “I am not trying to compete. It goes without saying that it was far, far more horrible on the plane.”
But it is the different angle of vision that excites and disturbs Samantha. If she could see the little girl in the blue coat in someone else’s frame, if she could study her, would the puzzle solve itself? “Tell me about watching us on TV.”
Lou clenches her interlocked fingers and the knuckles give off soft cracking sounds that make Samantha wince. Lou’s hands turn the color of sunburn. Then she lifts her elbows like wings and her fingers stretch and pull at each other, her hands involved in a tug-of-war. Neither hand lets go. Her elbows droop at her sides. “Sometimes, especially during the Morocco landing, the camera would zoom in close,” Lou says in a low voice, “and you could see someone’s face through a window.”
“It was very hot,” Samantha says. She undoes several buttons at the neck of her cotton dress. “People were fainting from the heat, I remember that.” She remembers, across the aisle, a tiny woman with gray hair. I have a granddaughter who’s just your size, the little gray-haired woman told Samantha. That was before anything unusual had happened. The woman was wearing a black dress. Later, when the plane was on the ground again, when it grew hotter and hotter, Samantha remembers that the gray-haired woman reached over and tugged at her sleeve. Water, the woman said, water, water, although she did not make any sound. It was the shape of the words that Samantha heard. “My teddy’s thirsty too,” Samantha told her, and the tiny woman opened her mouth and then she went soft and slithered down to the floor like a towel falling into a pool and Samantha’s mother said, Heat prostration, and Sam, if you don’t take off your coat, and she took it off then, she thinks, and maybe her father put it up in the overhead locker or maybe Sam kicked it under the seat. Wherever it was, the coat remained on the plane. It did not slide down the escape hatch with Sam.
More than thirteen years later, the lost coat still gnaws at her days and her nights. It has eaten her. In dreams, she looks under the seat and she opens the overhead locker, but her coat has gone, and a salamander with sluglike skin and a smell of blocked drainpipe slithers out. Its eyes are bloodshot. How much do you know? its eyes ask.
I know more than you think, Samantha tells the bloodshot eyes, and what I don’t know yet, I’ll find out.
“For days, I never turned the TV off,” her aunt says.
“You’ve never told me this before.”
“You’ve never wanted to talk about it.”
“Now I do,” Samantha says. “Tell me about watching us on TV.”
“I didn’t sleep. I ate in front of the set. But I never saw you. I never saw any of you; at least, not while you were on the plane. When the children were being off-loaded, I watched for you like a hawk. You were almost last. I was afraid you weren’t going to get off.”
“I didn’t want to. They had to push me.”
“The camera got you in close-up at the top of the chute. I’ll never forget your eyes.” Lou touches her niece’s cheek and then throws her arms around Sam and hugs her tightly. “I’d been so afraid,” she says. “I burst into tears when I saw you. I couldn’t stop.”
Samantha disengages herself and moves away. “It was so hot on the plane. It was so hot. We couldn’t breathe.” She feels feverish. “Do you have something cold? Iced tea or something?” She fans herself with one of her aunt’s magazines. The paper feels damp. “Don’t you have air-conditioning?”
Her aunt is startled. In October? she does not say. “I’ve got the heat set low, Sam, because we’re supposed to be conserving energy, but I can turn it right off, if you like. The mayor will thank me. In Manhattan, there’s always risk of outages.”
Samantha feels faint from the heat, but when Lou lowers the thermostat, she starts to shiver. “Can you turn it up again?” she asks. She can hear a baby crying fretfully. “Doesn’t that get on your nerves?” she asks. “Is it from next door?”
“I can’t hear anything,” Lou says.
“It sounds like Matthew.” On the plane, her baby brother’s crying went on and on and on. Her mother crooned to him and put her lips against his burning cheeks, but he wouldn’t stop. “He had a heat rash,” Samantha says. “He’d drunk all his formula and they wouldn’t give us any—”
“Don’t,” her aunt says. “Samantha, please don’t.”
Don’t worry, there’s a blind curve just ahead, Samantha could have told her. She cannot finish any of her stories, they are full of holes. As for the connecting tissue: she cannot tell if she remembers the thing itself, or the newsreel clips, or the events as she has pored over them in previously classified documents, obtained through much diligence and cunning on her part. A lot of the past comes back at her in print, with lines and half lines and whole paragraphs blocked out.
Approximate time frame known XXXXXXXXXXXX anticipated strike at major airport XXXXXXXXXX Paris or London XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX flight bound for New York City, passengers Americans and Jews XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXX codes broken, connections engineered XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX sting operation, code name Black Death, controlled damage XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX Salamander in charge of operations XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXX XXXX
That is where she met Salamander. In a document. It was a case of obsession at first sight.
But Salamander’s number is unlisted.
Your call cannot go through as dialed, the recordings say. Please check your information and try again. This is the answering service, a voice advises. Please leave a message and we will get back to you. That is not our department, people say. That person is no longer with us. That happened before our time. All matters falling within the purview of national security are beyond the scope of our … We have no records, we are unable to confirm, we cannot release that information, we cannot be answerable for acts of God, acts of terrorism, acts of double agents, acts of rogue elements of foreign powers, acts of war.
Rogue agent, she reads in other documents, following Salamander’s trail. Salamander to negotiate with Sirocco XXXXXXXXXXXX arrangements for payment to be made in XXXXXXXXXXXX Sirocco dangerous and unreliable but usable XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX loose cannon, Salamander warns, but as rogue agents go, we can use for Black Death XXXXXXXXXX backstairs contacts in the palaces and has usable information on the princes that not even XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sometimes people Samantha is talking to thin out into block capitals and
