‘That’s my name,’ and, ‘Yes,’ Xas said.
The director looked around the gathering. ‘We have to do this today. We have to do everything today. I want Millie to crash her Spad—I’m already up to nine hundred and she still hasn’t given me a firm yes.’
‘I haven’t given you any kind of yes, Connie.’
Crow gave Millie his full attention. He revised his offer. ‘Nine fifty,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘I’ll fly stunts and light the smoke pots for you today, Connie. I’ll crash the Spad tomorrow.’
Crow was silent a moment, looking out over their heads, serene, like a minister directing his prayer to the decoration over the door of the church. When all the talk had subsided in the group, he returned his eyes to Millie. ‘Barnstormers blow in all the time here, Millie. But I like to hire the best people. People I know. I’m in a fix with this film. You know that. And my best pilot seems to have lost her nerve.’
‘Sorry,’ Millie said. ‘But not today.’
‘Even if I hire your friend?’
‘No, Connie.’
‘Early tomorrow, then?’ Crow said, with arch sweetness. ‘I’m talking about a crash you’ll walk away from without a broken fingernail. I’m not talking about a big spectacle. Just something that will do with the right shots around it. I’m not Cole, after all. I’m not going to leave in footage with real deaths.’
The pilot with the bleeding ear spoke up suddenly. He said, ‘I think I’m good to go.’ He sounded gloomy, but gallant.
‘No you’re not, Frank,’ said Crow, and clapped his hands and pointed down at the man, meaning ‘someone get this guy out of here for me’. ‘But thanks,’ he said.
Frank’s appointed minder helped him up and led him over to a car. Its engine was running. Frank paused, looked back over his shoulder and said, to Millie, ‘Will you get that Fokker back to Mines for me?’
‘Sure,’ Millie said.
Crow lifted his voice to recall everyone’s attention. ‘I’ll go over the plans once more with all the flyers, and the crews in the chase planes.’ He placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘Gil is in charge once I go. I have to hunt up Paige this afternoon and write dialogue.’
Various people made noises of sympathetic exasperation.
‘We’ll re-shoot Marshall’s death scene with sound tomorrow, so might as well do it in the wreck. Did you get that, Millie? The wreck.’
‘Nine hundred,’ said Millie, ‘and I’ll supply you with a wreck tomorrow morning.’
‘Okay. But remember I don’t need you to flip it, Millie. I need Marshall upside down, but we can flip it with wires. Between the crash and flipped plane we can cut away to the crash team running from the hangar.’
‘You might get lucky. I might flip it anyway,’ Millie said.
‘Try not to,’ said Crow. Then he said, ‘Have I got everyone’s attention?’
Everyone made noises of affirmation and encouragement, the whole group moving closer together as if to protect and warm the director. Xas found himself shuffling in, pressed by bodies, feeling their eagerness and loyalty.
Crow said, ‘Jimmy has it in his head to get some shots from the control cabin of that airborne luxury liner. I know it doesn’t sail till eight this evening.’
‘The newspapers say “aloft for the sunset”,’ said Gil.
‘So our plan is to go over there now and make friendly overtures to the captain about him watching some of the shoot.’
‘As if he’ll see anything when we’re out by Redondo Beach,’ said Gil.
‘Well, he’s not to know that,’ said his brother. ‘And ten to one he’s sentimental about fighter pilots.’
‘And you’re not, of course,’ said Gil, teasing.
‘I’m not sentimental about anything.’
Gil said, ‘Jimmy and I will go make overtures. We have some German.’
‘Take Carol.’ Crow put his hand on the silky crown of the woman who had been standing beside him. She was very pretty. ‘Carol will butter them up.’
Gil, Jimmy, and the director’s secretary walked off. The rest of the team surrounded the plan table. For the next forty minutes Crow talked the pilots through their stunts. For some of it—Crow said—they were just to get up in the sky and dogfight, chase about keeping one another in sight. ‘The fighters will be filmed by both chase planes, from above and below together. Then alone from behind and in front for later back-projection—especially shots of the Fokker on Marshall’s tail.’
The chase planes were closed-cabin six-seaters. They were going up with four men in each, and equipment. The stunt flyers sat in to hear what the director had to say to the cameramen. Xas picked up new words. He wondered what it would all look like when it was put together, the dogfight, the cockpit shots of ‘Marshall’ before the swinging shape of a hunting enemy plane, black blood blowing from his mouth. He wondered if they meant to film only against the towering cloud and clear sky, for how could straight Californian roads and right angle intersections double for the landscape of France? Xas wondered—but didn’t interrupt to ask questions. He watched, all the while feeling his attention dilate. He was enchanted by the accord in the group; how, though Crow was in charge, everyone contributed. He got the feeling that this group wasn’t just full of old hands, but was, as a group, itself an old hand.
Someone passed around sandwiches and coffee.
Then, ‘Oh, goody,’ said Crow. He put his coffee cup down, drew himself up to his full imposing height, and strode out to meet Gil, Jimmy, Carol, and a group of men in dark blue uniforms. The last of these was just stepping off the zigzag stair of the mast. A square, bearded figure, his uniform bright with silver braid and buttons—the captain of Lake Werner. For a moment the captain stood, rocking from foot to foot, testing the lack of give in the ground. When he did this, Xas recognised him. It was his captain. Hintersee.
At around four the slight breeze that had been blowing all day began to fall. The thunderhead still hung over the bay, its shape now degraded by the hot rising afternoon air. Xas’s stunts were done. Millie was up again in her Spad, with smoke pots, playing at being wounded. The big chase planes had joined her.
Crow had left his brother completely in charge of the second round of the day’s shoot. He said that the writer, Ray Paige, would be up and sober—he and Ray better get to work on that dialogue. As Gil climbed into his Travel Air again Crow warned, ‘Careful of your turns,’ and walked off toward the Mutual Aircraft hangar where he’d parked his car.
Jimmy Chan discussed his signals with the pilots he’d lined up for his ‘take-off’ shots. Then he turned to Xas and said, ‘Would you help me carry my camera up the mast?’
Xas didn’t really want to go into the airship, but couldn’t see how he could explain his reluctance. After all, he could hardly claim to be afraid of heights.
He and Jimmy carried the camera up the zigzag stairs. Xas volunteered to be on the downhill side, since he was stronger. Jimmy stopped to catch his breath at the top, then they clambered across the gangway from the mast into the airship’s control cabin.
One of Lake Werner’s officers came over and said, ‘You are going to have to be quick, Mr Chan. The ground crew will soon arrive. We have borrowed one hundred men from your Navy to grapple the airship down so that our passengers can come aboard as though walking into a night club. These are not people who’d take kindly to having to scale the mast.’
‘I promise to be as quick as I can,’ Jimmy said.
‘Your stunt planes have been too far away to watch without the aid of field glasses,’ said the officer, with a faintly accusing air.
Within the next few minutes, as Jimmy set up his shots, the Navy riggers arrived. For the moment they seemed content to sit on and around their trucks.
Xas looked down from the control cabin and saw that there was a platform already in place, covered in red carpet and festooned with bunting. It had a rail made of bronze stanchions threaded with red silk guide ro
pes. There was a red carpet running up to the platform, flanked by potted palms and the flags of the republics, Weimar and the United States. From above, the platform looked like a hotel lobby during a political convention, only parked in a field of self-seeded barley and alfalfa. Lake Werner’s flattered passengers would, once they were aloft, be able to see for themselves how notional the ceremony of their send-off really was.
Jimmy began filming, while several curious Germans hovered around him.
Captain Hintersee appeared beside Xas. He took Xas’s arm, and spoke to him in German. ‘When I saw you before among the stunt flyers I wasn’t sure, but now—’ Hintersee shook his head, apparently stunned. Then, ‘Who are you?’ he said.
Xas realised that, in fact, he’d been waiting for his captain, that when he’d agreed to help Jimmy it wasn’t just because he hadn’t been able to make an excuse.
Hintersee led Xas away from the control cabin. Xas was compliant, waiting on the resources of the moment, for the moment to crack open and reveal a secret compartment and its tools: facility, goodwill, concord. And then it did, and Xas saw what he could say. He answered Hintersee in German. ‘August Hintersee,’ he said, ‘I believe that my brother, Hans Ritt, was under your command?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course, you are Hans’s brother.’ Hintersee sounded at once relieved and dubious.
Xas’s jaw was sore—which surprised him. He tried to relax it. He thought: ‘Living with these apes is making an ape of me.’
Hintersee retained his arm. He said, ‘Please join me for coffee. I’d like to talk to you.’ His voice rose at the end of his sentence. He was asking Xas for a name. ‘Herr Ritt,’ he added, when a name wasn’t forthcoming.
Once, Xas’s beloved, Sobran, had made a list of names the angel could use. ‘By rotations,’ Sobran had said, ‘a new name every twenty-five years, at least.’ It was a kind of game the man and angel played, the man imagining what lasting influence he might have on the angel and inventing things, like a calendar of aliases. But the game was meant also to remind the angel to behave himself. Not to double back on a dead identity. Not to break in on the hearths of those who live in the shelter of time.
Hintersee conducted Xas to a table on the promenade deck. They were shortly followed there by a steward carrying a coffee pot and cups on a tray. The captain had the steward pour the coffee.
For a few minutes Hintersee let Xas sit and look at the view.
The Santa Monica Mountains weren’t visible from the promenade deck’s angled windows, only the airfield as far as the eucalyptus lining Pico Boulevard. The deck was built for taking in views from the air. Lake Werner’s designers hadn’t wanted her passengers to keep a constant eye on the weather, as those in the control cabin did.
‘Our meeting is a very happy accident, it seems to me,’ said Hintersee. ‘For I hope you will be able to help me solve a puzzle that has troubled me for years.’
Hintersee was bearded. By tradition all airship officers were, and many of the men too, which in wartime had been a departure from the rules of any other service, where only officers wore whiskers and non-coms might be permitted a moustache at most. A beard helped to keep an airship man warm. It is cold at eleven thousand feet and, unlike planes, airships stayed up for days.
Xas looked at Hintersee and saw a sombre, watchful man with a thick, glossy black beard. He saw that his captain had aged well, but was nevertheless greatly altered. Hintersee seemed grim and formal—very different from the man who had commanded the raider Zeppelin. It was as if that man had been folded up very small, like a letter a rejected lover folds and pokes into a corner of a wallet. Perhaps—Xas thought—his captain was the kind of man on whom loss makes a greater impression than any happiness before or after. Hintersee had Lake Werner, but remembered his lost airship. And he remembered his navigator, Hans Ritt, a young man of whom he was fond, and who had fallen from the cloud car.
‘This is most welcome, thank you,’ Xas said to his captain, and lifted his cup in salute.
Hintersee said the coffee was his own private blend. Then, ‘We have some time, Herr Ritt. So—if you please—let me tell you what happened to your brother.’
On a night in 1917—said Hintersee—when there was a fog over the English Channel, his navigator, Hans Ritt, was lowered down in the cloud car to see if he could spot any ships. ‘We were in luck that night,’ Hintersee said. ‘There were three ships, showing no light, but visible to Hans, who had excellent night-vision. Hans calculated their positions, and began to relay the information via the telephone line that linked the cloud car to the control cabin. I had the receiver to my ear. I was above Hans in the cabin, with five other men.’
Xas fixed his gaze on the coffee in his cup, its diminishing circle of black. He tilted it back and forth so that it caught the light and flashed like a signal lamp.
‘The line was open,’ Hintersee said, ‘so I heard everything that happened to the occupant of the cloud car.’
Xas looked up from his cup to his captain. ‘Oh, Hell,’ he said. From the moment the fog had ruptured he hadn’t given the phone a thought.
‘Good. I have your full attention,’ Hintersee said. ‘Yes—the line was open. And there was someone else there.’
Xas shook his head.
‘Yes,’ Hintersee said, insistent. He must have read Xas’s look as disbelief. He asked, ‘Did you never speak to any of the men who were in the control cabin that night? We all came through the war. Weren’t you curious to hear from any of us? It surprises me that Hans’s own brother didn’t have enough curiosity to seek out those men and ask them what had happened.’
Xas didn’t say anything.
‘Hans stopped speaking,’ continued Hintersee. ‘It was abrupt. He had begun to give us the bearings of our targets. But then he just stopped and said, “No.” It didn’t seem connected to his calculations. He wasn’t saying, “No, I’m mistaken, there are four ships, not three.” It wasn’t anything like that. When I heard him say “No” I didn’t feel myself addressed—and, after all, I was the man on the other end of the phone line, the only person Hans should be talking to. But, “No,” Hans said, not to me. And then we in the control cabin felt a faint jolt as he jumped from the cloud car.’
Hintersee stopped and studied Xas’s face. ‘You’re angry,’ he said. ‘Are you angry because I’m representing your brother’s death as a suicide?’
‘No,’ Xas said.
‘But you are angry. I can see that you are.’ Hintersee waited for a response and, when he didn’t get one, he simply went on with the story.
‘The cable jolted faintly as Hans jumped, then, a moment later, it jerked again and swung as though something had struck the cloud car. A shock went through the ship. The cable made a ringing noise, as though it was taking a greater weight. And then I heard the other person—the person who was there with Hans.’
‘No,’ Xas said—in a perfect imitation of Hintersee’s lost Hans—a blunt refusal.
Hintersee went on. ‘The person who spoke after Hans had jumped—that person addressed someone else again. I was listening, but I knew then, and know now, that it wasn’t to me that he spoke.’ Hintersee considered Xas’s face. ‘How do I know that?’ he said, as though Xas had asked. ‘I know by what he said. Do you want to know what he said?’
‘No,’ Xas said again. He wanted to get up, but found he couldn’t move.
‘He said: “He won’t speak to me.” That’s what I heard as the cable swung back and forth beneath the belly of the airship as though something heavy were clinging to the cloud car. He said: “See what he does to avoid speaking to me?” His voice was indescribable—’
‘How could you understand him?’ Xas said. ‘Was he speaking German? Why would he speak German?’
‘I think it wasn’t German. And I have no idea how I was able to understand him. If I were to describe the voice I would only be able to say that it was commanding—and comprehensible,’ said Hintersee. ‘He finished speaking and the cloud ca
r lurched violently. It was as if something sprang away from the car and, relieved of a weight, the basket rebounded on its cable. It was all over in a moment. My officers were shouting at me. They wanted to know what was happening, what I’d heard. I couldn’t even begin to explain. I ordered the cloud car winched up. And when it appeared it was empty.’
Hintersee sat, his hands folded behind his coffee cup, and looked at Xas. Who didn’t say anything.
Hintersee checked his watch.
Xas took note of this and said, ‘You don’t want to push your departure time.’
Hintersee signalled the steward. He said, ‘Fetch the officer of the watch.’
The steward went away through one of the narrow doors in the salon’s wall, which was decorated with a frieze on the theme of the romance of travel—steamer trunks, paper streamers, and women with bobbed hair and long blowing scarves. Xas stared at the frieze till the door opened again to admit the officer of the watch.
Hintersee said to the officer, ‘Would you please get those riggers on the job.’
While Hintersee gave his orders, Xas steeled himself to wait the man out. Any moment now Hintersee would realise that he had told a mad story, and that Hans’s brother would no longer meet his eyes. Xas resolved to stay silent, and let the man’s self-consciousness well up and cover everything over again.
But that wasn’t what happened. Once the officer left, Hintersee returned his attention to Xas and began to eulogise. ‘Hans wasn’t ambitious,’ he said, ‘but things came to him in the same way that this sugar cube—’ He picked one up between his thumb and forefinger and touched its bottom face to the surface of his coffee. The cube darkened with an audible hiss. ‘In the same way that sugar absorbs liquid, Hans could touch things and take them up.’
Xas turned away from the man. Hintersee’s expression hurt him. That look of love and regret. He faced the window and, for a moment, was dazzled by reflected light. The sun had reappeared. In descending its disc had been eclipsed for some time by the lower slopes of the thunderhead over the sea. Out again now, the sun was reflecting from the ground below the airship, ground whitened by the uniforms of the Navy riggers, who were deployed on the airship’s six anchor lines, pulling with gloves and grapnels. The officer of the watch was giving orders, standing well back and signalling with his bright gloved hands. Lake Werner began to sink. Its shadow appeared in the crowns of the distant eucalyptus; a horizon of shadow, like an inverted hill.
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