George Clooney was sleeping, or pretending to.  He was well dressed'”gabardine slacks and an Aigner summer shirt'”and handsome as hell, the Alitalia flight attendant with the drink cart was telling herself.  Che bell'uomo!   She'd seen a face like that somewhere'”lined by time, but affascinante.  Where?  An engraving of a poet?  An old painting in a museum?  (The makeup department had done a number on his face.)

The actor'”posing as 45, pale as alabaster, with pitch-black hair and a haggard look'”opened his eyes suddenly, and the woman's heart stopped.  He was looking at her.  It wasn't evil she saw in those steel-blue eyes (contacts'”makeup's finest)'”they weren't a killer's eyes'”but instead a quiet power, the kind that could change the world if the world would only let it.  Nevertheless, her heart hammered; and, though it did, she made herself push the cart to him, asking him, eyes averted, if he wanted anything, hearing the American accent in his 'No, thank you,' and moving on reluctantly to other passengers.   She was from Lucca, the old walled city where people were less cynical than they were in Florence and Rome, and courtesy came easily to her.  She took pride in it, in fact.  She wanted to look at him again and smile back, but couldn't; and because she couldn't, she didn't see what happened then.

Beside Clooney sat a woman wearing a summer dress with gaudy flowers, ready perhaps for a tour of Rome or an affair with a Roman lover, but resting now.  Her arm was bare, and the mole on it, near the wrist, was nothing to worry about, she had told herself.  But it was.  She should have seen a doctor about it long ago, Clooney knew.

The actor's arm, bare too because of his short sleeves, was touching the woman's, but the woman was asleep and didn't pull away.  Had the flustered flight attendant been watching, she would have seen the mole shrink slowly, grow paler, and finally become nothing more than a freckle.  Had she seen this, her heart would have thundered until the man smiled at her again and this time stilled it.

He knew from experience'”the kind that could get in the way of one's work-that when people saw the cross burnt into his chest like a small cattle brand, the one he'd received in Eastern Europe as a child, or the gaunt facial features surgery had given him six months ago (so that he might look like Christ in so many famous paintings), it often took more than a mortal smile to give them peace.

It was sad, but so human. There were things people should indeed be scared of in this world—especially now, as end times began—though he, George Clooney, was not one of them.