The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  M. Vallon embraced his wife and daughters, and they stood together, listening. The siren waned, and then the streets were quiet.

  “It could have been anything,” he said.

  No one was ready to return to bed, so they sat together for a while in the dark at the dining table. M. Vallon said, “When I was on the rue de Rivoli today, I had to pass the Hôtel Meurice. I was not allowed to walk in front of it, where there is the white barrier, so I walked through the Tuileries for some distance. It sickens me, the enemy headquartered in such a magnificent place, in the heart of the pride of Paris.”

  He slammed his fist on the table, an unexpected gesture from this elegant man, Marshall thought.

  In the morning Marshall chatted with Annette as she and Monique prepared for school.

  He said, “Your parents are magnificent. You too. You’re all very brave.”

  “No. We have to be careful, but we must help you. You are our cause. If we don’t help the aviateurs and get them back safely, then we have done nothing.”

  He remembered he was sitting on a divan. She leaned over and gave him a quick two-cheek kiss. Then she lifted her satchel and headed for school.

  “You are very nice,” she said, turning at the door.

  THE PHOTOMATON WAS NO longer there. In its approximate place was a souvenir shop selling gaudy silk scarves, postcards, plastic Eiffel Towers, even berets. The legendary Paris that had been saved from obliteration was now burlesqued by tourist-happy gay Paree. Marshall walked down the Colonnade, past the swank Hôtel Meurice, M. Vallon’s anguished tone echoing in his thoughts. At the place de la Concorde, the view before him was vast and open, like his ardent heart.

  22.

  HE WAS LIKING THE WIDE-OPEN SPACES OF PARIS, THE EASE of movement, the pace. One afternoon he strolled through the Jardin des Plantes. Annette had taken him and another aviator to see animals in a large park, but today the layout of the menagerie at the big botanical garden did not seem at all familiar. He stared at the sad apes and headed for the exit on the rue Linné.

  “MONSIEUR GUY, BONJOUR!” he said with exaggerated good cheer when he arrived at the Everything Store. Guy was his best friend in this city, he thought rashly.

  “Bonjour, Captain, how do you go today?”

  “I go just fine today. And you, Guy?”

  “Comme-ci, comme-ça. A little of the gallbladder.”

  “Quoi?” Marshall didn’t recognize the French term.

  “Next to the liver.”

  “Too much rich food, Guy?”

  Guy shrugged. “It is necessary to eat.”

  Marshall enjoyed poking around the store, gabbing with Guy about his stuff. He seemed to be a pack rat. Marshall had recently discovered some artifacts from the forties among the piles of outdated merchandise. He pored through postcards and photos of warplanes and old sheet music, a miscellany scattered among batteries, shower attachments, art supplies, nails. Guy knew that Marshall was a pilot who had been in France during the war and was seeking the past, but he had volunteered little of his own. He had said, “I was only a little child.”

  Today Guy pumped him for the story, and Marshall stayed for a long time, telling Guy about hiding out in Paris during the war. Guy listened as though he was turning over a problem in his mind.

  Finally Guy said, “I have often heard the older people say to the younger ones, ‘Il vous faudrait une bonne guerre’—you need a good war. They meant so we could understand the hardship of life. But the ones who were résistants would not say that. They were disgusted by war.” He paused and stared into the labyrinth of his store.

  “I would not wish a war on my child,” Guy said.

  WAITING FOR NICOLAS’S NEXT REPORT, Marshall passed a few days uneventfully, watching himself settle into some vague routines. In the mornings he ate cornflakes or eggs in his kitchen, then went to the tabac up the street for a double express. He liked it better than his own experimental brews. He bought bread from the boulangerie, lugged his laundry to a woman down the block, explored the neighborhood. He walked through the corner church whose bells he heard so frequently. It was the Saint-Pierre de Montrouge, at place Victor Basch. The names were just words to him. He made a circuit of the pews and altars, but he did not know what to look for. He explored Montmartre, ate a croque monsieur at a sidewalk table, and mounted the steps of the Sacré Coeur but didn’t go inside. After buying a small TV from the Everything Store, he found a news-debate program he enjoyed and was pleased that he could more or less follow the fast-talking Frenchmen. He rediscovered jumping jacks and push-ups. He couldn’t find anywhere to buy a pack of peanuts.

  At the bank, he changed another two hundred dollars into franc notes. Then reluctantly he arranged to meet Gordon Webb on his next stopover in Paris.

  23.

  WHEN THEY MET IN THE LOBBY OF THE PAN AM CREW HOTEL, Gordon Webb saluted Marshall and invited him for a drink in the bar. Wearing khakis and a polo shirt, he looked ready for a round of golf. At first Marshall didn’t notice a resemblance between Gordon and the resolute pilot of the Dirty Lily, but later he heard Lieutenant Webb’s voice in Gordon’s guffaw. The kid had a loud laugh, just like his father.

  “Well, Marshall Stone,” Gordon said after they had been served drinks. “I tell you, right now I’m bored with airline flying. I miss all that shaky-do flying I did in ’Nam! I bet you miss those Big-Ass Birds.”

  “The B-17 wasn’t very shaky-do, not like you mean in a fighter.”

  “You’re putting me on. I’ve seen films of 17s damn near doing rolls.”

  “Well, maybe,” Marshall said. “But you can bet those crews needed to wash out their shorts when they got back to base.”

  “That’s a joke,” he added when Gordon didn’t respond.

  Gordon said, “I’m thirty-eight. I did three tours in ’Nam. I signed on with Pan Am five years ago. After flying reconnaissance, the airline is like milk runs. Pretty dull.”

  “Times have changed,” Marshall said, smearing water from his glass around on the table.

  “I flew the fastest. I flew recon. I flew the Voodoo, the One-Oh-Wonder.” Gordon made sweeping, swirling motions with his hands, a bird angling and diving.

  For a while, Gordon described his hairiest flights in the F-101, and Marshall found himself both envious and eager to quit the subject. He glanced intermittently at the TV screen—the largest he had seen in Paris—that hovered above the zinc bar. Gordon’s voice drowned out the TV and the quiet conversations of the others in the room. The waiters scurried past unobtrusively.

  At last, with his second drink, Gordon asked about his father’s last flight. Marshall remembered how he had taken over the plane because he thought Webb had the jim-jams. This was not what he told Gordon.

  24.

  IT WAS A TENSE MISSION, BUT MARSHALL WAS GEARED UP FOR IT. Rocking and swaying, he rode the rolling air as the formation of nearly a thousand fully loaded heavy bombers clawed their way to Frankfurt. The Dirty Lily behaved herself. The formation was so huge—a great dragon, a sky serpent, miles and miles long—that no single bomber was in much danger. Enemy fighters could maul a squadron far in front or far behind, they could blast the guts out of bomber after bomber, but your own squadron might sail along undisturbed.

  With all their guns, B-17s truly were flying fortresses, Marshall believed then. He remembered the strangeness of flying with stacked bombs at his back and gunners all around—pickets on duty, manning the ramparts. The pilots sat high in the cockpit like kings on thrones, commanding their airborne castles.

  As the Dirty Lily advanced into Germany, a swarm of Messerschmitts appeared in the distance. They whipped through a high squadron far ahead. Marshall could see the winking lights of machine-gun fire.

  An Me-109 came closer, diving toward a nearby squadron.

  “Bandit at two o’clock,” the right waist gunner called to the crew. Hootie’s tone was as nonchalant as if he were offering a passing hello to a ground crewman.

  Now
other crewmen got on the inter-phone.

  “Where’s our escort?”

  “They’re coming.”

  “We need P-51s,” Webb said.

  Marshall didn’t see any friendlies.

  As usual, the chatter was nervous, self-mocking, and incoherent. Webb had never succeeded in imposing discipline.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Adjust, adjust.”

  “No, we’re clear.”

  Marshall was imagining what he would write to Loretta. The enemy fighter was like a devilish insect tormenting a cow in a herd. Up close, the interceptors were more like vampire bats. No, not that at all.

  “Can you see, can you see?”

  “Oh, say can you see.”

  “There’s more of them—”

  “There’s a Mustang—a little friend!”

  “That one’s ours all right.”

  “This is tight.… Hold on.”

  “Stop it, guys,” Webb said. “Pipe down.”

  An Me-109 was spiraling, aflame. The sky ahead was chaotic, with tracers and shell bursts scratching the blue like an electrical storm. Strange colors and breezes whirled aloft. It was not real. It was a show. We know what we’re doing, Marshall thought.

  He had been such a smart-aleck, he thought now.

  Several Me-109s were tagging one of the planes ahead. Webb was jiggling and shimmying, to spoil the fighters’ aim, although they weren’t shooting yet. Some were getting closer, but nothing to worry about yet. In the Dirty Lily’s nose compartment, the bombardier and the navigator were working their guns. In the rear, machine guns hammered sporadically. The plane shook with the recoil. Marshall vibrated in his seat, which he had reinforced with a piece of metal from the repair post.

  Then the fighters melted away. The squadron was approaching the target—the grid of factory buildings, the roadways the crew had been told to expect.

  “She’s yours, bombardier,” Webb called to Al Grainger. Webb eased back from the yoke.

  The flak guns down below opened up. Batteries of 88s filled the sky with exploding fragmentation shells—great puffs of greasy black smoke with crimson fire in the center, bursts of lethal metal splinters whistling through the air. The agitation from the shells whipped up the already tempestuous sky, but the Dirty Lily bored straight ahead through the black blotches, held steady by the bombardier. This was anus-puckering time. The flak seemed close enough to touch. Jerry flak was accurate, as flak went.

  Marshall pictured Al Grainger leaning over his bombsight and gently maneuvering the Dirty Lily with slight twists of his control knobs. The pilots could only sit and wait. There were no atheists on a bomb run, Grainger always said.

  When the bomb-bay doors opened, a rush of freezing air blasted the crew.

  “Shut the door!” Marshall called, as usual, waiting for Grainger to toggle the bomb switch. Sweating out the bomb run seemed to take hours.

  Grainger called, “Bombs away!” and the Dirty Lily lifted, suddenly lighter and buoyant. Webb instantly grabbed the controls again. The front of the formation was bending back. The huge dragon was slowly wheeling around to begin tearing and pawing its way homeward. The sky was graying, but the weather would hold. They could see below them tracer smoke and then the multicolored smoke blooms from the falling bombs.

  There was more flak. Marshall heard bits of it hitting the fuselage. It was raining metal.

  Then the plane jerked. Something heavier had hit them. It didn’t register for a moment. Marshall saw smoke puff from the #4 engine. The engine began to sputter.

  “Shut down number four!” Webb commanded. “Feather the prop!”

  Marshall yanked the throttle and punched the feather button as quickly as he could.

  “Done,” he said.

  Underpowered, the Dirty Lily was sluggish again, and they were unable to keep up with the other Forts. The drag on the starboard wing was severe. Losing speed, she was dropping from formation. Marshall struggled to trim the plane, while Webb pushed the yoke forward and descended. They needed to get away from the action, where they wouldn’t be noticed. They hoped the Dirty Lily’s olive-and-gray camouflage paint would make them inconspicuous. Alone, a straggler, she would be easy prey.

  “We can get back on three engines,” Webb said, stating the obvious.

  Webb was too calm, Marshall thought. That was because this wasn’t really happening.

  Marshall didn’t know what had hit them. Probably flak. But maybe it was a chunk of metal blown off a Fort. The sky was a pandemonium of random debris, shells and fragments, ragged junk, pieces of airplanes.

  This wasn’t what he had imagined back in flight school. This was all wrong.

  WHEN THEY WERE LOW enough to doff their oxygen masks, Webb sent Marshall back to the waist to inspect for damage. The waist gunners were scanning the skies through their open windows. Marshall noted some flak rips in the plane’s skin, but nothing serious—a few punctures, a couple of jagged metal bits of flak underfoot. The fuselage was cramped, crew jammed together ass to elbow. But the light coming through the windows was dazzling.

  Then, as Marshall turned back toward the cockpit, the light flickered. A wisp of cloud washed past. Then another. Marshall hurried forward. Through the cockpit windows he saw a lovely drift of whiteness in front of them. Clouds. Webb burrowed into the mass. The lighting dimmed. They were inside a soft gray haze, concealed from sight.

  “Thank God,” Webb said, as Marshall slid into his seat. “If this cloud-bank goes far enough.…”

  He didn’t need to say more. If they could work their way west hidden within clouds, Jerry wouldn’t spot them.

  They flew on, steady and cold and watchful. They alternated. Webb flew for a while, then handed off to Marshall. From time to time, they dipped below the clouds so the navigator could get a peek at the ground, to correct his position coordinates. The crew was grim and silent. Marshall refused to believe they might not reach base. The trip home should be simple now, a steady push into the west. Slow, maybe, but they would get there. They were having steak and ice cream at mess that night, rare treats.

  “Webb, I need you to drop below again.” It was Campanello, the navigator.

  “Roger.”

  Webb took the controls from Marshall and eased back the throttles. The plane sank gracefully toward brightness below. She floated downward into the clear. Marshall was counting the seconds till they could climb again.

  They depended on Campanello to guide them home. On the way over, there was no need to navigate. They had played follow-the-leader, the sky full of Forts all going in the same direction, and Campanello could take it easy. But now, with his compass, ruler, and a pencil, and only a few glimpses at the world below, he had to take them home by dead reckoning.

  Lily lifted up into the clouds again.

  THEY HAD BEEN FLYING more than an hour, disbelief masking dread. They were still swaddled in clouds when a Focke-Wulf 190 suddenly appeared alongside Marshall’s starboard window, materializing out of the gray mist. Marshall and the German pilot spotted each other at the same moment, and each froze. The Jerry’s leather helmet was pushed back, exposing a patch of bright blond hair. Then the FW-190 flipped and vanished.

  “Bandit starboard!” Marshall yelled on the inter-phone just as he heard the guns open up.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “Did you see that guy?”

  “Let’s get the hell home,” Webb said, muttering half to himself, half to Marshall.

  How did the 190 find them? He would circle back, if he could. Marshall called to the gunners, “Don’t blink!”

  It must have been sheer, lousy chance, he thought. Fighters were looking for them, but the chance of finding them in the clouds was one in a million. And finding them again, unlikely.

  But the FW would alert others. More German fighters would be looking for them now. A straggler. A defenseless Yank.

  “Those big Fritzes get ambitious when Goering threatens to send them to the Russian fro
nt,” Marshall said. “He promised them an Iron Cross for every Fort.”

  They flew on, Webb maneuvering only a little, a slight zigzag in the clouds. There was a nervous babble on the inter-phone for a while, but it died down.

  The silence of the inter-phone then was like the crew holding its breath. When Marshall wasn’t scanning the cloud-clogged skies, he steadied himself by methodically reviewing the compass, the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, making a constant inventory of the instruments. Could we speed up? Could we trim better?

  Webb, exhausted, handed off to Marshall while he wrote up the data in his log. They seemed to be flying in slow motion. It was eerie, timeless. They pushed through the enveloping grayness, at times seeming not to move at all. Marshall’s eyes were stinging. He had to remind himself to blink. He had hardly noticed when they came down out of the sub-zero cold.

  Slowly they groped their way, fighting the yoke and rudder pedals, trying to pile up the miles behind them. An hour of this. Or was it a day? Or a week?

  The hands of the chronometer crept ahead but didn’t seem to have any meaning. The Dirty Lily skulked through the grog. They were slinking toward home.

  We won’t die, Marshall said to himself. We might not die.

  Then the clouds began breaking up. Damn. Adrenaline pulsed higher. The vapor around them thinned, broke apart, and gradually evaporated. They were in the open.

  It must be Belgium down there, unless they had angled down over France. No sign of the Channel, unless it was the blue haze on the horizon.

  Farmland, a river, a village—a mile or so below. Marshall could make out a stone church. More villages and fields.

  Campanello was calling through the inter-phone the name of the river below when a Jerry fighter bore in on them from dead ahead. Grainger yelled out, “Attack! Attack! Twelve o’clock level.”

  —Grainger was shooting.

  —The plane jolted.

  —The Plexiglas nose cone shattered.

  —Bullets smacked the back of the pilots’ control panel.