Flying Without Wings

by Paula Wynne

  Allan seemed pleased that he had lots of people to interview and question and was permanently surrounded by eager beavers who wanted their mugs on telly.

  Due to the increased activity, Matt had been roped in to help Mum until she could find an extra waitress. He kept his eyes on the door, watching for her so he could dash off to join Allan’s final day of filming the village, even though today wasn’t a good day to do that with so many people under his feet. Although Matt found it tiresome watching the many out-takes and repeated scenes done from every angle possible, he also found it exciting.

  Then he saw Cami.

  She walked into the square, the limp slight, but noticeable if you knew. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. The butterflies fluttering around in his stomach returned and set his pulse racing. Today she looked even more beautiful than the last time he had seen her.

  A cropped red shirt floated over the waist of her jeans and again her aura shone with energy and a stunning self-confidence. As she strolled towards him, the noise and chatter and clattering of cream teas all seemed to fade into the background.

  She was coming to see him. Not Allan, or the commotion his documentary had caused.

  Matt’s pulse kicked into double time.

  Her bouncing, strawberry-blonde tresses floated around her shining face. As she spotted him, and waved, she whipped a lock off her cheek and twirled it around her finger. His world suspended as Cami once again set his whole body on fire. Elation crept along his arms, raising his skin into goosebumps.

  At that moment, Cami suddenly halted and twisted around. Allan was waving her down.

  Through the glass, he watched his cousin talking to Cami. Just as suddenly, the rapture of seeing her again was sucked away. The sensation of being isolated and disconnected from those around him slammed into him.

  Did they know each other? Or did Allan just want to interview her as a local person?

  Allan had the advantage over him. With his university degree, flashy job and fancy camera equipment he could capture Cami’s heart quicker than Matt.

  An abrupt hostility to his cousin filtered into him.

  ‘Matt. Matt!’ Someone called out and Matt blinked.

  He turned to see Mum, obviously having come in round the back, waving at him and indicating that tables needed clearing. He gave her a sullen look and started clearing dirty dishes. He couldn’t be trusted with a trayful of them, so he hurried to the scullery with only handfuls on each trip. Each time he collected more, he glared at Allan, who was still chatting animatedly to Cami.

  What were they talking about?

  As he watched how Cami threw her head back and laughed at something Allan had said, Matt clenched his teeth until his jaw ached. Bitterness crept through him. Cami was his girl and now his cousin, a few years older, better looking and more modern, was captivating her. A slight growl rose in his throat. He should go out and join them, find out what was so fascinating to talk about.

  Another shout from Mum…and he went into autopilot again, clearing dishes with his hands while his eyes were fixed on the happenings outside in the square.

  ‘Mum, I need to go.’

  ‘Not now, Matt! Sheila hasn’t arrived. I need you to clear the tables. I’m selling more cakes than ever before thanks to Allan.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sneered, ‘thanks to Allan!’

  ‘What?’ Mum rounded on him.

  ‘Whatever!’ He slunk off and cleared more coffee cups. One old lady pressed a pound into his palm as he passed thinking he was the waiter. Normally, he would smile his thanks, but all he could muster was a pinched expression as his gaze kept roving to the window.

  He kept telling himself that Allan was only interviewing Cami, like he was doing to most of the locals. That it didn’t matter because she had been on her way to see him not his cousin yet doubt still punctured his inner arguments.

  By now, Allan and Cami had moved further up the square, talking with their heads closer.

  A pain from clenching his jaw started filtering into Matt’s brain. He could never compete with Allan, he knew that, but he wasn’t just going to shuffle around in here with his usual air of resignation. He placed the coffee mugs back on the table and ignored the customer’s startled looks. Scuffling over to the door, he swung it wide and marched out into the square. Hurrying across The Fairground his stupid foot dragging behind him, scoring a line in the gravel.

  He came to a crowd and shoved his way through, expecting to see Allan filming, but only the Vicar stood in the middle, lecturing the people.

  Matt swivelled around and around, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  35

  John Falcon

  June 1977, Abandoned Salt Mine, Poland

  Fate had led us to England. Despite all the anticipation of the Russian arrival, they did not treat the concentration camp prisoners that well. One of them even called us a dirty Kraut. That kind of thing really angered me! But what could I do? As a young boy, he had often spoken to his inner self. Me, his spirit, his very soul. But in recent years he had lost any inclination towards soul searching.

  John Falcon twirled his moustache as he watched Aron wielding the axe. Sweat trickled down his face and rested between his lips. He had taken first turn to hack at the old oak door barricading the cave entrance.

  During his rest, he became lost in thought and memories.

  After the war their remaining family had returned home only to find their house destroyed. Ima did not want to live in Germany anyway and they had spent many months amongst the legions of displaced travellers before heading to distant relatives in Austria.

  Their journey had taken them through the destruction of war, where dirty cities were littered with bodies and walls of rubble. What hospitals there still were overflowed with the wounded and dying. Yet, although everything lay in ruins, it was still an improvement on the camp. When the brothers ventured out alone, they were offered bread and tea and as much sugar as he could stomach. He had pocketed the tea for Ima.

  She had continued to obey the commandments and say her prayers on Shabbat and was always reading stories and blessings.

  Many charitable organisations and families had helped them out with both the material things they needed and in trying to find out news of loved ones. Of Papa, though, there had never been a word, and with gentle voices and pain filled eyes, a succession of people had told them that they must assume the worst.

  Ima’s tiny flame of hope had grown weaker. Her God still gave no answer, and the man she loved had been taken away, never to return. These were the two pillars of her reason to live, and they had no longer been enough. Where he and Aron had recovered at least their physical strength, Ima had continued to decline until finally she passed away.

  Even before this he had retained few illusions about the existence of justice. Fate was not doled out according to virtue, you had to make your own, and what you wanted you had to take. So he and Aron had set out on a relentless quest to track down two Nazis; Steffan Sommer, who knew where the Nazis had hidden their stolen treasure, and Friedrich Wollner. The Wolf. The man who had taken the time before fleeing for his life to steal a child’s toy aeroplane.

  They had travelled all across Europe, sometimes helped but other times surprised that the Nazi hostility towards Jews had taken root in the most ordinary of German minds and persisted even after the end of the Third Reich. It had been hard, and it had been necessary first to learn how to lie, and then also how to steal.

  They followed rumours of treasure and tracked the paths that Nazi loot was known to have taken, and they were not the only ones. Most often only hostility existed between these rival fortune hunters, but occasionally they also encountered some camaraderie. One time, tired and hungry in a mountain village in the south of Germany, they had met a man who told them of the well-paid contracts that existed to do what they already did. Go to England, he’d said. A lot of the richest families had fled there before the war and they now sought news of the properties a
nd treasures they had left behind and would pay handsomely to have someone else go and find this for them.

  Soon after crossing the channel, John anglicised his name to fit into their new life. He knew where to seek the work he wanted and preferred that nobody else they met should be easily able to guess the sole reason they had arrived in England.

  But Aron refused. He said he would die with his name and no one, not even his brother, could take away his heritage. John ignored all Aron’s grumbling about traditions and culture and did what he thought best for himself.

  John’s first commission was innocent enough. It came in his early twenties from a rich British Jewess who had lost relatives in the war and he was sent to find her missing family.

  Although Aron was reluctant to go back to Europe, the money convinced him. Paper money. Just like the money that he had printed in order to stay alive. Ever since then the elusive stuff had gripped him with a fever.

  That same passion didn’t surface in John. No, for him it was all about revenge. Money was nothing more than a way to count that.

  They worked diligently and with intelligence on that first job, and their history as camp survivors got them information that even money could not have bought. The news they returned with was not good, but it did at least provide their client with dates, places and some sort of closure. The circles that their client moved in were tight knit, and her recommendation meant that several more contracts followed. Gradually, though, the interest in finding relatives dried up, and the commissions then shifted to finding specific paintings, treasured heirlooms and other memorabilia, both worthless and extremely valuable.

  Then, their hunts turned darker. They found the best paid contracts were often for treasures that had been undeclared or over which there were ownership disputes. They had become good at what they did, and John began to resent that he would be hired to find such lost wealth for people who had fled before the war started and then paid only a tiny fraction of the worth of what he tracked down. Why, he wondered, were his clients’ claims on these valuables any stronger than his own?

  At first, fighting Aron’s hesitation had been easy. ‘Why the hell not?’ John had argued, ‘Who do we owe anything to? After all that we went through!’

  Aron didn’t want to take the Jewish riches, neither did John. At first, anyway. But he had come to see it as taking back what the Nazis owed him. He often did the right thing, though. Wherever possible, he anonymously gave money to the organisations helping camp victims find their lost families. And track down those who had committed such evil acts against them, although of Wollner and Sommer there was still never a trace.

  By now, John, as he had been nicknamed, had hunted a fortune in Nazi treasure. He had become one of the world’s sought-after men for taking daring risks to find specific artefacts. He was hired by private collectors across the world.

  John considered himself to be a lucky man. His clients paid him big money to do what had burned inside him since he was ten.

  Get revenge.

  He found the clients a stash of hidden Nazi treasure, tucked away for their Fourth Reich, and by doing so he took revenge on the Nazis for stealing from him. Like millions of people around the world, his clients were increasingly fascinated with German history and Hitler’s war.

  Yet though they fantasised about hidden treasures, they forgot, or at least sanitised in their thoughts, the dark side. Never once had any of the loose cartel his main clients formed asked in any depth about his own history. Never had any of them shown any lasting sadness at the masses of people killed, or at how the war had impacted the whole world.

  Personal items like rings should have been claimed by organisations for those they had been stolen from. It was not just free treasure to be found and claimed by anyone with the resources to seek it out, but increasingly that was how life had become after the war.

  This illicit treasure hunting left a sour taste in John’s mouth and he carried a heavy heart. But he kept doing it for that one, burning reason: to purge the injustice of the day he had watched a German soldier drive away with his aeroplane.

  Quite often John’s quests seemed to end up with him exploring caves, either by himself or with a small group of trusted men. Like today, just him and his brother.

  Of course, some finds ended up with only Nazi paraphernalia, like helmets, knives, compasses, gas masks, cannisters and even the odd dud rifle. That sort of stuff his clients didn’t want, so he sold it privately to small-time collectors. People who were intrigued with the war, and in owning their own small part of it.

  Of course, he could never tell his wife the details of what he did. Nor could he mention that it had been Steffan Sommer’s ghostly trail that had led him to the old airfield near Bremen. He’d thought that he’d hit a dead end, but he had got talking with a farmer about aeroplanes. They must have been about the same age, and it had been a genuine joy to talk about the merits and flaws of the machines that both of them had watched ploughing the skies.

  The farmer wasn’t the gregarious sort, and it seemed to John that opening up like this was a rare experience for him. At some point they had discussed a particular Cessna and a sudden, dark shadow had fallen over the farmer’s face. Hesitantly, he had revealed a story about an English plane coming into their desolate airfield in June 1945 and picking one passenger up. Did he know a name? No, but after the war a man had come there seeking news of his cousin. A man named Sommer.

  John hadn’t shown the slightest reaction, and their conversation had moved on to other planes. It took a lot more research to find out that the plane had landed in Berkshire, close to what had been an RAF base.

  He and Aron had made a journey to the airfield, but there the trail went cold. Scouring the village and surrounding countryside for a Nazi ghost had resulted in him meeting the beautiful Emily, and then finding her pregnant after a few clandestine trysts.

  At first he had considered flight, but as she had done many times in his adult years, Ima had come to him in a dream, and reminded him that he was not someone who ran from problems. So he stayed to face them, and instead of enduring a loveless marriage he had fallen in love.

  With his daughter.

  It was ironic that their baby was so Aryan, with Nordic looks inherited from her mother. Whenever that chubby faced child, who he secretly called Elza, looked at him, his hardened exterior melted. After every fight with Emily, all it took was one look at his little girl and he resolved to stay put.

  Had he met Emily five years previously, when he was living in a rented hovel, she wouldn’t have given him a second glance. By the time he found Sommer’s trail, though, the money had been rolling in for some time and he had acquired the good clothes and airs of the entitled rich that were necessary for the society in which he now often moved. She didn’t ask about his job and he volunteered few details. She was happy with the wealth and suffered from no great need to know where it came from. She happily accepted just that his travelling job as a “specialist engineer” paid handsomely.

  Of course, Emily had never been entirely grateful for her shopping allowance: sometimes it was simply inadequate for all that she desired on her weekend shopping trips to London with friends. Nor that she only had a new car every second year.

  How he would earn the money didn’t enter the equation. She enjoyed her social life, so he could never stop, never go back. That would only turn things upside down.

  To save himself the bitching and moaning, he had promised himself to get out. His trips were based on his clients’ demands, but over the years he’d come across a lot of good leads for valuable, easy to sell loot. He would go into business for himself for a while and sell the finds to the highest bidder. Emily would have everything she wanted, and Sweet-Pea would grow up with no threats, and no notion of what her precious father did on his trips away. In fact, she might even think they were from a long line of rich aristocrats.

  He chuckled. That really sounded good to him. Emily would be content. Anyth
ing for some peace.

  And most importantly, his Sweet-Pea would want for nothing. Their only bone of contention was how much his daughter should be given. While Emily, oblivious to the irony, argued against giving Sweet-Pea everything she desired, John knew he had spoilt her but also there was no way she would be damaged from all the riches he poured onto her. Yes, she had her mother’s exterior beauty, but inside her was a character that was all from him, and it was a thing as hard as diamond.

  His daughter would never, ever suffer as he had done. He wished, as he had done thousands of times, that Ima had lived long enough to meet her little granddaughter.

  Even the day she died, Ima had believed in her God. When he’d scoffed that God was clearly not listening to any of her prayers, she had simply said that God was listening, but He was silent that day.

  The anger made John inhale sharply. God had been silent from the start to the finish of the war. And even now He was silent, and unable to heal those wretched wounds.

  Even the fates of her husband and daughter had not been enough to make her see. Up until the very end, she had preserved her faith in God. In her last hours, Ima had asked him to pray for her safe passage to heaven to meet with Papa. He had refused to pray to a being that did not exist, but had held her hands as she mumbled the prayers. His last words to her were, ‘If your God is up there listening, He will understand and forgive me.’

  Of course, he hadn’t believed that. Nor had he believed he needed forgiving. It was Ima’s God who should beg all the Jews for forgiveness that He had allowed the war to happen.

  Shaking off the abrupt misery that filled him each time his mind strayed into that black hole of sordid memories, John wiped his forehead.

  He bit into an apple from his backpack. He savoured the sweet and juicy taste as he had done every time since those days eating dried out apple peel and thinking himself blessed. Whenever he ate an apple, he would smell it first, rubbing its firm skin along his nose and lips to breathe in the fruity scent. Then, bite by bite, he would swirl it around his mouth, suck its juicy flesh and swallow slowly.