6 - Passports Please
Analise sat in the voluptuous, leather seat of first class.
To call it a seat was to do it a serious injustice, it was almost a bed. She curled into it and gazed out the window at nothing in particular - she'd made it without getting arrested!
"Champagne Ma'am?"
A steward leaned round the curtained divide that separated the seat from the aisle, proffering a flute.
"Ummm, do you have orange juice?"
"Certainly. Vodka? Gin?"
"Just the juice please"
"Ice?"
"No thanks"
He handed her the drink,
"OJ with a large splash of OJ", he smiled at her.
Analise was bored. Thirty-five thousand feet up and nothing to do - there's only so many animals you can make from clouds. She'd given up in disgust on 'Smooching with Woo-Who?' half way through the first chapter. It was poorly written, badly typeset, full of bad punctuation, and, to cap it off, the heroine's name was spelt different on pages 3 and 5. She'd browsed the in-flight magazine. She was seriously considering the Lonely Sim guide, but she hated reading about a place before she was there - it ruined the surprise. The magazine had a puzzle page and she decided to do those. She fished in Mel's bag for a pen; her hand touched something sticky. Her fingers were covered in blue ink - at least now she had something to do!
The contents of Mel's bag were neatly cleaned and sorted before her.
Fortunately, the ticket and passport had been in the other side of the bag and had escaped the blue flood. The pen had been exiled to a sick-bag, along with several, now blue, tissues. Analise needed something to soak up the remaining ink from the liner. Her eyes alighted on 'Smooching with Woo-Who?' "So, you have a use after all", she purred. Pushing the book into the corner as a blotter, her fingers brushed against something hard in the bag. Consigning the book to the sick-bag (poetic justice she thought) she peered into both sides of the bag - empty. But she'd felt something? She felt around with her fingers - there was something in the fabric divider between the two halves. Closer examination revealed a pocket with a concealed zip - anyone doing a quick search would assume anything they felt in the pocket was in the other side. Analise emptied the pocket. Two sealed, in-date condoms; they were added to the sick-bag. A foil-covered bubble sheet of six unmarked pills - they could be ripped off in pairs, one blue and one pink. Analise had heard of them, they were known as "his'n'hers", John had suggested they try some. She added them to the sick-bag. The last item was a passport.
Analise turned the passport over and over. She wasn't sure she wanted to know why Mel had two passports, one of which had been hidden. She put the passport on the arm rest and repacked the hand bag. There was a slip of paper inserted in the passport, Analise slid it out. It was a hotel reservation - she'd been wondering where Mel had been going to stay. She slid it back into the passport. Why was the reservation in this passport and not with the airline ticket? Mel almost certainly knew where she was going, so didn't need it. She didn't, so she slid it back out and studied it. Paid in full for the next three nights. Hotel Utopia, address, phone number - sounded pretentious. No booking address. Client name was 'Ms A Fernandez'. Analise instinctively knew who the passport would be for. Mel had a minor speech impediment as a child and couldn't pronounce 'Jimenez' for years, it came out as 'Fem-man-dez', and the A was bound to be for Annie - she opened the passport. "Ten out of ten", she said to herself, "but why do you need another passport? What have you been doing?" Analise put Mel's passport into the hidden pocket and kept Annie's. 'I've illegally posed as Mel', she thought, 'can't get into any more trouble posing as Annie.'