Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Beryl had changed little physically. The face was still the same lovely oval, the dark hair still framing it in a twentyish bob. “You don’t look a day older,” Adrian said.

  “You do,” she said. “Your hair.”

  Adrian brushed self-consciously at his receding hair line. “They say bald men are sexier.”

  “You’ll never be sexy, Adrian. But you’ll always be attractive to women.”

  “Why?”

  “Every woman likes to explore an enigma.”

  “I don’t think of myself as enigmatic.”

  “You are. I didn’t feel I could devote my life to solving you. Are you still married?”

  “More or less. How about you?”

  “You know I’m not married.”

  “Not even in love?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “You still think the Soviet Union is the hope of the world?”

  “I’ve grown a bit more sophisticated. I think socialism is the hope of the world. Hasn’t it arrived in Washington, D.C., under the flag of the New Deal?”

  “Roosevelt isn’t a socialist. He isn’t anything. That’s his problem.”

  “Perhaps it’s your problem too, Adrian. Not being anything eventually becomes distressing.”

  “I’m not sure you’re right about that. I know exactly what I want to be at the moment.”

  “What?”

  “Your lover again.”

  Beryl did not display the slightest surprise or shock—which only made her more desirable. “Does that make any sense?” she said.

  “We have quite a lot in common. Planes—memories.”

  Beryl raised her wineglass. “Let’s rely on memories for the time being.”

  In Adrian’s middle-class hotel off Picadilly, memory created a bittersweet aura. Beryl’s skin was still wet, glistening from the shower as they embraced. He licked drops of water from her small rounded breasts. His hand moved easily, knowingly, up her firm thighs.

  “I’ve had other women. But I’ve never loved anyone else,” Adrian said.

  “It’s been the same with me,” Beryl said.

  Over a nightcap they talked about her flight around the world. She had a backer lined up, the publisher of the Daily Mail. Adrian assured her the plane would be provided free of charge. He would put Frank Buchanan in touch with her the moment they got back to California.

  “You’re such a dear,” Beryl said, with a contented sigh.

  “Tomorrow—dinner again?”

  “Why not,” she said.

  It was the old Beryl without her radical animosity, her war wounds healed by time or the progress of socialism. Politics were not important, Adrian told himself. Love transcended politics as it transcended time and space.

  The next morning, Adrian was awakened by a call from George Knightly, the RAF officer who had come to the Athenaeum Club with Winston Churchill. “Could you spare a few minutes for another talk about that bomber?”

  “My designer’s off in the country visiting friends.”

  “We can chat just as well without him.”

  Adrian was sure Knightly was going to beat his price down to nothing to help save dear old England’s ass. He was not going to let sentimentality bankrupt him. He arrived at the Air Ministry determined to bargain hard for every shilling.

  Knightly shoved a chair beside his desk and tugged at his mustache. “This is a bit awkward but it has to be done. I take it you’re an old friend of Beryl Suydam? That explains the—er—reunion last night in your room?”

  “Why is that any of your goddamn business?”

  “It shouldn’t be. I gather she’s quite a piece in bed, if half the hangar talk I’ve heard is true. But the fact is, old boy, she’s a Soviet spy.”

  “Absolutely ridiculous!”

  “I wish it was. She’s a marvelous flier. Quite a personage, you might say. But the evidence is rather overwhelming. Since you’re going to be building a bomber for us, if things develop with Herr Hitler, I thought you should know.”

  “Can you prove this—this—slander?”

  “This may be a bit painful. But you’ve asked for it.”

  Knightly took a folder out of his desk and handed it to Adrian. In it were a number of photocopied letters from Beryl to someone named Sergei. “You’d be most interested in the one on the bottom. She wrote it last night in the lobby of your hotel,” Knightly said.

  The letter was on hotel stationery.

  Dear Sergei:

  The fish bit the moment I dangled the hook. I’m sure I can get you all you want on the light bomber in a week’s time. He wants to marry me! That can be dealt with, of course. I’m inclined to go ahead with the round-the-world flight and see what else I can get from Frank Buchanan’s files. I’ll probe Adrian about that fighter plane tomorrow night.

  Beryl.

  “Sergei is her Soviet control. He’s been working for us for several years.”

  Adrian was too dazed and humiliated to do anything but nod.

  “We’ve no objections if you want to go on seeing her for a bit. You might pass on some rather useful misinformation to her. Multiply the number of planes we’re buying by the order of five, say.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve reason to think it’ll get to Herr Hitler via Moscow. The Germans have a covey of agents there. Trying to play the intimidation game a bit on our side. You might throw in some bull about orders with other plane makers. Heavy stuff.”

  “I see.”

  “She’ll be doing her damndest to please you, old chap. Don’t see how you can lose.”

  Knightly’s smile sickened Adrian. The man of course had no idea what Beryl Suydam meant to him. For a moment, Adrian contemplated something much more vicious than repaying deception with deception. He imagined murder. He saw his fingers around Beryl Suydam’s fragile throat, his thumb pressing hard on the hollow he loved to kiss. Bitch, howled a voice that did not belong to him. It wailed down from the stratosphere, where Beryl had found the strength, the guile, to make him a fool.

  Forethought rescued Adrian. Outside the air ministry, he stared at the traffic on the Thames and told himself this was simply another phase of the great game. He had been given a license to enjoy himself. He would use it to the full.

  For the next two nights, Beryl played Delilah to Adrian’s cunning Samson. When she whispered I love you at the climax, his mask almost slipped, he almost reached for her lying throat. When she did it again the next night, Adrian almost believed it. He wondered if Knightly knew everything. Was this woman secretly pleading with him to rescue her from deception?

  How could he speak? Knightly had warned him it was vital to keep Sergei’s double agentry concealed. He would not live twelve hours if Beryl discovered it.

  Beryl lit a cigarette while Adrian poured her a brandy. She curled up on the bed, oozing charm. “I’ve heard wonderful things about the planes you’re making.”

  “‘Want to make’ would be better. We’ve had a hell of a time selling most of them. The competition is tough and the airlines are going broke. The Army and the Navy have no money. That’s why this order for a thousand bombers from the British is a godsend.”

  “A thousand?” Beryl said. “I wonder where they’re getting the money.”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  “What other planes do you have?”

  “A pursuit plane. It can outfly anything in the air.”

  “I smell a speed record. Can you send me the plans?”

  Adrian shook his head. “We’re keeping that one in a locked file.”

  “Adrian. You can trust me. I might even help you sell it to someone else.”

  The lovely lips curled into a Cheshire-cat smile. She was devouring him in her lying mind. Adrian no longer had any doubt that Knightly was right. Still he could not let go of those whispered words. I love you. Was she, even in the slimy gutter of deceit, asking him to forgive her?

  Adrian finished his brandy and told himself
he was a fool. Take what you can get and forget the rest. Forget the soaring and adoring. From now on, Adrian Van Ness would enjoy his women without the emotional window dressing of love.

  “I’ve got bad news,” he said. “I have to go home tomorrow. A labor crisis.”

  He teased her left nipple until it came erect. “Once more for auld lang syne?” he said.

  For a moment he was sure she knew. He wanted her to know. He let the coldness in his mind fill his voice, his eyes. But he said nothing. It would be much more satisfying to let her dangle on the hook of doubt for the next year as he made excuses about the round-the-world flight and fed her more misinformation about the light bomber and other planes. Revenge could be sweetened by time—and more nostalgic encounters in hotel rooms.

  But there was still a corner of Adrian’s soul where I love you whispered, where memory wept and hope mourned.

  WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE

  Adrian returned from his trip to England deeply depressed. Amanda assumed it was because he had failed to sell a single plane. When Victoria asked him if they could go to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays, he snapped “no” so harshly she burst into tears. He rushed out and bought her a seventy-five-dollar Shirley Temple doll, then excoriated Amanda in private for letting her daughter have delusions of wealth.

  “We’re not going to be rich, ever,” he said. “Get that through your head. The aircraft business is a penny-ante game and it’s going to stay that way.”

  “You’re the one who talked about going to Hawaii,” Amanda said. “You buy her the most expensive doll in the store. Then you tell me her delusions are my fault?”

  “She’s your responsibility. I don’t have time to educate her. I wish I did.”

  “Gordon is forming his own oil company,” Amanda said. “He called to ask if we wanted to buy any of the stock.”

  “We’ll be lucky to pay the mortgage on this house,” Adrian snarled.

  “He’s brought in another dozen wells. He’s going to be a millionaire,” Amanda said.

  “Are you going to hate me for the rest of your life?”

  “I don’t hate you,” Amanda said. “But you obviously have no intention of giving me a chance to love you, either.”

  “What do I have to do to merit that,” Adrian said. “Grovel?”

  “Give me some evidence that you want me to love you.”

  “I do!” Adrian said.

  “For whose sake? Mine or Victoria’s?”

  She saw fear flicker in Adrian’s eyes. She had read him correctly. Instead of admitting she was right, he retreated into sullen isolation again.

  “Do I have to fill out a goddamn questionnaire?”

  They went back to being antagonists in small things and large things. One of the large things was the drift toward war in Europe. Hitler swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia, making the British politicians who favored appeasing him look more and more foolish. The British and French began rearming to meet the German threat. Adrian frankly, unabashedly welcomed the prospect of an explosion.

  “How can you say such a thing?” Amanda gasped. For her it was a grisly replay of the First World War. All she could think of was her father’s death, the destruction of Eden.

  “Because it will be good for the airplane business,” Adrian said.

  “It will mean death, suffering for thousands, millions of people,” Amanda said.

  “I don’t know any of them,” Adrian said. “I can only sympathize with people I know.”

  “I’m not sure you can even do that,” Amanda said.

  Amanda of course had no idea that the Adrian who said those heartless words was the man whom Beryl Suydam had wounded. For the first time in years, she felt repelled by her husband. His good manners, his dislike of argument, had held such feelings at a distance. She was even more dismayed a few weeks later, when the newspaper informed her that the British had placed an unprecedented order for two hundred light bombers with Buchanan Aircraft. That day, Adrian came home brimming with good cheer. He had a huge teddy bear for Victoria and a string of pearls for her.

  “I’m beginning to change my mind about the aircraft business. It may not be penny-ante after all.”

  “I don’t want them,” Amanda said, giving him back the pearls.

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “I don’t want to wear anything that comes from planes built to kill people.”

  “I always knew your intelligence was limited. This proves it,” Adrian snarled. “These planes will defend decent people against barbarians. Do you want Hitler and his friends to conquer the world?”

  It was too late to advance this rational argument. Amanda could only remember Adrian’s declared indifference to slaughtering people. “I don’t care who wins as long as we stay out of it,” Amanda said. “This sort of thing—making planes for one side—will drag us into it.”

  Amanda was speaking out of the depths of her California self, in a voice that millions of Americans shared. To her, Europe was a land of literature and monuments, the dead past that could be explored from a distance but was not worth the death of a single American. Adrian, with his deep ties to England, could only respond with outrage. Seven-year-old Victoria watched, bewildered and tearful, as her mother and father insulted and reviled each other.

  Amanda joined America First, an organization committed to keeping the United States out of any future war. Henry Ford, former governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana were among its leaders. Its chief spokesman was aviation’s hero, Charles Lindbergh. Adrian was infuriated but how could he object to a policy that Lindbergh was advocating? Polls showed 80 percent of the voters backed America First’s call for strict neutrality. Earlier in the decade, Congress had passed a neutrality act which forbade the United States to sell arms to any country at war.

  On September 1, 1939, huge headlines blossomed in all the Los Angeles newspapers, announcing that the Germans had invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. For Amanda that only made America First’s task even more important. Adrian had other things on his mind. He rushed to Washington, D.C., to wangle a change in the neutrality act, which forbade him to ship his bombers to England.

  Adrian came back to California with a self-satisfied smile on his face. At his suggestion, Roosevelt had persuaded Congress to amend the neutrality act to permit the bombers to be delivered, as long as they did not leave the country under their own power. Adrian had found an airfield in North Dakota on the Canadian border. Buchanan pilots would fly the planes there and Canadians would tow them across the border, where British pilots would be waiting to fly them to England.

  When Adrian described this coup at dinner on the night of his return, Amanda denounced it as a criminal evasion of the law. “Who did you bribe?” she asked.

  “Do you realize where we’d be if we can’t deliver those planes?” Adrian shouted. “Bankrupt. Ruined.”

  “In a good cause, that wouldn’t bother me in the least,” Amanda said.

  “It would bother the hell out of me,” Adrian said. “Especially when the cause is brainlessness masquerading as idealism.”

  “Please stop, please!” Victoria cried, putting her hands over her ears.

  For Victoria’s sake, Adrian and Amanda negotiated a private neutrality act. She would say no more about his bombers and he would let her continue to support America First. A few weeks later, Lindbergh came to Los Angeles to speak at a rally. Amanda announced she was going and Adrian sullenly assented.

  In the flag-decorated auditorium on Wilshire Boulevard, Amanda was stunned to see Frank Buchanan in the front row. “What are you doing here?” she said, sitting down beside him.

  “I could ask you the same question,” he said.

  “I’m sure Adrian is considering divorce. But I feel this so strongly.”

  “So do I.”

  “But you’re still designing those bombers. How can you live with that?”
/>
  “I’m here to prevent American boys from flying in them.”

  “I thought making them at all was reprehensible. Don’t you think it puts us squarely on one side—against the Germans?”

  “I hope not.”

  The pain in Frank’s eyes made it clear that his conscience had asked the same question. She saw the anguish of his position and dropped the argument. She no longer despised this man. He seemed sad and lonely in his shabby flight jacket and tieless shirt.

  Lindbergh gave a stirring speech, denouncing Franklin Roosevelt’s attempts to evade the neutrality act and edge the United States into the war on England’s side. He grimly declared Germany was going to win the war and there was nothing the United States could do about it but adjust to a world of new political realities. Amanda applauded fiercely, agreeing with every word of it. She noticed that Frank did not applaud. He sat with his arms folded on his chest, looking troubled.

  Amanda drove Frank home to his house in Topanga Canyon, listening to him argue with himself. He was not sure Lindbergh was right about the Germans winning the war. He was unsure about Germany. Did Hitler’s rampant anti-Semitism justify building planes for the British? Didn’t every country have its anti-Semites? Could they possibly be right? His friend Ezra Pound, the greatest poet of the era, thought so.

  Amanda said she disliked anti-Semitism as much as Frank—but she hated war. When they reached Frank’s Topanga house, he urged her to stay for coffee. She sensed his loneliness. His anguish over the bombers was only a small part of his need for her companionship.

  Inside the crude three-room house, she was appalled by the dirty clothes flung in corners, dishes piled in the sink. “Forgive my bachelor’s style,” Frank said. “I should have a woman come in once a week at least. But I can’t afford it.”

  The words gouged her nerves. The chief designer at Buchanan Aircraft could not afford a cleaning woman? Frank saw the question in her eyes and began telling her what he did with his money. Some of it went to causes like America First. More went to Ezra Pound, whom he had been helping to support for years. More went to help Billy McCall, Buzz McCall’s son, who was in college at UCLA. Buzz and the boy did not get along. Or, more precisely, Billy did not get along with Buzz’s wife, Tama.