“Where is your mother?” she snapped. She had that look we Catholics call self-righteous. But if she wanted to rat on me, boy, was she in for a crushing disappointment.
“New York,” I said, pulling loose and picking up speed as my sneakers got in the right position for a landing.
“Liar!” echoed off the tiled walls.
“Really, Thomas,” said Daphne when she joined me at the bottom.
Our train was loaded and about to pull from the station, a two-wheeled shopping cart the only thing holding the door open. A grandma-type pulled at the rubber handle, trying to get the wheels out of the gap. From the opposite side, I held onto the wire frame, keeping the cart in place long enough for Daphne to catch up. We got in and the train rocketed toward the Leytonstone station.
“So why was Jack’s leave canceled?” I asked once we found seats.
“Seems there’s been some sort of an accident. A number of the boys are out of commission while they heal and now Jack has to fly in their place. He’s exhausted, dear man. Twenty days in a row and sometimes three ops a day. Yesterday he fell asleep in the cockpit after he’d landed—too knackered to make it to a cot.”
“What kind of accident—you mean a crash?”
“Well, yes, actually—but not an airplane crash, thank God.” She chuckled with relief. “Jimmy tripped running down the stairs this morning and then quite a few of the other chaps tripped over him. There were broken bones, even. Sel was nearly blinded by a telephone directory. You know how it is when the air-raid siren goes—the mad rush to get into the airplanes. It’s no wonder something like this doesn’t happen every day.”
I narrowed my eyes and said, “How’d Jimmy trip is what I want to know.”
“Oh, Thomas,” said Daphne laughing harder, “I know how your mind works. Why I can see the gears spinning. It was just clumsiness, plain and simple.”
She was proving my point: English people were too trusting. That’s what got them into this mess in the first place. While Hitler was building Panzer tanks and Messerschmitts, teaching kids to goose-step and getting ready to march into Poland, their prime minister was flying to Berlin for tea parties. New Yorkers, on the other hand, are born suspicious. We don’t trust nobody—not policemen, not politicians, and especially not Nazis. Good thing our president is a New Yorker. Hitler wasn’t going to pull the wool over Roosevelt’s eyes.
“First we’ll join Mum and Dad for dinner. She’s making Wartime Vegetable Turnovers with Wartime Dipping…from a recipe she found in Woman’s Own magazine. Doesn’t that sound scrummy?”
“Just delicious!” I said, in a way that any New Yorker knows means just the opposite but fools the English every time. Recipes with the word “wartime” are supposed to make you feel patriotic while eating cardboard. It always worked out to this: hold the sugar, skip the cream, forget the meat, and hide the butter.
“And now we should make our plan for the week’s end,” said Daphne. “After dinner, how about taking in a picture show!” She took a folded newspaper from the big pocket on her wool coat and opened to the movie section. Her red lacquered fingernail began hovering dangerously above an advert for Hold Back the Dawn, one of them tearjerkers girls love but men fall asleep watching.
“How’s about The First of The Few,” I said, snapping my fingers like the idea just came to me. It starred Leslie Howard, the British actor who’d pretended to be a Confederate soldier in Gone With The Wind. Scanning down the movie timetable, I could see it was playing at the Leicester Square Theatre.
“Haven’t you seen that ten times already?” said Daphne. “I know I have. Jack can’t get enough of it.”
Ten was too low a number. Once, when I’d gone to see it with Jack, we stayed for three shows in a row. Lord Sopwith and me already been eight times. I didn’t mind seeing it a million times, it being about the invention of the Spitfire. There’d been only one teary bit where the inventor gets cancer and dies. That was my cue to visit the refreshment stand and buy myself some of what the British called cotton-floss but is the exact same thing as cotton candy. I’d get back in my seat for the spine-tingling dogfight ending. Jack would whisper in my ear, explaining every maneuver. It was all part of my ground training.
“How about The Goose Steps Out?” I said. It featured Nazi spies. I’d learn how Abwehr secret agents worked. There were spies all over London, which was why they had to paste posters everywhere warning people to keep their lips buttoned.
I looked around the train car. Across the aisle from us sat the grandma-type with the shopping cart: a case in point. Pinned to her lapel was a Bundles For Britain button with a red V in the center that stood for victory. She was knitting a pair of men’s socks with green wool. By the look of it, a real patriot. Yes, siree, this was the perfect cover: secret agents, armed with bayonet-sharp knitting needles—sending those socks to the German Wehrmacht. And who knew what lurked in the shopping cart?
But Daphne wasn’t going for The Goose Steps Out. “I’m living in a war film,” she said. “What I need right now is escapism. Anything wrong with that?”
We landed on Jungle Book, which wasn’t a war film or a romance. The book wasn’t half-bad and the advert showed a roaring, man-eating tiger. I knew the tiger was going to eat one of the bit players. Coming out of the theater later that night, I said, “Technicolor. They oughta make all the pictures with the stuff. Blood is so much more bloody when it’s red.”
“I prefer black and white, actually,” said Daphne. She was looking a little queasy, so I changed the subject:
“So Sel’s eye got knocked out by a telephone book, that right? He’ll probably have to get a glass eye.”
“I didn’t say knocked out. He’s not blinded but his eye is scratched and bruised and he can’t fly.”
“Which phone book exactly?” Details are important to good detecting.
Daphne sighed. “How should I know? Southend-on-Sea. London. Why does it matter?”
Los Angeles, I thought. Some of the Eagle Squadron pilots had Hollywood starlet girlfriends and would need their numbers handy. For sure, it wasn’t the Southend-on-Sea directory. Too thin. “What caused Jimmy to trip?” I asked.
“Honestly, Thomas. I wasn’t there. And if you want to know, my guess is that he had one too many at the pub last night and woke with a hangover. The boys are under enormous pressure these days and they do like to let off steam. Or perhaps he was bone-tired from all the flying he’s had to do.”
“I’m not buying it,” I said. I knew these pilots. They had reflexes like cats. Could take a plane up to 15,000 feet, dive at 500 miles an hour, and level out so close to the ground they got grass stains.
Daphne yawned. “Well, Sherlock, if you must mount an investigation, you can ask Sel yourself. We’ll bring him flowers and a get-well card. That is, if Jack can free himself long enough to make the trip worthwhile. Otherwise I’ll take you to the British Museum. We can see the mummies. You’ll like that, won’t you?”
“Nah,” I said. I’d already been and it was a gigantic letdown. All the real treasures had been moved from the museum for safekeeping. Good thing too, because a German bomb destroyed the room where they’d kept the ancient Parthenon frieze. All they had on display now were cat mummies, a dime-a-dozen. Rumor was, some of the treasures were kept in the basement and others in an unused Tube station. I’d been asking around. My plan was to become America’s answer to Howard Carter—the Egyptologist who uncovered King Tutankhamen’s tomb. The problem was that fighting around Malta was preventing me from getting to Egypt. But for now I had other things to think about.
“We’ve got to go to RAF Rochford tomorrow,” I said. “I suspect there’s a ring of—”
Daphne rolled her eyes. They were so pretty, what with them long lashes. I couldn’t finish the sentence. “Oh, get on,” she said. “You just want to see your brother, and I shan’t argue with that.” She got that glazed look in her eye I knew all too well—daydreaming about her wedding. Once that started,
there was no use discussing anything serious. We were back on the train again, heading to her house. I took the paper from her pocket without her noticing and turned to the comics: Addy and Hermy. The Nasty Nazis: my favorite British cartoon, featuring Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring. Daphne yawned and her eyelashes lowered. Before I knew what happened, her head was resting on my shoulder. If Jack were in my place he would’ve leaned over and kissed her cheek. I was puckering my lips when I heard his voice in my head. “Wait one cotton-picking minute,” he said. My lips went slack and I shook my shoulder until Daphne bolted upright.
“Are we there yet?” she said, not suspecting a thing.
CHAPTER THREE
I WAS SLEEPING on a foldaway cot with a mattress that made my body feel like it’d been pressed in a waffle iron. I’d gotten soft sleeping on a feather bed at the Sopwith’s place. It didn’t take much for Daphne to wake me.
“Jack just rang up and said that we might be in luck,” she said, flattening my cowlick with her spit-dripping fingers. “Things are quiet thus far. I say we head to the base before the Luftwaffe change their minds. We can pick up breakfast rolls in the refreshment room at Liverpool station. You can get a currant bun if you’d rather.”
“Currant?” I said yawning, propping my head on my elbow. “What’s a currant?”
“They resemble cherries.” She was trying to lore me into getting up, taking advantage of my passion for maraschino cherries. Daphne was still in her nightgown with her hair in curlers. I’d get another hour of shut-eye while she prettied herself up. That’s what I thought anyway. Not 15-minutes later and she was poking me again, dolled up and dragging me from the cot. “Get up already!” she said in a begging voice. “If we miss the next train, it shall be an hour wait for another.”
I thought: An hour wait—while Jack sits there all lonely. Good thing I’d slept in my clothes, making it possible to move directly from the cot to the front door. Daphne was having trouble catching up in those clickity-clack high-heels of hers.
While she locked the door, an air-raid siren went off. We ran for the Leytonstone Tube station. A Dornier Do-17 flew overhead, its engines shaking the ground under us and rattling the fillings in our mouths. Daphne held the picnic basket in one hand and put the other over her head. I stopped short, taking a compass from of my pocket. The German bomber was coming from the southeast and heading toward downtown London—aiming for Buckingham Palace where King George was drinking his breakfast tea: Earl Grey, same as the Sopwiths drank.
Daphne made her way down the stairs ahead of me and didn’t see a squadron of Spitfires chasing after the bomber. Drats, I thought, knowing that one might be my brother’s. But I wasn’t about to say anything. It was a good idea to get out of town even if Jack wasn’t there to greet us. At any minute bombs would start raining down. If one dropped on you, it was goodbye Charlie. The force alone could suck your eyeballs out. The Home Guard taught people to press tight over their eyes.
We made it to Liverpool station in the nick-of-time, slowed down by the wicker picnic basket which we were taking turns carrying. Rain was pounding on the greenhouse roof in the main terminal, water pouring through glass shattered during the Blitz. Lucky for us, Daphne brought along an umbrella. The Southend-on-Sea bound train whistle blew and we made a beeline for the first car. A sailor grabbed Daphne by the waist, making like he was helping her in. She said, “Thank you very much, but I’m perfectly capable of entering a train unaided.” We made our way through three packed cars before finding seats next to the lavatory, where no one wanted to sit because of the stink.
Daphne was talking non-stop, filling me in on her wedding plans. If I was still stuck in England when the big day came, I was slated to be best man. Some of my duties, I was learning, belonged to the maid of honor. Sophie, Daphne’s best friend, should’ve got the part, only she lived in occupied Paris and the Nazis wouldn’t issue her a travel permit.
The train left the station and I began scanning the horizon for one of them barrage balloons—fake helium blimps tethered to steel wires, which the RAF knew to fly around but everybody hoped the Germans would crash into. The Luftwaffe was now equipping bombers with wire-cutting explosives and that was something I desperately wanted to see. My eyes were on the window with an ear pointed toward Daphne.
She was explaining that as best man and man of honor, it would be my job to help her make hors d'œuvres. From what I gathered this involved Spam and biscuits. Only I didn’t have a clue what that word meant, not knowing big-letter French words. I’m fluent in Latin, thanks to the nuns at Saint Brendan’s Catholic School in East Hempstead, New York, where I was once a student. If you ask me, Latin is pretty much a waste of time. What with it being a dead language, fluency is useless. The lingo—or lingua, I should say—died out when the Barbarian’s plundered Rome starting in 363 AD, forcing Roman citizens to speak Proto-Germanic. From that sprung Yiddish, a language still used in Brooklyn. I had a neighbor back in East Hempstead who’d emigrated from Germany via Brooklyn and spoke German and Yiddish, but not a word of Latin. You don’t need Latin unless you plan on taking your orders and becoming a priest, which I didn’t. Hieroglyphs was what I needed.
Meanwhile I was having a hard enough time with my English, which according to Lady Sop was “atrocious.” So I figured I’d try out some real English on Daphne: “What shall we dine on whilst traveling?” I said. “Dare say, we’ve forgotten to stop off for the cherry buns, what?”
“Listen to you!” she said, laughing so hard I could see her molars. “Speaking like a Peer of the Realm. Jack will hardly recognize you.”
That had me worried. If Jack even hinted to Ma that I was turning into an Englishman, she’d disown me. Ma and Da were straight-off-the-boat Irish immigrants and didn’t like the British none. When a boy came rolling down the aisle with a food wagon, I said, “Whatta ya got, bub?”
An hour later, we exited the Southend-on-Sea Victoria station. It always reminded me of something out of Hansel and Gretel. “Call it Tudor,” Daphne said, correcting me. “Hansel and Gretel were German.”
We walked miles before we got to the gate leading into RAF Rochford. Every time a Spitfire flew over our heads we waved, hoping it was Jack. One flew so low, it messed with my hair. The pilot tipped his wing and waved back from his open cockpit. He got one look at Daphne and spun the Spitfire like a gyroscope. By the time we arrived at the guardhouse, my feet were blistered.
The soldier said he couldn’t let us in without clearance. Daphne asked him to call into the dispersal hut, hoping Jack was there. A minute later, he stuck his head out the window, “Line’s busy, miss.”
“Can you try again, Corporal?” said Daphne, batting her eyelashes. “Keep at it and someone is bound to pick up.” The corporal got right back on the horn.
A minute later: “Warrant Officer Noble picked up. She’s comin’ out to get you. She’ll authorize you and sign you in, right and tidy.”
While we waited, Daphne explained that Geraldine Noble was stepping out with another pilot in the squadron. The four of them had been out on the town, double-dating. Geraldine was in the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force, abbreviated WAAF, which rhymed with calf. They had the important job of plotting the course of bomber and fighter squadrons, giving radio instructions to airmen, and operating the radar. They were the envy of every dame in the kingdom, seeing that they had first dibs on handsome pilots and were issued an endless supply of black nylon stockings.
Me and Geraldine were already acquainted. She might be going steady with a pilot, but I knew she was sweet on me. “Tommy!” she squealed as she came to the gate. I had to back away before she could smear lipstick on me. “Aren’t I your best girl?” she asked.
“No going,” I said. “Where’s my brother, anyway?”
“Out, I’m afraid. He asked that I entertain you until he gets back.” She took a clipboard from the corporal and signed us into the base. As she handed the clipboard back, she doubled over and groaned. Her whole face wen
t ghost white and she fell to the ground, landing hard on her backside.
Daphne ran over to help. She was a nursing school dropout. “Corporal,” she shouted, “Quick! Ring the medics!”
“Ruddy ’ell! I feel like a double-decker hit my stomach,” said Geraldine.
“What did you eat for breakfast?” I asked.
“Eggs and kidneys. Toast with a little margarine and Marmite, same as everyone. And would you look at that—I have a ladder in my stocking!”
I knew my brother didn’t like Marmite on his toast. It was yeast paste. “What else did you eat?” I asked.
“Tea without sugar,” she said, twisting her stocking until the rip faced backwards.
Before I could continue the investigation, the corporal interrupted with: “ ’fraid the medics are occupied. Seems ’alf the base is sick. Guess um lucky I ’aven’t ’ad me breakfast yet. Been on duty.”
Just as he said the word sick Geraldine threw up on herself. All over the good stocking, too. I backed away, gagging. She obviously liked Marmite.
“Any German POWs working in the kitchen?” I asked.
“As if we’d let Nazis prepare our food!” said Geraldine, a bit dazed.
Daphne rolled her eyes. Little did she know. I’d heard it on the radio: some numbskull in Washington D.C. was hatching a plan to make German POWs work at military base commissaries—washing dishes, cooking and mopping floors. According to Geneva Convention rules these POWs had to get American military wages: 80 whole cents an hour! Didn’t matter, said one politician: better the Germans do the grunt work and the Americans get sent to fight Hitler. I was meaning to write President Roosevelt and warn him of the risks. I’d met Nazis and knew how shifty they were.
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