- 1 -

My reunion with Leo, like many incidents of my life connected with airports, had begun badly. I was held up in rush-hour traffic in central London , arrived late at Heathrow, and by the time I reached the right part of the terminal the passengers from his flight had all cleared Customs and left. It took me a few minutes to find that out, then I headed over to El Al to look for messages and have Leo paged.

“What’s ’is name?” asked the young girl behind the desk. No Israeli she, but a genuine English rose, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked.

“Leo Foss. He was supposed to be coming in on Flight 221.”

“That’s in already. I’ll page ’im, though. And what’s your name?”

“Lionel Salkind.”

“Righto. An’ I’ll keep an eye open for ’im, as well.” She smiled at me — dimples, too. “Can you tell me a bit about what ’e looks like, so I’ll know what to be watching for?”

“No problem there. He looks—”

“Lionel!” The familiar voice came from behind me.

“—just like me,” I finished, as I turned.

I knew what the girl’s expression behind me must be. I’d seen it often enough. The fact that Leo and I had different last names only made it more confusing. I looked back at the girl and shrugged apologetically as Leo and I approached to within a foot of each other to perform our usual reunion inspection and survey.

Most people would say we are identical, but of course we’re not. We both are very aware that Leo is half an inch taller and usually five pounds heavier (Not this time, though. He was either a little thinner, or tired and worried). He was wearing his hair an inch shorter than the last time we had met, ten months earlier, but that was no surprise. So was I. We had become used to the built-in tendencies to favor the same actions at the same time. Now behavioral differences impressed us more than similarities. Today, for instance, we both wore dark sports jackets and red ties; but Leo was sporting a strange tie clip, rather like a little golden beetle. That was new, and rather surprising — neither of us liked to see men wearing jewelry, and we both shunned rings.

“Now then, about dinner plans,” I said, after we had sized each other up and were walking side by side through the terminal to the usual accompaniment of turning heads. “Are you ready for a Chinese meal experiment?”

“Sorry, I can’t do it this trip.” Leo shook his head, and I noticed what looked like a love bite on his neck, low down near the collar. “I tried to call you from Zurich , but I couldn’t reach you. There’s been a change of plans, and now I’ll have to fly on to Washington tomorrow morning.”

“But that still leaves tonight. I’m not playing.”

“I know — I found that much out from your manager. I’m relying on that. I have to talk to you, privately.”

There was an odd expression in his voice. It confirmed my first impression. He was tired, and under some unusual kind of strain. Others might not have noticed it, but I could feel it under my skin.

“Do you still keep the apartment up north?” he went on. “The one you don’t need.”

“Of course.”

It was a luxury, but when you travel as much as I do you really crave for a place where you can practice quietly and add to your repertoire. I’ve never been one of the Rubinstein types, who seem to be able to stay on top form without much daily practice. Maybe that’s one reason I’ll never be the world’s number one. But if you want to get into even the top hundred concert pianists, you have to work at it — and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. It’s hard work, too.

“I haven’t been up there for a couple of months,” I said. “But it’s well looked after.”

“Good. I want to go there so we can talk in peace for an hour or two.” Leo was looking all around him as he spoke, very edgy. I was picking up his nervousness, and I didn’t like it at all.

“We don’t have time for a trip north if you have to leave tomorrow.” I accepted his need for a place to talk privately without even thinking about it.

“Yes, we do.” Leo managed a grin. “I called in here from Zurich and booked a helicopter. By the time we get over there the flight plan should all be cleared.”

“Up to Middlesbrough ?”

“Right. No Chinese meal tonight. You’ll have to feed me on black pudding and tripe.”

He faked a shudder. I’d been raised on them, but Leo’s American palate had trouble with some of the delicacies from the north of England .

It was clear that he didn’t want to talk any more serious matters until we were out of the airport, so I didn’t push it. We chatted about trivia on the shuttle bus to the pad, about two miles away, and when we got there found a little BMR-33 four-seater waiting for us. She was a lovely trim job, blue and red painted, with the engines all warmed up for us and ready to go when we walked up to her.

“Want me to fly her?” I asked. Leo and I both fell in love with flying and with helicopters fifteen years ago, when we were still in our teens, and we both held current licenses.

He shook his head. “No way. That’s my privilege as Big Brother.”

Leo was forty-three minutes older than me, and we never forgot it. Other people suffered some confusion when he referred to me as his “younger brother,” or I talked about his great age.

“All right, old man,” I said, and went to stow his bag in the rear. While Leo signed off for the ’copter, I climbed into the passenger seat and checked the weather report. It was nearly six-thirty, just getting dark, and there was cloud cover at three thousand feet. Not the most perfect conditions. Leo was shaking his head in annoyance when he finished with the paperwork and climbed aboard.

“Lots of traffic, I guess. Look at this lousy flight plan. We have to head way off to the west before they’ll let me swing up north.”

“What do you have as the Middlesbrough ETA?”

” Eight twenty-eight .”

“That’s not bad at all. I’ve done this before. You’ll find that everything clears up once we’re past Cambridge — it’s just this mess round London that’s a pain.”

He grunted, and settled in at the controls. Visibility was good in spite of the cloud overhead. I could see the dark flats of the Water Board reservoirs off to the southwest as we lifted, and away behind us the haze of London itself was a blue-grey ball over the city. We rose to two thousand feet and slid away to the west.

I hate to say it, but Leo was a better pilot than I was. That was a surprise to me, since on all the standard tests that we had been taking together since we were in our early teens, I scored higher on manual dexterity than he did. Leo had his own explanation for that. He said it was training, not talent, that gave me more nimble fingers. “What do you expect?” he would say. “You wouldn’t expect a pianist to act as though he was all thumbs. It’s mechanical aptitude that counts in being a good pilot.” And of course, on mechanical aptitude he usually scored a tiny fraction higher than I did — but not enough higher, in my opinion, to explain his easy skill as a helicopter pilot. I suspected that was training, too, rather than talent. Leo simply got in more flying hours, though it was hard for me to see how his job offered the opportunity for it.

He had relaxed a good deal as soon as we lifted off, and now that we were moving west towards Reading he began to whistle softly, just loud enough for me to hear him. It was the first movement of the Unfinished, taken a little slowly.

“You realize that you’re a semitone flat?” I said. “It’s in B, not B-flat.”

He turned his head and grinned at me. “Sorry, Little Brother. I just wanted to see if you were awake still.”

He had the ear, all right, but he had simply never got around to learning to play a musical instrument. When I thought of the huge chunks of my life that had been swallowed up on practice, I sometimes wondered if Leo had the right idea and I was off my head. But it was too late for that sort of thinking. I leaned back in my seat.