The Messenger Read Online Free PDF Page A

recycling. Then she brushes close by the other, rounds the corner and begins the long trek toward first class, careful to touch each seat back as she goes.
    At the end of her lap around the cabin, Daria arrives back at her seat to see that her fashionable neighbor is awake and reading, a pair of elegant gold-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. “It’s a long flight,” she says.
    “Yes, very.”
    “It’s good to move around.”
    “Yes, it is. I get uncomfortable,” Daria says, stretching theatrically.
    “Your muscles cramp.”
    “Yes. Exactly.”
    “My husband sometimes works with the air force and they have to fly terribly long missions. They have rules that they have to move around so the blood in their legs won’t pool, but it’s impossible in those little planes.”
    “I would think so.” Daria looks at the woman for a moment. “Is that a good book?”
    The woman makes a face. “It’s okay. They’re always the same,” she says with a shrug. Perhaps embarrassed to be caught reading something so insubstantial.
    Daria puts one hand over her mouth, as if to stifle a yawn, stretches her back from side to side. “Do you have family waiting for you?” the woman asks. The question is hesitant. Almost as if she were afraid to ask something so intimate.
    “No. I’m on business.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. Writing an article. A travel article.”
    “Oh, really. A writer!”
    “It’s my first assignment.”
    “Well, you must do a good job. That’s exciting. It’s good to travel, especially when you’re young.”
    “I know. I’m lucky.”
    “And plus they pay you for it!” The woman laughs. It is a beautiful laugh. Infectious.
    Across the aisle, someone in a blanket rolls over; the woman goes back to her book, and Daria goes back to her movie. The action hero and the ingénue have been separated. The villains are all ugly, sexually predatory, dark skinned and have scraggly beards. Just more of the same Hollywood propaganda.
    Berlin. Only last night—a lifetime ago, Daria thinks.
    The message from Ali was that she should come there for a job interview while on leave from her publisher.
Klic!
is a weekly magazine based in Rome, and she is a “sponsored intern.” Not quite a job, it is a way for corporations to kick-start a reporter who might later do them favors. There are girls and boys who do this all the time, she has learned. You just have to be halfway attractive, able to use a digital camera, and prepared to cough up two hundred words on the latest celebrity scandal. She was hired at the magazine for her final summer at the school. And that meant it was goodbye to Leonardo, whom she had only just met.
    But it was a job, the first step on the career ladder. She was moving up, and, since she had been ordered to, still enjoying the ride.
    It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t really work. Mostly it was fun. She had met Roberto Benigni, and Mariacarla Boscono, which was great because she said they could have been twin sisters, footballer Francesco Totti, who was posing for a fashion shoot and was a complete dream, and Camilla Ferranti, who was famous because Berlusconi called the head of RAI to get her a part in a TV series. The worst part of the job amounted to standing around outside some fabulous club, because reporters were hardly ever allowed in. The internship was set to run out after Christmas, and she was already wondering what she was going to do, when the message came that her cousin had bought her a ticket to Berlin.
    It was nothing special, nothing cinematic. Just a pink message slip.
Please call the personnel manager. Everything has been arranged
. All she had to do was get to the airport on time. She arrived yesterday afternoon. At the Regent there was a note waiting in her room. No signature. The company was called Seyylol AG and wasinterviewing applicants to join their public relations department. They had a suite at the Adlon and she was to be there at 9:00 p.m.
    She knew immediately what it