Conquerors of the Sky (36 page)

Read Conquerors of the Sky Online

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky
12.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Dick Stone spent the rest of his first week at Buchanan Aircraft acquiring an office in the executive tower and a blond secretary named Regina who helped him requisition some secondhand furniture and a used dictating machine. At Adrian Van Ness's suggestion he began analyzing the company's financial records. He also began educating himself in the intricacies of the aircraft business. This meant asking engineers, designers, purchasing agents, and foremen innumerable basic questions. Most people were delighted to explain their sometimes arcane specialties, especially the engineers, who felt no one appreciated them. He listened to endless horror stories of idiocies they had prevented the designers from perpetrating on various planes.
Late Friday afternoon, Cliff Morris called and told Dick to meet him in Frank Buchanan's office. The chief designer was in a more cheerful mood. “This
fellow swears you're not one of Adrian Van Ness's finks,” he said. “He's persuaded me to introduce you to the Honeycomb Club. Did you pick up any Greek history in your marvelous MBA course?”
“A little,” Dick said.
“That's where the club's name comes from. From the same story that gave me the name for the Talus—the life of the great Athenian designer, Daedalus. Talus was his nephew. Daedelus murdered him because the boy was on his way to surpassing him. I chose the name for our new plane to remind us how often original ideas are destroyed in the name of the great god profit.”
“Hey, Frank, be careful,” Cliff said. “That's my god you're bad-mouthing.”
Frank smiled and continued his explanation. “Daedelus and his son Icarus were our first fliers. They fled to Crete after murdering Talus. King Minos made them virtual slaves, creating buildings and machines for his nation. Daedalus decided to escape and he designed wings for himself and Icarus.
“He gave the boy the first aerial advice. Fly the middle course between the sea and the sun. But Icarus, like many a pilot since, became drunk with the exaltation of flight. He soared into the upper air, where the sun melted the wax on his wings. They fell off and he plummeted into the sea, atoning for the murder of Talus. Isn't it marvelous the way these old myths contain fundamental spiritual ideas? Contrary to appearances, you don't get away with murder or anything else in this life.”
Again, Dick was struck by Frank Buchanan's resemblance to his grandfather. He had heard the same passionate rendition of
Faust, Till Eulenspiegel,
the
Nie-belungenlied
from him. He made the stories meaningful in the same way, linking them to history and experience.
Buchanan shrugged into an old flight jacket. He summoned two designers about the same age as Dick and Cliff. Sam Hardy was short, thin and scholarly looking. Jeff Hall was angular and wry. They trooped downstairs to a battered prewar blue Ford. Sliding behind the wheel, Frank headed west through the gathering dusk to the coast road, continuing to talk about Daedelus. “Like the fliers of today, he was a worshipper of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In Sicily he designed a temple in the shape of a golden honeycomb for her on the promontory of Eryx. You're about to visit the California version of the shrine.”
Buchanan swung onto a two-lane highway that wound between steep-sided hills. “Topanga Canyon,” Jeff Hall said. “The Greenwich Village of Los Angeles.”
“Where I'd be living if I wasn't married to the Nightstalker,” Sam Hardy said.
They turned into a narrow dirt road with thick woods on both sides and rocketed up an almost vertical hill into a parking lot. Before them in the glow of concealed searchlights sat a building with a distinct resemblance to an airplane hangar. Swinging doors spun them into a lobby that was painted gold; the walls and ceiling were scalloped like the inside of a honeycomb. A slim smiling redhead strolled toward them, wearing nothing whatsoever.
Stone stared in disbelief. Nothing! Not even a G-string.
“Hello, Frank,” she cooed and kissed Buchanan on the cheek. “And Cliff—I hope you're not mad at me for saying no the other night.”
Cliff patted her smooth tan rump. “You know how to fix that, Madeleine.”
“Too late,” she said, strolling away with Frank Buchanan's flight jacket. “Billy said he's going to have ‘private—keep out' painted right here.” She pointed cheerfully to where Cliff's hand had been a moment before.
Everyone laughed. Dick thought Cliff's jollity was forced. They sauntered into another gold-scalloped room where about two dozen mostly crew-cut men were drinking at a long bar and at scattered tables. A shapely brunette, also wearing nothing, was plinking out “The Darktown Strutters Ball” on a baby grand. Moving around the room carrying trays of drinks were a half-dozen other women, redheads, blondes, brunettes, each beautiful enough to land a long-term Hollywood contract, all of them in the same costume. Redoubling the dreamlike quality was the way none of the drinkers was paying the slightest attention to them.
“I remember the first time Buzz took me here, when I came back from Germany,” Cliff said. “I thought I was dead and in some sort of flyer's heaven.”
“We better explain the rules to Dick,” Frank Buchanan said. “The club is dedicated to Buzz McCall's cherished belief that there are only two things worth doing, flying and fucking. The latter is not permitted on the premises. However, none of the girls works two days in a row. They're always available for late-night appointments, or matinees the following day. Presuming you strike their fancy as much as they strike yours.”
“Where do they come from?” Dick asked.
“From all over the country,” Cliff said. “Most of them are trying to get into the movies.”
“A doctor checks them every week, so you don't have to worry about catching anything but hell from your wife if she finds out where you've been,” Sam Hardy said.
“Do they get paid?” Dick asked.
“Plenty. It all comes out of the membership dues,” Frank said. “The company pays the money directly to the club, just like the oil companies do for the stuffed shirts at the California Club.”
“That's the most exclusive club in L.A.,” Cliff explained.
“It's all a tribute to the cost-plus contract, one of the noblest inventions of the mind of man,” Sam Hardy said.
“What are you drinking, boys?” asked a throaty voice. Dick Stone looked up into a pair of coned breasts, topped by luscious dark red teats. There was a woman's face above these charms, of course, with a strong-boned, western look. But in his state of shock Dick could think only of anatomy.
“We'll all have the usual, Cassie,” Frank Buchanan said.
They drank Inverness at a deadly rate. Dick became more and more detached from reality. Frank Buchanan asked Cassie for a pencil and paper. He and the two young designers began sketching revised versions of the Talus. At first it resembled a boomerang, then a V-shaped projectile. Then the wing swelled and
merged with a fuselage, creating a bat-like shape. The engines, eight of them, were on the back of the wing.
“The idea is to put most of the plane in the wing. Or most of the wing in the plane,” Frank said. “It will take time to figure out which way to go.”
A rotund totally bald man with a black cigar clenched in a corner of his mouth slapped Frank on the back. “Now what crazy goddamn thing are you cooking up?”
“A plane that flies without engines. On wish power,” Frank said. He introduced Moon Davis, Buchanan's chief test pilot. With him was Harry Holland, introduced as the second best designer at Douglas, which, Frank added, smiling broadly, “wasn't saying much.” Holland had lines like crevasses in his face, making his gray crew cut even more incongruous. “Seriously, Harry, why didn't you put the wings where the tail is on the DC-Six? You could have added a hundred knots to its airspeed.”
“Because Don Douglas would have kicked my ass into Long Beach Harbor if I suggested it,” Holland said.
“You're a slave to a tyrant, Harry. Rise up. You have nothing to lose but your paycheck.”
“I didn't have the nerve to start my own company, Frank.”
“I didn't have the brains to keep mine.”
Hours seemed to pass. Dick kept seeing Cassie's coned breasts, forgetting who they belonged to, wanting to touch them, until Cliff whispered: “You want to play halfsies with her? There's more than enough to go around.”
“Sounds good,” Dick said, even though he did not really think so. He wanted to make his own selections. He eyed the other women. A brunette with soft rounded breasts reminded him of Nancy Pesin. That made him feel guilty for a moment. But too much was bombarding his senses to give guilt or any other emotion a chance.
The conversation swirled around planes of all sorts: World War I Spads, helicopters, bombers. Buchanan and Holland insulted each other's taste in fuselages, wings, tails. Buchanan drew a sketch of a Douglas airliner, making it look like a drunken bumblebee. Holland retaliated with a sketch of the Buchanan Excalibur that turned it into a flying dinosaur.
“At least we're not as bad as those myopic bastards at Boeing,” Frank said, “Have they ever produced a decent-looking plane?”
Never, everyone agreed. Boeing had never produced a decent-looking plane and never would because it rained too much in Seattle. Their brains were waterlogged. Only Lockheed was admitted into the fraternity of aviation geniuses. Occasionally they produced a passable plane like the P-38. Frank even conceded Kelly Johnson, Lockheed's chief designer, knew more about tails than he did. They drank a toast to Alexander Kartveli, Republic's chief designer, for the P-47, which Frank pronounced the best fighter of the war. Dick noticed they did not drink to any engineers, salesmen, or company presidents.
Dick was close to passing out when they finally hailed Cassie to order dinner. While they read the short menu, Cliff told Cassie that Dick was famous in New
York as the man no woman could satisfy. “Now, that's a challenge,” Cassie said.
Dick smiled drunkenly at her. It was all unreal. Six weeks ago he had been living a conventional life. He was a husband, supporting a wife, planning a family, moderating his desires like a good middle-class citizen and dutiful son. A single word had sent him hurtling across the continent to this lotus land where there seemed to be no limit to desire and satisfaction. It was so free it was scary.
One of Cassie's breasts was in his mouth. His tongue revolved on that dark red teat. He was free to do that some night soon. His hand roamed those firm thighs, that auburn pussy. There were no obligations, no prohibitions, no guilt. Incredible.
He ordered steak like everyone else. “Buildin' up your strength?” Cassie said.
“I'd say you're being challenged, Dick,” Sam Hardy said. “With Cassie satisfaction is guaranteed.”
“Unto exhaustion,” Moon Davis said.
“You're just a dirty old man,” Cassie said and swiveled away, her compact rump rippling.
“Now there's the kind of flutter I admire,” Davis said. “Why can't you work some of that into your goddamn planes, Frank?”
“Because you'd never keep your eyes on the controls,” Frank said.
They ate thick steaks washed down by more Scotch. Frank Buchanan began assaulting an idea Adrian Van Ness had launched in
Newsweek'
s profile of him, a lightweight vehicle he called the People Plane. With savage sarcasm Frank mocked the idea of a plane in every garage. “People kill themselves by the thousands driving cars. Can you imagine what they'd do flying planes? Of course, that wouldn't bother Adrian any more than it bothers those vultures in Detroit. Some people will do anything for money.”
Cliff reminded Frank he used to agree with Adrian on the People Plane. “I don't agree with Adrian about anything. On principle,” Frank roared.
“Douglas is fooling around with the same idea. We call it the Convertiplane,” Harry Holland said. “It's half-helicopter, half-propeller driven. If you think flying a jet's dangerous you should try getting that thing back on the ground.”
There was a commotion at the entrance to the dining room. A big blond man in a blue Air Force uniform was standing there, his arm around Cassie and Madeleine. “Billy!” Frank bellowed.
All around the room heads turned, expressions changed, as the other drinkers and diners and waitresses turned to gaze at the newcomer. On the women's faces was a range of emotion from patent envy to suppressed desire. On the men's faces rueful admiration was almost universal. This was obviously a celebrity. He seemed to know it too, as he strolled toward them. The grin on his face was supremely reckless, the eyes coolly defiant. He doesn't give a damn for anything or anyone, Dick Stone thought, in a burst of intuition he would confirm many times in the next twenty years. How do you get that way?
In a moment Dick was shaking hands with Major Billy McCall. Frank Buchanan flung one of his long arms around him. “You're looking at a test pilot that
can fly anything we put in the air,” Frank said. “The best goddamn pilot alive today.”

Other books

J. Lee Coulter by Spirit Of McEwen Keep
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles A. Murray
I'm with Stupid by Geoff Herbach
El Niño Judio by Anne Rice