No, she thought, it was worse. At least those were solid brands. Meridian had sunk to the level of a poorly run bus line.
Janie maneuvered quietly around the first-class seats. Sharon Douglas was asleep at last, using an eyeshade and earplugs, and Janie found herself trying to review what she’d told the senator. They had talked—or rather, she had talked and the senator had listened—for two hours after the dinner service was done. But what had she said? The memory was jumbled, but if Senator Douglas was not a woman of her word, Janie’s career would come to a screeching halt as soon as Meridian’s leaders discovered she’d blabbed.
Not that she knew any smoking-gun secrets, but she did know how dysfunctional Meridian had become in the cabin. The senator wanted to know the routines and where the problems were, and Janie had told her. “There’s so much wrong, it’s hard to know where to start.”
“Well,” Sharon had said, “tell me what you’re upset about right now. Tell me what you’d tell your chairman if he was willing to listen to you.”
Janie began with the hatefulness of the little notes left in her box in the flight attendant crew room—not only the ones from fellow flight attendants who thought she was sucking up to management but also the constant barrage from the company itself. Each official memo ended with the same sentence: “Compliance is mandatory! Failure to comply will be met with severe disciplinary action, up to and including termination.”
“What a great a way to begin each trip,” Janie said. “Getting endearing little love notes in the box with things like: ‘Bretsen, J., you were seen with a run in your panty hose last week. That must not happen again’ or ‘Bretsen, J., you reported two minutes late last month. This is the second tardy check-in within the past six months. Five tardy check-ins require disciplinary action.’ On and on. I mean, I was very briefly a temporary flight attendant base manager, and I never would have given such mean, catty notes to my people. It’s my airline, too, but I’m not allowed to help. I’m not allowed to give even a little. I’m supposed to thrust the union contract in the face of our crew schedulers with glee and say, ‘See? You can’t make me fly. You’ve got to dump three hundred paying passengers over to Delta when we desperately need the money because Janie will get beat up by her union if I help out.”
“When you do give a little, does the company at least appreciate it?”
Janie laughed, without humor. “No way.”
“Never anything positive?” the senator had asked.
“The pilots have a phrase: Ten thousand ‘Attaboys’ are instantly extinguished by a single ‘Aw, shit!’ Same with us. But the union’s got a big point, too. The company’s trying to get rid of our union. They want a strike. They want to replace us, and the union’s just trying to hold them to their contract. I understand that, but …”
“It’s still your company?”
“Yeah. Exactly. I even own some stock, and it gets terribly confusing. When I do what the union says, it’s like I’m shooting my own foot, you know? Boom, company. Take that. Ow!”
It was amazing, Janie thought, that a powerful United States senator would have the patience to listen to a two-hour rant. “I’m trying to figure out what’s gone wrong with this system, Janie,” she’d explained. “Meridian may be by far the worst in customer service, but almost all of them are awash in unhappy people, substandard service attitudes, and furious passengers these days. In the terminals, in the cabin, in the cockpit, on the ramp … everywhere I look, people are fed up and furious with this form of transportation, and employees like you are fed up with their treatment and fed up with the passengers. The thing is, it’s getting dangerous.”
“You mean, air rage? Furious passengers doing things?”
The senator nodded. “Any experiences yourself?”
“No,” Janie told her, deciding not to tell about the drunk in a first-class aisle seat a month before who’d assaulted her when she leaned past him to reach a window seat tray. The shock of realizing the man was actually biting her left breast through her bra was impossible to describe. Somehow she’d expected a sky marshal to jump up and collar the man, but none had appeared. She’d been too startled to even slap him, and when the company quietly warned her not to sue, that had been the end of it. It was better to think of it as a nightmare anyway.
“I don’t see much of anything resembling customer service anymore,” Senator Douglas had continued. “I’m convinced your leaders would take out the seats and put in overhead leather straps if the FAA would let them get away with it, just to get a greater return on investment.”
“It’s the rat principle,” Janie said.
“I’m sorry?” Sharon Douglas had leaned a bit closer.
“Rats in a maze. It’s an old, classic experiment I remember from my psych classes in college. When rats were put in overcrowded conditions, their behavior became increasingly bizarre in direct proportion to the crowding. The greater the crowding, the worse the antisocial, even psychotic, behavior. Fighting, cannibalism, catatonic rats … they couldn’t take it, and neither can we.”
“‘We’ meaning airline personnel?”
“And passengers.”
Janie shook her head to end the mental replay of their conversation. She paused just behind the forward galley with a blanket in her hand, looking for any of her passengers who might need it. The cabin felt comfortable, and all but one of her first-class people were sleeping. Pitch darkness filled the windows with a timeless void as they soared over the Atlantic, rushing toward the belt of twilight currently approaching middle Europe and marking the division between night and day. Astronauts in orbit saw it eighteen times per day, she’d been told. An eastbound transatlantic flight saw it twice, once with sundown after takeoff, and again after a short night over cold waters.
She took a deep breath and felt the tight muscles around her shoulders relax. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had really listened.
Janie had no illusions left about her airline career. She needed to be thinking hard about finding another job.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HEATHROW AIRPORT, LONDON
7:58 A.M. Local
First officer Garth Abbott stood at the window of the small hotel room buttoning his gold-braided uniform coat with his left hand while he pressed the GSM cell phone tightly to his face with his right, as if the force of his grip could squeeze a few more words out of the now-silent device.
What had she meant, “Perhaps?”
His mind was suddenly far away, chasing his wife back through the thousands of miles of digital connections to their Wisconsin home and playing the same old gut-wrenching game of trying to decide whether there was something to worry about.
“I’ll see you Thursday,” he’d said.
“Perhaps,” was her only response.
He checked his watch, relieved to find he still had the twenty-five minutes he’d allocated for getting to the restaurant and wolfing down some breakfast before “Captain Sunshine” lumbered through the lobby and willed the morning.
It was 8 A.M. in London, and 2 A.M. in Wausau. Her call had startled him. She knew he always kept his phone on, but she seldom rang it.
Is she worried I won’t return on time? I’ve always come home when I said I would.
Garth zipped his roll-on bag and put on his hat, making one last check of himself in the mirror before sweeping out the door. He’d been grateful to find the inbound flight was so delayed. It had meant hours of extra sleep, but suddenly he felt just as tired as he would have been with a 2 A.M. wake-up call on the original schedule.
Maybe she’s worried about my flying with Phil Knight. Maybe I shouldn’t have shared that frustration.
The third-floor elevator lobby was devoid of other crew members, and he was secretly relieved. His mind was grinding through the possibilities, and he wanted no distractions. Like a computer condemned to use all its capacity to calculate the ultimate value of pi, he had to fight the desire to find a chair and fold in on himself
as he fought for an answer—partially in puzzlement, partly in fear.
Dear God, is there a chance she’s planning to leave me?
The possibility had hovered at the edge of his consciousness for months like a persistent rumor, though she professed to be content. There had been little incongruities, and he realized he’d refused to think about the possibility she was seeing someone else. Yet, sometimes the faraway look in her eyes defied that reassurance, and he worried that she was ready to run and didn’t even know it herself.
But there was only so much they could say to each other on the subject of contentment, and he’d concluded that bridging the gender gap with words was impossible. If he was from Mars, she had to be from somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri.
He left the elevator at flank speed and hurried across the lobby past a stationary formation of potted ferns and into the restaurant through a large double door, spotting Knight at a table near the entrance a moment too late to escape.
“Oh. There you are, Phil,” Garth said weakly, his heart sinking as he realized Knight had already seen him. Garth feigned a smile, expecting none in return.
The captain had been hunched protectively over his cereal bowl, but he looked up and nodded now to his copilot as he motioned toward the adjacent chair, his left arm still partially encircling his meal.
“Morning,” Phil Knight managed. Garth pulled out the chair and sat down. There was an international copy of USA Today on the table in front of Knight, but it was folded and untouched.
“So,” Garth began as cheerfully as possible, “did you get into the city this time?” He already knew the answer.
“London, you mean?” Knight replied.
No, you twit. Bangkok! Garth thought, carefully sequestering the mental retort a safe distance from his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “Central London.”
“No,” he said with a sharpness that startled Garth. “I, ah … had dinner with a pilot friend near here.”
Yeah, sure you did, Garth thought. Probably spent the evening with a book of foreign phrases. I’ve never seen a captain so uptight about dealing with foreign controllers.
A waiter bustled past with a heavily laden tray of food for an adjacent table, bumping Garth’s chair as he passed. Another waiter appeared at the table with a pot of coffee and a bored demeanor.
“You are having the buffet?” he asked.
The former allure of breakfast had paled with Carol’s strange response over the phone and evaporated completely in Knight’s company. Garth shook his head. “Just coffee, thanks.”
The waiter poured a cup and disappeared, leaving another of the deep and embarrassing silences that Garth had come to expect in Phil Knight’s presence. He stirred some sugar into the coffee and began reading an article in the folded newspaper. He wanted to reach out and unfold it—the story concerned a stock he owned—but Knight was strange about such things. If it was his newspaper, magazine, or anything else, he didn’t want anyone fooling with it. Even moving such an item seemed to trigger a high-voltage wave of anger, never stated but clearly felt, as if the act of touching something Phil Knight had placed somewhere was a condemnation of his decision to put it there.
Garth averted his eyes and made a mental note to get his own newspaper before leaving the hotel.
Knight was concentrating on his cereal again, carefully shoveling in the contents a spoonful at a time, his shoulders hunched in a way reminiscent of Richard Nixon.
Two more weeks and two more international trips were still left before the month of flying trips with Knight would be over. Garth had already bid away from him by carefully examining the captain’s selection of requested trip pairings before making certain he bid differently. Carefully bidding the trips one wanted to fly was a monthly ritual for airline pilots, but occasionally, like now, it became a matter of emotional survival.
“Is he dangerous?” Carol had asked.
“No, not dangerous, and not incompetent, exactly,” Garth had replied. “Just … very unsure of himself. And I really think he hates me, not to sound paranoid. For that matter, I think he hates all copilots.”
A chair scraping backward with a sudden burst of noise startled Garth. He looked up to see Knight push away from the table, grab his flight bag, and turn toward the door without a word.
“See you at the bus,” Garth said to the captain’s back.
There was no response.
ABOARD MERIDIAN FLIGHT SIX, LONDON HEATHROW
8:45 A.M. Local
Janie Bretsen had already unstrapped herself by the time the seat-belt chime sounded seconds after the 777 lurched to a halt in its Heathrow gate. She deactivated the emergency slide at door 1-L now before moving to the first-class cabin to collect the Levys and get them ready to exit first. She shot a cautioning glance at Lara Richardson, who would now be her third crew member with a disciplinary write-up. The pilots had begun the initial descent into London before Lara got around to telling her about the couple’s daughter and the agony they were going through. Janie had immediately reseated them in first class, but in the meantime they’d been subjected to a night of agony with all the other passengers crammed together in coach.
The coach seats alone caused people to become angry, she thought. Supposedly they could empty the airplane in an emergency in ninety seconds on the ground, but all the flight attendants knew that was a sick little joke. The passengers were jammed so close together with so little leg room it would take at least five to six minutes to get them all out. Leaving a bereaved couple in that environment all night long had been nothing short of cruelty.
She’d gone to the cockpit to use the company satellite phone to call the London operations chief for Swissair, the Levys’ connecting airline, who promised to meet them at the gate with a special customs clearance. Then she’d called the hospital in Zurich, holding her breath until she heard that Janna Levy was still hanging on to life—a hopeful fact that she immediately relayed to the couple.
Janie hugged Anna Levy at the door, fighting back tears herself. “My prayers go with you both.”
“Thank you,” Chuck Levy said, taking her hand.
“And again, I sincerely apologize for the boorish conduct of my crew.”
“That’s all right. We appreciate your help,” he said, turning to put his arm around his wife as a delegation from Swissair moved forward to greet them.
“We have a car to take you directly to our Zurich flight,” the Swissair station manager was saying. “We’re locating your bags, and we want to assure you that our people will meet you at planeside and take you directly to the hospital on arrival in Zurich.”
They enfolded the Levys in a blanket of compassion and eased them down the jet-way stairs. Janie watched them go with a lump in her throat.
Why can’t we treat our passengers like that? she wondered.
“Excuse me, who’s the lead flight attendant?” a young woman in a Meridian uniform asked.
“I am,” Janie replied. “Can I help you?”
“I have an urgent message for Bretsen, J.”
Several miles away from Heathrow, Garth Abbott collapsed the handle on his rolling overnight bag and hefted it into a shuttle bus waiting on the hotel’s front drive. He stepped inside and glanced down the aisleway, verifying that Phil Knight was already aboard. As usual, the captain had gone to the last seat in the bus and was sitting and staring impassively at the seat back before him.
The copilot spotted an empty window seat halfway back, a safe distance from the zone of required small talk around Knight. He put his pilot case in the overhead, swung past the knees of the passenger in the aisle seat, and sat down before glancing at his seatmate. The man had almost the same vacant look Knight usually adopted, and for a brief moment, Garth entertained the hilarious idea that the man was doing a Phil Knight impression. He suppressed a laugh and looked at the passenger a bit more closely.
The man was in his late thirties or early forties, his black hair neatly trimmed, his clothes expensive. The
man’s tie was loosened, the collar of his white shirt unbuttoned, but he was clean shaven.
Garth looked away, then glanced back, specifically looking at the man’s hands. He was wearing a wedding band, and on the third finger of his right hand, a class ring of some sort. He leaned over the aisle, pretending to look forward, and the fleeting moment gave him a closer look at the embedded gold emblem on the ring’s red stone. It was a caduceus, the internationally recognized symbol of the medical profession, a staff encircled by a snake.
A physician.
The man’s eyes flickered in the direction of the copilot and Garth hurriedly looked away, slightly embarrassed to be caught staring.
Brian Logan had spent much of the night in central London in a park he and Daphne had loved, until the London Metropolitan Police eased him into a taxi and sent him back to his hotel near Heathrow. Brian remembered paying the driver and refusing his offer to walk him to the lobby. He had thought of collapsing on one of the lobby couches, but his bag was in his room, and one way or another he’d have to visit it and shower and shave before leaving in the morning. He couldn’t arrive in Cape Town looking like a bum, no matter how he felt. It was a hopeful sign, he concluded, that he even cared.
He had wobbled to the room and shed his clothes, curling up in a fetal position beneath the covers as he finally drifted to sleep thinking about Daphne, their nights in London, and how amazing it had felt just to hold her.
The sun streaming in the window had awakened him, and with a loud buzzing in his head, he’d called Meridian’s reservation line. He was sure he’d missed the flight, and almost relieved at the prospect.
“No, sir, Flight Six for Cape Town is quite delayed this morning,” the agent reported. “The flight is posted now for a nine-forty-five departure.” Brian replaced the receiver with strange memories of the night before swirling through his head.
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