Trophy for Eagles

by Boyne, Walter J.

  At the Ancon airbase, crowds of Peruvian officers and enlisted men stood in separate groups, watching the two airplanes stream toward the coast in their inverted embrace. Santos stood next to Hughes.

  "Senor Bandfield is in trouble, my friend."

  "No, Colonel, he's got Hafner just where he wants him."

  Santos shot him a black-eyed glance and laughed.

  The Rapier looked like a dump truck carrying a crashed airplane on its back. Bandfield found himself caught a mile from the runway, five hundred feet from the sea, his visibility cut to a small gap that the oil had not covered.

  Hafner maintained position, herding him toward the airfield, pushing him down. At the edge of the field, there was no choice—if he went on, the rising hills at the end of the field would claim them both. The sale was not worth dying for. Bandfield cut his throttle, surrendering with his touchdown, while Hafner pushed the nose up, rolling the A-11 across the field and then giving a first-class aerobatic show.

  There was another big party in the Peruvian officers' mess that night. Bandfield didn't attend.

  *

  Issy-les-Moulineaux, France/March 16, 1932

  She tried to concentrate on the beauty of the night, the Venetian-blue sky reminiscent of the name of a perfume she had worn the first time she and Stephan had made love—Guerlain's L'Heure Bleu. There was still sufficient light to pick out the naked arms of obsidian black chestnut trees growing on both sides of the narrow street, somehow surviving in the small round circles of ground picked out of the cobblestones. Stephan was driving maniacally, sounding his horn and flicking his lights, the yellow reflection bouncing off the stone walls of the houses built square with the twisting roads. Patty closed her eyes and gasped as an ancient Frenchman, clad in a blue cloak and beret, clutching two long loaves of bread, leaped aside to flatten himself against the wall. She grasped the strap on the door of their Bugatti 50 and looked at her husband closely: Stephan rarely drank, and the champagne must have made him tipsy.

  It had been quite a day. Stephan had left the air force in a glorious ceremony at Le Bourget, where the 1st Pursuit Squadron had honored him with a flyover, nine parasol-wing Dewoitine D-27s in tight formation.

  At the officers' mess, the champagne-laden toasts had unsettled Stephan to the point that she had been afraid he was going to back out of his decision to enter civilian life. The way he was driving now, he might never have a civilian life.

  "Slow down, Stephan—you don't know who is coming!"

  "That's why I flash my lights, darling Patty, so that they know I'm coming. I wish I'd known that Angelique was coming! I'd have kept you home."

  The good-natured courtier of the past was now the typical French husband, demanding and with a temper as short as his height. And she was failing him badly on two accounts: she had failed to conceive and she had failed to please his family. Their most recent visit to the country home near Saint-Jean-le-Thomas—she still considered it to be more the Dompniers' than her own house—had brought things to a head.

  "Angelique shouldn't have been invited! I don't care if the two families are old friends. She shouldn't have come with all her brats!"

  Stephan had laboriously arranged a week with his family in one more attempt to maintain the harmony the wedding had generated. After Orleans, his family had been enamored of Charlotte and Bruno, but had never really come to like Patty. Their emotions were mixed about Stephan's heirless state. On the one hand, they desperately wanted grandchildren from their only surviving son. On the other, they were not certain they wanted the Dompnier bloodline, impeccable for centuries, contaminated with Patty Morgan's.

  The visit had started well. Their house was huge, with great French doors opening onto walled gardens. There was a walkway along the walls from which you could gaze on the tides racing to Mont-Saint-Michel. But inside there was an austere air of decay fostered by walls festooned with trophies of the hunt, ample evidence that the Dompniers had done their part in slaughtering fauna all over France. Patty vaguely remembered the den of her grandparents' house, where a friendly moose head, one antler slightly lower than the other, with layers of dust converting the glassy eyes into a leering wink, had decorated one wall. At the Dompniers', the trophies didn't stop with heads; hundreds of family photos, all in heavy frames that seemed to armor rather than present, competed for space with an army of tails and hides that showed the scars of pests and bullets. Every wall and doorway was a pincushion of horns and hooves of all sizes and descriptions, long, short, furry and cartilaginous, virtually every hard part of an animal that a hat could be hung upon. An Indian fakir could have been uncomfortably thrust against any wall and never missed his bed of nails. In dusty counterpart, obviously discontented stuffed birds and beady-eyed squirrels sat, forever immobile, on any flat area, while no chair or couch went without its fox-fur throw.

  Madame Dompnier had another little hobby—tortoiseshell baskets. Her vivid description of how she did it—from trapping the poor dumb beast to boiling the bones from the carcass to varnishing the shells—almost made Patty a nonstarter for breakfast and began the general declining trend of events.

  After Sunday-morning mass, they had invited Angelique Giscard and her family for the afternoon. The daughter of old friends of the family, whose own country home bordered the Dompniers', she had once been Stephan's intended. Then Stephan's infatuation with Patty had changed everyone's plans. Angelique had married a wealthy manufacturer in Amboise, producing for him with bovine regularity children of alternate sexes, a boy, a girl, a boy, a girl. It was almost certain that her visit was a celebration of French family fecundity, an example to Patty.

  Patty rarely drank, but the going was getting steadily rougher and she had fortified herself at lunch with extra wine and even accepted an Armagnac from her father-in-law's traveling collection. The spirited conversation turned on shared events of the two families from years ago, and she had time to think. Over a long series of suppressed giggles, it became manifest to her how impossibly funny it was that Angelique's first boy looked just like Stephan. Stephan's father pressed her to tell what she was laughing about, and Patty was amazed when her observation terminated the afternoon in a flurry of flouncing dresses, children pulled along by their arms, and a rising round of shouting in French too fast for her to understand. They might have forgiven her if she had not laughed again when Angelique's firstborn, following her down the stone stairs, stepped on the hem of his mother's skirt and pulled it down.

  In the words of P. G. Wodehouse, Patty had sunk to the rank of a fourth-class power—and she didn't care.

  Even the pleasure she found in the flying lessons that Stephan continued to provide was diminishing. She was now an expert instrument pilot, as fully qualified as Stephan himself, but he would not permit her to engage in any record flying. As a result, the France she had loved so much now stultified her. Stephan wanted a conventional French wife, proper in bed, bountifully fertile, and oblivious to his cinque d. sept requirements. She was unconventional, tired of being proper, not certain that she was the unfertile partner, and painfully aware that he was seeing a young widow each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

  It was not working out.

  She loved him still. Perhaps the new job would help them adjust. And she knew him well enough to know that he too was terribly worried that he might be at fault, that he might be the sterile partner. It was an inadmissible subject of discussion, but she was so familiar with his turn of phrase that his concern was evident.

  He slid the Bugatti to a stop in a spray of gravel, the fast car's inadequate brakes just managing to dig in before the rough board fence was reached. He parked in the lot adjacent to the low-lying sawtooth-roofed buildings of the Caudron aircraft factory. Put up during the war next to the very field where flying had first been nurtured in Paris, it was now decaying, just as aviation itself was decaying in France. She thought that part of Stephan's irritation might be caused by the unending chaos of the French air force and its ma
nufacturers.

  The old Stephan showed through, and he smiled at her.

  "Come, cherie, let me show you what I'm going to be doing. I made arrangements for a guard to let us in."

  At the gate a one-armed, enormously fat Breton, obviously an ex-poilu eking out a disability pension, grunted at them as he turned massive keys in plated locks that would survive for years beyond the lifetime of the fragile wooden doors they protected. He led them down long narrow hallways, the unpainted framework dimly glowering in the lapped edges of the pools of light from widely separated forty-watt bulbs, to the experimental area. Without a word, he turned on the overhead lights and plopped down in a chair, his expression saying that they could do what they wished, he was going to rest.

  Patty had visited her mother two years earlier, and been given a tour of the Hafner factory. It had been spic-and-span, and the experimental shop had glistened like an operating room. She was appalled at the Caudron plant, with its sawdust-littered floor, open cans of thinner, and ancient belt-driven machines granular with encrusted machine oil. But in the center of the room, its wings supported on ordinary wooden sawhorses, was a beautiful airplane.

  "This is what I will test. If it does what they say it will, I'll fly it in the Coupe Deutsch races, and then perhaps we'll take it to America, to Cleveland."

  "It's beautiful, Stephan."

  They walked around it. A low-wing monoplane, with retractable landing gear and an enclosed cockpit, it was covered with mats to protect the glistening deep-blue finish.

  "It looks very fast, Stephan. Will it be safe?"

  He nervously pursed his thin lips. "Oui. A bit tricky perhaps, on the approach, but otherwise all right. I'm looking forward to it."

  "Have you had any second thoughts about leaving the air force?"

  "No, I should have gone years ago, but there was nothing I could do in flying that would have been as satisfying. This will be."

  As they made the progress back toward the car, she slipped her arm in his.

  "Stephan, I'm sorry about the business with Angelique. I meant no harm. I was just feeling sorry for myself, and drank too much."

  He squeezed her arm against his side with his own.

  "How can I be too unhappy about not having children? Who knows if it is my fault or yours? But you shouldn't have been unkind to Angelique; her husband will never let her forget. It may even affect his feelings for his son. And you know that I never touched her."

  They walked in silence. He felt a little better for having raised the issue of America. There was a doctor there, he had been told, somewhere in Texas, who could do wonderful things for fertility with the glands of unborn animals. He could never admit it to Patty, to anyone else, of course, but he was going to go there and take a course of treatment.

  Patty was pleased with the mention of America as well. To make up, she vowed to write Angelique's family and apologize.

  *

  Farmingdale, Long Island/May 9, 1932

  Murray slowed the big Duesenberg down to avoid the group of workmen slouching along on their way to the plant, each man carrying his lunch in a string-tied, newspaper-wrapped package. He knew how glad they were to have the jobs the A-11 provided. Production had been winding down, and the orders Hafner had secured in South America would give them a few more months of work.

  As he drove slowly up the Hafner Aircraft Company's circular drive, he noted with approval that mallards were mixing in with the domestic ducks. They swam in tight circles in the pond that reflected the new administrative section Charlotte had built in front of the old Aircraft Corporation plant. Bruno was asleep in the backseat, exhausted from a bad crossing on the Mauritania, his dachshund, Nellie, blissfully dozing at his side. He had gone straight from Peru to Buenos Aires and then to Germany for a six-week stay on "family business." When Murray had picked him up at the pier, Hafner had nonetheless been jubilant, in a better mood than Murray had ever seen him in, despite the fatigue.

  As he parked the car, Murray reflected that life had worked out far better than an utter realist like himself could have expected. He had grown up in northern Queens at College Point, his dad a rough brawler who neatly combined working at a brewery and owning a beer garden, an economic combination that ultimately caught the eyes of the brewery accountants and earned him a six-year jail sentence. High school had never been Murray's real goal, and what he learned in the streets proved to be invaluable to Bruno, who had given him almost total authority to run the armament side of the business. It was a bonus he had never expected, but was glad to deal with. He knew that a lot of Hafner's faith in him came from his facility with instruments and other sophisticated devices. His specialty was what the mob euphemistically called "pineapples." As a hobby, he was enamored with radios of all sort. He had picked up his first radio knowledge from a correspondence course, finding that he read "radio" as some people did the comic pages, and that any small electrical or mechanical device was an open book to him. It had often puzzled Murray that he liked to use his hands for two totally different sorts of things. He used them as battering rams, to punch out positive responses from recalcitrant people who didn't wish to do what he or Bruno wanted, and he also used them as tweezers, to pick at some delicate thing and make it operate.

  Fully awake by the time Murray had switched the Duesenberg's ignition off, Bruno Hafner bounded up the stairs two at a time, waving Charlotte's telegram and clutching the dog under his arm. He bowled past Dusty Rhoades without a word, burst into her office. She was standing at the window, behind a molded wood desk stained in a blond finish that matched her hair almost perfectly.

  "What's this about Santos changing his mind?"

  She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, then dropped her hands to rub his shoulders. "Relax, Bruno. Everything's okay. Glad to see you." Her words were soothing, and he responded to her gentle massaging touch across his shoulders.

  In Peru, Santos had become greedy, and wanted a little more on his end. The deal before had been 10 percent of the gross for twenty-four aircraft. When he protested, Charlotte upped the ante to 15 percent of the gross for forty-eight. She knew he'd have to cut some more people in at the Peruvian War Minister's office, but was sure the sale was firm.

  "Thank Christ! I risked my neck for that order, flying Bandfield into the ground." The remembrance of the flight still gave him pleasure; it could have been improved only if Bandfield had crashed.

  Her expression didn't change. She watched him closely, in nervous anticipation, trying to guess how he felt. Before he left for South America, Bruno's moods had been swinging more wildly than ever before. He seemed to need a victory of some sort every day, a reaffirmation of his skills and intellect, or else he plunged into ugly depression and lashed out at everyone. Ominously, the duration of his moods was changing in inverse proportion to his successes. The more he achieved, the more Hafner Enterprises prospered, the more difficult he became. Good news lifted him higher for shorter periods; bad news cast him lower for longer times.

  The variation in tempers was defined by what was left of their sex life. He wanted her now only occasionally, either when he was at a peak of euphoria and felt expansive, or when he was in a black pit of depression and sought to degrade her with a quick, brutal coupling. The old incandescent passion was long gone; now she provided him only indifferent conjugal service in either mood. Her own burning sex drive was diminishing, apparently assuaged by her business success.

  And by Dusty. She would never have believed that he could come to mean so much to her. Somehow, over the last year, she had fallen in love with him, and was totally unable to explain why. She knew this had to do with his drug habit, something she was resolved to rid him of. Amazingly, given her experience and appetite, she even loved the fact that over time he had become a lousy lover who sometimes suffered from impotence, sometimes from premature ejaculation. It didn't matter. She loved the whole man for a change, not just the sports equipment. The drugs had made him passive, no longer es
pecially eager to fly, apparently content to work at the plant just to be with her. He wasn't an engineer, but he had good instincts and knew the material suppliers so well that he always got good enough prices that Bruno never questioned his value.

  Yet Bruno's presence had the same depressing effect on Dusty that it did on her. When he was away, Dusty became progressively more ardent; as soon as Hafner came back, Dusty began to withdraw guiltily into a shell. It was understandable, for just dealing with Bruno was a never-ending psychological battle. She kept control of him by playing constantly switching subjects, changing roles, sometimes contradicting, sometimes being silent. Charlotte based her tactics on his mental state, making positive suggestions for the business when he was up, slipping in negative thoughts about people and events she was against when he was down. Now she sensed it was time to divert his attention, to soften him up for the excellent briefing Bineau was about to give.

  "Did you hear that they found Lindbergh's baby? He'd been dead for some time."

  The press had treated the kidnapping in the most tasteless, sordid style, and Hafner had reveled in it. He'd always considered Lindbergh to be an intruder who had taken his prize, and the public never let him forget it. The year before, at a black-tie dinner honoring Orville Wright, the crowds had swarmed around Lindbergh, ignoring Hafner.

  He snorted. "Too bad, but it serves the high and mighty bastard right."

  Charlotte stared at him. It was an appalling attitude even for Hafner, and with difficulty she pulled herself together, conscious that there was work to be done. She tried to shift his emotions with the same precise control that Murray used in changing gears in the Duesenberg. Her conversation was a matador's cape, switching his boiling anger from subject to subject until she could find safe ground, the narrow emotional zone where they could talk sensibly.

  For the moment it seemed safe, his mercurial anger suppressed by the bad news about Lindbergh. She could sense almost to a degree how well he was containing the rage of his self-hate, storing it like steam within a boiler, sometimes releasing it in a tirade of anger, sometimes converting it to a synthetic friendliness that portended evil.