They glided on upside down, and he laughed to think that was how they had started the day, coupling fiercely upside down, hanging off the end of the bed, her little body pumping ferociously at his, her eyes wild with excitement. They had awakened at four, and came together quickly. She would not let him rest; when his energy flagged, she summoned his excitement with her mouth in an eager frenzy. Heat roared over him as he remembered how they had giggled as she Wrestled with him, somehow working her way under him, trying to reverse their positions without him withdrawing, finally failing in a roar of laughter. She had given up, and walked over to get her robe. He saw that her firm bottom was ripped, not by his nails, but by hers, long red streaks dividing her sweet rump into broad bands of white, creating a luscious flag of self-inflicted passionate pain.
It was a puzzle. She had said she was a virgin when he first took her, and she had seemed to be. He couldn't believe that she could have been so extraordinarily deceitful as to fake it, to carry pigeon's blood in a wax capsule as errant Roman women were supposed to have done on their wedding nights. It wouldn't have made sense. He had told her he didn't care, and was actually concerned that he was despoiling a virgin. And she swore that what she did was all new to her, all natural. He wanted to believe it, did believe it, gloried in believing it.
Now that he was so hopelessly in love, so utterly beside himself, it wouldn't matter if he found out that she had come from some whorehouse in Marseilles. Nothing she or anyone might do would change his feelings, charged with so much besides sex, for her.
Patty snapped the little Farman Sport upright with a flourish, glanced south to the Pyrenees for orientation, then cut the fuel and switched off the magneto.
"Dead-stick landing," she yelled.
He nodded; she was showing off, and why not? She was good. His thoughts ran back to when Patty had first asked him to teach her to fly. He'd never had a woman student before, and was inclined to refuse. But he had served with her father and could not deny her.
He leaned over. "You're too close in and too high."
Patty shook her head. "Ah, we'll see." If she landed long, ran off the end of the field, turned over, so what? The war put things in perspective. There was little genuine risk.
Her glance caught him studying her. She sent a smile that burned down to his belly, and then returned to her absorption in the approach.
He told himself that she looked like her father, not really sure this was the case. He'd known Donald Morgan for only four weeks before his death. But a month was more than a lifetime at the front, and aces were heroes to the new pilots. Morgan was credited with five official kills, and his comrades said there were a dozen more. It was all the more amazing because he was an old man for combat flying, thirty. Dompnier was then twenty-two, the same age as Patty now.
He checked the smoke from the factories. The wind had switched and was stronger. She wasn't too close in at all; what must she think of his judgment! The huge field, still cluttered with dozens of hangars and hundreds of smaller buildings, was devoid of traffic. A Nieuport 29 fighter was being rolled into the hangar of the unit he commanded. For the thousandth time, he asked himself why he stayed on, an aging captain going nowhere, and for the thousandth time he answered himself—for the flying. He could find other, better-paying jobs, but he couldn't live without flying.
God, he loved her; teaching her had been torture. When he let her solo, he had sweated as never before, almost collapsing in relief when she landed. That night, filled with champagne and passion, they had made love the first time. Now she had fifty hours of flying time, her license, and his heart. She knew she was good, and it worried him; overconfidence came easily to young pilots, especially the talented ones, and it was the greatest hazard.
They were too close to the hangar line.
"A droit," he commanded, pointing to the north.
Patty shook her head and laughed, concentrating. She trod on the rudder pedals and fishtailed the tiny biplane, slowing its powerless glide, stirring his stomach.
"I give up." Dompnier put his hands at his sides and waited for the broad green flying field to reach up and meet them.
The trainer touched down simultaneously on its two wheels and tail skid, and Patty jammed in full left rudder. Two-thirds through the turn, she countered with full right, and the tiny airplane rolled forward to stop precisely on the spot from which they had started.
In the always-deadening silence after a flight, he yelled, "Ah, you are incorrigible and I love you." He would have kissed her if the mechanics, a covey of raucous enlisted men still glowing from the noon wine, Gauloise cigarettes drooping from the corners of their lips, had not been slouching forward to trundle the airplane into the hangar. In war there was never enough manpower for anything; in peace there was always too much.
Plainly pleased with herself, Patty climbed out of the cockpit, pulling off her helmet to shake out a silken avalanche of glistening blond hair. She pinched her nose, forcing back pressure to clear her ears.
Dompnier melted when he looked into her amethyst eyes. They were large, one just slightly oval, one slightly round, the piquant mismatch adding interest to beauty.
"How was that?" she asked.
"You've gone far enough. What more can I teach you?"
His flesh tingled as she reached up and caressed his face.
He went on hurriedly, "No more about flying, but tonight I'll teach you something else."
"My French Valentino, you are greedy, not needy! If you are going to teach me anything, you're going to have to go to America with me. My stepfather doesn't know it, but he's going to have a new copilot—me!"
Her words startled him.
"Never. Too dangerous, Patty, even for you."
She looked at him quizzically. "I thought we were never going to tell each other what to do."
He smiled, backpedaled. "Your mother would not permit it."
"No, she would not, but I'm over twenty-one, and I can wrap my stepfather around my finger. He'd see that a father—sort of—daughter team would make headlines." She blew a kiss at him and walked off in the air force flying suit she had wheedled from him, and had altered to fit.
Stephan watched her glide over to her car, a huge slope-nosed Renault, enjoying the movement of her hips beneath the taut fabric. It tantalized him until he realized that half the enlisted men were watching her, half watching him watch her.
He snarled at a sergeant for smoking near the aircraft, and busied himself with the log. Surely her mother would never let her try to fly the Atlantic! He would follow her to New York, and they'd have to marry. They had traveled throughout France together, stopping at inns he knew to be tolerant, where the proprietors were too sophisticated to ask embarrassing questions. She told him that it was different in America, that people were, as she put it, "nosy."
Stephan wanted to marry her, to take her off the market, to make her his own while she still was captivated by him. It did not matter that his parents would not be happy. For years it had been assumed that he would marry Angelique, the daughter of a family friend whose father happened to own a few thousand acres in the Loire Valley. It would have been a good match.
***
Chapter 2
Roosevelt Field, Long Island/May 19, 1927
Bruno Hafner was angrier with the doctor attending him than with Bandfield. The young physician, just out of school, was worried about the effect the wound might have on Hafner's ability to undertake a long flight, and insisted on keeping him under observation. When Hafner protested too loudly, the doctor resorted to sedatives.
Hafner's enforced "vacation" was viewed by Dusty Rhoades with mixed emotions. It left him with little to do—and that always led to trouble, to the futile fight against his habit. He spent the morning trying to distract himself, elbowing his way through the good-humored, excited airport crowd that was only lightly sprinkled with pickpockets and con men. One enterprising salesman had a folding stand from which he sold "autographs of all th
e flyers" on regular penny postcards. You could buy a Richard Byrd for a dollar, a Hafner for seventy-five cents, a Lindbergh for fifty cents, or a Rhoades for a quarter, reflecting the flyers' fame and an assessment of their chances. Since the fire, Bandfield's cards had been marked down to a dime. Rhoades toyed with the idea of telling the police the truth, that none of the signatures were genuine, but decided to live and let live.
His charitable feelings stemmed in part from his own guilty feelings about his increasingly forced relationship with Hafner. He wanted to make the flight; he didn't want to make it with the German. He recognized that it was his own fault that there were so few alternatives, yet he entertained the wistful fantasy that Hafner would develop both a complication and a conscience and tell him to go on alone.
He saw Lindbergh walk toward him, then suddenly duck in the hangar. Slim was apparently trying to keep his distance from everyone to avoid taking sides in the argument. Relentless, Rhoades followed him inside and caught him at the door.
"Got a second, Slim?"
Lindbergh's thin voice was stern, like that of an aging high school teacher whose patience has been exhausted. "Not really, Dusty. After what's been going on, I need all the time I can get just to do some thinking."
"Yeah, me too. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. You know Bandfield. Do you think he's all wrong about Hafner?"
The tall pilot stood, arching his back to stretch, eyes surveying the end of the field. Rhoades was Hafner's copilot, and Lindbergh didn't know the motive for the question. He decided to play it safe. "I was in flying school with Bandfield. He was first-rate, and would have made a good officer. I can't believe he's simply going off half-cocked. Nor can I believe Hafner is an arsonist."
"Me either."
"Both men have behaved pretty well since. Bandfield wouldn't apologize, but he dropped the idea of an investigation. And I understand Hafner just wants to forget the whole thing and get back to the field."
"Yes, that's what Charlotte tells me."
Lindbergh's expression didn't change. "Look, I've got to run. I think Hafner's right—everyone should let the matter drop. I'll just be glad when I get off from here, and get away from the crowds and the intrigues."
Rhoades watched him walk off, feeling pangs of envy that Lindbergh had a plane of his own, and gentlemen backers. As he watched, the jealousy turned, as modest as an early-morning bird song, into the first quiet signals of his driving need, a delicate early-warning message sent along the nerve endings of his extremities. For the thousandth time, Dusty told himself that he would not give in, that he would change the downward spiral of his life.
Almost immediately he felt the hunger settling in, bird song turning to a claxon. The quiet quiver escalated, as if its thermostat had been turned up, turning into a burning at his fingertips and at the base of his skull, an implacable warning flush that said "Feed me!" even as it drenched his psyche in a repellent combination of need, greed, sin, and self-disgust.
He fought it as he always did, trying to think of other things. Gentlemen backers, he thought. My backer is no gentlemen, but he is a source. Rhoades felt the fabric of his willpower shredding even as he tried to turn his attention away from the thought of the kit he kept in his car.
"Holy Mary, Mother of God, help me." In the last four years he'd repeated those words a thousand times, and poor Mary had never been able to help, nor had anyone else.
Lots of people had supplied answers to the wrong problems. He'd been told that he ought to get married, have a family, get out of flying into something steady. He knew he never would. The anonymous drifting from one job to another, the total freedom from responsibility except when actually working on a plane or flying it, and the easy comradeship were accessories to the addiction. The idea of going back to St. Louis to work in the Bemis Brother Bag factory, supervising young hillbilly girls fresh from the Ozarks, sickened him. He had seen what happened to his dad, working for Anheuser-Busch, drunk on his gallon of beer every day, until Prohibition drove him into amateur bootlegging. He was away from all that, and lucky to be flying at all.
And yet he knew it wasn't luck at all, but Hafner's calculation. Hafner needed him to do things that were not ordinarily done for hire, and would have him only on the terms of a dependency.
Hafner had introduced him to cocaine first, and later heroin, all the while supplying him with money, responsibility, and guilt. Now he was hooked—on all three.
The whole sorry process had been fostered by his asocial existence. Until a few months ago, the free-and-easy women he bumped into in blind tigers around the country got about as close as he wanted women to come. He preferred purely physical relationships, just two bodies, two sets of organs working each other over, to climax not as lovers but as strangers. The thought of marrying someone, being responsible for her well-being and maybe even having children, had been frightening to him. Now that was changing, and he wasn't sure he could handle the new requirements.
Rhoades upended a wooden Coca-Cola crate, trying to stave off the moment when he would give in, and rethinking Lindbergh's guarded answers. He felt guilty around Lindbergh, knowing how much he would disapprove of Rhoades's habit if he knew of it. And then too, Lindbergh was not easy to like, too reserved and somewhat pompous. Yet Rhoades admired him. For a young guy without any previous experience, he did a great job with the reporters and with the public, who'd gone absolutely crazy about him.
That's what made the brush-off hurt. In the past Lindbergh had been equally courteous to everyone, generously sharing the information on prop settings that the Standard Propeller Company had sent him, or telling what he'd learned about flying the great-circle route over the ocean. Lindbergh had known that Hafner had hired an ex-Navy man to teach him navigation, but he had wanted to share the new information with Rhoades anyway.
Then he felt his resolution bursting into desire like a match thrown into a fire. Dusty went to his Model A and drove to a rural lane not far from where a farmer's stand was waiting for the first of the spring's produce. He pulled the front seat out and extracted the leather kit Hafner had provided him, just as he provided the supplies for it.
The fever was coming fast. While he did not yet have to have a fix, he didn't want to delay. He was worried about timing. If Hafner came back tomorrow, he'd expect him to be ready to fly. There was a note in his own handwriting in the kit, placed there during some earlier futile fit of conscience. It said: "A shot in the head is worth two in the arm." He grimaced. Maybe it would come to that someday, but now the shot in the arm was sufficient.
He spent the afternoon in pleasant aimless puttering. Balchen invited him to town for dinner, but he declined; he wouldn't need Balchen or anyone for a while. He ate a beefsteak covered with greasy onions and edged with watery mashed potatoes at the local cafe, drinking a bottle of Moxie with it. He went back to the hangar to wait. Around nine, he stretched out on the cot. He had barely closed his eyes when Murray shook him.
"Whatsa matter?"
"It's three-thirty, and they just brought Lindbergh's plane over from Curtiss Field. I thought you'd want to know."
Rhoades was instantly awake, thanked him. "Any word from the hospital?"
"No. I talked to the nurse and she wouldn't let me talk to Captain Hafner without the doctor's permission."
Dusty ran to the operations shack, raised a sleepy operator on the phone, and called Hafner's house. No answer. Rhoades slammed the receiver down, then called the hospital. The nurse gave him the same answer she had given Murray, but he wheedled the number of Hafner's doctor from her.
The phone rang for a long time before a woman's voice answered sleepily.
"Is Dr. Poole there? This is an emergency."
"Dr. Poole is on a train to a medical convention in Chicago. Have you called the hospital?"
Rhoades groaned, then called the nurse again. This time she put him through to the doctor who was on duty. "This is an emergency, Doctor. Captain Hafner is needed at the airport. We'
re about to make our flight to Paris."
He could tell that the doctor was young—the answer confirmed the impression of his voice.
"Look, Mr. Rhoades, I understand what you are saying. But this is Dr. Poole's patient, and the chart indicates that Captain Hafner had a sedative about nine o'clock. I'm not going to release him, especially not to go flying. You can talk to the hospital administrator in the morning."
Rhoades gave in. It was always possible that Lindbergh would turn back. He might have a fuel problem, or the weather might be worse. He decided he'd be prepared in case Hafner suddenly showed up.
He sprinted back to the hangar and yelled, "Murray, let's roll that fucking airplane out and get it ready!"
Murray bristled at the orders Rhoades was flinging about, but grudgingly admitted to himself that it was probably what Hafner would want.
After doing everything that could be done, Rhoades slumped on the wheel of the Miss Charlotte, looping his arm around the broad flat strut for support. That goddam Bruno. That goddam Bandfield. And that goddam Lindbergh. Dusty felt envious for a moment, then switched gears. Slim was just smarter, with better backers. He thought about going over and wishing him good luck, but decided against it. Lindbergh would be totally preoccupied with getting ready, and there would be enough people hanging on, shrieking for attention.
He was dozing, sitting on the ground, when the noise of the engine of the Spirit of St. Louis running up broke the morning calm. Dusty stood up and wet his finger, instinctively checking the breeze. It was downwind, maybe three to five miles per hour. He wondered about the adjustment Slim had made in his prop setting. He'd altered it to permit a better cruise speed at the expense of a longer takeoff run. Now, with an adverse wind, that was a mistake.
The minutes dragged by, double-laden with Lindbergh's preparations and the frustration of Bruno's absence. With a flurry of activity, the Spirit began to roll forward between two columns of well-wishers, mostly men and a few women who had been waiting for the last three days for something to happen. Like a second-rate opera company, the men on each side of the fifty-yard-wide takeoff path turned and took a few steps with the airplane, bringing their hats and caps up stiffly in a stage salute. Then the Spirit accelerated, the rough ground jolting it so that the wings shook in short jabbing movements, like those of a boxer warming up during the jog into the ring. Rhoades, fingers crossed, called on the Virgin Mary again in a quick prayer as the silver monoplane moved sluggishly down the damp field, corkscrew shrouds of moisture pearling back from the propeller blast. He knew precisely how Lindbergh was feeling—tense, waiting to see if the speed built swiftly enough, keeping the stick back in his belly and tromping on the rudder pedals to hold the airplane straight so the enormous overload wouldn't strain the gear. He could tell that the airplane felt logy, unresponsive, a groundling creature unable to fly.
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