The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  The moment comes after the contract for the house is signed. The futures trader springs for lunch, and the cocktails put me in a light mood for the first time in nearly a year. At home, I pour myself a scotch and carry it up to the desk that the moving company will soon be carting off to storage. I waste time finding a coaster, waste more time arranging the envelope under the desk lamp, and then still more time looking for my letter opener, even though I could easily slip my finger under the flap. Then I’m out of excuses. I sigh and lift the flap, finding that the glue has long ago dried out.

  I turn it over, and the first things to fall out are black and white photo prints taken, as I remember, with a box camera. They are contact prints—four inches square—and they are more yellow and brown than black and white.

  Suddenly, we’re staring at each other. I’m looking at a twenty-one-year-old, marveling that I was ever so slim, and that my smile was ever so genuine. The twenty-one-year-old is looking back at me. I doubt he realizes who I am, which is a kindness, because he would certainly be shocked at what he was to become.

  He’s wearing uniform slacks and an open-collar shirt. The silver bar on the collar identifies him as a first lieutenant. Between his fingers is the requisite cigarette. His hair is cut painfully close. He’s leaning against the fender of a small Austin sedan. Next to him, falling across the car, is the shadow of the photographer, hunched over the camera’s small viewing glass. The name comes to me instantly: Carberry. Michael Carberry, my best friend.

  And there he is in the next photo. This time it’s Michael with his foot up on the running board, and it’s my shadow that falls across the car. He’s broader than I am, and looks more curious than happy. Everything was brand-new to Carberry. Cars, cameras, swing dancing, pubs, restaurants, women with seams down the backs of their legs—they all amazed him. He came from a farm town in South Dakota that he described as “one store with one telephone.” In the picture, I’m sure he’s wondering what he’s doing in England, leaning up against a minute sedan with the steering wheel on the wrong side. I always meant to call there and see if anyone who knew Michael Carberry would answer the phone. It’s one of the many things I never got around to doing.

  Next is Kay’s portrait, taken when she graduated from college and delivered to me in Arizona, where I was in type training on the B-17. It’s hand colored, which makes her hair more yellow than blond and her cheeks much too red. The same photo is printed in black and white in her college yearbook, and I think there was another on her family’s piano. It was on my desk in England until the night when I closed it up in its paper folder and slipped it into the drawer. I honestly intended to return it to Kay when I came back to the States. That was another decision put off until the tide rose, and that I found had already been made when the water ebbed.

  I open the next portrait folder carefully, but still a group of snapshots topple out on the desk. The portrait is Angela, who looks embarrassed to find someone staring at her. She’s seventeen, two years younger than when I met her, wearing the dark sweater with the separate white collar that was the preferred attire in her secondary school. Hanging on her chest is the locket her parents had given her for graduation.

  Her hair is brunette—a color that doesn’t really exist—flowing in smooth waves until it touches her shoulders. I never saw it that length, because the wartime styles were shorter and more active. In the photo, her eyes are indifferent, but I remember them instantly as a true brown with a joyous brightness. Her face is a bit too round for contemporary fashion modeling, but the fuller, healthier look was the glamour of the time.

  I used to see her in my dreams, a long time ago, and her beauty always thrilled me. I clearly remember that when this photo was on my desk, I actually spoke to it, smiled at it, and thought it smiled back. Even now, I can hear her voice, with its rushed rendition of British phrasing. Whenever we spoke I began to sound like her, and began using words like “lovely” and “smashing,” which were seldom used in the New York suburb where I grew up. But the portrait has long been silent. Some of the small photo prints show Angela and a girl friend, who I think was called Sarah. In one shot they’re flanking Carberry, one leaning on each of his shoulders. Typically, Michael seems amazed that two young ladies are so close to him, and I think probably a little bit embarrassed. He didn’t really want to date English girls, thinking it was disloyal to the tiny little blonde whose picture was on his desk, but whenever it was his turn to use the car, I would ask Angela to fix him up with a date. By double-dating on his turns, I got to see Angela that much more often. There are also shots of me between the ladies, and one of Michael and me flanking Angela, which must have been taken by the date of the day.

  There are a dozen photos that show just Angela, even though they are about “us.” She’s sitting on a blanket, next to a picnic basket, a meadow falling away behind her. I remember the day immediately, and even the taste of the cucumber sandwiches that have not yet come out of the basket. I kissed her then, quickly and impulsively, while she still had breadcrumbs on her lips.

  Angela is standing knee-deep in a stream, holding her skirt up, and reaching for a bottle of wine that we’d put in the water to chill. That was another picnic. She was living with her parents, and drives out into the country were the only way we could be alone together.

  In another photo, she’s posed in front of her house, a short man and a thin woman standing to either side. Her father has a stern, disapproving look. He usually tried to be pleasant, but the occasional forced smile couldn’t hide the suspicion that I had nothing but the worst intentions for his daughter. He’d been in the British Expeditionary Force during the first Great War, and I think he may have remembered his own liaisons with young French women. He would have preferred not to have me calling at his home, but he probably understood that if it wasn’t me, it would be another Yank. His daughter was of age, and there was a whole American army camped at his doorstep.

  The woman is smiling. She recognizes that her daughter is blissfully happy, and remembers the feeling from her own youth. She sees the same adoration in my eyes that were in the eyes of young men who came calling on her. She knows what’s happening between Angela and me, and probably suspects how far it has gone, but she is generous enough not to press for details.

  I asked them to pose for this photo so I could send it home to my parents. I think he looks disapproving because he knows he is being conned. She’s smiling because she knows her daughter is happy and doesn’t care if it’s all pretenses. Angela believes me, and at the moment I really wanted my folks to see the woman I’d fallen hopelessly in love with. But when it came time to mail the picture, I thought better of it. The photo, without an accompanying explanation, would be too abrupt an announcement. I would decide later exactly how to handle it. And, of course, that was another of the decisions that languished in my footlocker.

  There she is, standing in the garden behind the inn. It’s a typical English garden, with a wrought-iron love seat set into arrangements of wildflowers. The half-timber building fills the background. The gentleness of the setting is remarkable, considering the world of the time, and the smile in her eyes is overwhelming.

  We had spent our first night together at the inn. Angela had made the arrangements herself, determined to rescue me, at any cost, from the stench of fire and blood that was unhinging my mind and deadening the feeling in my fingertips. The cost was high. She gave up her family, her home, and her place in the small, insular society of her village. I’ve often hoped that her love for me didn’t cost her even more than that. That was the night I closed Kay’s portrait and put it into the desk drawer. But I couldn’t tell Angela, because I had never told her about Kay.

  There are several snapshots of my crew, a group of children who could be a high school baseball team or the guests at a party held in a finished basement where someone had been daring enough to sneak a dash of gin into the fruit punch. Instead, they’re sitting on top of a five-hundred-pound bomb, pointing pr
oudly at the insults they have painted on the warhead.

  They’re posed next to the open-side gun bay, surrounding the machine gun that hangs out from a band of long brass cartridges. They are crouched under the glazed nose of the B-17, proud of the miniature bombs painted above them to signify the missions they have flown.

  They are so small and vulnerable. The plane is primitive and fragile. It all seems like a grade school recital, played in front of a crude canvas set. I have to wonder which of them made it through to the end of the war and which of them survived the more subtle carnage of the world they helped save. The house settles around me. I feel terribly alone.

  I go back over all the pictures. They are faded, stained, and poorly lighted to begin with, but each image is completely clear to me, even colorful, with an added dimension of depth. I’m not seeing the photo prints. I’m seeing the memories.

  I reach into the manila envelope and my hand touches the letter. I slide it out carefully, my mind filling with images, even before I see the handwritten address:

  Detective Sergeant Browning

  Norfolk Constabulary

  Whittingbridge Station House

  He was a small man, always in a three-piece suit, always removing his hat as he stepped in and replacing it carefully when he left. His hair was steel gray, thinning to wire strands across the top. His eyebrows and mustache were bushy, but nicely trimmed. Detective Browning was soft-spoken, never impatient, and invariably polite. But he was a policeman through and through, persistent as a bulldog, certain that he was the wing nut that held English common law together and convinced that his role was all the more critical, given the war’s massive assault on every principle of justice and fairness.

  When he first came to the air base, I thought him a ridiculous caricature of a past era, totally out of touch with his times. He was questioning the death of a young English woman, apparently killed in a bombing. It was hard to take him seriously when thousands of English were being killed every day, and when our own small corner of the war effort was losing over a hundred young men every time our planes took off. Even when he documented that the girl had been murdered, I didn’t truly care to become involved in his problems.

  Somehow he managed to convince me that a single murder was the very essence of what the war was all about, and that if I wasn’t interested in bringing the guilty to justice, then we might as well pack up our bombers and our base and go back home. Then he involved me, to the point where my own men were beginning to look on me as a traitor.

  His was a decision I thought I had made. I had carefully written the synopsis of my evidence and arranged it so the identity of the woman’s killer was inescapable, but I hesitated in delivering my information until it was too late. I had suddenly been ordered back to the United States, and the transport was already warming its engines on the runway. I decided to mail it to him, but then I took the letter—in its stamped and addressed envelope—and slipped it into the manila envelope, along with all the other issues that I firmly intended to resolve.

  I owed Browning better, just as I owed Angela much more than the letter I eventually managed to send her. But he didn’t even get a letter.

  I put everything back carefully into the manila, and then put the large, aged envelope into the desk drawer. I go down to the kitchen, uncap the scotch bottle, and pour myself a dividend that is actually a full finger taller than my first drink. I carry it into the family room and decide to switch on the television. Television and alcohol are the opiates of my generation—a group that passed on marijuana as immoral and heroin as dangerous. Somehow we were able to convince ourselves that mindless staring while in a state of liquor-induced stupor was a harmless pastime.

  The television screen fills with electronic snow and speakers hiss from all corners of the room. I remember that I have discontinued the cable service as part of my preparations for moving, so there will be no image to blot out the contents of the envelope. I’ll have to come to grips with the decisions that were never made.

  I don’t think I had yet turned off the television receiver when I knew I would go back to England.

  Kit takes my decision as a sign that my grief has gone over into madness. “That was 1944,” she says, as if she were speaking of the Punic Wars. “Nothing will be the same. The people you knew are all…”

  “Dead,” I say, completing the thought that she doesn’t want to finish. “And you’re right. People I knew in 1944 would be in their seventies…” And then, with a smile, “…most likely dead.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Kit says.

  I understand. She doesn’t mean that everyone my age is dead. She just means that they might as well be.

  “Kit, I still play a good game of golf and a decent game of tennis. I fully plan to go on living.”

  “But England?” she protests.

  “I’m not ready for Sun City—or managed care.”

  “Wouldn’t a cruise be better? Or a tour? I mean, if you want to travel…”

  “I’m not traveling. There’s some unfinished business in England that I’d like to wrap up.”

  “Nobody cares what happened in 1944.”

  “I care.”

  “But everyone will be…”

  “Dead,” I say, once again adding the word she doesn’t want to say, and then we start all over again.

  I take her out to dinner, because I’ve already cleaned the stove and the only things left in the refrigerator are ice cubes. She does most of the talking, because she knows I like to hear about my granddaughters. She mentions that she spoke with her brother, Todd.

  “What does Todd think about my going to England?” I ask.

  “He’s surprised,” she tells me.

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that it was kind of a change of pace for you.”

  I mimic Todd’s patronizing voice. “So old tight ass is finally entering the human race.”

  Kit giggles, and then confirms, “He used different words, but you got his meaning right.”

  I shake my head in despair.

  “He really cares about you,” she says, defending her brother.

  “I know,” I answer, “in his own way.”

  Over coffee, I tell her about Detective Browning. Her eyes widen when she hears about me helping to investigate a murder. It’s unbelievably out of character for the father she knows, and she hangs on my every word as I unravel the mystery. When I mention Angela, I treat her as the child of the family I befriended, rather than a lover who was burdened with a family. I’m sure Kit can’t imagine me with any woman other than her mother. That’s how I want to keep it.

  Todd calls me the next morning, which means that Kit called him the moment she got home from dinner. “You gonna wear your medals?” he asks. He’s pretending to be joking, but we both know it’s a dig. Medals and golden underwriter certificates are the rewards for mindless conformity, he has told me often. Even though I’m beginning to agree with him, I can’t admit it.

  I explain my involvement in an unsolved murder, leading up to the fact that I may be the only person on Earth who knows the identity of the killer. “It’s an open file that I’d like to close, just as a favor to the detective who ran the investigation.”

  “You think he gives a damn?”

  “He’s long since gone,” I remind my son, “but if he were alive, he most certainly would give a damn. Justice was important to him.”

  Then I allude to Angela and my worry that her life might have been scarred by the war. For the first time since his teen years, he doesn’t interrupt. Maybe he guesses that the young woman was more than a casual acquaintance. Before he hangs up, he manages to advise, “Take care of yourself.” Kit is right. He does love me—in his own way.

  My flight leaves Kennedy airport in the evening, arriving in London the next morning. I’m in business class, so I have a martini with olives and a small bowl of peanuts before the 747 even starts its engines. I’m in a plush leather seat that tip
s back like a lounge. There’s a television in the armrest so I can choose from among two dozen programs. And if I don’t like any of those, I can still pick from three classical music programs in stereo. The menu on my tray says I’ll be dining on either roast duck or Dover sole. I’ll be choosing from among six wines that they claim to be from their “cellars.”

  I’ve done a fair amount of traveling in my business career, but I still marvel at commercial jetliners. If we had been flying 747s during the war instead of B-17s, we never would have lost a crew. There wasn’t a fighter in the world back then that could have climbed to the 747’s cruising altitude. There was nothing fast enough to catch up with it.

  We roll out to the runway, and then the fan-jets turn on for real. In an instant we’re at high speed, and a second later we are pointing to the sky. The huge plane fires up effortlessly. Suddenly I remember the runway markers rolling by, one after another, as the bomb-heavy Flying Fortress tried to get off the ground. And then, while the wheels were coming up, the overloaded bird tried to decide whether to keep climbing or just topple lazily back to earth. With its engines howling and wings shaking, every takeoff was a miracle. Then it took us half an hour to climb to the height that the 747 reaches in just a few minutes.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot’s Appalachian voice drones into my headset, “I’d like to welcome you…”

  But the voice I hear isn’t pleasant and reassuring. Instead, it’s a scream of terror, coming from the past life that I am daring to visit.

  Then

  “Jesus…Jesus…we’re hit!” Billy Campbell, the bombardier screamed insanely. “Oh, Jesus…Patten is…Oh, Jesus!” Something had ripped through the belly under the nose and cut into Patten. His blood was spraying around the tight compartment in the bomber’s nose, just forward of the flight deck. I could see the crimson splattering on the astrodome right in front of the windscreen. Campbell’s wild screams and the star-sight dome suddenly opaque with gore. I tore at my oxygen mask, afraid that I was going to be sick.