by Max Hennessy
‘Yeah, I guess so.’
‘You mean Courtney says “Do this”, “Do that” and she raises her hand and says “OK, Pop, let’s”?’
Woolff grinned. ‘Not on your sweet life I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Girls don’t do as Pop says anywhere these days. Alix Courtney does as Alix Courtney wants, and says what Alix Courtney thinks – even if the Old Man don’t like it. She’s waiting at the house for us. You can drive straight on to the field out of the back door.’
Sammy eyed him thoughtfully. ‘Good-looking?’ he asked after a while.
Woolff nodded enthusiastically and they guessed he was probably a little smitten.
‘French blood,’ he said. ‘Courtney’s wife was from New Orleans. Black eyes. Dark hair. She’s…’ he searched for a word to describe her and ended lamely with the same words as before, ‘she’s OK.’
Sammy grinned. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘If she’s as OK as all that, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.’
Chapter 3
As they drove out of Medway, Ira noticed that among the old Fords and farm trucks parked in the shade there were still a lot of horse- and mule-drawn vehicles. Men in bib-fronted overalls moved among them, straw-hatted, thin-limbed and slow-speaking.
‘Hick town.’ Woolff jerked the words out in his shy awkward way. ‘I like it.’
The Courtney house was set back off the Charleston road down a dirt track between high dark trees whose leaves hung heavily in the heat, and they turned into a wide gate and down a long shadowy avenue set with a double line of oaks on either side. The Spanish Moss hanging from the branches barely moved in the still air.
‘Magnolia,’ Woolff said. ‘Some guy built it around 1846.’ He didn’t seem over-impressed by the age of the house. ‘Went down some after the Civil War. Falling apart now, I guess.’
Ahead of them now they could see rusting wrought-iron gates and, beyond, a white building and a row of crumbling brick huts.
‘Slave quarters,’ Woolff said indifferently, gesturing with one hand. ‘In the days when there were slaves.’
Lopsided wooden stables and a disused cotton gin appeared on their right, then they were through the wrought-iron gates and Woolff was braking on a dusty drive where grass sprouted between the crushed pebbles. An elderly woman pushing half-heartedly at a hoe stared at them disinterestedly. Apart from him there appeared to be no one else about the house, though they could hear a radio blaring jazz through an upper window. As they climbed from the car, they saw that the house was unkempt and lacking paint, and the brickwork showed in places through the whitewash.
Woolff led the way on to the high front porch and through the pillared portico, and they found themselves in a shabby green-painted hall. Opposite them was a winding white staircase devoid of carpet and to their left, down a set of wide steps, a huge library whose shelves were almost bare of books.
‘In here,’ Woolff said.
Above the fireplace there was a photograph of a man in a khaki uniform wearing the pale blue képi of the French Army. Beneath were other framed photographs of the same man wearing the leather coat of a pilot, sometimes with a helmet and goggles, sometimes without. He stood in front of a whole array of long-vanished aeroplanes – Caudrons, Moranes and Nieuport Bébés – sometimes surrounded by faces that Ira recognised. There was a model of a Spad hanging on a bracket on the wall, a Hotchkiss machine gun, an engine plate bearing the mark of the Johannisthal Works in Berlin, and a strip of canvas marked FOK EII 179 in Gothic lettering.
‘That Courtney?’ Sammy asked, indicating the photographs.
Ira nodded. ‘That’s him. He’s a lot older than me.’
Woolff crossed to the bookshelves. From among the magazines, newspapers and broken-spined books, he produced a bottle of whisky. ‘It’s real,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you can get it. It makes a change from making your own.’
He was obviously at home in the house and seemed to have been in the habit of coming and going as he pleased.
He handed them glasses then he went into the hall and began shouting up the stairs. ‘Alix!’ he yelled. ‘Hi! Alix!’ Upstairs they heard the harsh tones of a radio announcer cut off in mid-sentence and there was an indistinct answering call from somewhere above them in a high-pitched woman’s voice, then Woolff reappeared. A moment later, they heard heels on the bare wood of the staircase, and Alix Courtney entered. She was frowning as though she had a headache.
To Ira’s surprise, after Woolff’s glowing description of her, she was not as beautiful by accepted standards as he had imagined, because her face was angular and her mouth was almost too wide, but the jetty hair and the black eyebrows that defied the prevailing fashion of plucking and pencilling made it striking. She was younger than he had expected, too – startlingly young – and, as they rose to their feet, she regarded them warily with a cautious expression that for a fraction of a moment made her look like a schoolgirl.
Then the expression vanished as she smiled warmly at Woolff. ‘Radio just announced that one of those stunt fliers at Thomsonboro killed himself,’ she said.
Woolff’s eyebrows shot up. ‘He did?’ He didn’t seem surprised. ‘We sure saw ’em trying. How?’
‘Wing collapsed.’
‘I guess it wasn’t rigged right. They never are.’
‘He had a guy from Medway as passenger. They’re fishing ’em out of the sea this minute.’
For a moment she seemed to have forgotten Ira and Sammy, then she appeared to become aware of her neglect. ‘Pa’ll be here tomorrow,’ she said. She spoke quietly but there was no shyness in her manner. ‘He’s negotiating a loan. He needs capital for his new braking system.’
She offered the information as though it were in parenthesis, something that was quite unimportant, and crossed towards a sagging settee, her eyes all the time on Ira.
She wore a yellow shirt and well-worn but neatly fitting oil-stained jodhpurs that managed to show every curve of her slender figure. In spite of her garb and the short hair bobbed around her ears, however, there was nothing boyish about her. Ira eyed her cautiously, noting the liberal application of lipstick and make-up.
She saw his eyes on her. ‘I don’t wear this get-up all the time,’ she pointed out aggressively.
‘Good thing,’ Sammy said with a grin. ‘It was always the women who wore the trousers in China. It never seemed to do ’em much good.’
Her head jerked round. ‘I’ve even been known to wear evening dress,’ she said. ‘Such as it is. We don’t wear as much as we used to, these days. We’ve found men won’t dance with us if we do.’
Ira said nothing. They’d met girls like Alix Courtney in Shanghai. Despite their youth they had been surprisingly mature. They could hold their drink like men, knew all about sex, and hid their intelligence behind a frantic search for excitement.
‘I expect we’ll handle it,’ he said.
She seemed a little relieved that they weren’t nervous of her imperious manner and eyed them for a while longer, then she rose, lit a cigarette and poured herself a gin that was stronger and larger than any Ira had ever seen a woman drink before. As she sat down again, she stared at Ira with a blank, frankly curious gaze.
‘You’ll be Ira Penaluna,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’
‘My father told me about you. He met you when he was in France.’ She frowned. ‘You’re not what I expected,’ she ended.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘What did you expect?’
She ignored the question. ‘Pa’s never stopped talking about you,’ she went on. ‘You went to Russia, didn’t you? Flying against the Bolsheviks. Then Africa and China.’ She gazed at him steadily. ‘What was it like to kill all those men in the war?’
The question took him by surprise. He hadn’t thought about the war for years. When it had ended he’d been little more than a schoolboy with a gift for survival and his youth had saved him from too many scars and too many memories.
‘I can’t remember,’ he s
aid shortly.
‘Or don’t want to remember?’ she asked.
‘If you like.’
‘All those planes you destroyed, though. There weren’t many better at it.’
‘That wasn’t flying.’ Ira frowned, aware of a troubled look on Woolff’s face and Sammy fidgeting restlessly, and conscious that the conversation was getting a little out of hand.
‘This aeroplane of yours,’ he said before she could continue. ‘I understood we could ask you questions, because you knew all about flying.’
She gestured with her cigarette. ‘Of course you can. The biggest thrill there is for me is lifting an aeroplane off the ground.’
Despite her poise and the faint, barely hidden hostility in her manner, she appeared a little in awe of Ira’s reputation and her clumsy attempt at impressing him seemed to make her all the younger.
Sammy’s eyes flickered. ‘The biggest thrill for me,’ he said, ‘is getting it down again – in one piece.’
She looked up sharply at the sarcasm and for a moment the inky-velvety eyes were bright and keen and angry.
‘Bully!’ she said slowly. ‘Only I don’t believe you!’
‘No,’ Sammy agreed equably, pleased with the effect he’d produced. ‘There’s more to it than that. But that’s important.’
She ground out her cigarette, her ennui gone in a new brisk manner. ‘What do you want to know?’ She had shed the uninterested manner completely now and become as forthright as they were.
‘We’ve come a long way to fly this aeroplane of your father’s,’ Ira said. ‘He’s paying us a lot of money to do it. So far, though, we don’t know much about it. We want to know what it’ll do. How fast it flies. How high. How much it lifts. We’re going to try to fly it for nearly four thousand miles non-stop on a route where if it fails us there won’t be much chance of us coming out of it alive. We’re interested in how safe it is.’ She stared at him for a while, then she sat bolt upright. The frown had vanished and she looked alert and intelligent.
‘It’s a Courtney,’ she said.
Ira nodded. ‘Up to now that’s the first we’ve been told about it. I gather it’s a biplane.’
She flung a glance at Sammy, faintly distrustful and wary after his tart sarcasm.
‘Yes,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘It’s a biplane.’
‘Biplanes are out of date,’ Sammy pointed out bluntly. ‘Everybody’s building monoplanes these days.’
She frowned heavily, glancing at him again as though she resented his presence and his brusque observations. ‘Biplanes have been proved reliable,’ she said, a sudden sharp edge of irritation in her voice.
‘And not so strong,’ Sammy pointed out.
She seemed to feel they were being unnecessarily critical. ‘You’ll not find much to complain of in that department,’ she said sharply.
‘How big is she?’
‘She’ll have a forty-five-foot wing-span and she’ll be twenty-eight feet long. She’ll weigh around three thousand pounds.’
‘Unladen?’
‘Unladen.’
‘And laden?’
‘Do you want it exactly?’
Ira nodded. Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to lift it off the ground and every pound’ll count. What’s the wing area?’
‘Enough. Do you want to see the plans?’
‘Have you got them?’
‘Somewhere, I guess.’
‘How about having a go at digging them out?’
‘Now?’
‘Why not? It’ll be as well to know a few things about her, otherwise we might find ourselves going down the runway at eighty miles an hour without a cat in hell’s chance of getting off.’
She gestured with her cigarette, faintly irritated by their persistence. ‘We could put a bigger wing on her if you weren’t satisfied,’ she said.
Ira refused to be put off. ‘How’s she powered?’
‘Two Gnome-Rhône Jupiters.’
He said nothing and she looked quickly at him. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked sharply.
Sammy gestured, his dark eyes fierce. ‘There are better engines than Gnomes these days,’ he pointed out. ‘These new Wrights burn only two-thirds what Gnomes burn.’
She frowned, a little taken aback by his firmness, and Ira interrupted, trying to take some of the tension out of the interview. He could see Woolff’s face growing longer and he was moving awkwardly on his feet, obviously disturbed by the marked hostility in the air.
‘There are better engines,’ he agreed. ‘Engines that go for days without stopping. Engines made here in the States.’
She glanced at Woolff but he refused to be drawn into the argument and she turned back to Ira. ‘You’re asking a lot, aren’t you?’ she said roughly. ‘They’re new. They cost money.’
‘They might cost us our lives,’ Ira said quietly. ‘What happens if an engine cuts?’
‘You have another.’
Ira nodded. ‘Will she fly on one engine?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you tried her?’
‘Yes.’
Ira was suddenly beginning to enjoy himself. ‘With the full amount of fuel aboard for the dead engine?’ he said.
She paused, frowning again as though this point had troubled her, too. She looked quickly at Woolff once more.
‘I knew you’d ask that one,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the engine won’t fail.’
Ira leaned forward. ‘If it did,’ he pointed out, ‘the other one might not be enough for the extra fuel and the crew.’
She sat silently for a moment, seeing that neither he nor Sammy was likely to be talked into giving ground. She moved restlessly on the settee, fingering her cigarette case and toying with the frayed turn-ups of the jodhpurs, then she glanced again at Woolff, who looked down abruptly, and back at Ira.
Abruptly she swung her feet to the floor. ‘I guess we’re not getting very far.’ Her voice was brisk and cold and unrelenting. ‘We’d better go see the ship.’
Chapter 4
She led them through the back of the house and out on to the lawn. It was shaded by a gnarled oak so vast that even on the hottest day the garden remained cool. The air throbbed with the mourning of doves, and nearby they could see cane brakes and a gleam of water, and a few white birds among the reeds. The drowsy honk of water fowl came from the river that meandered behind the house, the old cotton route to Charleston, and they could see a jetty built of heavy timbers where a rotting flat-bottomed barge was moored.
Beyond the magnolias and the over-grown banks of azaleas there was a small graveyard among the cannas and moss-garlanded oaks, where all the names – every single one of them – were the same. The dates stopped abruptly at 1867.
‘This is a beautiful place,’ Ira commented.
‘Magnolias and moonlight,’ she said shortly. ‘The romantic South.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s falling apart.’
Certainly the garden was overgrown and the grass was uncut. Hedges encroached on to the paths and the neglected fences had fallen down.
‘Damned house,’ she went on bitterly. ‘Never enough people around to do anything. I sometimes look forward to going back to New York. I’ve got a house on Long Island.’
Beyond the tufty lawns there was a wide spread of longer grass that stretched in flat folds to the horizon. In the distance they could see the roofs of Medway and a few large sheds among the trees. ‘Those are the hangars,’ she said.
A red Pierce Arrow that looked as big as a destroyer stood on the edge of the field. She slapped the bonnet affectionately.
‘Drive her,’ she said. ‘She’s got a standard shift.’ She turned to Woolff. ‘You’d better take Mr Shapiro, Hal. You can talk about motors.’
Woolff nodded and he and Sammy disappeared through the bushes to where he had left the Sunbeam. As Ira felt for the gears of the Pierce Arrow and moved the throttle and choke levers on the steering wheel, Woolff’s car roared round the house, lurched on to the field,
rolling on its springs, and set off across the grass towards the hangars, swaying and bouncing over the undulations in the ground.
‘Better follow him,’ Alix said,
Ira let in the clutch and the Pierce Arrow jolted forward. ‘She’s fast,’ he commented.
She shrugged. ‘She’d be faster if she were new. You can borrow her until you can hire one of your own. You’ll need an auto. Everybody has an auto.’
For a while she was silent as they bumped across the field, then she half-turned in her seat to look at him. ‘How did you get into flying?’ she demanded unexpectedly.
Ira paused, his hands gripping the quivering steering wheel. Though his grandfather had been a sea-captain plying out of Fowey in square-riggers for Australia, for his father excitement had come not from stately sailing ships but from the fragile new-fangled string-and-wire contraptions that were beginning to claw their way into the sky. When one of them had finally sent him to his grave with a broken neck in 1913, the particular strain of Cornish Penaluna that ran through Ira’s veins had put the sea behind it for ever.
‘My father built aeroplanes like the Wrights,’ he explained. ‘But the Wrights were cleverer than he was and made it first. He was killed when one of his engines failed. I used to help him. That’s how I got into flying.’
For a moment she said nothing, then she gave him a little twisted smile. ‘I just wondered,’ she said. ‘Because there are a lot of phoneys in this racket. Wise guys, all hot air. I know. I married one.’
She looked barely old enough to have been married and seemed to have remarkably little affection for aviators. Her voice was full of contempt. She tossed aside a dead cigarette and lit another.
‘What about the money?’ she asked bluntly. ‘Are you in it for sport or for cash?’
‘I’m a professional flyer,’ Ira pointed out with equal bluntness. ‘I have to be. It’s the only thing I can do. And the better I am at it, the better it is for me and the people who employ me. I earn what I’m paid.’
She seemed to feel he was resentful of her questioning. ‘Don’t get so edgy,’ she said sharply. ‘We need people like you over here. Flying in this country so far’s only produced a lot of crazy fools who’ve made it an attractive form of suicide. They stunt second-hand wartime planes. Half the excitement comes from not knowing what’ll happen next. A lot of ’em kill themselves like that guy at Thomsonboro – because their ships are old and badly serviced – and people have gotten around to associating flying with lunatics. That’s not what the Wrights intended when they got their Flyer off the ground.’