Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  The next afternoon, a TWA pilot flying a SkyRanger II reported seeing the wreckage of a green bomber on the slopes of one of the Sierras. It took a rescue team two days to reach the plane and radio back that Beryl Suydam, the queen of British airwomen, was dead. The cause? A faulty altimeter. The instrument had told her she was flying at twenty thousand feet when she was actually at twelve thousand—and the mountain was eighteen thousand feet.

  Adrian had every altimeter in Buchanan Aircraft tested. All worked perfectly. Why had this one failed? He summoned production chief Buzz McCall to his office and asked him. “How the hell do I know?” Buzz said.

  Buzz could have done it. He had killed twenty-three pilots on the western front in World War I. Adrian had heard him boast about strafing German trenches. If a British agent came to Buzz and said it was time to dispose of Beryl, Buzz would have simply nodded and agreed to maladjust the altimeter.

  A sleepless night later, Ponty visited Adrian’s office to ask Buchanan Aircraft to stage a memorial service for Beryl. “Go to hell,” Adrian said. “Hold it at the British consulate in San Francisco.”

  Ponty sighed. “This is the last favor I will ask, Adrian. I’m flying back to England next week to help organize underground resistance in France and Italy.”

  “Did you have anything to do with fixing that altimeter?” Adrian said.

  “My old friend,” Ponty said. “I am not, strictly speaking, a member of British intelligence. But I understand certain things. Walls have ears. For those who play the great game, they have always had that peculiar quality—but now electronics makes the most private moments audible.”

  “It wasn’t necessary! She was ready to change sides!”

  Ponty lit a cigarette and looked out the window at a half-dozen new bombers waiting to be flown to North Dakota. “Adrian—surely you must know this arrangement between us and the Russians is a marriage of convenience that won’t survive the war, presuming we win it. They are enemies of all the things we value. You and I can’t really estimate what Sergei might mean to us in twenty years. You were wrong to sacrifice him. Wrong to place your personal desire ahead of history’s imperatives.”

  Ponty put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder. “Yet I understand, old friend. I understand why you did it. She was very beautiful.”

  Adrian wept. For Beryl and the self he had chosen to become, the boy, the man who vowed to learn history’s lessons, to play by rules that only the powerful understood. “We’ll stage—we’ll hold the memorial service,” he said.

  To Adrian’s surprise, Amanda offered to go to the service with him. As the British consul and a half-dozen British film stars praised Beryl’s courage and patriotism, Adrian sat in a cockpit of private sorrow. Through the window he peered at his wife. Should he try to persuade her to love him again?

  To his amazement, Amanda seemed to be thinking similar thoughts. That night as they were going to bed, she put her arms around him. “Adrian,” she said. “I can see how much she meant to you. She was a woman you loved in England, I’m sure of it. She talked you into building those bombers. I know you’re not religious and neither am I in the ordinary sense. But I do believe in the great precepts. The wages of sin is death. Doesn’t this prove it?”

  “I don’t think it proves anything of the sort,” Adrian said.

  “Perhaps not. But I thought we might try to love each other again. All you have to do is tell me you won’t build another warplane.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Adrian said.

  In a world already half engulfed by war, this naive woman was telling him to abandon the great game. Adrian vowed to go on playing it, to accumulate enough power and wealth to bar ruined from his soul, no matter what it cost him.

  “I knew that would be your answer,” Amanda said. “I had to ask the question.”

  For a moment Adrian sensed he was losing something precious—a chance to regain that youthful mixture of idealism and pity and desire that had drawn him to Amanda. So be it, he told himself. He was too absorbed by his grief and his determination to stay in the great game to wonder why his wife felt compelled to give him one last chance to love her.

  AT WAR IN EDEN

  On the third day of the year 1941, Amanda Van Ness put her nine-year-old daughter Victoria on the school bus and drove to Santa Monica Hospital to take Frank Buchanan home to his house in Topanga Canyon. He had made an amazing recovery from his injuries. Within a week of the crash, he was sitting up in bed reworking the Nelson bomber’s design to give it the speed the British wanted without the extra propellers that had almost killed him.

  The doctors warned him not to go to work for at least six months. Buzz McCall arranged for the work to come to Frank. Buchanan Aircraft was competing for dozens of contracts from the U.S. Army and Navy for every imaginable kind of plane. Congress, prodded by Franklin Roosevelt, had begun rearming the United States to deal with a world in which German power might be awesomely dominant.

  For Amanda this only meant a renewed commitment to America First. Frank remained equally committed to keeping America neutral. He told Amanda that the planes he was designing would prevent a war because no one would dare to attack a strong United States. Amanda listened without argument, waiting for a sign that Frank was ready to respond to her declaration of love.

  Frank was sitting on his hospital bed, dressed and smiling. Skin grafts had repaired most of the burn damage to his face and hands. His only disability was a limp. His right leg, which had been badly shattered, was still weak. He leaned on Amanda’s arm as they walked to the parking lot. The temperature was in the seventies. The sun poured down and Amanda felt something—a voice or a single string of an instrument—begin to vibrate within her.

  Frank was so quiet. He barely spoke as they drove through a changing landscape. People were surging into California by the tens of thousands. Clusters of houses were springing up on every other hillside. “From what I hear, half of them are probably working for you,” Amanda said.

  “Buzz told me they hired another thousand men last week,” Frank said. “They’re buying up all the houses on about four square blocks to expand the factory. Adrian predicts we’ll go over ten thousand by the end of the year.”

  “He adores it,” Amanda said. “I’ve never seen him so happy.”

  In a half hour they were winding through the green stillness in Topanga Canyon. There were no crowds of newcomers here; only a scattered handful of “settlers,” as they liked to call themselves. In Topanga, Amanda could still imagine early California. That was another reason for the singing in her soul. Topanga was a place where Eden could be recaptured.

  Up the steep road to Frank’s house she climbed in second gear. “I’ve gotten experienced,” she said. “A few more times and I’ll apply for my pilot’s license.”

  Frank nodded, smiling in an inward way that deepened the singing voice within her. Sunlight poured through the leaves of the sycamores surrounding the house. Inside, Frank stared in bewilderment. The place was immaculate. Books had been put on shelves, the bed was made, the closets were full of clean sheets and pillowcases. The floor had acquired flowery rugs. A painting, a Matisse-like view of sailboats off Santa Monica, hung on the bedroom wall.

  “You did this?” Frank said.

  Amanda nodded. “You’re going to keep it this way. There’s no reason in the world why a man without a woman has to live like an ape. What would you like to eat?”

  “Waffles,” Frank said. “Waffles and ice cream. I’ve been dreaming of waflies and ice cream ever since I woke up in that hospital room.”

  “Is that all you dreamt about?”

  “No. I had a very strange dream, the first day. A beautiful woman stood beside the bed and promised to love me.”

  “That was unquestionably delirium,” Amanda said. “There were no beautiful women in your room that day.”

  “Yes there was.”

  They stood there in the sunny stillness. The living room window was long and wide.
They had left the door open. More sunlight, full of birdsong, wreathed them. “Oh my darling,” Frank said. “Did you mean it? Or were you just trying to keep a wreck alive for pity’s sake?”

  “Would I be here if I didn’t mean it?”

  They were standing a dozen feet apart, speaking through the shafts of sunlight.

  “What about Adrian? Victoria?” Frank said.

  “Damn Adrian. He’s a greedy swine who doesn’t know the meaning of the word love. Victoria will be a woman someday. She’ll understand.”

  The telephone rang. They stood there while the clang shattered the sunlight, the birdsong, the singing in Amanda’s soul. Frank picked it up. “Velly solly,” he said, “Missa Boocannon no here. This Chinee man who clean up slop. Missa Boocannon come in from hospital and go out again. I tell him to call you. Missa Van Ness? I write down chop chop.”

  He hung up and stood there, smiling. Amanda walked through the sunlight into his arms. A wind swept through the sycamores. The world shimmered. Amanda saw sunlight breaking, exploding into great globules of vanilla light. She swam up a milky river of hope and wish to Frank Buchanan’s arms.

  She wept when she saw the purple patches of grafted skin on his chest. “I don’t want you to fly again. Ever,” she said.

  He promised her no such thing, of course. He presumed it was wish, not reality, she was invoking. “Only with you beside me,” he said.

  They lay on the sunny bed for a long time, savoring the moment, touching only hands at first, then hair, then tongues, lips. Then kisses, deeper and deeper and longer and longer, kisses and caresses drawing her out of her self into a new dimension. It was totally different from Adrian, the only other man she had known. Adrian could not escape his knowing self, his awareness of his performance. “Do you like that?” he would ask. He wanted applause!

  Frank wanted nothing but Amanda. He wanted what Amanda gave him and gave Amanda what she wanted from him without words, without hesitations and questions and egotism. There were no selves, no divisions in the pool of light in which they swam, only a blinding oneness that annihilated thought and fear and responsibility. Adrian and Victoria and her mother and father and even her dream of world peace vanished. She was Frank and Frank was Amanda and simultaneously they had ceased to exist. They had become memories, rumors, beings beyond time.

  Still her body spoke and acted and his body responded. Hands and tongues and lips and hair and legs and thighs touched and white fire leaped within the pool of light like voices singing against a full orchestra. Amanda prayed for a child. It would be a savior, a saint. She was losing faith in Victoria, who reminded her of Adrian in too many ways, especially her willfulness.

  The rational mind can explain this ecstasy, of course. Two people with a grudge against a third, two believers in love, two souls who had challenged death and won, two rebels against respectability and convention and habit. A lonely bachelor and a repressed, neglected wife. Tristan and Isolde reunited in spite of treachery and betrayal. Eden regained by an act of will, a surge of faith.

  The analytic mind is a wonderful thing. But its logic cannot—in fact, must not—explain away what happened to Frank and Amanda in Topanga Canyon on January 3, 1941. Nor can the mind, if it feeds data into its brain cells for a million years, reproduce that wonder.

  Finally there was consummation. A light richer and milkier than sunlight engulfed them. A golden light, shot through with shards of diamonds. As Frank’s life, his self, his being leaped in her, Amanda broke the silence with his name. Frank. The word named everything in the known world. Happiness and unhappiness, victory and defeat, hope and despair. It embodied light and dark and warmth and cold and wealth and poverty. Frank. Everything was possible within the compass of those five ordinary letters.

  They lay there, folded in the golden light, in each other’s arms, for hours. They only spoke in fragments. Love. Life. Forever. Then Frank began to laugh. At first Amanda was shocked, almost frightened by the violence pouring out of his big chest until she realized what it meant. He was laughing at everything. At death, at Adrian, at Buzz McCall, at Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the newcomers in their ugly houses on the hillsides.

  He was Eden, California, laughing in its golden light at the rest of the world. She joined him, laughing, touching, kissing, laughing, weeping finally, both of them, weeping and licking away the salt tears. That was how the wonder ended, salty.

  “Believe it or not,” Frank whispered. “There’s an earthbound part of me that has somehow survived annihilation and still wants those waffles and ice cream.”

  “With champagne?”

  “Is there any in the house?”

  “The refrigerator is full of it.”

  Frank opened a bottle while Amanda cooked the waffles. As they sat down and clinked glasses, the telephone rang again. Frank answered it and went into his Chinese routine. “No Missa Ran Ness. Missa Boocannon not here. But he come in and I tell him you called. He go out again and say he come to factory chop chop.”

  “You’re not really going,” Amanda said as Frank hung up.

  “They’re having all sorts of problems with the pursuit plane we’re building for the army. It killed one of our best test pilots yesterday.”

  They ate the waffles and drank the champagne in silence. Light drained from the room. A colder wind sighed through the trees. Amanda saw she had loved without conditions and now could not impose them. This man designed planes for a living. Could she expect him to stop doing it because they had lived in Eden for a day? The best she could ask was a future of visits to Eden. She tried not to think of that as a diminution, a pollution of the golden light. But it was hard. Suddenly all she could remember was the salt taste of tears on her lips.

  Eden remained Eden for the next few months. But other realities revealed a dismaying persistence, an indifference to the way the world had been transformed. Franklin Roosevelt continued to nudge America toward war. Adrian was his ally. He talked, thought, ate, breathed war and warplanes. That made Amanda redouble her struggle against the war. Scarcely a day passed without a rally, a seminar, a letter-writing campaign to congressmen. All diminishments of Eden.

  Intensifying her anguish was the awareness that it was a losing struggle. Radio broadcasts and news films dramatized the merciless German bombing of London and Coventry and Liverpool, arousing sympathy for the British. Their local propaganda, often generated from the offices of Buchanan Aircraft, was relentless.

  Frank began to drift away from his commitment to peace. The pressure of work was enormous. They had built a new wind tunnel at the factory, the largest in America, and it was teaching him all sorts of fascinating things about airflow’s effect on a plane’s speed and stability. Another enemy to Eden.

  Occasionally Frank deserted his wind tunnel and his designs to go to America First rallies, ignoring a directive from Adrian that forbade anyone in the company to support what he now called a subversive organization. But Amanda could see Frank’s mind was dividing on the subject of peace or war. Germany’s brutal use of airpower had aroused his male blood. He wanted to build planes that would enable America to strike back with the same savagery if Germany attacked us.

  Another enemy to Eden, where division, disagreement, was intolerable, where a single string untuned could turn the singing into wails of regret. Still they met there on sunlit mornings and afternoons. Never at night. Amanda had acquired a dislike of making love at night. She blamed it on Adrian, who would never dream of taking the time to do anything during daylight hours but make money.

  Adrian, unaware of Eden, remained maddeningly unpredictable. He was growing richer and more powerful each day and he wanted to share it with her and Victoria. They moved to a fifteen-room Tudor house in Bel Air, one of the most expensive sections of Los Angeles. They began going to dinner parties with wealthy descendants of the scoundrels who had looted California until her father and other honest men broke their political power in 1910.

  More enemies of Ede
n. Amanda was barely polite to them. She tried to maintain a similar surface politeness with Adrian. But that was not easy. After a party, Adrian was sometimes amorous. She could not always refuse him. He was playing the patient, generous husband.

  Almost instantly she saw it was a mistake. She had not realized how central her body was to the experience of Eden. She had attributed the ecstasy to California’s sunlight, to Topanga’s stillness, to Frank’s lovemaking skill. She had to complete the performance with Adrian although her flesh shriveled at every touch.

  “Is this the way it’s going to be for the rest of our lives?” Adrian said when it was over. “Are you ever going to stop sitting in judgment on me?”

  Amanda almost confessed Frank, Eden. But she realized Adrian would never tolerate it. She saw how dangerously she was living. She was trapped between Adrian and Frank. She was at war with herself in Eden.

  The big war spread across another quarter of the globe when Germany attacked Russia. The newspapers, the radio, grew frenzied with it. Roosevelt flourished a map before Congress, reputedly proof that Germany planned to invade South America next. Amanda felt war rising like a scummy frothy flood, its sickening surface lapping at the gates of Eden. America First announced another poll still showed 80 percent of Americans wanted to stay out of it. Buchanan Aircraft’s Nelson bombers flew in droves to North Dakota to be towed across the border into Canada. Adrian came home to report that he had just signed a contract to produce Boeing’s B-17 Flying Fortresses, a program that would virtually double Buchanan’s workforce.

  So they came to a sunny Sunday in December. Adrian was in Washington, D.C. to work out the final details of the B—17 contract. Victoria was at home with the housekeeper and a half-dozen friends, giving a pool party. Eden had never been milkier, more full of golden light. For a while Amanda forgot the carnage swirling around them.