Brain Storm

13

The stewardesses all found him to be just darling.

He was so, so sweet. And polite? Everything was please and thank-you with him. He was positively the nicest little man they had had aboard the South American Air jet in a long time.

They just couldn't quite place his accent.

"Is it Swiss? It's Swiss, isn't it?" asked Bootsy.

She was thirty-two, blond and as perky as an Os-mond on uppers.

"You are very perceptive," the old man conceded.

"I knew it/' Bootsy said. She turned to her fellow crew members and flashed a set of the most perfect caps her meager paycheck could afford. "I told you," she said with a superior tone.

Another stewardess, a twenty-eight-year-old molded-plastic beauty with lacquered hair and a nose that had been rhinoplastied nearly to extinction, put on a pouty expression. "I knew it was European,"

she complained, as if this somehow gave her extra points. Her name tag identified her as Mindy, and she turned to the steward behind her for verification of her claim.

He, like Bootsy, was in his early thirties and, continuing the similarities, shared her strong physical attraction to the plane's copilot. The tag on his starched white blouse announced him as Brion.

His carefully plucked eyebrows furrowed as he looked the old man in 21B up and down. "I never would have guessed Swiss. It's a little rougher than that, isn't it? No offense," he added hastily.

The passenger squirmed in his seat. "Please, I am very tired."

"Of course you are," Bootsy said in a motherly tone. She shooed Mindy and Brion away.

"It still sounds sort of German to me," Brion said as he and Mindy picked their way back up the aisle.

"I'm sorry about them," Bootsy said once they were gone. She sat in the vacant seat beside the darling little man and placed her hand on his jacket sleeve. "They're really awfully, awfully nice. Except sometimes." She laughed as if she had just said something terribly amusing.

"It is our burden to endure the imperfect," he agreed. "Tell me, how soon will we be arriving in New York?"

She checked her watch. "Oh, another hour. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea?"

He raised a hand. "I am fine."

"Then I won't bother you anymore." She patted him on the arm and stood. She carefully smoothed the wrinkles from the front of her uniform skirt.

"You have lovely eyes," said Erich von Breslau.

He considered himself an authority on eyes, having removed many sets of them from a large number of screaming, nonanesthetized patients.

"Why, thank you," Bootsy gushed. She batted her glued-on horsehair eyebrows.

"They are very beautiful. Very blue, aren't they?"

He breathed deeply, considering. "Tell me," he said after a moment, "are you a religious person? If you don't mind my asking?" He tipped his head and stared into her beautiful blue eyes.

Bootsy sucked in a mock-guilty hiss of air.

"Oooh, you got me. Not really in a strict sense. But my mom was a Baptist. My dad was Jewish."

"Oh." Though he tried to mask it, there was a strange coolness in his tone.

She wasn't sure what she had said to offend him.

"Not Orthodox," Bootsy said quickly. "He was Re-formed. He didn't run around with the curly side-burns or anything. We ate pork and everything. But with me and my brother, my folks didn't want to force us into anything—you know, they didn't want to upset either family—so they waited and let us decide what to do when we were eighteen. I guess I sort of decided on nothing really." She held up her hands. "That's not to say I'm not religious. I am. In my own way."

"How nice for you."

Bootsy beamed. "It is, isn't it? Look, I've got to make my rounds, but I'll be back. Don't you worry."

She touched the darling little man on the arm once more, reassuringly, and headed up the narrow aisle.

Dr. Erich von Breslau looked down at his sleeve where the Jewess had placed her hand. Though no difference was visible to the naked eye, he knew there now was one. He made a mental note to burn the jacket he was wearing once he reached New York.