The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, History, Art. The felt animals have begun their migration across the bulletin board. Madeleine is unsurprised to see that she is indeed a hare in reading. She has, however, in spite of being an excellent speller, been designated a tortoise in writing. She is being penalized for penmanship. Apart from the fact that her writing still looks too much like printing, no matter how hard she tries, she always runs out of room at the end of each line and winds up with words scrunched in the verbal equivalent of a pileup on the highway.

  It is five to three and Mr. March has chosen the best botanical drawings and prepared them with Scotch Tape: buttercups by Marjorie Nolan, tulips by Cathy Baxter and dandelions by Joyce Nutt. Madeleine drew excellent daisies with faces and long eyelashes—one is smoking a pipe, one is winking, a third has a moustache and glasses. Her disappointment at not being chosen is tempered by the realization that she is lucky to have earned a dolphin in Art for such unrealistic flowers, as it’s apparent, now that she glances around, that the purpose was real-life. She casually folds her arms over her daisies.

  Mr. March says, “Diane Vogel, proceed to the front of the class please.” He lifts her up by the armpits and she sticks the three pictures over the window of the inside door—the one that opens onto the corridor. He sets her back down and says, “Thank you, little girl. You may return to your desk.” Then he gestures to the door, like a lady on a Duncan Hines cake commercial: “Thus we turn our best face to the rest of the school.”

  Madeleine looks at the papered-over window. The art is facing out. At least we don’t have to stare at Margarine Nolan’s buttercups.

  “You’re getting company,” says Simon.

  “Oskar Fried is here.”

  “Not yet, this is something else, bit of a wrinkle.”

  Jack is in the phone booth next to the grocery store. He felt a little odd answering it; what if someone were to see him? No one did, but if someone had, how would he have justified answering a pay phone and proceeding to have a conversation? He was startled by the only answer that came to mind: adultery.

  “They’re sending a second man,” says Simon. “Another officer will be joining the mission as your counterpart.”

  “My counterpart?”

  “Your opposite number, as it were. A USAF type.”

  “Why are they involved?”

  He realizes as soon as he asks that Simon is not about to answer, and indeed Simon replies, “Cooperation under the terms of NATO, dear boy, your tax dollars at work.”

  Jack recognizes annoyance beneath the casual tone, and senses that, if he asks now, Simon may actually tell him something. “Why do we need another man?”

  “Because nature and the United States Air Force abhor a vacuum. They also abhor relying on anyone but themselves.”

  “Isn’t this a joint effort?”

  “Oh yes. As Abbott says to Costello, ‘You follow in front.’”

  “I didn’t know MI6 worked so closely with the American military.”

  “Keep pumping me and I’ll blow up.”

  Jack chuckles. “So what’s our second man supposed to do?”

  “For the most part, he’s simply to be there on the ground, in case.”

  “In case what?”

  Simon sighs. “They don’t want to entrust Fried solely to a Canadian.”

  “We work with the Yanks all the time, what’s the problem?”

  “Well, Canada is leaky, for one thing.”

  Jack again sees Igor Gouzenko, hood over his head, naming names in Ottawa. But that was years ago. Along with the atomic spies at Chalk River…. “It is?”

  “It’s a bloody sieve.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  Simon groans. “Point taken, Messrs Burgess and Maclean have rather tarred our good English name of late. But I went to Oxford, mate, not Cambridge.”

  “So where do I meet up with this USAF type?”

  “There’s an exchange position at your station, yes?”

  “That’s right. It alternates between Americans and Brits”—Jack is a little taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to him that the American would actually be posted to Centralia. Group Captain Woodley must be in the loop after all. “It’s supposed to be a Yank this time but the fella’s late.”

  “That’s because they pulled the original man and posted another at the eleventh hour.”

  “An intelligence type?”

  “No no, some fresh-faced kid. A little younger, a little quicker, perhaps, than the bloke they’d planned to put out to pasture up your way.”

  Jack is stung. “Si, it’s still a training base, and a not too shabby one at that.”

  “No offence, mate, but we’re talking bugsmashers and Chipmunks, are we not, and this pilot comes to you straight from USAFE.”

  United States Air Force Europe. “Wiesbaden?” Jack gets the picture. The American has just come off a tour of duty flying Sabres and F-104 Starfighters—widow-makers. “So what’s the drill?”

  “Well, it doesn’t change much for you really, because the American chap hasn’t been given the straight gen.” Gen—general information. Intelligence.

  “Why not?”

  “I suggested to them that he didn’t need to know yet and, in the end, they concurred.”

  Jack doesn’t ask who “they” are. “They” are a committee; it will have sprouted from a branch of American military intelligence, it will have an acronym like countless other committees that proliferate and cross-pollinate in a big bureaucracy, and it might not officially exist. Somewhere there are human beings behind the letters, but they are as transitory as the initials themselves. If it’s indeed possible to deduce the aims of an organization by analyzing its actions, Jack reflects, the aim of most bureaucracies is to confuse.

  “So your American friend knows very little,” says Simon. The chain of command will run from Simon, through Jack, to the American. “They suggest you brief him upon arrival.”

  “No problem,” says Jack

  “I suggest you may see fit to put that off until the last moment.”

  Jack smiles. “Whose suggestion would you suggest I follow?”

  “No worries if you choose mine, I’ll take any kicks that are coming.” Simon goes on to explain that the American captain will arrive in Centralia knowing only that, during his year as an exchange officer, he will at some point be called upon to perform a special task.

  “What task?”

  “Well, naturally the Americans will have one of their own escort Fried south of the border when the time comes.”

  “So Fried is going to the States.”

  “And thanks to the Americans, you now know more than you need to.” He sighs. “I don’t know why I bother sometimes.”

  “No harm done, Si, who am I going to tell? I still haven’t told anyone about the time you buzzed the nurses’ residence in Toronto. So what’s Fried going to be working on, jets? Missiles?”

  “Rug-hooking, I think.”

  Jack laughs and opens the door of the booth with his foot to let some air in. The afternoon is heavy with sun. “So all this American fella knows is that at some point a Canadian officer will contact him and brief him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He doesn’t know it’s going to be me.”

  “No one knows it’s you.”

  Jack removes his hat, wipes the band of perspiration from his forehead, and puts the hat right back on, because the sun pierces his eyes. “No one except Woodley,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “The CO here.”

  Simon sounds relaxed as ever. “No, as I said, I’ve closed the loop on this one.”

  Jack pauses. It’s one thing to feel he’s acting as a private citizen helping Simon with a favour. But a foreign officer has been posted here for a purpose of which Jack’s CO is unaware. Still, the man will function as a flight instructor; he’ll step into a position that would be filled by an American in any case. His “special task”
will take a day at most. And it’s not as though he’s coming from a hostile country. Simon is still speaking: “… only you and I know where Oskar Fried will be living. Only you and I know him by that name.” Of course. Jack ought to have assumed it was an alias.

  “One man to babysit, and one to stand by in the dark until it’s time to escort Fried. Simon, that’s a whole lot of hand-holding.” He lowers his chin, getting the most out of his hat brim.

  “It’s overkill.” This time Simon does not sound amused. “There’s no need for this poor Yank to move to Canada, uproot his family for a year, just so he’s in position for a task that would otherwise cost him a day. I don’t like it.”

  Jack hears Simon in the instructor’s seat beside him, not sure I like the looks of that. Never anything so adamant as I don’t like it. He feels momentarily disoriented, as at the sudden cessation of an engine, and regains his bearings with a pragmatic observation: “It’s a waste of the taxpayers’ money, that’s for sure.”

  “Whenever you increase the points of entry in a mission, you lose control. That’s when you get gremlins.” Simon’s voice is clipped, precise as chalk on a blackboard. “This Yank’s no doubt a good man, but the Americans, in their customary zeal, have increased the target area. The chances of a fuck-up will now likewise increase. It’s sloppy and bloated and it annoys the hell out of me.”

  Jack waits for more, but Simon is silent. “We could use you here at the management school, Si.”

  Simon laughs and sounds like himself again: “Word of advice, Jack. Number one: If there’s ever another conventional war, join the intelligence service. You’ll be relatively safe, and you’ll know more or less what’s actually going on. Number two: Observe carefully what the Americans are doing. Then do the opposite.”

  Jack laughs. “When’s this fella getting here, anyhow?”

  “Any day now. Name’s McCarroll.”

  “Sorry, I meant Fried.”

  “Oh. Shouldn’t be long.”

  “Why here, Simon?”

  “You’re an inquisitive bastard.”

  “I’m interested, I can’t help it.” He leans against the glass, glancing over at the PX. “Listen, you know what I’m looking at right now?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Chicken legs thirty-nine cents a pound, homo milk is on special, and there’s a Red Rocket by the door, drop a nickel in the slot and you can go to the moon. There’s a four-year-old astronaut in it right now.”

  “Going stir-crazy?”

  “Naw, it’s a great place, just not exactly where the action is. What’s out your window? The Pentagon? The White House?”

  “The domino theory in action: I tell you one thing you don’t need to know and you go at it with a crowbar. I’m not telling you a bloody other thing, sunshine.”

  “Come on, Si, toss me a bone, you old son of a gun.”

  Simon sighs. Jack waits.

  “Well, the first factor in selecting this location is you, of course.”

  Jack savours it silently.

  Simon continues: “Then, as you may be aware, there is your country’s reputation as a way station for weary travellers.”

  “You mean refugees?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Canada is an easy route to the U.S. In this case, that’s working in our favour.”

  “But why park him here, why not ship him stateside straight away?”

  “Canada is also both far enough removed from and closely enough allied to Britain and the U.S. to provide haven.”

  “Because Fried is working on something the Soviets and the Americans both want,” Jack hazards. “Which means they’ll look for him in the States first. But by the time he gets there, he’ll have a new identity—he’ll be Joe-Blow Canadian crossing into the U.S.” Jack is of course aware that Britain, Canada and the U.S. share intelligence—cooperation among these countries is often smoother than cooperation within them, due to inter-service rivalries. But he has never seen it up close—a case study. “What do we all get out of it?”

  “Goodbye, Jack.”

  “Hang on.”

  “Christ, what now?”

  “Who the heck is Major Newbolt?”

  Simon laughs. “You’re going to have to do your homework, lad.”

  “Let me know when I can buy you that drink.”

  As he turns to leave the booth, Jack sees that a small lineup has formed. Cadets standing at a respectful distance, waiting for the phone. They salute; Jack touches the brim of his hat and heads across the parade square for home. Something the Soviets and the Americans both want…. He doesn’t have to look up in the sky, he knows it’s there—even when you can’t see it.

  “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to earth.” Kennedy said that last year, but the Soviets have kept right on eclipsing American efforts, making heroes of Russian cosmonauts smiling out from the pages of Life. Luniks, Vostoks, manned rockets bearing the red star, hurtling skyward, gaping fire, two launch pads for manned flight at Baikonur in Kazakhstan compared with the lone Pad 14 at Cape Canaveral. The first U.S. attempt to match Sputnik blew up on the launch pad—the British press dubbed it a “Flopnik!” Oskar Fried is a scientist from the winning side, and the United States Air Force has gone to great lengths to import him. When Jack recalls recent articles and editorials about American military determination to compete with NASA, the connections seem suddenly crystal clear. He quickens his pace, his leg muscles feel taut and tireless, he could easily run home.

  The Soviets are not like us; while we’re “mooning” about space exploration, they are turning their best military brains to the problem of space flight, pouring unlimited state funds into it, unconstrained by a congress or parliament. That’s why President Kennedy has approved billions for NASA. That’s why the U.S. Air Force is clamouring for a piece of the pie, convinced it ought not to be left entirely to the civilian agency. Jack glances up; there it is, mild disc. To fly there. To stand in the darkness of space and view our earth, milky blue, fragile jewel. There is not a human being on the planet who could remain unmoved by the enormity of such a feat. That’s why, apart from immense strategic advantage, there is such prestige attached to it. Hearts and minds and muscle. Jack feels certain now it’s why USAF is determined to acquire its own Wernher von Braun, in the person of Oskar Fried. He watches a fuel truck lumber past him up Canada Avenue toward the hangars, and behind it, Vimy Woodley at the wheel of a big Oldsmobile with a carload of Girl Guides. He returns her wave. One of those young gals is bound to be her daughter. When he gets home he’ll tell Mimi to line her up to babysit Friday night. It’s high time he took his wife into London for a fancy dinner, just the two of them. He glances at his watch. Five-twenty; Mimi will expect him by now. He quickens his pace, feeling springs in his heels, wings on his feet. When Jack was a boy he idolized Flash Gordon. It was science fiction then. Now it’s just a matter of time.

  He recalls Henry Froelich the other night, questioning von Braun’s civilian status. Yes, von Braun worked for the Germans during the war, but he was a scientist, and why shouldn’t the Americans turn his skills to their advantage now? Not all men of science are paragons of virtue—Josef Mengele wasn’t the first to prove that. But von Braun worked on weapons, not human beings. In this he was no different—certainly no worse—than the scientists on our side who developed the first atomic bomb. Froelich was right, they did hold it together with masking tape for that first test blast down in Los Alamos; men and women in khaki shorts, eggheads, civilians—Jack has seen the photos. Von Braun is of that ilk. The Einstein of rocketry. He masterminded Hitler’s “secret weapon,” the V-2 rocket, granddaddy of the Saturn and every ICBM on the planet. And he did it at Peenemünde. The research and development facility that Simon helped to bomb in ’43. Jack shakes his head—talk about a small world.

  He strides past the Spitfire, eager now to see his wife. She will ha
nd him a martini avec un twiste. They have been separated for the space of an afternoon, yet he feels as though he’s on his way home from the airport—can’t wait to see you baby, look what I bought you when I was in…. And as he crosses the Huron County road that separates the station from the PMQs, a perfectly reasonable explanation occurs to him for a person arranging to receive a call at a pay phone—apart from adultery, that is. He might have had a sudden impulse while passing the phone booth. Might have stepped inside and phoned a store—Simpson’s, say, in London—to inquire about a brand of perfume as a gift for his wife. The salesperson might have had to go to another floor, then call him right back from a different phone….

  He enters the PMQs, alive with children and tricycles. The smells of many suppers perk his appetite and add to the edge in his stomach. He looks up at the sound of his name and returns Betty Boucher’s greeting.

  “How are you, Betty?”

  “I hope they’re treating you all right, Jack.”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Dad! Catch!” His son tosses the football on the run as another boy tackles him, bringing them both down. Jack catches the ball, trots twenty-five feet, turns and bombs it back across three lawns. The boys dive.

  “Mimi, I’m home.”

  She smiles at him as he appears in the kitchen doorway and tosses his hat onto the halltree. She doesn’t ask him why he’s late, that’s not her style. She’s in stockings and pumps, never slippers after five, the strings of her white apron go round her waist twice, she hands him a martini, butts out her cigarette and kisses him.

  “Something sure smells good,” he says.

  “Fricot au poulet.”

  Mimi has supper on the stove, every hair in place, and she’s put away under the sink the old maternity dress and rubber gloves that she wore to scrub the floor. Clark Kent changes in a phone booth. Superwomen are more discreet.

  He slips his arms around her waist. “Where’s Madeleine?”