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‘You ever been up in a plane?’
Brad Lundmark shook his head, the way he might have shaken it if the Archangel Gabriel had asked if he was acquainted with Paradise.
‘If you got some time to help me out here over the next week or two, I’ll give you a ride. What d’you say?’
‘Oh, yes! Sure thing, Captain! Gee! I promise I’ll –’
‘Hey, hey, it’s OK. It’s only a plane ride. If I’ve got any cash left after we’ve fixed her up, I’ll give you a couple of bucks a day as well, but no promises.’
Abe rummaged in the rear cockpit and brought out a fur-lined sleeping roll which he threw out under the wing. Lundmark looked shocked.
‘Captain, there’s a boarding house just down the block. You can’t –’
Abe pulled his shirt off, took the sponge and the bucket of water, and scrubbed himself hard all over. He sluiced water through his close-cropped grey-blond hair, until it stuck up in spikes, and rubbed hard at the back of his neck, where there had been a line of sweat and grime.
‘That’s better.’
Abe fiddled in his luggage for a spare shirt, which he pulled on. Lundmark noticed that the cuffs and collar were old and worn.
‘Brad?’
‘Yes, Captain?’
‘I gotta have food. Poll here’s gotta have fuel. She’s got some pretty bad hospital bills coming up. One thing I can’t afford to spend money on is a bed.’
Lundmark shook his head. ‘That ain’t right. If you explained who y’are to Mr Houghton at the hotel, why I’m sure he’d –’
‘He’d tell me to pay for my bed just like anyone else. Brad, I’m gonna lie under the wing of my airplane. Can you think of a better place for a guy to sleep?’
Lundmark shook his head.
‘No, Captain. Say –’
But what he was about to say, Abe would never know. There was a minor commotion in the yard outside. Somewhere a small dog barked angrily. Then four men appeared in the barn door against the violet air. They were dressed in dark suits and ties, which they wore with Sunday stiffness. One of the men – six feet plus, mid-fifties, lean, intelligence in his face, moustache – spoke.
‘Good evening to you, Captain Rockwell. My name’s Gibson Hennessey, owner of the General Store down there. On behalf of the town, I’d like to apologise for being so neglectful earlier. I want to assure you that we didn’t mean no disrespect. It wasn’t ’til the kid here informed us who you were, that we realised we had a hero of the United States in our midst.’
Abe’s blue eyes gave nothing away, but his mouth possibly hardened a little before he answered. ‘I didn’t feel no disrespect, Mr Hennessey. I didn’t exactly let you know I was coming.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘And I’m plenty happy with the barn here.’
The second of the men laid his hand across his chest. He was a plump man, fat and buttery. “Low me to introduce myself. Ted Houghton’s my name, proprietor of the Independence Hotel and Bar, only these days I ain’t got a bar. I’d be only too honoured, if you’d accept my hospitality for the duration of your stay.’
‘Right, and any assistance we can give in getting your airplane all fixed up, you just ask.’
The two sides fought gently for a minute or two. Abe wanted no fuss. He just wanted to fix up his plane and move on. But there was no escape. Surrounded by the four dignitaries, Abe was escorted back to the centre of town, feeling like a prisoner on his way to the jailhouse.
‘The folks here wanted to show their appreciation…’ murmured Hennessey, as a crowd of two hundred people stood and cheered Abe’s arrival. A collection of schoolkids performed a rendition of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. A man, whose name Abe didn’t catch, made a truly dismal speech of welcome. Abe was expected to reply at length, but he just stood on the hotel steps and said, ‘I’m mighty grateful to you all. Thank you.’
There was another round of applause. Half the schoolkids thought an encore of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was in order, but luckily the effort sputtered quickly out. Abe was bundled into the hotel where he was the guest of honour at a five-course dinner, ending with a vast sponge cake in the very approximate shape of an airplane.
By eleven o’clock, Abe had finally escaped to his room.
He rooted around in his bags for a tattered pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, then stretched out on his bed and lit up. With the oil lamp set low, he lay on his back and breathed smoke at the ceiling. His face was tired and he looked ready to sleep.
For ten minutes, he lay and smoked. Then a couple of circular marks on the wall high up behind the wardrobe caught his eye. Swinging his feet lightly to the floor, he took a chair over to the wardrobe and examined them.
The marks were gouged right through the plaster through to the room next door. The top of the wardrobe still had a little white dust beneath the marks, indicating either that the hotel didn’t dust very often or that the marks were relatively recent.
Captain Abe Rockwell had earned his rank as a pursuit pilot in the United States Army. Before the war, he’d been an auto mechanic, then a racing driver. When war had broken out, he’d decided to switch trades. He’d thrown in his job racing cars. He’d wangled his way out to France as a mechanic attached to one of America’s newly formed flying squadrons. He’d fixed planes by day, and by evening more or less taught himself to fly. Despite being over-age and lacking either a commission or a college education, he nevertheless persuaded the authorities to give him a chance in the cockpit. He’d repaid their faith. His first victory over a German machine had come within two weeks. Another three months had seen his fifth victory – and his official recognition as one of America’s few fighter-aces. By the end of the war, he’d been promoted to captain, had command of a squadron, and had had nineteen victories officially confirmed. Of the American pilots to have survived the war, only Ed Rickenbacker had shot down more enemy planes.
Abe was a military man who’d seen plenty of combat, plenty of action. He knew what bullet holes looked like, and these were bullet holes.
4 (#ulink_4e39b5dd-6ced-510a-8e20-cd5ca732ab9a)
Willard didn’t get headaches. He didn’t get them from heat. He didn’t get them from noise. He didn’t even get them after a jugful of martinis, when everybody else was looking as white and fragile as a porcelain teacup. But he had one now.
He stepped inside. The shades were down and the interior was cool and dim. Reflections from the pool outside trembled on the ceiling. Willard closed the door, and the voices grew small and distant. He had been holding a letter in his hand, which he let drop on the carpeted floor. The letter was from his accountant. A stunt plane they’d used but hadn’t insured had just smashed up. Another eighteen thousand bucks had slid uselessly down the pan.
He sank into a deep chair and sat slumped, hardly moving.
Willard felt lousy, when all the time he knew he should be happy. After all, he was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.
His great-grandfather had begun it all, manufacturing handguns and rifles for sale to the country’s wild frontier. The business had prospered. The Civil War had turned Thornton Ordnance into one of the country’s biggest profit-makers, one with international reach. The nineteenth century had been a good one for wars and the firm had benefited from every one. When the Great War had broken out in Europe in 1914, Thornton Ordnance entered its most profitable phase. Junius Thornton – Willard’s father – made money hand over fist. On America’s entry into the war, profits had doubled, then doubled again.
But it wasn’t just Willard’s family which had been touched with magic. He had been too. Willard had been a student at Princeton when Germany, in a fit of lunacy, began unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, thus propelling America into the war. Willard’s studies hadn’t exactly been going badly, but they certainly hadn’t been going well. Willard happened to meet a British pilot and saw the way the man had used his war stories to pull any girl he wanted.
And so, one sunny autumn’s day and with almost no prior consideration, Willard had taken the plunge. He’d joined up. He sought a pilot’s commission and got it. Within three months of that sunny October day, he was in France, a lieutenant in the US Army Flying Corps.
He hadn’t been there a week before he regretted it.
On his first flight over enemy lines, he was almost killed. On his second flight, he returned with bullet holes plugging his upper starboard wing and the tail mounting. Within three weeks, Willard could count four lucky escapes – and not one time when he’d even got a shot away at the enemy.
That had to change and it did.
By a fluke, Willard was transferred to the Ninety-First Squadron, under the command of Captain Abraham ‘Abe’ Rockwell.
Before letting his newest recruit out on patrol, Rockwell ordered Thornton to take to the air, twenty-five miles behind the lines, to take part in a dummy patrol and dogfight. Willard thought he’d done OK, but Rockwell had torn Willard’s combat-flying to pieces. Over the next two weeks, he’d reassembled it, from the ground up.
When Willard was allowed back into the air, he scored his first kill on his very first patrol. He wasn’t the best pilot in the sky, but he was no longer a dangerous novice. By October 1918, he’d brought down three German machines – just two short of the magical number, which would turn him from a fine pilot into an officially recognised flying ace.
Rockwell had seen the younger man’s desire and, in the first week of November, assigned him to fly against the enemy Drachen – gas-filled observation balloons, that rose from fixed steel cables a mile back from the collapsing German front. The assignments were simple and dangerous. Simple, because there was nothing easier than shooting at a giant inflammable balloon. Dangerous, because the Germans curtained their precious balloons with intense and accurate anti-aircraft fire. Willard accepted his assignment gravely. Before each flight, he was so afraid, he vomited secretly in the hangar toilet. But he’d hit his targets and escaped being hit himself. On November 8, three days before Armistice was declared, Willard downed his second Drache. A Drache counted the same as an airplane. By the time peace broke out, Willard Thornton was a flying ace. He returned to America, a hero.
He hadn’t been the bravest pilot, or the best. He hadn’t scored anywhere near as many kills as Rockwell or Rickenbacker. But none of that mattered. He was an ace – and he was stunningly good-looking. Up-close, far away, carefully staged or thrillingly informal: there just wasn’t an angle that made him look bad. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, wide-chinned, strongly built. His smile was terrific, his eyes enticing, his mouth full and kissable. He was dazzling to look at and he knew it.
Hollywood saw the potential and was quick to move. The studios fought to get his signature on a movie deal. One of the studios had a guy literally follow him round with a blank contract. Willard rose to the bait and signed.
His first picture had billed him as ‘Willard T. Thornton, America’s favourite ace’. A movie-going public, still enchanted with its war-time heroes, flocked to see it. For a few brief weeks, Willard’s had been one of the most recognisable faces in America. The second picture had sold well. The next two movies had done OK. The last two had sagged, flopped, sunk from sight.
But Willard had grown up a little. He knew enough to make a picture of his own – ‘Heaven’s Beloved, a picture of class’. He’d asked his father for finance. His father had put him in touch with Ted Powell, a Wall Street banker. Willard had made his pitch – and Powell had bought it. And although the picture was over-schedule, although Daphne O’Hara had just quit right in the middle of filming, although costs were out of control and his precious stunt plane had just crashed, Willard’s luck was staying the course.
Ted Powell continued to believe, continued to come up with cash. The original sixty-thousand dollar loan had mushroomed. First to eighty, then to a hundred, then to one-twenty, then to an ‘open-ended loan facility’ – banker-speak for don’t-even-ask.
Willard was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.
5 (#ulink_a7b2a5d9-7c97-5a29-a496-932aeb3d83c3)
The Lundmark kid showed up at seven o’clock sharp, with a pot of coffee and a couple of rolls.
‘Feeding me, huh?’
Abe had been up at dawn, and found nobody yet awake at the hotel. Sooner than wake anyone, he’d come directly to the barn. He’d shaved in a can of hot water brewed over a primus stove, then stripped to the waist and washed under the yard pump. Right now, he was stretched out on a bale of straw, rubbing soft wax into his flying boots and mending a small tear on his jacket.
‘I just thought … if you don’t want it, I can…’
‘No, Brad, I want it. There are a couple of mugs in there,’ said Abe nodding at the rear cockpit of the broken plane. ‘Green canvas bag.’
Lundmark approached the plane like it was holy, and came away with a single mug.
‘Don’t drink coffee? You’re missing out.’
Abe sipped his coffee and took a bite of the bread roll.
‘We’ll get to work shall we? We’ll need to send away for a new blade,’ Abe indicated the busted propeller. ‘Aside from that, if we can find some timber and a forge, I haven’t seen anything we can’t fix.’
‘Really? Wow! You can get it going again, Captain?’
‘Careful, Brad. She’s a lady.’
‘Huh? Oh. I mean, her. Sorry.’
‘Reckon we can. First thing is to send a wire to my friends at Curtiss. Get a new blade out here. There a post office in town?’
‘Sure, Captain…’ Lundmark’s reply wasn’t exactly confident.
Abe was silent for a minute. He’d flown over the town, searching the ground for landing sites. He brought the view to mind. There are an infinity of obstacles that can smash up an aircraft. A cow. A ditch. A rickety fence with a single strand of wire. A boulder. A pothole. A tree stump.
Or telegraph wire. During the war, a friend of Abe’s had been shot up in a dogfight over enemy lines. With fabric streaming from one wing and controls mushy from German bullets, the plane had limped home. Struggling in to land, barely skimming the tree-tops, the plane had struck a line of telegraph wire. The wheels had snagged. The nose had been yanked down. Pilot and plane had dived into the ground at seventy miles an hour.
Abe thought back to his view of the town from above. No wires. ‘There’s no telegraph, is there? Where we gotta go? Brunswick?’
A tiny hesitation. Then: ‘Yeah, Brunswick. Joe Borden takes his cart in on a Tuesday. I guess we could ask him.’
‘Good.’
Abe paused. He’d seen something else from the sky; something that had puzzled him then and was puzzling him even more now. ‘A mile south of here,’ he said, ‘there’s another town.’
‘Uh-huh.’ The kid was non-committal, but evasive. He began cleaning invisible muck from a side of the aircraft which enabled him to keep his expression concealed.
‘There’s no other town marked on my map. It’s Rand McNally, 1921. I’ve never known ’em to be wrong before. Not that wrong anyways.’
‘It’s called Marion. It’s kind of new. Grew up a lot the last couple of years.’
‘That’s a lot of growing.’
‘I guess.’
The kid clearly didn’t want to talk, and, though Abe’s intense blue-eyed stare held the boy a few moments longer, he allowed the matter to drop. But it was a puzzle. It wasn’t just that Rand McNally hadn’t marked the town. It was where the town was and what it was.
What it was, first of all. From the air, Abe had seen large white houses, big yards, motor cars, even a couple of swimming pools. The contrast with the sun-bleached timbers and dusty streets of Independence was even stronger when darkness fell. Whereas Independence couldn’t boast a single electric bulb, the town below had been a blaze of light. The thump of oil-fired generators had thudded softly through the night.
Then there was the matter of where it was. Independence stood in a low range of hills on the edge of the Okefenokee swamps. Between Independence and Jacksonville there were salty marshes, mangrove swamps, a maze of creeks running out to the ocean. Independence was connected to the rest of the world only by a single-track unpaved road, plus the railway which ran just inland from the coast.
Why on earth had a slice of the brash new America wound up in these back-of-beyond swamp lands? Where was the money coming from to finance those new houses, the big cars? And why was the kid Lundmark lying to him about having to hike in to Brunswick to find a telegraph?
Abe could remember the view from the sky perfectly well. Marion, Independence’s mysterious new neighbour, had a line of telegraph wire running directly into it from the south. If Abe wanted to send a telegram, he only had to stroll a mile downhill.
6 (#ulink_bba71dbd-a408-573a-8b5f-ea9689685234)
The cigar smoke hung blue-grey in the projector beam. The first reel snickered to an end and the screen filled with light. Willard jumped up to change the reel.
‘That dame,’ said Ted Powell, prodding the air with his cigar, looking every inch like the Wall Streeter that he was. ‘Is she meant to be the same as the first one?’
‘Brunhilde Schulz? O’Hara?’
‘Blondie back there. The one who just got kidnapped by the bank robbers.’
‘O’Hara quit on us. Right in the middle of filming. Breach of contract. We found a girl who looked OK from a distance, but all the close-ups are of O’Hara.’
‘Is that why the backgrounds are funny?’
‘They’re not that funny.’ Willard fiddled the second reel into place, poking the fragile celluloid through the little rollers. The lamp inside the projector was burning hot and the whole apparatus was scorching to the touch. ‘Ow! Here. You’ll like this next bit.’
The next bit was the skyscraper scene.
‘That’s me in the plane. I did this stunt myself.’
‘Funny place to park an airplane.’
Willard and the girl who really was O’Hara bounded out onto the roof. They looked dramatic – tragic – resolute. Then they bounded into the plane. The next shot had the propeller whirling and Willard clenching the muscles in his jaw.
‘Plane that starts itself,’ commented Powell. ‘Nice.’
‘She’s only a Gallaudet and she didn’t start herself. We’re doing things cheap here, Powell. Cheap as we can without … without…’
‘I was kidding, Will. And call me Ted.’
