If the whole roulette table didn’t know, they were about to. Five years earlier, Mabel had met the love of her life, Hernando Rocha, a Colombian coffee king, when she was a naïve heiress in Connecticut. He adored her so much he gave her a million dollars in jewels and a million dollars in cash on her wedding day to spend however she liked. Then, in the midst of their unbelievable happiness, Rocha was killed in a car accident in his native land and Mibs had been vulnerable ever since. Oh, yes, and a widow.
Again, if Mibs were being even the tiniest bit honest, the story might read a little differently. She had married Rocha, he had been the coffee king of Colombia, and he had given her jewels and wealth to use at her disposal. But it is there that the tale of enraptured love began to branch. Following the ceremony, the groom hightailed it to South America, the bride hitched a ride on the Majestic to Europe, and they never saw each other again. They allegedly exchanged letters, though Mabel had not heard from her adoring husband, nor he from his adoring wife, for six months prior to the car crash that left Mabel so vulnerable, so widowed, and so awash in millions and millions of dollars. Mabel learned of her husband’s demise and her ultimate vulnerability only after she was floated an aged, four-month-old copy of the newspaper La Prensa that told of the account. She quickly retained a South American lawyer to protect her interests and to whom she sent a bundle of Rocha’s letters, including several addressed to Mi Mujercita Rubia (“My Little Blond Wife”).
Perhaps, if she had known their love was to be cut so drastically short, she might have made more of an effort to travel to his primitive jungle home, or even answer his last letter. But regrets were more worthless than flawed diamonds: there was simply no use keeping them around.
So, for the past six months that Mabel had been a widow (she didn’t count the four months that she didn’t know of her plight: “The heart keeps the truest time,” she always said) at thirty, she’d spent her time divided between her villa in Chantilly, the roulette table in Monte Carlo, and her palatial house in Paris, on the good side of the river. And it was there that she planned to head after she stopped off in Chantilly and collected the treasure chest of jewels before they vanished into the hands of the unrepentant thieves and were delivered to the seedy underbelly of the secondhand jewelry market. True, although the sixty-two-carat diamond had been previously employed in the ancient crown of Poland, Mabel didn’t consider that gem to be “used,” only “royally handled.”
After betting an obscene amount of her dead husband’s money on a game she pretended to understand, Mabel left the blackjack table, hopped back into her Bentley, and, remarkably, beat the bandits home. She had Marcelle pack everything worth stealing, and the two of them zipped off to Paris in search of the tiny man, his plane, and eternal fame.
* * *
Charles Levine was an impatient man by nature, and it showed. His fingers constantly tapped on the top of a table when he was in conversation; when he wasn’t speaking, his foot wagged back and forth like a fish trying to return to water. While not a midget, Charles Levine was indeed a tiny man, but it suited him. His compact proportions packed a powerful caliber. He rarely talked about his intentions; he liked having an air of mystery about him. He enjoyed that pocket of his persona very, very much.
Sitting in the lobby of his hotel, he was waiting to meet the man who would return to him his destiny. He had just been beat, badly and unfairly. When he recognized an opening, he never hesitated to jump, and his methods worked so well, he thought them somehow scientific. But this time, he had been beat.
The son of a scrap-metal dealer, he had been raised in Brooklyn; after sixth grade he left to join his father in the family business. So he never had an education like that bastard Lindbergh. What the hell difference did it make? He’d found other things to give him an education: he was offered a mechanic’s apprenticeship at an aviation company, learned everything he could about motors, engines, and planes, and flew at every opportunity. He made his first million when he was thirty with the Columbia Salvage Company selling the scrap metal from the war back to the government. That takes smarts, no matter what anybody says. If any dummy coulda done it, any dummy woulda.
With his fortune, he turned the salvage business into the Columbia Aircraft Company with a partner, Giuseppe Mario Bellanca, who’d just left Wright Aeronautical with the rights to the impressive airplane the Wright-Bellanca 2. They hired pilots to perform publicity stunts and Levine got to fly whenever he liked. He built airplanes; he sold airplanes. He was now considered an airplane man. But the Wright-Bellanca 2 was the golden egg; Levine loved that plane. It was the most viable aircraft to make the flight across the Atlantic, which was what the unknown twenty-five-year-old airmail pilot Charles Lindbergh had in mind when he tried to buy it to secure the $25,000 Orteig Prize for a flight from New York to Paris. Levine saw an angle and offered him a deal: $15,000 for a plane easily worth twice that. It would raise the Columbia Aircraft Corporation to one of the leaders in aviation. Lindbergh wanted to name the plane the Spirit of St. Louis, but Levine already had a name in mind: the Columbia. Lindbergh returned to St. Louis, secured a check for $15,000 from his backers, and returned the following week.
But a week is a week. In those seven days, in Levine’s office on the forty-sixth floor of the Woolworth Building, fingers began tapping, feet began swaying. He was thinking.
“I got a better idea,” he said when Lindbergh returned with the funds. “You fly the plane, but we pick the crew.”
Lindbergh did not move. He did not glare at Levine but fixed his gaze upon him, looking the man square in the eye. Challenging him.
Lindbergh, the son of a former congressman, finally replied. “I believed you to be a man of your word.”
Levine shrugged. “Oh, I am, Mr. Lindbergh, I am. They’re just different words now,” he said with a grin.
Lindbergh was escorted down forty-six floors and returned to St. Louis by train, not air.
Which was just the way Levine had figured it.
* * *
Levine tapped Clarence Chamberlin and navigator Lloyd Bertaud, a famed World War I pilot and holder of the world flight endurance record, and asked them how they’d like to pilot the first transatlantic flight and win the Orteig Prize. As they were preparing for a takeoff at Roosevelt Field, Levine handed them both an oddly worded contract contrary to their verbal agreement. Levine now got the prize money, put them on salary, and enlisted them on a yearlong worldwide tour—dishing out bonuses when he felt it appropriate.
The battle over the contract went public. Bertaud filed an injunction for breach of contract, and the plane was padlocked in the hangar until the matter of the contract was resolved. It was still sitting there on May 20 when Charles Lindbergh, who had turned to the small Ryan Aircraft Company to build a single-engine monoplane in sixty days, took off from Roosevelt Field in his plane named the Spirit of St. Louis, and headed for Paris.
Chamberlin stood there and watched Lindbergh go. He barely cleared the telephone wires at the end of the runway.
An hour later, a Brooklyn judge summarily dismissed the injunction, but the following day the world exploded into cheers as Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris to a welcome no one had ever seen before.
* * *
Clarence Chamberlin was happy to sign the new contract that the burned Levine placed before him, guaranteeing his wife $50,000 in life insurance and him $25,000 to fly the plane now that the Orteig Prize belonged to Lindbergh, who not only had been successful in his flight but was now the most famous man—to be more precise, hero—in the world.
Levine quickly announced that the Columbia would make the transatlantic trip, landing in Berlin and breaking Lindbergh’s long-distance record by three hundred miles. He hinted it might even fly as far as Moscow. He teased that the passenger was a secret and that no decent reporter would miss this takeoff when the identity was revealed. If Levine was anything, he was a showman, and on the morning of June 4, with hundreds gathered to watch what the
y hoped would be a grand story to tell for decades, Levine was the ringmaster of his very own circus. His wife, Grace, and nine-year-old daughter, Eloyse, were simply two more faces in a crowd that was growing furiously by the minute.
When the frenzy had peaked to a level of electricity that Levine could feel in his bones, he signaled and Chamberlin walked toward the Columbia, waving to the crowd, which went mad with excitement. Chamberlin started the engine, and the roar of the masses quieted, waiting for the mystery to finally reveal itself. After several minutes of only the hum of the propellers droning on, murmurs started spreading.
“What’s going on, Levine?” someone from the crowd demanded.
The ringmaster shrugged and worried aloud that something might be wrong.
“It’s a stunt!” another person yelled. “It’s just a stunt!”
“No, no, no,” Levine offered up quickly. “I’ll go see what’s going on . . . Whatever the problem, I will fix it!” he promised before his wee legs took action. He scrambled across the field to the Columbia and began talking to Chamberlin while making great hand motions, the conversation growing contentious. The crowd paused, each member trying in vain to catch a word, the sound of the engine drowning out any hope of eavesdropping. The exchange between the two men became more intense, and the crowd, in unison, leaned forward as Levine climbed into the cockpit. Grace Levine hoped against hope that her husband would not be involved in a physical confrontation in so tiny a space, although confined quarters did work toward his benefit.
Finally, after a minute, she breathed a sigh of relief when Levine’s bald head popped out of the cockpit and he waved to the crowd, then gave the “OK” signal before closing the cockpit door and the Columbia began shooting down the runway. At the edge of the runway, Chamberlin lifted the plane without endangering even one telephone line, the image of it becoming minuscule as it flew off into the sky.
A terrified scream from Grace Levine cracked through the silent and perplexed crowd. “Stop him! Stop him!” she demanded, as if anyone had the ability to catch up to the airplane and pull it back by the tail.
“If I had known you were going to fly on that plane, I would have burned it first!” she cried with her last breath before she crumpled to the ground in a heap. Eloyse burst into tears upon realizing her father had just vanished. The mystery passenger had successfully guarded his secret, having not spilled a word of it to anyone aside from his pilot—not even his family—which was the plan all along.
* * *
Two days later, Chamberlin guided the Miss Columbia down just outside the town of Eisleben, Germany, as the plane ran out of gas. They had been in the air for over 43 hours and flown 3,905 miles, breaking Lindbergh’s mark by 295. When they refueled and finally landed in Berlin, a crowd of more than 100,000 wildly cheering Germans met them.
Finally, the fanfare Levine craved was his: there were receptions, parties, invitations from dignitaries, crowds waiting, and kisses blown from pretty women.
Within a couple of weeks the panoply had dutifully run its course, and while the world was still looking at Lindbergh, Charles Levine was a novelty that had lost its shine. Deciding on his next move, he did not approach Chamberlin with his new idea; they were no longer speaking after Chamberlin hired lawyers after he noticed his check was missing roughly a third of the agreed amount. Levine called Chamberlin’s bluff; then, as a public snub, he asked for an audience with Maurice Drouhin, a French aviator who had held the long-distance record before he and Chamberlin had the nerve to break it.
Sitting in the lobby of his Paris hotel, waiting for Drouhin, Levine felt exhilarated. He had been the first passenger over, but Levine wanted to be the first to fly the east–west leg of the Atlantic, a much more difficult and treacherous undertaking due to counter winds and the storms that formed over the ocean.
Maurice Drouhin was definitively French. His thick, dark hair was combed back from his face in one sturdy wave; his thin, sloping nose seemed to bloom at the tip; and his close-set eyes were piercing and serious. His thin lips bore no expression as he quietly stood over Levine in the bustling lobby and held out his hand in greeting.
“Good to meet you,” Drouhin said carefully, as if he hopped over each word.
“Yeah, yeah, likewise,” Levine said with a vigorous nod. “I’m looking for a pilot, and you, I heard, are the best one in France. I got an opportunity for you to enter the halls of fame with me, in my plane, the best aircraft in the whole world.”
“Parlez-vous français?” Drouhin continued, one of his eyebrows arching widely.
Levine was still shaking his head in silence when Mr. Hartman, his lawyer, entered the lobby.
“He don’t understand me,” Levine said to Hartman, throwing his little hands up.
“Not to worry!” Hartman said with a confident laugh as he pulled a French–English dictionary from the breast pocket of his striped cotton suit and then smiled.
Neither Levine nor Drouhin smiled back.
* * *
Mabel Boll and her maid had been driving around Paris for six days with two million dollars’ worth of jewelry in her car, looking for one Charles Levine, the man with the plane. In a splinter of memory, she recalled a conversation she once had with an heiress about women flying. It had mildly interested her. She couldn’t be mannish enough to want control of the thing, God no. But then came the fame of Lindbergh, and she wanted that. The kind of fame she coveted. The sort of respect she deserved. Levine had a plane and she wanted to fly in it, all the way across the ocean to endless glory.
She had seen his photograph in the paper—she “read” the French ones every day in case she had been mentioned, which was easy once she discovered her name was spelled the same way in English and in French—so she felt that she could identify him on the spot if necessary. She’d committed his face to memory: the squinting eyes, the bald head, his inverted triangular nose, and the deep cleft in his chin that capped off his boxy jawline. His features, Mabel had noticed, looked like they were too much for the landscape of his face to handle fairly, and had been pressed together to make everything still fit. Not that he was unattractive, Mabel thought, and then laughed to herself.
She had called every reputable hotel in the area and asked for him, with no luck. She asked every waiter, every maître d’ if they had seen him, and sent Marcelle, the blue suitcase weighing down not only her arm but also the entire side of her body, to ask every short man with a shiny scalp if he was Mr. Levine.
It was exhausting. Finally, Mabel had an idea and rang up Jenny or Rose Dolly—she was never sure which—and asked whom Levine had come to Monte Carlo with.
“With Harry, of course,” Jenny or Rose answered, meaning Mr. Selfridge.
“Terrific,” Mabel squealed. “I’m having an intimate dinner party on Saturday. Please come, and make sure you ask Mr. Levine and tell him I’m simply dying to meet him. In fact, I’d like to make him the guest of honor. What do you think?”
“It sounds marvelous!” Jenny or Rose replied. “Would you like us to perform? We’re putting together a new act, and I must tell you that it is perfectly scandalous!”
Mabel’s hackles went up. The last thing she wanted was the frenetic Dolly sisters thrashing about completely out of sync, spraying perspiration everywhere like wet dogs.
“I can’t tell you how sweet it is for you to offer,” Mabel cooed. “But this is to relax, not work, silly Dolly! Can’t have you dripping into dessert! You are too, too kind.”
“That’s why there are two, two of us!” Jenny or Rose squealed.
“Make sure Levine can come,” Mabel reminded her. “Because if he can’t come, the party’s off. And make sure he knows I’m an American. From New York.”
“I always thought you were from Connecticut,” Jenny or Rose remarked.
“Born in Connecticut,” Mabel replied, scrambling. “But raised on Park Avenue. By my millionaire father.”
“Yes, of course,” the Dolly said. “I’ll make sure
to tell him!”
* * *
When Mabel opened the door of her grand Paris mansion on fashionable Rue de la Faisanderie wearing one hundred diamond bracelets from her wrist to her biceps, she was surprised to see that Charles Levine had not come alone.
“Mrs. Boll,” Levine said, bowing his head briefly, his hat in his hand. “Charles Levine. Thank you for inviting us.”
Mabel looked down, then flashed her eyes up at him and smiled bashfully. “That’s Miss Boll, I’m afraid,” she said, extending a delicate and limp hand. “I’m a widow.”
“This is Maurice Drouhin, my pilot,” Levine said, motioning to the towering dark man standing next to him.
“Mmmmmm,” Mabel said, still smiling, and transferred her limp wrist over to Drouhin, who scooped it up gently and kissed it with his wire-thin lips.
Levine shifted his weight from one stocky leg to another, and Mabel thought she heard a small sigh.
“Please come in,” she said to her two new guests.
“I hope you’ll pardon me for bringing an additional guest,” Levine said as he eyed the walls of Mabel’s marble entry hall, flanked on either side with life-size marble replicas of the Venus de’ Medici, Aphrodite, and Greek slave statues, all pert and apparently chilly. Drouhin’s smile turned to a strained, budding blush at the aggressive row of nudity, but Mabel didn’t seem to mind as she led them into the banquette room, consisting of nothing but long, low chaises. While it was the vulnerable widow’s vision to re-create the romance of a harem tent, it more closely resembled a taupe velvet infirmary, perfect for the unconscious hours after the gin bottles had been emptied. It was where the Dolly sisters, Harry Selfridge, and Lord and Lady Rivington, low-level, down-on-their-luck aristocrats who had recently lost their estate and would lend their title to any dinner party that served them a free meal, were enjoying some cold martinis.
Crossing the Horizon Page 4