Conquerors of the Sky (46 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

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“You did. You did,” Frank said. “But—”
What? He did not know what was wrong with Billy. Did flying at mach 2 make some men unfit for ordinary happiness? Was Billy living out his brother Craig's dictum on women: they're only good for one thing? Frank no longer believed that. But he had not been able to make happiness with a woman part of his own life. Nor had Billy's other father, Buzz McCall.
Was Billy, in that peculiar symbiosis a son can contract from a father, imitating him and Buzz in a deeper, lonelier way? Marrying himself to the Air Force and a struggle to keep it on the cutting edge of flight, while a swelling bitterness demolished his soul?
“Do you want me? Is that why you're here?” Madeleine said. “He sends people here all the time. I've thrown them all out. But I'll make an exception for you.”
Frank took several hundred dollars out of his wallet and crushed it into her trembling hands. “Go home,” he said. “He can't help it. Bad things are happening up there in the sky. That's where he lives these days. It isn't your fault.”
“I love him, Frank!”
Gazing into Madeleine's once beautiful face, Frank Buchanan had a wrenching intimation that this was not the last time he would hear this cry from a woman trying to understand the mystery of Billy's flight from happiness.
Champagne glass in hand, Adrian Van Ness stood in the doorway of the Buchanan Aircraft chalet at the 1955 Paris Air Show watching Major Billy McCall streak overhead in the company's new supersonic jet, the Scorpion. Around Adrian stood a cluster of Air Force generals and executives from Pratt & Whitney, builders of the jet's engine. “That almost makes me wish we still had a war in Korea,” one of the generals said. “I'd love to see that thing up against a MIG-Fifteen.”
Adrian murmured agreement. Everyone declared the Scorpion the most audacious airplane ever built, a marvel of lightweight construction and design. It had already set six world speed and altitude records. It could outclimb, outdive, outturn every fighter plane in the world, sending designers in other companies reeling back to their drawing boards.
Frank Buchanan had created the Scorpion after spending three months in Korea with Billy McCall and other pilots. Unfortunately, the war it was designed to fight had ended. The Communists had abandoned their plan to unify Korea at the point of a gun. The cold war continued, of course.
The Scorpion had also set a record for killing pilots. Six had died in the testing process, exploring what happened to an airframe at Mach 2. Many more had died learning to fly her since she became operational. The Scorpion did not tolerate mistakes. The thin, astonishingly short swept wings had inspired some people to call it a missile with a man in it. A pilot who forgot his flaps on a final turn to land never got a chance to correct his error. An engine failure left the Scorpion with the aerodynamic characteristics of a bathtub.
Although the generals admired the plane, the Air Force was not rushing to buy large numbers of it. Their current order was a puny hundred copies. But
Adrian had an answer to that problem: he was selling it to the rest of the free world—with the help of Prince Carlo Pontecorvo.
Ponty had emerged from World War II as a hero of the underground resistance to Naziism. He had helped organize the continental struggle with British guns and money and finally led one of the most successful guerrilla groups in his native Italy. His book,
Code Name Zorro,
described dozens of narrow escapes in night drops, ambushes, and near-betrayals.
While Adrian struggled to keep Buchanan aloft in the turbulent postwar world, Ponty had been absorbed by the fight to beat back communism in Italy and France. He had been a conduit for millions of dollars funneled into the contest by the Central Intelligence Agency to support politicians with the courage to resist Moscow's collaborators. Now, with the left wing thrown on the defensive by the surging prosperity of the 1950s, he was in an ideal position to become Buchanan's roving representative.
Buchanan had brought planes to other Paris Air Shows, of course. It was the preeminent event of the aviation world. Every nation that either made planes or bought them poured into the City of Light for a wild week of partying and dickering and eyeing the competition. Le Bourget Airport became a sort of world's fair of aviation, with the latest model airframes and engines on display or roaring overhead.
Adrian returned to the air-conditioned interior of the chalet as Billy McCall began doing a series of stunts over the field that had the grandstands shouting applause. In a sitting room Ponty was watching Billy on closed-circuit television. With him was Frank Buchanan, Buzz McCall, and florid General Heinz Gumpert, second-in-command of the West German Air Force. “I wish we could get him to train our pilots to fly your plane that way—without fear,” Gumpert said.
“It's the only way to fly any plane,” said Buzz McCall.
“Especially this one,” Ponty said.
Six months ago, Ponty had persuaded the West Germans to buy no fewer than four hundred Scorpions. Harsh necessity had required the victors of the Second World War to rearm Germany. Risk aside, it was painless. They had billions in surplus marks from their miraculous economic revival, enough to buy the west's latest weaponry.
Adrian was not especially surprised to learn the deal involved that old reliable lubricant, douceurs. Last month, Ponty had coolly informed him three million dollars should be deposited in a certain Swiss bank. He would withdraw appropriate sums to reward the German politicians and generals who had participated in the decision to buy the planes. The great-grandson of the man who bought up the entire Congress of the United States to build the first transcontinental railroad smiled his agreement. He had brought the money to Europe and dispatched Dick Stone to Zurich to deposit it yesterday.
Adrian's daughter Victoria joined them, wide-eyed at Billy's aerobatics. “He can make that plane do anything!” she cried, as Billy put the Scorpion through
a climbing roll with flaps and landing gear extended, no more than a hundred feet above the runways.
“It's not supposed to be able to do
that
,” Frank Buchanan groaned.
Now twenty-four, Victoria had not inherited her grandmother Clarissa's regal beauty nor her mother Amanda's winsome femininity. In low heels, she was almost as tall as Adrian. Her Englishy tweeds, a style he currently favored, made her resemblance to him almost dismaying. Adrian told himself there was something plaintive, even appealing about her homeliness. She made no attempt to disguise it with makeup or high fashion. Far more important to Adrian was her intellectual sophistication. She had spent the past four years at Somerville, one of Oxford's colleges for women. She had become a good minor poet and had an admirable grasp of English and American history and literature.
Adrian had sent her to school in England for a number of reasons. The sloppy, sulky postwar California teenager with nothing but pop music and movies in her head had driven him to outbursts of rage. But the main reason had been his deteriorating marriage—and his affair with Tama Morris. Whole weeks passed without him and Amanda discussing anything more significant than the weather. She never displayed the slightest interest in probing his vague excuses for spending two or three nights a week at Tama's Malibu cottage. With Victoria at home, this kind of routine would have been unthinkable.
Victoria was also well on her way to getting her name into Clarissa's will—something Adrian would never do as long as he stayed in the aircraft business. That was another reason Adrian had sent her to England. Victoria, of course, had no idea that she was a weapon in this lifelong power struggle.
On the TV screen the Scorpion was replaced by the plane that was creating an even bigger sensation at this year's show—the jet-powered British airliner, the Comet. It was a sleek swept-wing affair with four Rolls-Royce Avon engines. The pilot made a swooping pass over the grandstand, banked and climbed to 10,000 feet almost as fast as the Scorpion.
As if it were a cue, Clarissa entered the sitting room. She had let her hair go white, which added a grace note to her hauteur. She wore only black suits and gowns now, heightening the play of light on her proud, lined face. “That's the sort of airliner you'd have in production right now, Adrian, if you'd listened to me,” she said.
“I told him exactly the same thing,” Frank Buchanan said, without turning his head in Adrian's direction. In the five years since the cancellation of the Talus, they had yet to exchange a civil word. Most of the time his chief designer communicated through memos or messages carried by Cliff Morris or Dick Stone.
“Jets guzzle fuel,” Adrian said. “The flying public has no confidence in them.”
“I'm looking forward to flying on her,” Clarissa said, as the Comet continued to perform in the sky above Le Bourget.
“I wouldn't, if I were you,” Frank Buchanan said.
“Why?”
“That crash off Calcutta worried me.”
“A woman my age doesn't fret about sudden death, Mr. Buchanan. In some ways it would be a blessing.”
“Grandmother!” Victoria protested, tears in her eyes.
“I like your mother. She reminds me of my own. Indomitable,” Ponty said.
Adrian heard the irony in Ponty's voice. He had met Ponty's mother. She was a dragon in the operatic Italian tradition, an interesting contrast to Clarissa's controlled severity. Women! Incredible how they haunted a man's life.
The sale of four hundred Scorpions to the Germans had encouraged Ponty to introduce Adrian to someone else who could help them sell planes in Europe—and possibly in America. Madame George was a thin gray-haired French woman with a severe smoker's cough and watery red eyes. Madame explained in excellent English the advantages of using one of her girls to persuade a potential customer. The fee was five thousand dollars. Adrian had recoiled—until he met several of the girls.
They were the most exquisite women he had ever seen, all perfectly groomed and dressed with Madame George's infallible good taste. They were well-read and au courant politically. Panache seemed to characterize all of them, a serene self-assurance that was never grossly sexual but was subtly, persistently erotic. Ponty had chosen his latest mistress from Madame George's collection and he advised Adrian to consider doing the same thing.
“It's not inexpensive, of course,” the Prince said. “The girl must have a suitable apartment, charge accounts, an air travel card. But you could pass most of the expenses through the company, no?”
No, Adrian thought, although he assured Ponty he would consider it. He already had a mistress who was quite enough for a busy man with only a moderate sex drive to handle. But he had to admit to himself that Madame George's girls made Tama Morris look shopworn—or maybe just worn.
That night, in Tama's room at the Crillon, Adrian asked her if she thought Madame George's girls were worth the price. Tama scoffed. “We could bring six or eight of our girls over here for five thousand dollars,” she said. “They could have a great time and do us a lot more good.”
Adrian sighed. More and more, Tama showed her limitations, mental as well as physical. She was provincial. California did not travel to Paris. He had discovered this at the last two air shows. At home he had grown more and more weary of Tama's compulsion to play office politics. Even before he met Madame George and her girls, he had begun to think it was time to shed Tama.
“I'm going to use them for people at the top,” Adrian said. “People the Prince can reach. They expect something more than a quick lay.”
“You get some liquor into our girls and they'll do anything,” Tama said. “They're from California. They don't have any inhibitions.”
“Maybe the buyers do. They're getting more sophisticated—like the planes. That's something I've been trying to explain to Cliff.”
Cliff and Jim Redwood had been trying to sell an upgraded version of the
Excalibur with very little success. “People don't want a 1940s plane in 1955,” Tama snarled. She was always ferocious when Adrian criticized Cliff.
“Maybe I don't want a 1930s woman in 1955,” Adrian said.
“There's plenty of other people who do,” Tama shouted. “Anytime you want to take a walk, go ahead. I'm sick and tired of playing
Back Street
for you. If you had any guts you'd have divorced your creep of a wife and married me years ago.”
“Thank God I'm not impulsive,” Adrian said, stalking to the door.
“Adrian!”
Tama was standing at the French window overlooking the Place de la Concorde. In her lacy pink negligee she was a parody of the movie queen she had never become. She looked frightened—and old. “I didn't mean any of that, Adrian.”
“I did,” he said, slamming the door.
She was the most beautiful woman Dick Stone had ever seen. Tall, with chestnut hair that shimmered in a glowing aura around her high-cheeked, fragile-boned face. Her expression was mildly bemused, even disdainful, the wide oval eyes unillusioned. For the first time Dick was glad he had come to the Paris Air Show.
He worked his way through the jammed salon of the Buchanan Chalet, squeezing past U.S. Air Force generals and Royal Air Force air marshals and German Air Force colonels and their wives and/or mistresses. Occasionally, his quarry disappeared behind a pair of massive military shoulders. From the opposite side of the room, he saw Billy McCall moving in the same direction. But Billy got waylaid by one of the more routinely beautiful women who thronged the room and suddenly Dick was standing in front of her without the slightest idea what to say.
“Can I help you?” he said. “I sort of work here.”
“For the Americans?”
“I am one,” Dick said, mildly flattered that she did not think so at first glance.
He had spent the past six weeks in Germany working out the financial details of the sale of four hundred Scorpions to the Federal Republic's air force. It was the first time he had returned to Europe since he had bombed it in the
Rainbow Express
. A strange atavism had seized him as he walked the streets of Munich and Bonn. The land of his ancestors had spoken to him with a confusing mixture of menace and affection.
By now, Dick and the rest of the world knew about the Holocaust. He knew that one of the worst concentration camps, Buchenwald, was only a few miles
outside Weimar, that paradigm of kultur he had objected to bombing. He wondered what his grandfather would think of his schizoid fatherland now.
“I was told to look for General Heinz Gumpert,” she said.
Dick knew the suave ex-fighter pilot well. He was the West German Air Force's vice chief of staff. They had spent many hours negotiating the complex problems of training pilots to fly the unforgiving Scorpions, teaching ground crews to maintain them, subcontracting to German companies the rights to make spare parts and some of the sophisticated electronic equipment in the plane. He had found the general agreeable but formal—and a tough negotiator. Every time a Scorpion crashed—they seemed to go down at the rate of one a week—he demanded a new concession from Buchanan Aircraft.
“The general's in the far corner, describing how he almost shot me down at least a dozen times during the war,” Dick said. “Why not let me get you a drink first?”
“You were a bomber pilot?” she said, with just the slightest accent.
“A bomber navigator,” Dick said, steering her to the bar.
She ordered a Vermouth Cassis and smiled a thank you as he handed it to her. Close up, she was even more beautiful. Her neck was rather long and supple, her body a landscape of subtle curves and planes. She was wearing a clinging mocha silk dress with thin straps that left her shoulders and arms bare and revealed most of her long spectacular legs. Her only jewelry was a gold-link bracelet on her right wrist.
“A very scared navigator,” Dick said.
“Not nearly as scared as those you were bombing,” she said.
“You were—are—German?” he said.
“I lived in Schweinfurt,” she said.
“We bombed it many times,” Dick said.
“Every time I prayed you would hit our house and destroy us all. But you never did.”
“Why?”
There was a pause. In the depths of her wide gray eyes Dick thought he saw contempt. “Do you know Heine, the German poet?” she asked.
“My grandfather used to read him to me.”
“How odd. So did my grandfather.”
Suddenly she was someplace else, miles from this crowded room full of important people. The cool commanding line of her mouth broke and Dick thought she was going to weep. She sipped her drink and the mask of blase uncaring returned. Softly, casually, she recited:
Anfangs wollt' ich fast verzagen
Und ich glaubt ich trüg es nie.
Dick knew the verse.
At first I thought I could not bear
The depths of my despair.
He also knew the lines that followed it. He spoke them as softly as she had spoken hers.
Und ich hab' es doch getragen—
Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie?
Yet O yet I bore it.
Never never ask me how.
“Do they also apply?” Dick asked.
“Yes,” she said, smiling as if it were all a joke.
“Are you an old friend of General Gumpert?”
“I have never seen him before in my life.”
She smiled serenely at his confusion. “Madame George has asked me to make his stay in Paris more enjoyable. Most Germans—especially those who fly planes—tend to be uncultured. They need guidance, counsel in reading French menus, touring the Louvre—”
Her mockery was exquisite—and touching because it included herself. The reference to Madame George explained everything to Dick, of course. In the past week he had paid astonishing sums to Madame George for the services of her beautiful creatures. He should have known—in fact, he must have known—this woman was one of her stable.
The word
stable
suddenly seemed impossible or at least intolerable. “Americans need just as much cultural help, perhaps more,” he said.
“Oh, no. You are the conquerors. Have you not mastered culture too?”
“Not really,” Dick said, smiling. “What's your name?”
“Amalie.”
The name of Heinrich Heine's first great love.
“Why do you live in Paris?”
He was fumbling for conversation, trying to prevent her departure to General Gumpert.
“Because Madame de Stael said here a woman can live without being happy.”
“Can I see you again, after you've improved the general's culture?”
“Why?”
For the first time in his life, Dick spoke to a woman without even an attempt at calculation, saying exactly what leaped to his lips. “Because you're so beautiful.”
A wisp of a smile played across her mouth. It was impossible to tell if she was pleased or bored by the compliment. “Are you Jewish?” she said.
“What difference does that make?” he snapped.
She shrugged. “You don't look it. But then, what is a Jew supposed to look like? I've never quite understood that question.”
“You're Jewish?”
“I'm not supposed to answer that question. Or better, it should never come up.”
Cliff Morris slapped Dick on the shoulder. “Hey—is this General Gumpert's dinner date you're monopolizing, Stone?”
“I'm afraid so,” he said. Dick began to introduce her to Cliff and realized he did not know her last name.
“Borne,” she said.
The name of one of the many German Jews Heinrich Heine both hated and admired. Dick watched Cliff lead her through the crowd to General Gumpert, whose angular face was consumed by anticipation at the sight of her.
Cliff drifted back to the bar. “Two more fucking Scorpions crashed this morning,” he said. “Adrian told Madame George to send us the top of the line.”
For the rest of the party, Dick could not take his eyes off Amalie Borne. Occasionally her eyes strayed around the room but she never missed a beat in her conversation with Gumpert. The general was obviously absorbing immense amounts of culture.
The party began to wind down. Dick realized he had lost all interest in finding himself a date for the night. There were plenty of available women, journalists and public relations assistants and models from a dozen nations at the air show. With a little effort, a man could line up a different adventure every night. He turned his back on Amalie Borne and retreated to the bar to order Buchanan's favorite, Inverness single malt Scotch.
Dick drank the swill and brooded about his erratic love life. He had talked Cassie Trainor into going to college and she wound up getting a full scholarship to Stanford, putting an end to their nights and weekends at the Villa Hermosa. Cassie had wept at the thought of leaving him—but she took the scholarship. Now they were occasional lovers—she had others in Palo Alto, Dick was sure. He had more than a few among the swinging singles of the Villa Hermosa.
He felt a hand brush his suit-coat pocket. When he turned, Amalie Borne was going out the door with Gumpert and Adrian Van Ness and Tama Morris. In his pocket he found a small white card with a telephone number on it.
Dick called the next morning at 10:30. A maid with a heavy French accent was barely polite. It took several minutes to persuade her to let him speak to Miss Borne. Amalie's dusky voice finally came on the line. Dick suggested lunch at Verfours, a five-star restaurant. She said it might be better if they lunched at her apartment. Natalie, her cook, was making a bouillabaisse.
The apartment was in the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain, in one of those huge buildings with immense doors reinforced by black-iron grillwork, guarded by a concierge. The elevator rose with the serene majesty of an ascending balloon. The French maid greeted him at the door with a frown. She was about forty, with the face of a gorgon on Nôtre Dame. She led him down a short hall to a sunny living room, where Amalie was seated on a dark red couch,
wearing a blue peignoir. A bottle of champagne tilted in a silver ice bucket on a nearby secretary.
“I hope you don't mind,” she said. “I hate to go out to lunch. Dressing to Madame's standards is too exhausting to do more than once a day.”
“Of course.”
“After lunch we'll roam Paris a bit, if you're in the mood. I walk a minimum of five miles every afternoon. What do you do for your aircraft company?”
“I keep track of the money.”
“Ah. A man of importance.”
“Not really. I have very little say on how it's spent.”
“But you will, eventually?”
“Possibly.”
“What is your fascination with planes? You like to live dangerously?”
Dick shrugged. “The test pilots are the ones who take the real chances.”
“From what General Gumpert was saying last night, everyone who flies your planes takes chances.”
“That's true of the plane he's buying. It's very fast and very dangerous.”
“And you enjoy the vicarious encounter with death this plane creates?”
“Not really.”
“You don't despise the Germans? You haven't deliberately sold them a plane that will kill their new pilots?”
“No.”
“You're not here to find out if General Gumpert was sufficiently entertained to forget the recent crashes?”
“No!”
She smiled as if this was amusing. “Would you like to open the champagne? Or shall I call Annette?”
“Allow me.”
The wire was recalcitrant. It took him five minutes to free the cork. Finally they raised their glasses and Dick said: “To Heinrich Heine.”
“
Ich grolle nicht,
” she said, referring to one of Heine's most famous love poems, which began:
I won't complain although my heart is breaking.
“Tell me how and why you lived in Schweinfurt during the war.”
“You know the story of Anne Frank, the girl who hid in a Dutch attic? I lived a similar existence in Schweinfurt. The Nazis took my parents away to a concentration camp in 1939 when I was eleven. My mother left me with their dearest friends, the Starkes, whose house was at the end of our street. They hid me in their attic for the entire war.”
“Why did you pray every time we bombed Schweinfurt that we'd kill them—and you?”
She gave him a puzzled smile. “I don't understand?”
“You told me you did that—at the air show yesterday.”
“Oh! It was so noisy. You must have misunderstood me. I prayed the very opposite. Those dear devout people saved my life. I told the whole story to General Gumpert last night. He broke down and wept. Imagine? A famous
fighter pilot, with one hundred and fifty kills to his credit, weeping in this very room, after his fourth bottle of champagne, because I made him ashamed to be a German?”
She's lying, Dick thought. I'm not going crazy. That is irony you are hearing, savage irony of the sort Heinrich Heine used in his prose, when he was demolishing an enemy. “Remarkable,” Dick said. “Perhaps you should write a book. It might make some people think better of the Germans.”
“Perhaps I will when I'm old and feebleminded. Are you married?”

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