I knew him for a short while, a precious while. In the summer of 1944, just before I left on the mission that ended in my being shot down over Arles, I was stationed in Bastia in the northern part of the island, close to where he was. I had just read The Little Prince almost fresh off the press. Not one of my American colleagues even knew it existed.
But I loved it. I even loved the ending, when the Little Prince, this amazing miniature man from another planet, dies. It was so sad that I had to stick my head under the covers in my cot and cry.
I desperately wanted to meet St. Ex, so I got permission to take a jeep the six miles from our base to the beautiful village of Erbalunga, where his famous squadron was living. I was greeted with surprise. Americans never visited the French, unless they were commanders telling them what to do (despite the fact that the French pilots were often more experienced than the Americans). When I arrived, St. Ex was holding court outdoors after a picnic breakfast that looked and smelled delicious. He was telling a story and the others were listening with rapt attention, their mouths actually hanging open. He noticed me approaching and though I think he knew I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, put a finger to his lips and motioned for me to sit down and listen. He held me spellbound too. I felt I was in the sky with him, soaring with him, crashing with him. When he was done, there was silence. Then he stood up, produced a deck of cards from his sleeve and went through a series of tricks that had us all in stitches. But I noticed that he had scars around his eyes and one that snaked up from his mouth, and I could tell that it was hard for him to stand.
Every day that week in early June, I went back to visit him. He was enchanted by my interest and signed my book. We talked and talked, me in English, he in French, laughing and hugging each other, two citizens of the world communicating with our souls.
I became so enthralled with him that I decided to give him a gift. I liked to carve in those days and found a remarkable glowing pink rock on the beach. I’m not even sure what kind of rock it was. But it was a pretty good size and I carved into it one of his beautiful passages about friendship from The Little Prince, using a little stone chisel and a club hammer from back at the base. When I gave it to him, he was moved to tears and told me that he would keep it with him on every flight he made. He said this as if it were an important promise.
The very next day, I went on my fateful mission over enemy territory and lost touch with St. Ex for more than a month. But when I was rescued, I was taken back to Corsica from Spain for a short while for debriefing. And as soon as I could, I went to see him. I was shocked by his appearance. He seemed to have aged terribly. His body was finished with the world, though his spirit remained. He greeted me with a smile.
The next day I saw him go up on a mission. I had the sense that he was sneaking up, had not been properly cleared to fly. His friends had to tie his shoes for him and help him into the plane. He reached down before he took off and waved to me, holding my rock aloft.
When he was in the air, a French pilot who spoke English remarked to me, “St. Ex has come here to die.”
And so he did.
The following week, on July 31, he took off at about 8:30 am to photograph and map enemy-occupied land in southern France. Some say he had been grounded the day before but went into the skies regardless.
He never came back.
There were many myths about what happened to him. More than one German claimed to have shot the legend down. But no trace of him was found. It was as if he had vanished, age 44, in 1944. In the single saddest day of the Little Prince’s life, there had been 44 sunsets on his tiny planet.
St. Ex had returned to his home in the skies.
I remember my extreme sadness. I remember the anger I felt too, when I heard an American pilot report, about midafternoon, after St. Ex had been gone for too many hours, that a “Frenchie,” who was apparently a writer, had not returned. I wanted to bust him right in the chops.
Within weeks the Allies landed on the southern coast of France and began to squeeze the Nazis from the north and south.
When I got back to North America, I kept waiting to hear news that St. Ex had been found. But Paris fell to us, and then we marched into Germany, found the horrific extermination camps, the coward Hitler killed himself and finally his villains surrendered, but St. Ex never reappeared.
Then, more than half a century later, in 1998, a miracle happened. A fisherman working off the coast of Marseille found a rusted old 1940s bracelet in his net. It bore the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. After a few years of underwater searches, the wreckage of his Lockheed P-38 Lightning was discovered on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea nearby, 250 feet deep. The plane’s fuselage, propellers, landing gear bay and all sorts of other bits and pieces formed a line of debris nearly half a mile long.
His plane had dropped straight down into the water.
Did he decide to leave the earth? Was he hit by enemy fire? No one will ever know. And that seems fitting.
But there is something else that I would like to know, that I need to know.
That fatal day, was St. Ex carrying the gift I gave him? Did my extraordinary friend actually take the mark of our friendship with him to his death?
That is your task, Adam. I will say no more.
TEN
SEARCHING THE DEEPS
I sat and stared at the last page for almost a minute. How, in the name of one of Vanessa Lincoln’s sweaters, was I going to do this? The letter gave me so few clues. Grandpa wasn’t kidding when he said this was beyond difficult. The wreckage had been found more than a decade ago, off the coast of Marseille. Almost every trace of it was gone now and it had been 250 feet deep anyway!
I had only tried underwater diving once, during a holiday Mom and Dad and I went on in the Caribbean two years ago. It had been pretty simple stuff: just puttering around using a snorkel in shallow water as clear as blue glass, looking at exotic fish. We were planning to go again next year and swim with dolphins.
Two hundred and fifty feet deep? That seemed like an awfully long way down. And when I got down there, I’d be looking for a needle in a haystack or, more accurately, a rock in a sea, which was even worse.
But I wasn’t going to give up. The odds had been stacked against me in the first task, and I’d achieved it, hadn’t I? Sort of? I got to my feet and started to pace. Soon I’d made up my mind that there was no use trying to be clever about this. There was only one way I would have any chance of accomplishing the task. It was straightforward. I had to discover exactly where the wreckage had been and then find a way to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Which one first? I wondered if there was some way to kill two birds with one stone. Local divers likely knew all about this famous wreck.
I grabbed the Provençal phone book, which I assumed had Marseilles listings in it. What was the French word for diving? I thought of my private lessons and recalled a related word, the one for swimming pool, because it was so rude. Piscine, pronounced something like “pees-in,” or as I preferred to say, “piss-in.” I remembered having a good laugh at that and telling my friends—all of whom I’m sure had peed in pools at one time or another—about it. For once, being crude was turning out to be helpful. I was sure I could connect the word for pool to the one for diving. Jean dives into the pool. How would you say that? I was certain I had learned it. And then it came to me: Jean plongées dans la piscine. Plongée or something very close to it meant dive! I flipped through the phone book.
There it was: Plongée Sous-Marine. Underwater diving. There were about ten businesses offering scuba-diving instruction to beginners and expeditions for advanced divers. I picked one called Plongée Internationale, whose advertisement was partly in English.
I didn’t want to call them on my cell since I was afraid that I would have a difficult time understanding them. There was a much better chance of us communicating clearly in person, especially considering that I had such a complicated request.
It was just a little p
ast noon. I got a stamp at the front desk, mailed my letter to Vanessa and headed down to the restaurant where the young waitress worked. She was wearing a very short dress today, loose and plain and white, almost see-through, her only decoration a red scarf. But she looked great, of course, seemingly unconcerned about her revealing apparel. She had changed her hair. It was spiked today. She gave me that knowing smile, suggested a different meal and took her time bringing it to me. There was something about her style that made me envious. She didn’t seem anxious about life, the way I was, the way all my friends were back in Buffalo. She seemed to be moving slowly and happily through life, satisfied to be doing what she was doing. I knew there was a word for her. Finally, it came to me. Natural.
The concierge hailed me another cab, and by two o’clock I was headed toward Marseille, a little concerned about ending up somewhere in the city not far from where Mom and Dad were staying. Though I’d been texting them every day, saying I was okay, I didn’t want them to see me or know what I was doing. This was between Grandpa and me.
But I need not have worried. The cabdriver never even entered Marseille. He got on a highway just to the north and drove around the city, dropping me in a suburban area to the south. It was a pretty laid-back neighborhood. There were a few homes and businesses and a sandy beach. The coastline was rocky and led to a point in the Mediterranean. When I got out and stood facing the blue sea, I could see Marseille to my right with its big buildings and docks and rocky islands off its shore. To my left, a few miles in the distance, were more rugged islands and a huge expanse of water, seemingly endless, with almost no horizon. St. Ex had gone down somewhere way out there. Somehow, I was supposed to find a little rock he might have had?
Plongée Internationale was at the far end of a street not more than a two-minute walk from the water, and it was indeed set up for tourists. It was two stories high and fairly large, its stucco exterior painted blue like the sea, with fake palm trees outside and a sign that read We Speak English over the door with an American flag beside it. The building smelled of rubber and seaweed. There wasn’t much to the interior, at least as far as I could see. The first room was small, with a counter and shelves piled high with all sorts of rubber suits and scuba-diving equipment. There were photos on the walls of amazing underwater scenes in crystal-clear blue water and a video of similar adventures played on a screen in the corner of the room. There was a staircase leading upstairs, and I could see a big room through a wide doorway behind the counter. Obviously this outer area was simply for sign up. All the action took place elsewhere.
There was just one man behind the counter. His face was bronzed from the sun and his long hair was reddish and tinged with a gray that streaked through his ponytail and was more prominent on the beard that grew uncontrolled across his face. He was in shorts and a T-shirt bearing the company logo, and his flip-flops snapped on the floor whenever he moved. He looked up when I entered and gave me a smile that was obviously forced. His whole life must have been spent dealing with tourists. I was glad I was tall, since I hoped he’d think I was a little older than sixteen.
“Américain?” he asked.
I wished they’d stop doing that.
“Oui.”
“What can I do for you, my friend?” I didn’t have the sense that he was my friend. But he knew I could pay. I’m sure he was thinking, Young American, out on his own.
I explained what I was after and watched as he smirked.
“What you are asking, my friend, it is impossible.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because, unless you are an internationally acclaimed diver—and I know many of them and they are mostly French—then this cannot be done. Nitrogen narcosis—rapture of the deep—have you heard of that? The bends?”
I considered lying. “No,” I finally said.
“I thought not. Let us just say that that sort of depth is…out of your depth, and most everyone else’s too. C’est impossible! Most tourists we take to maybe fifty feet, maximum. There are regulations too. No one, certainly no tourist, is allowed to go as deep as you want to go.” He looked down at his books again.
“But I need to see that site!”
He raised his head again, as if my comment was a great intrusion on his time and dignity.
“Then you will need an atmospheric diving suit, you know, with a helmet and full body covering.”
“How much?” I took out the bank card my grandfather had given me. The man looked down at it. A sort of greedy expression passed over his face, then disappeared.
“No. Americans, they think they can buy anything.”
“No?”
“You are an amateur, my friend. You said so yourself, before you began with your fantasy story about Saint-Exupéry and his plane. You admitted that you were not experienced at all. I will not put you in a suit!” This time he glared at me.
“But I must—”
“There is nothing to see there! It is all gone, just like him. What are you looking for anyway? He wasn’t carrying gold, you know. He wasn’t that sort of man. What mattered to him was, you know, inside here.” He pointed to his chest.
“I’m not looking for gold. I can’t say what it is.”
“And I cannot help you.” He looked down at his books again and didn’t look up.
I began to walk away, back to the door. This was a disheartening dead-end. I was guessing that all the other diving places would have similar rules. If I couldn’t go down there myself—and that seemed absolutely impossible—I certainly couldn’t trust anyone else with the task of looking for my grandfather’s rock. Maybe I should buy a diving suit from a different supplier, without revealing that I was about to use it, and try this alone? Or pay someone to take me underwater illegally? I stopped at the door.
“Do not consider trying this, in any way,” added the pony-tailed man, who had obviously seen me pause. “If you do it, you will die.”
Well, that ended that possibility. I absolutely couldn’t dive by myself. Was there anything else I could do to make this happen? At least this guy had spoken to me again. Maybe I could get something out of him about the crash site, the wreckage. Maybe he could lead me to the people who found the plane.
“You,” I said, turning around, “you said that there was nothing to see at the site. How do you know that?”
“I have been there.” He wasn’t even looking up.
“You what?”
“Of course!” He looked up and smiled at me. “We all have. This is St. Ex, my friend! This was the greatest find in our lifetime.”
“Where is it?”
He paused. “I suppose there is no harm in telling you. If you stand outside my shop and look to your left, around the point there, you will see a series of islands, an…archipelago, no? L’île de Riou, a place of rocks.”
“Yes.”
“St. Ex went straight down out there that day, some kilometers in that direction over the water, maybe four kilometers from the shore?”
“Really? That is the actual spot?”
“But his body, it has never been found. They will never find it! And we will never know what happened that night. It is a mystery, no? St. Ex, he was a mysterious man. He knew things we do not know. He knew the truth. He has gone back to his planet!”
“I don’t want to find his bones or any—”
“Then, what do you want?”
I said nothing.
He smiled. “You, young man, are an unusual Américain. They never ask about someone like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. They ask only about the nightclubs, the wine, the women or the men. But you—you want to be near the great soul of la France. That is unique; that is admirable.”
I could tell he was leading up to something.
“I know a man here who helped with the St. Ex dives. He is an artist of the waves. He will be impressed with you. He might help you. He has a…what is the word? A submersible?”
“A summer saw blue?” That was honestly what I thought he’d said
. And that comment almost lost it for me. He wasn’t pleased with my imitation of his accent. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t know what he meant.
“Un sous-marin. A submarine,” he said tersely.
“A submarine?”
“A little one. Un petit. A man and a boy could fit in it. I will make a contact to him for you.”
The next day I received a call on my cell from the man at the diving place. He had talked to his friend, who he described first as an oceanographer then as a marine scientist and then as a “guy who likes to invent things,” and told him about my interest in St. Ex. The friend had apparently been impressed. He was planning to make a few dives in his submersible that week and was willing to let me go with him.
I was thrilled out of my mind.
But I wasn’t nearly as thrilled when I met my submarine captain. He was standing on the rocks a few miles east of Plongée Internationale, exactly where I was told he would be, the top of his wet suit stripped off and his hairy, naked back turned to me as he stared out over the sea. He was gazing in the direction of l’île de Riou. It was a gorgeous day, the water deep blue and lapping gently on the shore, the sky a lighter blue and cloudless, the white and gray rocks rising up like sculptures on the islands a few miles away. The sea smelled of fish and algae. The submersible was anchored just offshore, a miniature submarine that looked like the one on the cover of one of Dad’s Beatles’ records from eons ago. It really did. It was even yellow and painted with brightly colored peace signs. It was so small that it looked like a toy. I wondered how the two of us would even get into it. It was patched in places too, which didn’t inspire much confidence. A thick hose lay on the rocks in huge coils, tethering the submersible to what appeared to be a massive oil tank or oxygen chamber. It looked like there were literally miles of that hose. A big truck was parked nearby on the little rocky road. A boy of about thirteen or so stood beside the tank and turned to look at me when I approached, though he never said a word. He was wearing designer jeans that were so low-riding that I could see most of his underwear and the top of the crack of his butt. Not a pretty sight. He wore a torn T-shirt with the words Le Punk on it, and his dark hair was done up in some version of dreadlocks. He completely ignored me as I walked by him and right up to the pilot, who I assumed was his father.
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