The Kingdom of the Air

by C. T. Wells

  ‘I’m a South African.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on our side?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  The Warrant Officer’s temples creased with satisfaction and Josef saw that he was not the dumb brute he had been playing. It was all calculated to provoke a response.

  Josef hung his head. He had given them the proverbial inch, and now he had the distinct impression the English were about to take the full mile.

  ***

  The next telephone call woke Lucas at nearly midday. ‘What is it?’ He wrinkled his nose at the stench of his own breath.

  ‘We got him, Sir.’

  It was that idiot O’Donnell again. Sounding far too chipper for the time of day. It was barely the crack of noon. ‘Thank God for the Home Guard.’

  ‘It turns out that he’s a South African.’

  ‘So why is he flying for the Luftwaffe?’

  ‘He’s probably an Afrikaner, Sir. They’re rather a mixed bag over there and he’s one of the ones with German heritage …’

  ‘I know what an Afrikaner is, O’Donnell. How did you find that out?’

  ‘Told us under interrogation.’

  Lucas said nothing for a moment. He was fully awake now, and connections were starting to form in his mind.

  ‘Our boys have been over the wreckage. The plane was partially burnt, but identifiable. I have the report here in front of me. He was based in Normandy. Flew a Messerschmitt, callsign White Five in Jag–desh–something.’

  ‘Jagdeschwader. It means Fighter Wing.’

  ‘Right you are, Sir. But in the wreckage they also found some kind of camera set–up in the fuselage.’

  ‘He was a photo–reconnaissance pilot, then. With possible connections in British–held South Africa. This could be an interesting piece in the game, Major. Where is he now?’

  VI

  The savannah of his homeland was a vast tract of bleached grass dotted with acacia trees. Josef wriggled forward on the bench seat of the farm truck and bit his lip as he pushed in the clutch pedal. He was eleven years old again and could drive, well, enough to take his family for a ride on an empty road. He pushed the gear lever up into third and tried to accelerate smoothly. The truck picked up a little speed and juddered along a sand road, rippled with washouts.

  He was trying hard not to grind a gear or hit a pothole. His father was riding up on the tray of the truck with a rifle, keeping a lookout for lions. If he bounced his father off the tray that would not be funny.

  His mother and Melitta were inside the cab with him. His little sister was climbing all over the seat, trying to get a look out every window.

  ‘Sit still, Melitta. I’m trying to drive.’

  ‘I’m trying to spot animals!’

  ‘Look over here,’ hinted their mother.

  ‘Mutti! Zebra!’ Melitta sat tall on the seat between Josef and their mother, pointing out across the grassland. There were three small zebra grazing far away to their left.

  ‘Yes, dear. Well spotted.’

  ‘Not deer, Mutti. Zebra!’

  The three of them laughed.

  Josef slowed the truck, with a careful stretch for the brake and clutch pedals. They came to a halt and sat quietly for a moment.

  His mother tried to focus a small set of binoculars. ‘Bother!’ she exclaimed as the animals abruptly broke away and kicked up dust before they vanished into the shimmering horizon.

  ‘Maybe they heard the motor,’ Josef said.

  He accelerated gently and they headed further into the plain, miniature beneath the African sky. They drove on for several minutes, feeling the corrugations through the truck’s wooden spokes. He could sense the body heat of his mother and sister in the cabin with him, but he didn’t mind. He was proud of driving them and it seemed all the more comfortable without his father’s glowering presence in the cab. Perhaps his mother felt it too. There was a faint smile on her face. Maybe this was what she had hoped for in a family outing. It had been her idea, and somehow Kurt had been persuaded. He wasn’t a man to waste petrol.

  There was a dull rap on the roof of the cab. Had he done something wrong?

  Josef slowed to a halt again and put the truck out of gear. Kurt Schafer’s face appeared at the window, tanned flesh, hardened like a saddle that hadn’t been oiled. He spoke in a low voice. ‘Turn off the motor and get out. I want you to see this.’

  Josef nodded. ‘Mutti, Papa told us to get out.’

  ‘No. Just you. Melitta and your mother should stay in the truck and keep the doors shut. Come up.’

  Josef turned off the motor and stepped out onto the running board. His mother pulled the door shut behind him.

  His father knelt on one knee with his rifle in hand. He had a finger to his lips and his brow creased in warning as Josef climbed up on the tray beside him.

  Josef nodded. He wouldn’t make a sound.

  Kurt pointed out across the plain. Josef looked out into the scrub, shielding his eyes from the glare. A gazelle was moving through the grass nearly half a kilometre away, stepping as lightly as a dancer. The doe’s pelt was honey and white, her dark horns bobbing whenever she cropped at a shrub.

  Josef glanced at his father. Was he going to shoot the gazelle? Why would he?

  Kurt squeezed the back of Josef’s neck and turned his gaze back to the grassland. He motioned with the rifle to another place on the plain.

  Then Josef saw it. Crouching in the grass was a lioness, her shoulders low, back arched and lithe muscles bunched. The cat’s motionless body was a study in the restraint of power. His father had done well to spot its fur against the parched grassland.

  ‘Watch what happens,’ whispered Kurt. He held the rifle with one hand and the back of the boy’s neck with the other.

  Then it played out. The gazelle crossed some invisible line, some point that triggered in the lioness an intuition the prey could be brought down. The big cat threw itself forward, bounding into a blur of motion. The lioness’s outstretched body flew across the terrain, claws hurling the ground away beneath it. She was the ruler of her kingdom and she had just decreed that it was time for an execution.

  The gazelle reacted swiftly, wheeling away from the attack. It bounded away in springy surges, but the lioness was already moving at a terrifying pace. An outstretched paw pulled down the gazelle and the lioness fell onto the creature’s slender neck. It was a stunning act of nature; like a flash of lightning in a summer storm. Breathtaking. But as he saw the lioness shake her mighty head and flick the limp gazelle in different directions, Josef turned his head away.

  ‘Look at it, Josef,’ urged his father. ‘Look at it!’

  Josef turned back to watch the lioness.

  Kurt Schafer spoke quietly into Josef’s ear. ‘In this life, son, there are predators and prey. Which will you be? The lion or the gazelle?’

  Josef shuddered, appalled at the choice. Why did it have to be about people? He could not put himself in this picture at all. He would not be the ragged carcass nor the red–mawed predator, slinking away with its kill. Why did he have to be either? It was as if his father had asked him to step into a motion picture screen. Impossible.

  His father’s hot breath invaded his ear again. ‘Which will you be, Josef?’

  He had to answer, and he knew what the right answer was so far as his father was concerned, but it was a stupid lesson. Josef turned his eyes skyward and in that moment he saw his salvation. High up, against the pale blue summer sky, a kite or hawk made lazy circles, far removed from the violence at ground level.

  ‘Answer me, boy. Which will you be?’

  Josef pointed to the sky. ‘I would be the bird, Papa.’

  ***

  Josef woke to a throbbing jaw and a clot of salty blood in his mouth. Underneath him was the hard bench in the cell where the i
nterrogation had happened. He wiped away the blood with the sleeve of his flying jacket.

  Above him was a barred slit window, but it had been crudely covered over with blackout paint, so almost no light made it into the cell. According to his watch, it was early in the afternoon, so he had slept for maybe only an hour or two since the Warrant Officer had left. He did a quick inventory of his injuries. His jaw was number one on the list. His ankle was stiff and swollen. His throat was thick and dry. His tongue was a leather belt. If there was any consolation, it was that his hunger had faded into the background.

  Josef heaved himself upright and flicked the dark blonde hair out of his right eye. At least they had taken the cuffs off him. He was filthy. Maybe being so dirty had caused him to dream of his squalid childhood. Or maybe the chase had brought back the memory of the lion and the gazelle.

  He tried to wipe his palms clean on his trousers. He hated dirt. In fact he had a pilot’s obsession with cleanliness and order. And he had a pilot’s obsession with checking the sky; judging wind speed, visibility, the altitude of cloud–base, the prospect of a change. These observations were a habit, a mental routine that put him back in charge. But here, the dim, narrow cell denied him any glimpse of the sky.

  The ceiling was stained by damp. Josef stared into a ring of discolouration as though it were a tunnel to another world. He imagined himself falling into some other realm. But the pain in his body brought him back to the hard bench. He had to face facts. He was captured. But, even worse, he was grounded. What if he never flew again? Josef closed his eyes. He couldn’t bear the thought. It had always been his way out.

  He got to his feet, stood on the hard bench and scratched at the blackout paint with his thumbnail. Hearing thudding steps and the jangle of keys, he turned to face a pair of military policemen as they unlocked the cell. Without a word, they led him down off the bench, out of the cell and through to a foyer that fronted an English street. The doors were glazed, but he could not see out into the street because of the blackout paint. One feeble globe lit the space. It seemed the British were living in perpetual gloom.

  Josef stood still and cooperated as the Military Police cuffed his hands in front of him. The walls of the police station were plastered with Ministry of Information posters. There was an appeal for men to become Air Raid Wardens. There was an invitation to contribute to the Spitfire Fund. On another large sheet, bold white lettering on a red field proclaimed to the citizens: ‘Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory.’ The red print had faded and one of the corners of the yellowing paper was starting to curl up.

  One of the MPs nodded at the door. ‘There are folk out there ... good English folk, who would ’ave you strung up in a jiffy.’

  Josef looked at the floor. He did not always understand the idiom of the English, but he got the general idea.

  ‘Folk what’ve had their homes destroyed,’ the MP muttered. ‘Folk what’ve lost family members. I’ve ’alf a mind to let ’em have a piece of you, Jerry …’

  ‘Shut your trap, William,’ the other MP said. ‘We’ve just got to get ’im in the car and our work is done.’

  ‘Righto, boss. Just havin’ a little laugh with me mate.’

  The one called William opened the door to the police station and they marched him outside. Josef squinted in the harsh sunlight. As his pupils contracted, he was able to pick out a couple of dozen villagers gathered in the street. Accusing glares met his gaze; fear and hate issued from their eyes. Josef looked down as they marched him down the steps. He was just one man; a wounded and exhausted one at that. He was nothing to fear.

  A few hostile shouts echoed in the air, but the villagers’ cries soon trailed off. Perhaps even they sensed his vulnerability and it tempered their hatred. Or perhaps they were just curious, expecting some vile monster, only to discover that German pilots looked a lot like ordinary English lads.

  There were more MPs on the street and they forged a path through the small crowd to a black Ford sedan at the kerb. A rear door was opened for him, and Josef was thrust into the car. The door shut behind him.

  VII

  The driver wasted no time pulling out from the kerb. He was a stiff–faced man of about thirty, with a military bearing despite his civilian clothes. He looked like a hard, competent fellow and probably ought to have been on a battlefield somewhere, except that Josef could see the rigid, pale flesh of burn scars above the left collar of his coat. And he wore one leather glove, on his left hand, presumably covering a wound. Maybe a mortar shell in a trench, or the turret of a tank engulfed in flame from an incendiary shell. This man had lived through some serious pain. He was a returned serviceman, reassigned to other duties. But what exactly?

  A second man sat alongside Josef in the back seat. He did not look like someone who had experienced much pain. He wore a tailored linen suit. Late thirties, perhaps, with fair skin that hadn’t seen a lot of sun. The slender hands that idly held a panama hat were soft and manicured. Josef retained a farm boy’s suspicion of anyone who didn’t do real work, and this one was suspicious.

  The man had oiled hair and a thin moustache. Maybe he was trying to look like Errol Flynn, but couldn’t quite compensate for the weak chin. A pretender.

  As the Englishman met his steady gaze, Josef reconsidered. This was not someone to underestimate. The pale eyes were bleary and bloodshot, suggesting some kind of decadence. But behind that there was something shrewd. The man wore an excessive amount of cologne, but he reeked even more of menace.

  ‘Good day, Herr Schafer. My name is Lucas.’

  Lucas. Was that a first name or a surname? There was no mention of rank. Why had he, a prisoner of war, been handed over to a civilian?

  ‘I hear you speak rather good English.’

  Josef nodded. He decided at that moment that he would stick to just name and rank. He had already said too much.

  ‘I think we can sort out some better accommodation for you, Josef. May I call you Josef? I rather detest the military preoccupation with ranks and whatnot. We have arranged for a dental surgeon to get you fixed up. I’m rather well–connected, and we can manage to bypass the usual dreadful waiting lists for dentists. Shocking situation, you know. It can take weeks to get an appointment. Anyone would think there’s a war on!’ He chuckled at his little joke. ‘At any rate, we’ve got a Mr. Payne to come up from Plymouth to get you fixed. Payne. Most unfortunate name for a dentist, what? Still, not so bad as a gynaecologist I came across once—name of Fiddler. Can you imagine? Dr. Fiddler, the gynaecologist!

  Josef fixed his eyes on the English countryside that flickered past. Judging by the sun and the shadows, he reckoned they were heading north.

  ‘You’ll probably feel more like chatting later, Josef. All in good time. I say, Mr. Hood, would you mind passing the blindfold?’

  The driver passed a dark velvet bag over the seat and Lucas pulled it over Josef’s head and drew a cord loosely around his throat. It hid the surrounds immediately.

  ‘Don’t take it personally. Just a precaution. Don’t want you coming back to drop a bomb on us, what?’

  Beneath the velvet, Josef frowned. He expected to spend the rest of the war in captivity. What was Lucas playing at? Psychological tactics? He was wary of talk that was designed to soften him up for the interrogation.

  Josef heard a metallic double–snick. He tensed, thinking Lucas had cocked a pistol. Then a match was struck and a waft of tobacco smoke assailed him. He guessed Lucas had been using a cigar cutter.

  ‘I import these from Honduras, Josef. Tegucigalpa’s finest. Blended with a little Nicaraguan leaf. Toros. Ever heard of them?’

  Josef shook his head. He had little idea what Lucas was talking about, but even in the bag, his eyes were watering from the pungent cigar.

  ‘I say they’re better than the Cubans. More aroma. You can taste a good plantation, Josef. They say t
he workers are exploited down there but it doesn’t hurt the final product.’ Lucas paused to take in a lungful of smoke and then fill the car with it. ‘But Josef, it’s jolly difficult to import from the Americas these days, what with your U–boats pestering our shipping day and night. Our merchantmen are all commissioned for coal and iron and whatnot. None left for the finer things in life.’

  Something his father used to say popped into Josef’s mind: ‘No–one can whinge like an Englishman.’ But he decided to keep it to himself.

  ‘I have only a few left in my case,’ Lucas went on, ‘but you may have one. Do you smoke, Josef? Oh, sorry old chap! It’s a bit difficult to smoke with your head in a bag, isn’t it?’

  Josef ignored the taunting. Instead, he estimated the time and distance they had travelled. Lucas stopped talking to savour his wretched cigar and it was easier to concentrate. Josef counted his heartbeats. He knew his pulse was usually forty–eight beats per minute at rest. On that basis, he estimated it was sixteen or seventeen minutes before they slowed and turned onto gravel for forty seconds before coming to a halt with a slight bounce of the Ford’s suspension. If they had averaged fifty kilometres an hour through the English country roads, which seemed a fair estimate, that would be about fourteen kilometres. Knowing his location would be the first requirement for planning an escape, and now at least he had a radius from Tavistock to work with. It might be smart to make a move sooner rather than later.

  Josef heard the driver exit the car, then his door opened. He was helped out of the vehicle and led across the gravel, up four steps onto a landing and through a door. It was cooler inside. The door swung shut and Lucas pulled the cloth off his head.

  ‘Voila! Welcome to my office.’

  Josef blinked. It was the entry hall of a fancy home. He was standing in a broad space, tiled in marble with two staircases curving upwards to the second storey. A vine made of wrought iron was entwined around the stone balusters, with gilded leaves gleaming under the light of a chandelier. Lucas had an impressive office.