Aces

by T. E. Cruise

  “Herman? Did it work?” Teddy demanded.

  “Like a fucking charm,” Gold said.

  Both men were quiet for a split-second, and then both burst out laughing.

  “Oh, Lord, I’d give anything to be a fly on the wall in the room when Tim finds out he already owns most of your Skyworld stock. He will be shit-faced!”

  “It may be a while before what I did comes to light,” Gold said. “And that’s fine with me.”

  There had been a renewed flurry of trading in Skyworld following the publicity surrounding Campbell’s court injunction against Gold’s stock-issue ploy. Gold had used the increased market activity to camouflage his selling off all but a fraction of his Skyworld holdings. His investment broker cooperated by disposing of Gold’s stock through certain brokerage houses and other friendly outlets.

  “Now that you mentioned it, I hope Tim doesn’t find out, for Hull’s sake,” Teddy said. “And for the sake of the deal.”

  Gold had done all he could to remain anonymous, but it was Hull’s cooperation that had been crucial. Campbell had delegated to Hull the authority to buy as much Skyworld as he could, no matter the price, as long as the buy was made prior to the stockholders’ meeting. Despite all of Gold’s precautions in disposing of his Skyworld holdings, Hull could have found out who was putting up such large blocks of stock if he’d asked the right questions. It was Hull’s promise not to ask those questions that assured Gold that he could make good on his own, earlier promise to his old friend: everyone had gotten something they wanted, but everyone had paid a price.

  “Don’t worry. Hull’s got a defense when the truth comes to light,” Gold replied. “Tim’s Achilles’ heel is that he thinks he’s so much damned smarter than everyone else. All Hull has to do is say that I tricked him, like I tricked Campbell. Tim will buy that. He has to. He needs Hull to handle the day-to-day running of his airline. And don’t worry about Tim’s promise to buy our airplanes. You know him as well as I do. He’ll stick to his word, even if he was tricked into giving it.”

  “So how do you feel about it all?” Campbell asked.

  “Tim and Hull have their company. I’ve lost Skyworld, but I’ve made a lot of money in the last couple of days, and the GC-1 Monarch is getting the leg-up on the competition that will help it to dominate the industry. What’s most important to me, personally, is that it looks like we can all remain friends.”

  “Not bad,” Teddy said. “Considering that during the past couple of years you’ve become only marginally interested in the airline business, anyway.”

  “I owe it all to Tim.” Gold laughed. “I’ve never forgotten the lesson he taught me years ago: ‘Never give anything away.’”

  BOOK V:

  1933–1943

  * * *

  AMERICA TOASTS TO PROHIBITION’S REPEAL—

  The Drink’s on Us,” Lawmakers Tell a Thirsty Nation—

  Philadelphia Bulletin–Journal

  HITLER ELECTED TO BE NEW HEAD OF STATE—

  Germans Swear Allegiance to their Führer—

  New York Gazette

  GOLD AVIATION AND TRANSPORT WINS 1934

  ROSS TROPHY—

  GC-2 Monarch Airliner Takes Aviation’s Top Award—

  FDR Congratulates GAT Founder Herman Gold at WhiteHouse Fete—

  Baltimore Globe

  LUFT HANSA COMMERCIAL AIRLINE SPANS GLOBE—

  Goering Named German Air Minister—

  RAF Calls Luft Hansa a Smokescreen for Secret WarBuildup—

  London Post

  U.S. WAR DEPT. HOLDS AVIATION CONFERENCE—

  Aviation Industry Vows to Answer Call for a New HeavyBomber—

  Herman Gold Rebuffed on Fighters—

  GAT Founder Told the Future of Air Power Belongs tothe Bomber—

  Aviation Trade magazine

  JAPANESE FLEET INVADES CHINESE PORT OF SWATOW—

  Both Sides Shell Each Other at Yuntung River—

  Chinese Leader Chiang Kai-shek Warns That War IsImminent—

  Boston Times

  GERMANY ENTERS INTO PACTS WITH ITALY,

  JAPAN—

  Mussolini Describes “Axis” Around Which Powers MayWork Together—

  San Francisco Post

  FRANCE, ENGLAND DECLARE WAR ON

  GERMANY—

  Los Angeles Banner

  U.S. ENTERS WAR AFTER JAPS BOMB PEARL

  HARBOR—

  Washington Star Reporter

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  (One)

  Hotel Regina

  Venice, Italy

  10 June 1938

  Gold was awakened by the low rumble of a motor launch cruising past the hotel. He was all alone in the big, canopied bed. Erica, wide awake and dressed, was finishing putting on her makeup at the mirrored vanity table.

  She saw him looking at her in the mirror, and threw him a kiss. “It’s close to nine, sleepyhead. I’m on my way out.”

  “Where are you off to?” Gold mumbled, stretching under the covers.

  “Suzy and I had breakfast sent up. We want to get an early start sightseeing so we can catch the first of the races before lunch.”

  “What about Steven?”

  “He’s a sleepyhead, like his father,” Erica said. “He thinks sightseeing is sissy stuff, so I told him he could come along with you, later.”

  “Fine.” Gold yawned, and sat up in bed. Erica was donning a plum-colored hat. Gold watched, amused, as she intently experimented with the rake of its wide brim in the mirror. She caught him looking, and stuck out her tongue at him as she stood up. “Well, do you approve?” she demanded, pirouetting.

  Gold smiled. She had on a long-sleeved, tan silk dress, cinched snugly at the waist with a braided leather belt. Her white anklets were turned down over sand-colored, suede bucks with red crepe soles.

  “Like a dewy young school girl,” he said. “He patted the bed. Care to come over here and fool around with a dirty old man?”

  “You sleep late, you miss out. See you at the races, to coin a phrase,” she said gaily, grabbing her purse as she swept out of the bedroom. Gold heard her out in the sitting room, rapping on Suzy’s bedroom door and telling her to hurry up.

  He got out of bed and wrapped himself in his robe. He heard his wife and daughter leaving the hotel suite as he padded barefoot across the Persian carpet to throw open the French doors and step out onto the bedroom’s balcony. It was a magnificent morning, clear and warm, with no humidity, thanks to the spicy sea breeze blowing in from the lagoon. Sunlight dappled the opalescent waters of the Grand Canal. The play of light and shadow embellished the unbroken line of stately, pastel-hued, quay-side palaces, their stone bulwarks etched by the centuries, grown dark and mossy down near the waterline. A gondolier, as timeless as Venice in his striped jersey, was poling his sleek, black, cigar-shaped craft toward the grand, baroque domes of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, on the opposite side of the canal. A motor launch, a green and black, steam-powered vaporetto, passed by, churning up a frothy wake that set the spidery gondola rocking. The gondolier protested the indignity with a baleful shout as he shook his fist at the fast-departing launch.

  Gold went back inside, through the bedroom, and into the parlor. Their hotel suite had three bedrooms and two baths, arranged off of this sitting room. The suite was furnished with antiques and hung with tapestries. One entire wall of the parlor was glass, opening up onto a waterside terrace that stretched the length of the room.

  Gold knocked on Steven’s bedroom door, telling his son to get up and get dressed. As he returned to his own bedroom, to shower and shave, and select the day’s wardrobe from the armoire, its lacquered doors inlaid with mother-of-pearl, he found himself whistling in happy anticipation.

  Venice held fond memories for him. The last time he had been here was back in 1936, a purely frivolous detour during a business trip that was in itself both a great pleasure and a triumphant vindication.

  GAT’s p
rototype, twin-engine, Monarch GC-1 airliner debuted in the summer of 1933, to a resoundingly positive industrywide reception. The airplane was everything that Gold had hoped, but the GC-1 never saw mass production. While GAT was tooling up its production lines, Teddy Quinn and his people worked out a way to stretch the Monarch’s fuselage to allow for two more passengers. It was this “stretched” version, dubbed the GC-2, that was put into production and delivered to Tim Campbell’s Skyworld Airline. Soon after, Tim Campbell would say that the smartest move he’d ever made was to let Herman Gold con him into buying the Monarch.

  In 1934 the GC-2 won the coveted Ross Trophy, one of the aviation industry’s highest honors. Gold would never forget the award presentation ceremony, held in the Rose Garden of the White House, and that sublime moment when President Roosevelt shook his hand in congratulations, while Erica and the kids looked on…

  Nineteen thirty-four also saw FDR charge that the airlines were operating as an illegal cartel, and cancel all the route assignments awarded under the Watres Act. Gold took no pleasure in being proved right. He wanted things to go well for Tim Campbell and Hull Stiles. The government invited new bids on the routes, but in order to “punish” those who had participated in the cartel, no airline that had previously held a route could participate. The airlines got around that by simply changing their names: Campbell’s Skyworld Airlines became Skyworld, Incorporated on its new papers. A potentially more serious restriction was that no contract would be awarded to any airline that still employed anybody who had attended the original conference in Washington to divvy up the routes, held just after the Watres Act had been passed, in 1930.

  Gold was worried for Campbell; it looked as if the government was going to force Campbell’s exile from his beloved Skyworld. It turned out that Gold needn’t have been concerned about his old friend, who was a master of manipulating technicalities. Campbell merely resigned his position as president, put Hull Stiles in charge, and stayed on, taking no salary, as chairman emeritus. Campbell was already a very rich man, so the lack of a salary did not hurt him. Technically, he was no longer employed by the airline, he was merely an “investor”; nevertheless, no decision concerning Skyworld was made without the prior approval of the “retired president.”

  Gold and Campbell had become better friends now that they no longer had to argue about business. They got together once a month or so, for cocktails and dinner. They’d talk about recent happenings in the aviation industry, and reminisce about their old times. The one thing they never talked about was what Campbell’s reaction had been when he’d found out how Gold had unloaded his Skyworld stock on the sly. That entire episode seemed to be closed, and Gold was content to leave well enough alone.

  In 1936 the firm of Rogers and Simpson perfected a more powerful radial engine, which GAT utilized to make possible the Monarch GC-3, a deluxe, larger version of the GC-2. The “3” could sleep fourteen or seat twenty-one, in addition to a three-man crew. It was faster, sturdier, more comfortable than its predecessor, and even easier to fly. It came equipped with the latest radio aids, an autopilot, and a hydraulic system for raising and lowering the landing gear. Its large seating capacity meant that for the first time an airline could run profitably just hauling passengers and not worry about supplementing income with cargo shipments. The GC-3 sold for one hundred thousand dollars, and Gold couldn’t build them fast enough. The influx of orders enabled Gold to complete phase-two construction at the Burbank complex, effectively doubling his production output. Gold also established a training school to which the airlines could send their mechanics tuition-free in order to learn how to maintain the Monarch GC series. Pretty soon, the GC was the only airplane that most airline mechanics knew how to fix, and that suited GAT just fine.

  When virtually every airline in America was either flying or waiting delivery of his airplane, and the United States Army and Navy had put in their orders for modified cargo carrier versions, Gold decided it was time to widen GAT’s territory. That was when he and Erica made their grand tour of Europe, mixing business with pleasure as Gold sold the GC-3 to foreign airlines.

  “I’m ready, Pop,” Steven said, poking his head through the doorway of the bedroom.

  “I’ll be right out,” Gold called, as his son disappeared back into the parlor. He patted the pockets of his silk tweed sports jacket to make sure he had everything he needed. He grabbed his white linen fedora and went out into the sitting room. Steven was out on the terrace, leaning over the balcony, his silky blond hair lifting in the breeze. Gold’s son was wearing chino slacks and an open-necked white shirt like his own, and a dark-blue, summer-weight wool blazer with gold buttons. As Steven came back inside, Gold noticed that the blazer looked tight across his son’s shoulders, and short in the sleeves. The blazer was only a few months old, but Steven, who was already big for his age, was growing like a weed.

  They went downstairs, and had breakfast in the hotel dining room. Steven chattered madly throughout the meal, excited about the races. Gold shared his enthusiasm. The Moden Seaplane Trophy International Competition, like the Schneider Race, was a series of closed-circuit elimination races over water, restricted to flying boats or airplanes equipped with pontoons. The competition was open to any government organization or private individual. There were more than two dozen airplanes entered, but by the time the final race took place, a few days from now, weather permitting, the field would have been narrowed to the top five airplanes. The races would be taking place off the Lido’s wide, flat, seaside bathing beach. It was going to be lovely in the family’s private viewing box, high atop the official grandstand, enjoying the sun and the ocean breeze, looking down at the lollypop-colored beach umbrellas and sipping lemonade as the sleek race planes went buzzing like gaudy bees around and around the pylons erected offshore…

  Gold and his son left the restaurant, and were cutting through the hotel’s ornate lobby, a baroque fantasy of pink marble, silk-flocked walls, and stained glass, when they were intercepted by a bellhop who led them over to the concierge’s desk.

  The concierge handed Gold a sealed envelope. Gold tore it open, then checked his pockets for his reading glasses. He realized that he’d left them upstairs. Hell, he always forgot something. By squinting, and holding the note at arm’s length, he managed to read it. He was surprised to see that it was in German.

  “I don’t believe it!” Gold exclaimed. “It’s from Heiner Froehlig, of all people!”

  “Who’s that?” Steven asked.

  “A friend… At least, he was, once.” Gold shrugged. “I told you about him… Froehlig was my chief mechanic back during the war. Remember? I told you how he and I used to work together on my Fokker tri-plane?”

  “Oh yeah,” Steven said.

  Gold smiled, lost in memories. “God, Heiner and I were the best of friends in those days…”

  “You never told me what happened between you,” Steven said. “Why aren’t you friends now?”

  “Well, the fact that I’m a Jew complicated things…”

  “Why?”

  Gold smiled. “I’m glad you don’t know. I’ll tell you about it, someday.”

  Steven nodded. “Pop, we’ve got to get to the races!”

  Gold hesitated. “I haven’t seen this man in almost twenty years. Now he’s here in Venice, and wants to see me.”

  “You mean right now?”

  Gold nodded. “He’s invited me for coffee at a cafe in Saint Mark’s Square.”

  “And I guess you want to see him?”

  “I’m very curious about all this, Steven.”

  “What about the races?” his son asked, looking crestfallen.

  “Saint Mark’s Square is right on the way to where we catch the motor launch to the Lido,” Gold promised. “Don’t worry, I’ll just have a quick cup of coffee. We won’t be delayed long.”

  They left the hotel, walking up to the Calle Larga 22 Marzo, where they turned left. They passed the midmorning shoppers frequenting the stalls
as they walked toward the Piazza di San Marco.

  Thankfully, Venice seemed relatively untouched by the political turmoil in Rome, and in the rest of Europe. During Gold’s first visit, back in ‘36, Mussolini had just been embarking on his Ethiopian campaign, and loudly pledging to keep Austria independent. The Italian dictator’s successes in Africa, coupled with his defiance of Hitler’s intended Anschluss—the union of Germany with Austria—had made Mussolini a hero among his people. The cafes of Venice had rung with laughter and joyous talk about how Rome would once again take its place as a great power.

  Since then the future had darkened, beginning when the Italians and Germans had joined together to aid Franco’s revolution in Spain. The Spanish Civil War had begun to wind down, but in March of this year, Hitler, despite his assurances to the Italians, had sent his troops into Austria. The Germans had advanced as far as the Brenner Pass, the Alpine gateway to Italy. Mussolini had been humiliated in the eyes of the world by Hitler’s action, but if the Italian dictator had been upset by Hitler’s breach of faith, he was doing a good job of hiding it. Gold had followed with regret and anger Germany’s persecution of its Jews. Now, Mussolini, emulating Hitler, had begun issuing anti-Semitic proclamations.

  The powder-keg international situation, along with the Italian government’s officially sanctioned hostility toward Jews, had originally made Gold reluctantly decide to not come to the races, but then a number of factors led him to change his mind. He did adore Venice, and now that his two kids were old enough to travel abroad, Gold wanted them to experience the city’s magic. There were also sound business reasons to make the visit. While GAT did not have an official entry in the races, Gold’s company did have an interest in the competition’s outcome. GAT had lent its technical expertise, and substantial financial sponsorship, to the race team fielded by an English firm, the Stoat-Black Aircraft Company. Gold had met the executives of Stoat-Black in 1936, while trying to sell the British on the GC-3, with little initial success. The British Airline executives, to their discomfort but out of national pride, were wedded to their home-built, lumbering, De Havilland and Handley Page airliners, despite the fact that they were far slower and more expensive to operate than GAT’s GC series. The British had wanted to buy, they just didn’t know how to climb down off of their jingoistic high horse in order to do so. Gold solved the problem by subcontracting to Stoat-Black the assembly of his airliners destined for England and the Continent. The solution worked out well for everyone: Gold was able to make a profitable sale, and take some of the pressure off of his overtaxed Burbank facility; the English were able to keep a stiff upper lip, and still buy the airplanes they wanted. Since then, GAT and Stoat-Black had worked together on a seaplane project for the RAF’s Coastal Command, in addition to the prototype fighter/race plane entered in the Moden Competition.