“Five pounds,” Kit said with a shake of his handsome head.
Minerva shook hers in sympathy. “But why not eat a small breakfast and a small lunch?”
“It’s a problem, I admit. If I don’t eat lunch at all, I’ll get hellishly hungry. That means, I’ll have to do something pretty interesting in the afternoon, to stave off the old pangs. So I thought I’d drive the Jag out to the airport and fly first. Then back to town and the A.C. for squash. The fellows wanted me to play for the club and I was too lazy. But I’ll change my mind.
A rubdown up on the roof solarium, maybe a cabinet bath, perhaps even a few fast rounds with Percy Wigman, on days when there’s time—and home again. All reduced. Or, if it’s an evening out, home and change and scram.”
“I wish you wouldn’t fly.”
“I know, Muzz. Silly of you.”
He went at the matter of losing five pounds, and diverting his mind from hunger’s pangs meanwhile, with great intensity. His heredity had, after all, geared him for large enterprise and since he’d eschewed them he was obliged to undertake small things in a big way. His red Jaguar roared north from Pearson Square and west the five miles on Elk Drive to Gordon Field, the civil airport. He’d phoned ahead; his fast, small plane was ready. He took off, ignoring rule and law, in the manner of hot Soviet pilots, retracting his landing gear to become air-borne.
High above the vast panoply of the two cities, he stunted. People on the ground watched with fascination. Old hands at the airport, even if they’d missed the take-off, identified the pilot by his performance in the air.
After half an hour, Kit tired of using the gray sky for a trampolin and came down closer to the cities, separated by a leaden river, which soon would freeze and bear a burden of dirty snow on its ice. He cut south and on the way came close to earth. Using the deserted Gordon Stadium as a kind of inverted hurdle, he made several passes into it at an altitude lower than its cement circle of seats, its press stand and TV stalls. The maneuver, also illegal, reminded him of faster and trickier antics over Britain. That thought sent him farther south and west to Hink Field, the military airport, where, keeping to the letter of the law, he annoyed several junior officers in Flight Control by circling the area at the closest permissible approach and shooting past nervous young men in trainers.
Swinging, then, on an arc of several miles, he bethought himself of Lenore Bailey. It was easy, at five thousand feet, to sight the metal glint of Crystal Lake. He came in over it low, circling its banks, unmindful of wincing patients in the Jenkins Memorial Hospital, and, zooming, twisting, he sorted from the residences below the intersection of Walnut and Bigelow.