How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

  “I think we should go.”

  “Yeah, OK. What about him?”

  “Him?”

  “Yeah. Him.”

  “He’s lucky to be alive,” Sheldon said.

  Sheldon put Lenny’s arm around his neck as if his friend were a wounded soldier and walked him out of the headlights into the darkness of the deep fields about a shadowed mile toward the lake. There, the boys could pick up the path that led them back to their bedroom. Inside and safe, they could sleep the sleep of comrades in arms; assuming, that is, that Lorenzo was gone.

  The police cars drove right past them, which gave Sheldon new hope for a good night.

  The night’s quiet returned when they were far enough away from the wrecked car. By the time Sheldon collected the bag of cash, the first crickets started to sing again. Lenny started walking taller and on his own.

  Sheldon asked, “Did you get fired again?”

  “Not exactly,” Lenny said. “I pushed it deliberately too far tonight. Wanted to see what would happen if I did it on purpose.”

  “They laugh?”

  “They laughed.”

  “But the manager didn’t like it?”

  Lenny shook his head. “Too Jewish.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it means, it means a lot.”

  * * *

  THERE WERE NO BELLHOPS on duty after midnight. The trains stopped running, and no one checked in that late. If they did, there was someone at reception who could take care of it and a janitor who could be called in to carry suitcases if needed. There were, therefore, no bellhops in the lobby after Sheldon dropped Lenny off in their room and proceeded through the halls to the reception desk and lucked upon Lorenzo being handcuffed in the midst of three armed cops.

  The enormous Mel Friedman was there and dabbing the top of his head with a handkerchief. He was talking with Ben Adelman and Mrs. Finegold, who was standing behind the front desk as though she were manning a machine-gun nest.

  The sound of Latin music filled the lobby with vibrant rhythms. A trumpet of precision and virtuosity rang in joyful obliviousness to the somber mood of the management.

  Mrs. Finegold snapped her fingers at Sheldon and tried to shoo him out of the lobby, but Sheldon was having none of that. This was the end of a story, and there was no way he was going to miss handing Lorenzo his hat.

  Ben, also defying Mrs. Finegold, called Sheldon over.

  “You did this,” Ben said, shaking his hand. “Well done.”

  “Thank you. It wasn’t easy.”

  “I was a little worried at first, I have to admit. I thought maybe you did it and planted the jewels to cover it all up, but the police here say they know this guy and the people he’s connected to, and for them, it’s open and shut.”

  “Why would you think I did it?” Sheldon asked, unable to leave well enough alone.

  “You got a way about you,” Ben said.

  “What way?”

  “Like your brain’s always at work and there’s more going on with you than seems to be going on. Like you have this . . . I don’t know . . . rich inner life.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Yeah. Me either.”

  The cops shoved Lorenzo, signaling that it was time to go, so Sheldon—a doorman, a bellhop, a criminal mastermind, and the right hand of God—jogged out the front door to open it and let them all out. After they passed through, he ran to the police cruiser and opened the back door as though Lorenzo were the Prince of Wales.

  “We got it, kid,” said a large cop with a fat belly and a big gun.

  “It’s my job, sir,” Sheldon said. “And we aim to please around here.”

  The cop didn’t argue. There was no point. It was late and it was just a door. Lorenzo was shoved toward the back seat.

  Before ducking his head, though, he stopped hard and looked Sheldon dead in the eye. “I’m going to find you,” he said—his eyes full of recognition and understanding now. He’d put it together. The face from the car.

  “If we meet again, Lorenzo,” Sheldon whispered back, “you’re gonna die.”

  * * *

  The police car, with Lorenzo in it, drove away without the lights flashing or the sirens blaring. For Sheldon, the scene felt like Whately when he and the sheriff sent away the Krupinski brothers. When the taillights disappeared down the hill, all that was left was the sense of an ending.

  Alone outside, Sheldon turned back to the hotel with plans to go see Lenny. That was when he saw Miriam pass through the lobby. She was holding the arm of a handsome young man, who was perhaps twenty years old. He wore a suit and tie, and had the posture of a man headed to Harvard. Passing reception, he stopped to shake someone’s hand, and Miriam stood by him as though she were a senator’s wife.

  In that moment, she turned to look outside and saw Sheldon. He raised his hand, but she turned her head away.

  Part III

  This Life

  Taming of the Shrew

  LETTER WRITING HAD BEEN a relaxing and satisfying way to stay connected to Mirabelle and Sheldon when Abe first arrived at ground school in January of 1940. He’d felt bad about leaving them behind that autumn, but by the new year, he’d been ready to reengage with the life he’d left behind. Maybe because the path ahead was finally clear.

  Some of the guys thought it was a bad omen to write letters before missions because it put everyone in a morose frame of mind rather than pumping them up like hunters before a kill, but Abe wasn’t superstitious, and unlike his Canadian friends, he was never afraid that he’d lose his anger. That photo from Austria never left his mind.

  Those quiet days of training coincided with quiet seas and not much pressure on the air defenses off the Canadian coast. Until April of 1940, the Germans didn’t have an Atlantic base. The newspapers explained the reasons for this better than the officers did. Nazi efforts to disrupt the provisions being sent to Britain would have required them braving the treacherous waters of the North Sea—and the British navy—or else they would have to slip out through the English Channel, which was impossible to do in numbers. All that changed in April of 1940 when Quisling helped the Nazis take over Norway and France fell soon after. From then on, the Germans had free rein in the Atlantic.

  The RAF Coastal Command dithered. All the best equipment and all the political backing in London was going to the Bomber Command because Churchill wanted to bring the fight to the Nazis and level Germany. That choice left the Atlantic’s merchant navy—and the four million tons of matériel it shipped every month—largely unprotected.

  Abe took Churchill’s decision personally because it meant he couldn’t drop bombs on Nazis. It did, however, help him find his specialty.

  He could have chosen anything he wanted. He was in the upper half of his class in general physical fitness, was the third fastest runner, and was the best distance runner on account of his slender physique and long legs and willful determination. Unlike some of the men, he had a high school diploma in hand, and having graduated with top marks, he was qualified for pilot training. His math skills were excellent. Even his eyesight checked out.

  But Abe didn’t want to be a pilot. To him, being a pilot was like being a caddy on a golf course. Pilots bring the tools to the field; it’s the bombardier who actually uses them.

  Louis, ever the gentleman, chose to be a pilot. Abe wanted to drop the bombs.

  Being a bombardier meant training on particular aircraft (the Vickers Wellington and later the B-24) and—more important—on the top secret Norden bombsight, a piece of extremely expensive kit with internal gyroscopes and stabilizers that made it possible for the bombardier to lock in a vertical line to compensate for the pitching and rolling of the aircraft, and in turn gave him control over the range angle and, ultimately, where the bombs fell.

  Or so went the theory. In any case, Abe wasn’t allowed to include any mention of it in h
is letters home.

  The geometry and practical exercises in the classroom gave structure to his creative desire to wreak havoc on German warships. Abe loved how each type of bomb trailed the plane on release at a different rate—the trail speed—and how the trail speed had to be matched to the airspeed and altitude when calculating the range angle for impact.

  He relished the imagination involved in trying to visualize how wind was a factor in pushing the plane off course on a bombing run, requiring him to measure the drift angle and match it to the bomb trail. Beyond his high school math, he learned to calculate the more complex cross trail, which he calculated as the trail multiplied by the sine of the drift angle. He could visualize it, calculate it, and use the Norden to clutch-in the stabilizers that could take things from there.

  The more complicated it was, the better, because it proved to Abe that the war effort needed him.

  * * *

  What Abe loved most was how the cold calculation of the mind produced devastating results. He felt like he was delivering back to the Germans the same recipe they were dishing out and that every time he got an equation right he was besting them at their own game.

  Superior race, you say?

  Can you catch this in your teeth?

  * * *

  Bombing U-boats was better than vengeance. It was the chance to be living proof that the German claims of racial superiority were false. Abe wanted to be a living counterfactual to everyone who thought Jews were degenerates and evolutionarily inferior. He wanted to be the truth. This was a motivation beyond vengeance. For Abe, excellence was a holy war and a battle for the truth about who and what he was.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, as Abe and everyone else soon learned, the Norden was a best-condition device that wasn’t capable of learning or automatically adjusting when the situation became variable. And war, they learned, was a variable enterprise. The Norden couldn’t account for changes in wind, battlefield smoke, aircrew stress, aircraft damage, bombsight obstruction from clouds or weather or glare, or any other real-life problem that was often faced. All of this added to the Norden’s circular error probable, which was the tightest circle that could be expected from a bombardier even in ideal conditions, which no aircrew ever faced. This meant—though no one wanted to say it aloud—that bombing was more art than science.

  Abe cared about none of this. Not the casualty rates from training accidents or the risks of being shot down or simply falling out of the sky due to mechanical or pilot error. He didn’t care about the cold at altitude nor—once they were transferred—the cold of Iceland. Short of shooting Germans through the scope on a rifle, the Norden was as close as he could get to putting Nazis in his crosshairs. These crosshairs were far above the target and he would never see the whites of their eyes like the Minutemen did with the British at the Battle of Bunker Hill, but it still beat sitting around in America waiting for Congress to remove their thumbs from their asses and join the damn fight.

  * * *

  In their remaining time in Halifax, the men smoked, played cards, and talked about the war they wanted to be in. What separated Abe from the Canadians most—to his surprise—was that he was essentially alone in wanting to talk about the Nazis. He had thought that this would be the obvious topic: who they were, what they did, and why they deserved death delivered in the form of aerial bombardment.

  Even his best friends, like Louis, didn’t want to talk about this. Their approach to it all was less emotional, less personal. If they did bother to discuss the wider canvas at all, they talked about the “British war effort” and the pathetic state of the RAF’s Coastal Command and what they called the Black Pit. The Atlantic Gap that couldn’t be reached by land-based bombers in Canada or the UK because of their limited range. Once a convoy crossed into the Black Pit after April of 1940, there was no land-based antisub­marine air cover, and the merchant marine was forced to rely on naval escorts that were seldom a match for the U-boats—at least early on.

  “Don’t you guys ever get angry?” Abe asked one day after folding his cards in disgust at their failure to line up correctly.

  “About what?” asked Louis.

  Abe took his question as an answer and let it go. What was he going to explain? The constant degrading humiliation of being Jewish? The relentlessness of being pronounced weak and incapable of honorable self-defense only to have the Axis machine demonstrate this by hurling its full mechanical weight at the throats of children as though that were proof? There was no explaining this to these guys. These were his friends and his comrades, but they weren’t his people. For Abe, this was OK. They didn’t need to feel what he was feeling in order to transport him and his bombs to the target.

  * * *

  For the better part of 1940, they patrolled the waters off Newfoundland and—like bad fishermen—caught nothing or had to turn back from possible encounters with the U-boats because their fuel ran out before they could try to halt the strangulation of Britain’s flow of matériel.

  In the autumn of 1940, they were transferred to Iceland. It wasn’t until the summer of 1941—the summer that Sheldon outsmarted the New England Mob, locked up his nemesis, and became rich all in one night—that things got interesting for Abe too.

  * * *

  It started with Alvin Cobbler. Alvin always had news, and while no one believed him at first, everything he said later came true. Alvin was from a town called Medicine Hat in Alberta, almost two hundred miles to the southeast of Calgary, which to Abe placed it nowhere and near nothing. Alvin was filled with fascinating information that was either perfectly true or complete bullshit, and it was rare that Alvin knew the difference. He was thin and short with unruly blond hair. As best as Abe could tell, Alvin never stopped talking unless he was ordered to, threatened, or was unconscious.

  “I’m telling you,” Alvin said one Saturday in April of 1941. The temperature in Iceland was hovering near freezing and a frosting of snow filled the windowsills of their barracks. The sorties they had been flying off the coast until then—like their sorties from Halifax—had achieved nothing other than freezing them at altitude. Abe hadn’t dropped a single bomb or spotted a single German U-boat. Which wasn’t surprising. Their range sucked. The planes couldn’t fly far enough into the Atlantic to find their targets. The Germans were mean, but they weren’t stupid.

  “The Americans are shipping some B-24s over to RAF Nutts Corner in Northern Ireland this coming summer,” Alvin said. “My cousin in San Diego works at one of the factories building the things and he saw the paperwork. And I have it from a source who knows a guy who knows for sure—”

  “Oh, fuck me, Alvin,” said Abe.

  “I’m telling you, some of the Liberators are going to RAF Coastal Command’s 120 Squadron, and we’re teamed up with them and that means we’re going to fly them. We’re going to get a long-range bomber. Don’t you understand? We’re going to be the first team to fly into the Black Pit. We’re going to close the Atlantic Gap. Let the games begin, and all that.”

  Iceland, for the past seven months, had been blacked-out dark and witch-tit cold, but it hadn’t been that bad because Iceland had something that no other place could boast about: Icelandic girls. Abe and his friends were the first foreigners to arrive in Iceland en masse since the Vikings, and every Canadian (plus Abe) was convinced that the girls must be sick of Icelandic boys and the profound lack of variety. The entire island was the size of a gumball so everyone had known one another since they were kids. And that is neither romantic nor sexy.

  Enter Canada.

  The Canadians liked to imagine themselves as exotic; and it was pretty rare for Canadians to be considered exotic. This moment—a fact they knew down to the man—was their one and only chance to capitalize on it.

  Abe had been among the first group who had achieved measurable success. He’d met a girl named Ingunn in a local tavern. She was very blonde, full-figured, a few years older than Abe, and very excited about his being American. She’d
seen the movies, learned the language (sort of), and wanted to go to Hollywood, which—quite by coincidence—was where Abe claimed he had grown up.

  “You’d love it,” he insisted.

  * * *

  By June of 1941, it turned out that Alvin—inexplicably, impossibly—had been right: A shiny new B-24 Liberator had been delivered to their windswept tarmac.

  * * *

  Their new commanding officer was a stocky, short, mustached, and uninteresting Albertan named Bachmann. Occasionally, and uninvited, Bachmann joined Abe and Louis and the rest of the crew for cards, but his conversation topics usually brought joy to a halt. He did, however, often share information at these games so his presence was tolerated.

  Bachmann was not a bad guy. He wasn’t evil and no one hated him, but if he vanished painlessly in a puff of smoke, the natural reaction would be to open a window and let it out. His thick mustache was borderline comical, and no matter how much PT he did, he never seemed to lose weight. But he was a reasonable midcareer officer and—he explained—he had a British cousin named Esther who worked for the new air officer commanding-­in-chief of the Coastal Command, Phillip Joubert de la Ferté. As their base in Iceland was a new RAF Coastal Command site—and since Joubert sat on the Atlantic committee with the Bomber Command and Winston Churchill himself—Esther was feeding Bachmann privileged news.

  Both Abe and Louis realized immediately that this was the kind of news that would have gotten them shot as spies if anyone had noticed, but somehow no one did. This meant that Abe and Louis and the rest of the crew knew things about the strategic air wing that no one outside of Churchill’s inner circle knew. All this made playing cards interesting.