Acts of faith (51 page)

“That was beautiful, Diana.”

“But a bit too—too philosophical? Maybe pretentious?”

“No.” She who’d claimed a portion of his heart from the moment he’d first seen her now owned it all, and she’d seized his mind with it. He surrendered. He would not try to argue himself out of the emotion roaring through him. It wasn’t an emotion that had ever submitted to reason. The only thing left to do was to express it, if he could marshal the courage.

“Another confession,” he said. “That day when Malachy . . . when you came to the door? Malachy had told me how old you were.”

“Fifty-one last month,” she said, in a neutral voice.

“When you came to the door, I was expecting—I wasn’t expecting you to look the way you did, the way you do.”

“Vitamins and lots of riding.” She laughed. She didn’t want the conversation to go where he was taking it. She stroked his forearm. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of it. I believe you’ve said more lovely things to me than I’ve heard the past year.”

“I wasn’t intending to say lovely things. I was, am, well, you’re as beautiful inside as you are outside.” God, he thought, did I really say something that trite?

“Oh, bosh. I’m quite ordinary.”

“No, no. Listen, today at lunch, all of a sudden I needed to see you. It came from nowhere, but maybe it didn’t. I think I’m—” An icy pain bound his chest and trapped the words in his throat. She took advantage of his hesitation to keep them there.

“You’re what, thirty-odd?” she asked, sounding almost prosecutorial.

“Thirty-four. Five in a few more months.”

“My daughter, had she lived, would have been just a year younger.”

Stunned by this revelation, he blinked, swallowed, stirred his coffee cup with his spoon. The cup was empty, and the metal made a nerve-wracking sound against the china.

“Daughter,” he muttered after a long silence.

“Born dead.”

“I’m sorry. So you’re—”

“Yes.”

“You don’t wear a ring.”

“No.”

This was brutal. As her answer, delivered in a downward pitch, cut off further inquiry, he did not make any. He swept up the check before she could.

“I have an account here,” Diana said. “That’s completely unnecessary.”

“I asked you to dinner. You could at least leave me that.”

“Very well. But I insist on saving you the taxi fare and driving you back into town.”

He was going to make one final attempt. “Diana.”

Thinking that he was about to protest her offer, she turned partway around, patted the purse hanging from her chair, and said, “No rubbish about me driving myself back home alone. I have a friend who lives here, chap named Walther. I’ve been trained to use him, I practice with him about twice a month, and I wouldn’t think twice about pulling the trigger on some thug.”

Now he gave up and said, “I believe you wouldn’t. I didn’t realize I was in dangerous company.”

“Hardly.” She tossed her head in the self-deprecatory way that had so charmed him that afternoon in her foyer. “I’ve got to stop off at the loo. Meet you outside.”

He interrogated himself as he stood by the door, looking at the parking lot and the long drive sloping down in the darkness toward the road. Why had she accepted his invitation, and why had she touched his hand with such tender pressure, and why had she made that remark about the pleasure of her company? Why had she dressed and made herself up so gorgeously if not to look pleasing to him? Was he being presumptuous? Women had always come so easily to him, he must have thought she would too, despite the manifest obstacles, the pressures of convention. He must have misread her entirely. But if he hadn’t? Then she and her husband must be living under some sort of arrangement—You’re free to fuck whomever you want so long as I am, too. Yes, that could be it. Long ago these white uplanders had established a reputation for adulterous hijinks, and he doubted they’d changed. It would be just the thing for a married middle-aged woman high up on the social ladder to have an adventure with a younger brown-skinned lover. Get some real gossip going, just for the thrill of it. A flash of pure rage brought sweat to his forehead. He shook out a cigarette, then tossed it unlit into the shrubbery. A new thought sprang up, calming him somewhat. She’d said she was going to drive herself back home, which didn’t suggest that she intended to make him a toy in some game of infidelity. Or was she playing it coy? He’d never been so confused. Well, he could thank her for preventing him from declaring his love and making a complete idiot of himself.

“Shall we then?”

She’d freshened up, and her beauty instantly dissolved his turmoil. Love—that was the only word in his mind, the only thing he could feel.

She started across the lot with her sergeant major’s stride, her heels clicking martially on the pavement. They came to her car, the same sedan he’d seen her drive more than a year ago.

“My daughter was not by my husband, nor by any previous husband,” she announced without preamble. “My husband came later.”

He decided to be chivalrous and held the door for her, even as he thought, I don’t need or want to hear any of this. But as she climbed in, his eyes shot to her skirt, riding up to reveal her equestrienne’s thighs. She tugged it down, and the rustle of cloth against nylon brought on a convulsion of raw lust. He circled to his side and got in and slammed the door. She didn’t switch on the ignition. She looked at him with a peculiar intensity.

“David lives in the U.K. We’ve been separated for a very long time. For reasons that are—excuse me—none of your business, we’ve never divorced.”
Money,
he thought. “But I haven’t seen or heard from him in over ten years. So, this.”

She held up her bare left hand.

“There are some reasons that are my business,” he said coolly. “Why you’re bothering to tell me all this.”

“Frankly, I don’t know.”

What did he have to lose? He reached over with one arm and took her by the waist and kissed her—a hard, almost violent kiss, forcing her mouth open, his tongue darting in to lick the inside of her lips. He’d no idea what he was trying to express, love or anger or a little of both. She didn’t resist, nor did she respond, her body limp.

“That was the reason, yes?”

She drew away, flung her head over the back of the seat, and said in an aggravated tone, “Oh, Christ!”

“Was that the reason, Diana?”

“I’m flattered, really I am,” she replied, holding her gaze to the overhead light.

“I don’t want to flatter you. I want to know if that was the reason.”

Lowering her head to look out the windshield, she assumed the posture of a race car driver, gripping the wheel with extended arms.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with you, Lady Briggs.”

“Lady Briggs doesn’t know either.”

“Which is why you wouldn’t let me say what I wanted to say?”

“What do you think? This isn’t merely wrong, it’s absurd.” She hesitated. “I noticed the way you looked at me, the day Malachy brought you over for the meeting. I wonder if you noticed the way I looked at you.”

“I think so, yes.”

“And the times we’ve seen each other in Loki. The past several months, I’ve found you sneaking into my head like a bloody burglar, and I thought I must be mad or a randy hag looking to rob the cradle.”

He could not have been more thrilled, hearing this. “You’re no hag, and thirty-four going on -five is not the cradle.”

Then he swooped down on her and kissed her again. If his was gentler than his first, hers was more ardent. She bit his lips lightly, pulled away, and lightly nipped one ear, then the other. His hand fell to her lap, parted her thighs and moved up under her skirt, searching for the band of her pantyhose. She gently pushed him back.

“For God’s sake, not here.”

“No,” he said, smiling. “But you know, I’m still anxious about you driving home alone at night, no matter your little friend Walther.”

“Ha! I don’t know why I said that.” She tidied her blouse, smoothed her skirt. “Walther is locked in a drawer at my bedside. The only thing in my purse is a can of Mace, so old it’s rusty.”

“Now I am more anxious than ever. I think you should ease my anxieties.”

“I know about you, Fitz. More than you think. You’re quite the swordsman from what I’ve heard. I’ve no interest in adding to your collection. Here’s a black one, here’s a white one, here’s a young one, here’s an old one. Thanks very much, but no thank you.”

“I’m in love with you,” he said, and felt greatly relieved, like a criminal admitting to his crime.

She looked up again, and speaking to some invisible personage, she repeated her exasperated “Oh Christ!” adding, “He’s in love with me. Barely knows me and he’s in love with me.” She returned her eyes to him. “As to your anxieties, I have staff. They’d be scandalized, and they’re terrible gossips.”

“Then you should drive me to the Norfolk tonight and yourself home in the morning. Or would that scandalize them, too?”

“Not as much.” The statement came in a wavering voice, the next in a tone of fierce resolve. “I’ll ring them up and say I’m staying in town with a friend and not to worry.”

Then she turned the key and put the car in gear.

Douglas

He’s in the pod. The pod is his window unto the world, and the world he sees below is white, with shades of gray and black and blue-gray mixed in. The boom points at it, a long steel finger, fins at a forty-five-degree angle so he can read, on the left fin, the word ARIZ, and on the right, the letters ANG. Not thirty feet below, a dark F-
15
floats like a manta ray. He could see the color of the pilot’s eyes if the pilot raised his visor. The fighter plane rises slightly, fuel port open, seeking the boom, as the boom seeks it, the boom wavering in the frigid air, twenty thousand feet above snow, ice, rock. Lying on his stomach, Douglas maneuvers the boom to and fro with the joystick, and then the nozzle finds what it’s looking for, just behind the F-
15
’s cockpit bubble, and locks in place. Two planes are one now, traveling together at four hundred knots, over the craggy roof of Kurdistan.

“Engaged,” Douglas says into his headset mike. Yes, engaged. Married. It’s impossible not to think of sexual imagery, not to imagine the KC-
135
tanker as a gigantic male dragonfly, penetrating its smaller mate, pumping her full.

The F-
15
fighter-jock gives a two-fingered salute: two men, twenty-five feet apart, looking at each other through Plexiglas. “Appreciate it if you guys could top me off,” the voice drawls. “Need about ten grand.”

“Sorry,” Douglas says. “Seven is all I can give you. Got four other customers.” He gestures at the other fighters, lined up in echelon off the tanker’s left wing.

Behind him pumps whirr, though he can’t hear them through his earphones. This is a silent place, the pod is. Numbers flash on the digital dial, and when they reach seven thousand pounds, he disengages the boom, and the fighter-jock gives another salute and peels off, twin tailfins and swept wings bristling with missiles slicing through the thin blue skies. Douglas goes with him in his heart. He’s where I should be, he thinks as the next F-
15
lines up.

Finally the last one is refueled, slides away, and banks southward.

“That’s it, Bob,” he radios the tanker’s pilot. Things are informal in the Arizona Air National Guard—a crew sergeant can call a captain by his first name.

“Okay, Doug. The Diamondheads are done for the day.” Diamondheads is the nickname of their outfit, the
171
st Air Refueling Wing. “Saddam Hussein is contained once again! And it’s back to another fun-filled night in magical Incirlik. C’mon up.”

He crawls out of the pod and into the belly of the aircraft, past the rest of the crew—radar operators, mission specialists—and into the cockpit, where Bob Mendoza is commencing his turn back to Turkey. Lou Engleman, the copilot, is talking to flight operations in Incirlik.

“War is hell,” Bob remarks, turning halfway around in his seat, his captain’s bars two black stripes on his desert tan flight suit. “Three days and a wake-up and home to Phoenix. ‘
By the time I get to Phoenix, she’ll be waiting,’
” he sings. “She’ll be horny too, I hope. Are we empty, Doug?”

“Not a drop left,” he replies, his glance falling covetously on the yoke in Bob’s hands, on the throttles and the instrument array. Altitude thirty thousand. Airspeed four hundred eighty knots. Engine parameters normal. In a little while he’ll be able to fly this airborne gas station, if the National Guard will let him, which it won’t. He’s well into commercial flight school back home and will soon have his multiengine rating.

“I got the scores from the tower,” Engleman says. “Cardinals lost again. Twenty to seven.”

“They shoulda stayed in St. Louis,” Bob declares, shaking his head.