The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  “That would be perfect.”

  She plucked out a key, examined it, and then handed it to me. “Could you give me just a few minutes to make sure everything is ready? Out of season, like this, we’re not opening the rooms every day. I’d like to send the girl up to open a window and freshen the towels.”

  “Fine,” I agreed, and then Angela added, “Of course.”

  “Make yourselves comfortable in the parlor. There’s one other guest, Mrs. Aston, who will be coming down to lunch shortly. And the luncheon guests will be arriving. You will be having lunch, won’t you?”

  I was trying to think of a way to say no when Angela said yes. We went into the parlor and settled into the stuffed chairs that surrounded a console radio and a piano. I reached out for Angela’s hand, but she pulled it away when we heard footsteps on the stairs.

  Mrs. Aston was an imposing woman in a severe woolen skirt and white shirt, all wrapped under the folds of an enormous cardigan sweater. She looked older than her fifty years because she wore no makeup and had her hair pulled into a painfully tight bun, but her voice was youthful and vigorous, needlessly loud, and nearly continuous. She was a more-or-less permanent resident, exiled from London for fear of the bombing. She and her husband vacationed in King’s Lynn to take in the salt air. When bombs had hit on the next street, he had insisted on sending her out of harm’s way, and she had offered no argument. “It’s terrifying,” she complained, referring to the raids. “There were sirens and searchlights every night, and generally that was all there was to it. But then one night, without any warning, the streets around you would begin to explode. Houses you had visited were simply gone. Neighbors never heard from again. One block would be just as it had always been. Right next to it, they would be digging in the rubble, looking for bodies. The Huns are simply inhuman. Who could drop bombs on places where families live?”

  I could, I thought as she babbled on. I remembered kicking out the bomb load the day the doors had hung up. There was probably a street in Germany just like the one she was describing. And the RAF could. They thought our claims for precision bombing were pretentious, at best. Their approach was to fly only at night and simply unload the bombs in the most densely populated areas. “Denies their military machine skilled manpower,” the air marshal explained.

  “It weakens the enemy’s will to fight,” the prime minister answered, whenever he was asked. Both might be true, but neither explained dropping hundreds of tons of incendiary bombs in the center of cities. The real reason was that Germany wasn’t going to be allowed to surrender. Once we gained the upper hand, Germany was going to be destroyed—bombed and shelled until not a stone stood upon a stone. That’s what the war had become.

  Mrs. Aston kept talking all the way to the dining room and joined us at a table as innocently as if we were related. “Oh, how lovely,” she said when I told her we were on our honeymoon, never considering that we might want to be alone. “Do tell me that you play bridge?” she asked when the custard dessert was being served. “There’s a gentleman here in town who loves bridge, but we can never find anyone to play with. I know he’d run right over.”

  She was a perfect tension breaker. When we got to our room, Angela doubled up with laughter. “Would you rather play bridge?” she asked between her gasps for air.

  I locked our door, “Just in case Mrs. Aston and her gentleman friend decide to drop in.”

  I settled into the stuffed chair and pulled Angela down onto my lap. We kissed, at first just brushing our lips together, then bonding our mouths, and with growing passion tasting and inhaling one another. We kept kissing while I unbuttoned her blouse, pretending that neither of us knew what I was doing. When I pushed her collar to one side, she shrugged her bare shoulder free so I could kiss her neck, her shoulder and across the tops of her breasts. When my fingers touched the strap of her slip, she maneuvered her shoulder until the strap fell away. She drew me into another long, openmouthed kiss while my fingers brushed over her breast. My excitement was growing until, to my embarrassment, I knew she could feel me through our clothing. Hers was obvious in the contour of her breast and in the pace of her breathing.

  She uncoiled my arm from her neck and slid off my lap, closing her blouse modestly as she stood. “I’ll just be a minute.” She took her small overnight bag into the bathroom. I welcomed the chance to undress and slip into the bed. I felt perfectly in control until I remembered the condoms. I jumped out naked and dug into my shaving kit.

  That was how she first saw me, standing naked, largely erect, with a package of condoms in my hand. “Oh, God, I wanted this moment to be so romantic.” But then my eyes found her, and I was so overcome that I didn’t care that I was ridiculous.

  She was in a gossamer dressing gown, pure white, held closed by a satin tie string at the waist. I knew instantly that it had been made for a bride, and that this was the way she was presenting herself to me. She was clearly visible, naked, through the transparent material, and certainly the most beautiful woman—the most beautiful sight—that I had ever stood before. My memory of the exact form of her body is vague. I saw her, and not any particular part of her. My own feelings at that moment are part of me forever, clearly remembered, but never again to be experienced. I became pure joy, unencumbered by my own physical person. I was outside my body and outside of everything the war was inflicting on me. Loneliness, fear, uncertainty, pain…For an instant I was spiritual, in a world created by what I felt for Angela. The moment passed quickly, replaced by feelings of affection, lust, and embarrassment. With my eyes locked onto hers, I slid back into the soft high bed. She came slowly around the elaborate footboard with a look of calm and confidence that made her seem suddenly older.

  “Do you like it?” she asked.

  “It’s…lovely,” I said, thinking she meant the gown.

  “Then you shall have it.” She opened the tie string with one hand, pushed the gown back from her shoulders and let it drop softly to the floor. Her eyes still held on mine.

  In bed, we drew together so I could feel the touch of her body, from her breasts to her knees. The joy, the passion, our minds, and our bodies all became one. And there was no one, nor anything else. I wanted it to last forever, but in truth I couldn’t keep it for more than a few fleeting seconds, and then we were thrashing in our shared sensual explosion. We lay together in breathy silence, certain that we would never be apart again.

  Was it really that extraordinary, or did it just seem so? I know it was different from any moment that I’ve ever experienced. There was the war with its constant threat of death. The horror of seeing your own destruction whenever a friend was blown to pieces. The escape into the soft consoling arms of this young woman. Her naked beauty that put aside all the frightening images. The touch of her skin that proved I was still alive. The explosion of joy in understanding that I was more than torn skin and broken bones. It was the goodness in life, glowing like a candle in the dark room of life’s horror. It is probably unfair to compare any other moment with that afternoon at King’s Lynn. No other moment could possible have so much darkness to shine through.

  Objectively, Kay was a far more beautiful woman. Her face was fairer, her hair more dramatically colored, and her body measurements more like an hourglass. Our bedroom setting was more romantic. Her lovemaking skills were informed at the beginning, and over the years she became expert in my preferences, as I did in hers. Making love to Kay was always anticipated and rarely disappointing, but it became so much a part of life’s routine that it may have become routine itself.

  I think Kay was cheated by not being there at that time. If she had found me lonely and shell-shocked, if she had secreted me away to the salvation of a country inn, if it had been her stepping out of the bathroom with the added allure of a filmy gown, that moment might have been hers. But when we fell into each other’s arms, there was nothing that we were protecting each other from. Our room was safe, nor were we seizing the moment. We had our lives ahead of us, an
d there was no terror. Our privileged lives banished all ugliness from our view. Nor was our love all that we had; Kay and I had been given a head start on our economic life, lavished with gifts, and nurtured in the bosoms of comfortable families. Nothing was at risk. Nothing was in danger of being snatched away.

  Angela and I made love again, bathed separately, enjoyed dinner—despite Mrs. Aston’s ongoing monologue—bundled up and went for a walk in the moonlight. The next day we went down to the shores of the Wash, took dozens of photographs with the same box camera, and ducked into a pub for hot soup and warm ale. We bought a bottle of wine at one store and two wineglasses at another, and then brought them back for an early-evening tryst. We missed dinner, made love with the window open and the covers pulled back, and bathed one another until the tub was cold. Late at night I went down to the desk, talked the night maid into two sandwiches and two bottles of beer. We fell asleep in the soft chair, fully dressed, with Angela on my lap, breathing easily into my ear.

  Sunday we made love in the morning, had a late breakfast in the empty dining room, and walked the edges of the marshes until dusk. Then we checked out, paid our bill, and drove home as the low sun cast long shadows across the road. It was dark when I left her at her door, holding her in my arms until her mother appeared at the window. Angela had built an elaborate weekend of work in the city and then shopping in London to cover her absence. She didn’t think that her mother would press her for details. “She’ll guess we’ve been together,” she told me, with an expression that accepted the inevitable. “One look at me and she’ll know.”

  I took the car to the garage, changed back into my uniform, and then went to the corner where the base bus picked up men on liberty. When I walked into the club, Michael Carberry was sitting with his navigator at the bar. He looked over in my direction, finished his conversation, and then brought two beers over to my table.

  “How did it go?” I asked. “Anyone miss me?”

  He told me no one could ever miss me. Then he repeated my question. “How did it go?”

  “Fine. Just fine. We had a very nice time.”

  He grinned. “A very nice time? A nice time is when you go for a walk in the park.”

  “Well, this walk in the park is sort of private, so if you don’t mind, I won’t be filling you in on all the details.”

  “But you’re all right?” he persisted. “I mean, sometimes, if everything isn’t perfect, people get depressed.”

  “Everything was perfect,” I said, “except there’s this terrible secret that she’s afraid I’ll find out about.”

  “Well, I assume you found out whether she was wearing falsies.”

  “Yeah, I did. That’s not her secret.”

  Carberry smiled and faked a punch to my gut. “Well, once you get that out of the way, there can’t be any important secrets.”

  “You sound like an old hand,” I teased.

  “I been in a few hay lofts.”

  “With Alice?”

  He winced. “I don’t want to talk about Alice.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, “and I don’t want to talk about Angela.”

  “So that means you love her?”

  “Yeah, of course I love her. What do you think I’ve been doing all this time?”

  He shook his head to point out that I just didn’t get it. “No, I mean you must really love her. That’s why I won’t talk about Alice and me. There’s something real special between us.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. There was something special between Angela and me, something I had never felt before. So now Carberry and I had two special bonds. There was the little Austin sedan and there was the fact that each of us knew what the other was feeling.

  That was the night that I closed Kay’s picture and slipped it into my drawer and put Angela’s graduation photo in its place. Arthur Lyons cautions me that Angela never said a word about my life insurance and certainly never asked me to change it. But at that moment, and for the weeks after, I certainly would have given her everything I owned or would ever own. She didn’t have to ask. What was mine was obviously hers. There was something special between us.

  Now

  I spend the next three days in the basement of the police station, trying the patience of Andrew Barnes. As keeper of records from all the townships in East Anglia, he claims to be three years behind in his filing. “Just dumped here,” he complains. “Mrs. Thatcher said it was efficiency, that it would lower the cost of government, so she just shut down the records departments, cleaned out their files and dumped everything here. Never budgeted for making sense of it all.” His hands came up in a gesture of pleading. “Who’s supposed to integrate it all? How am I supposed to get it all into the computers?”

  I explain my thinking. The Mary Brock record alludes to another investigation into foul play with the insurance of American flyers. Browning’s memoirs acknowledge that an investigation was already in progress, so there must be another record.

  “I dare say there is,” he admits, while allowing himself a lunch of tea and biscuits at his desk, “but where would it be?” He rolls his eyes in frustration. “If they had just sent a manifest along with the records they were delivering, then at least I’d know where I might begin looking.”

  “But there must have been some order to the deliveries…”

  He nods as he dunks a biscuit. “Things were generally brought in from the towns one at a time, so all the Whittingbridge records are probably in the same aisle. Look around where you found the Brock file.”

  “I did. The problem is that I don’t know what to look under. Brock was filed under the victim’s name, but this was an investigation into an ongoing swindle. How would that be filed?”

  He chuckles and tugs the napkin out of his shirt collar. “Haven’t got the foggiest. I’m sorry, but I haven’t even begun with the Whittingbridge files. They were all hand records, probably filed in any way that suited the investigating officer or his secretary, for that matter.” He stands, with a sigh, hinting at sympathy for my plight but indicating that he has more important things to do. “I’m in the Norwich property records and I’m only up to the j’s.”

  So I’m back down in the basement, frantic to find the earlier files where Browning most likely identified the woman he had turned. I’m half hoping I won’t find them, because by now I’ve had a turn of heart. I’ve pretty much convinced myself that it must have been Angela.

  At night, Arthur Lyons watches me sulk, with my nose in a whiskey. Gently, he tries to lift me out of my self-pity. “Might well be that she was doing the sergeant’s bidding at first, but that doesn’t mean that everything was a lie.”

  I nod. He’s right, of course. There’s no doubt in my mind that what Angela and I shared was genuine. There were words, glances, touches, and leaps of the heart that couldn’t have been rehearsed. The moments were true. But my memory has sanctified her to the point where I almost believe that she was delivered to earth, fully grown, by an angel. I can’t bear the thought of a blemish. I don’t let myself imagine that she was ever part of a scheme to seduce young Americans out of their death benefits or that when she met me she was only pretending to be attracted. “No matter how she found you, she loved you,” Lyons says, no longer pretending that he doesn’t know the reason for my return. “That’s what matters, isn’t it?”

  “Actually, Arthur, it doesn’t matter at all. I’m seventy-six years old, and a romance can’t change my life in the least—particularly not one from fifty years ago.”

  He smiles, and then he laughs out loud. “I suppose we are ridiculous, talking like a pair of schoolboys.”

  I nod, and sip my drink. Arthur takes the glass and refills it. “I guess that’s why I enjoy talking to you,” he allows, as he sets the fresh drink at my fingertips. “Everyone else talks about the dole or all that’s wrong with National Health, as if just surviving were worth the effort. You talk as if you’ve got plans.”

  “Thank you, Arthur. I enjoy talking to
you, too. I used to think everything was over. Now, if I can just straighten out the past, I think I may have a future.”

  He raises his own drink. “To the future,” he toasts.

  The next day I’m back in Andrew Barnes’s basement, squatting next to a bottom drawer. It’s filled with documents that are bound together with brittle rubber bands. I’ve assembled all the Whittingbridge police records and then broken out those for 1942 and 1943. As Barnes told me, they just dumped the stuff. Domestic violence, parking tickets, pub-hour violations are all piled together. He keeps telling me how long it will take him to catch up, but I think Barnes knows he’ll be enjoying his pension before he ever gets around to it.

  If there is a record of the investigation that Sergeant Browning described in his memoirs, it would have to be a big folder. He says several of our bases were involved and the folder that is just the Whittingbridge case is a couple of inches thick. There’s nothing here that fits the description, unless…of course! The other bases wouldn’t be in with the Whittingbridge material. They’d be filed under their own names. I look around at the rows of filing cabinets and the ceiling-high stacks of cartons. There were a hundred bases in East Anglia in a hundred different towns. They could be anywhere in the basement.

  I stagger heavily back up the stairs. Andrew Barnes looks up from his computer screen. He can see my defeat and he smiles triumphantly. His job is bigger than I am.

  “Calling it a day?” he asks.

  I nod. “More than a day. I’m calling it quits.”

  His expression saddens. Even though my failure reaffirms his importance, he liked having me around. “I wish there were something I could do. I told them when the Tories first held hearings on consolidating the records.”

  I give him a brief recap of the problem, probably to let him know that I went down fighting. In my summary, I tick off the names of the bases that I can remember, explaining that each one of them would have had a file.