Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Frank Buchanan said.

  “Why?”

  “That crash off Calcutta worried me.”

  “A woman my age doesn’t fret about sudden death, Mr. Buchanan. In some ways it would be a blessing.”

  “Grandmother!” Victoria protested, tears in her eyes.

  “I like your mother. She reminds me of my own. Indomitable,” Ponty said.

  Adrian heard the irony in Ponty’s voice. He had met Ponty’s mother. She was a dragon in the operatic Italian tradition, an interesting contrast to Clarissa’s controlled severity. Women! Incredible how they haunted a man’s life.

  The sale of four hundred Scorpions to the Germans had encouraged Ponty to introduce Adrian to someone else who could help them sell planes in Europe—and possibly in America. Madame George was a thin gray-haired French woman with a severe smoker’s cough and watery red eyes. Madame explained in excellent English the advantages of using one of her girls to persuade a potential customer. The fee was five thousand dollars. Adrian had recoiled—until he met several of the girls.

  They were the most exquisite women he had ever seen, all perfectly groomed and dressed with Madame George’s infallible good taste. They were well-read and au courant politically. Panache seemed to characterize all of them, a serene self-assurance that was never grossly sexual but was subtly, persistently erotic. Ponty had chosen his latest mistress from Madame George’s collection and he advised Adrian to consider doing the same thing.

  “It’s not inexpensive, of course,” the Prince said. “The girl must have a suitable apartment, charge accounts, an air travel card. But you could pass most of the expenses through the company, no?”

  No, Adrian thought, although he assured Ponty he would consider it. He already had a mistress who was quite enough for a busy man with only a moderate sex drive to handle. But he had to admit to himself that Madame George’s girls made Tama Morris look shopworn—or maybe just worn.

  That night, in Tama’s room at the Crillon, Adrian asked her if she thought Madame George’s girls were worth the price. Tama scoffed. “We could bring six or eight of our girls over here for five thousand dollars,” she said. “They could have a great time and do us a lot more good.”

  Adrian sighed. More and more, Tama showed her limitations, mental as well as physical. She was provincial. California did not travel to Paris. He had discovered this at the last two air shows. At home he had grown more and more weary of Tama’s compulsion to play office politics. Even before he met Madame George and her girls, he had begun to think it was time to shed Tama.

  “I’m going to use them for people at the top,” Adrian said. “People the Prince can reach. They expect something more than a quick lay.”

  “You get some liquor into our girls and they’ll do anything,” Tama said. “They’re from California. They don’t have any inhibitions.”

  “Maybe the buyers do. They’re getting more sophisticated—like the planes. That’s something I’ve been trying to explain to Cliff.”

  Cliff and Jim Redwood had been trying to sell an upgraded version of the Excalibur with very little success. “People don’t want a 1940s plane in 1955,” Tama snarled. She was always ferocious when Adrian criticized Cliff.

  “Maybe I don’t want a 1930s woman in 1955,” Adrian said.

  “There’s plenty of other people who do,” Tama shouted. “Anytime you want to take a walk, go ahead. I’m sick and tired of playing Back Street for you. If you had any guts you’d have divorced your creep of a wife and married me years ago.”

  “Thank God I’m not impulsive,” Adrian said, stalking to the door.

  “Adrian!”

  Tama was standing at the French window overlooking the Place de la Concorde. In her lacy pink negligee she was a parody of the movie queen she had never become. She looked frightened—and old. “I didn’t mean any of that, Adrian.”

  “I did,” he said, slamming the door.

  WENN DAS HERZ AUCH BRICHT

  She was the most beautiful woman Dick Stone had ever seen. Tall, with chestnut hair that shimmered in a glowing aura around her high-cheeked, fragile-boned face. Her expression was mildly bemused, even disdainful, the wide oval eyes unillusioned. For the first time Dick was glad he had come to the Paris Air Show.

  He worked his way through the jammed salon of the Buchanan Chalet, squeezing past U.S. Air Force generals and Royal Air Force air marshals and German Air Force colonels and their wives and/or mistresses. Occasionally, his quarry disappeared behind a pair of massive military shoulders. From the opposite side of the room, he saw Billy McCall moving in the same direction. But Billy got waylaid by one of the more routinely beautiful women who thronged the room and suddenly Dick was standing in front of her without the slightest idea what to say.

  “Can I help you?” he said. “I sort of work here.”

  “For the Americans?”

  “I am one,” Dick said, mildly flattered that she did not think so at first glance.

  He had spent the past six weeks in Germany working out the financial details of the sale of four hundred Scorpions to the Federal Republic’s air force. It was the first time he had returned to Europe since he had bombed it in the Rainbow Express. A strange atavism had seized him as he walked the streets of Munich and Bonn. The land of his ancestors had spoken to him with a confusing mixture of menace and affection.

  By now, Dick and the rest of the world knew about the Holocaust. He knew that one of the worst concentration camps, Buchenwald, was only a few miles outside Weimar, that paradigm of kultur he had objected to bombing. He wondered what his grandfather would think of his schizoid fatherland now.

  “I was told to look for General Heinz Gumpert,” she said.

  Dick knew the suave ex-fighter pilot well. He was the West German Air Force’s vice chief of staff. They had spent many hours negotiating the complex problems of training pilots to fly the unforgiving Scorpions, teaching ground crews to maintain them, subcontracting to German companies the rights to make spare parts and some of the sophisticated electronic equipment in the plane. He had found the general agreeable but formal—and a tough negotiator. Every time a Scorpion crashed—they seemed to go down at the rate of one a week—he demanded a new concession from Buchanan Aircraft.

  “The general’s in the far corner, describing how he almost shot me down at least a dozen times during the war,” Dick said. “Why not let me get you a drink first?”

  “You were a bomber pilot?” she said, with just the slightest accent.

  “A bomber navigator,” Dick said, steering her to the bar.

  She ordered a Vermouth Cassis and smiled a thank you as he handed it to her. Close up, she was even more beautiful. Her neck was rather long and supple, her body a landscape of subtle curves and planes. She was wearing a clinging mocha silk dress with thin straps that left her shoulders and arms bare and revealed most of her long spectacular legs. Her only jewelry was a gold-link bracelet on her right wrist.

  “A very scared navigator,” Dick said.

  “Not nearly as scared as those you were bombing,” she said.

  “You were—are—German?” he said.

  “I lived in Schweinfurt,” she said.

  “We bombed it many times,” Dick said.

  “Every time I prayed you would hit our house and destroy us all. But you never did.”

  “Why?”

  There was a pause. In the depths of her wide gray eyes Dick thought he saw contempt. “Do you know Heine, the German poet?” she asked.

  “My grandfather used to read him to me.”

  “How odd. So did my grandfather.”

  Suddenly she was someplace else, miles from this crowded room full of important people. The cool commanding line of her mouth broke and Dick thought she was going to weep. She sipped her drink and the mask of blase uncaring returned. Softly, casually, she recited:

  Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen

  Und ich glaubt ich trüg es nie. />
  Dick knew the verse.

  At first I thought I could not bear

  The depths of my despair.

  He also knew the lines that followed it. He spoke them as softly as she had spoken hers.

  Und ich hab’ es doch getragen—

  Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie?

  Yet O yet I bore it.

  Never never ask me how.

  “Do they also apply?” Dick asked.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling as if it were all a joke.

  “Are you an old friend of General Gumpert?”

  “I have never seen him before in my life.”

  She smiled serenely at his confusion. “Madame George has asked me to make his stay in Paris more enjoyable. Most Germans—especially those who fly planes—tend to be uncultured. They need guidance, counsel in reading French menus, touring the Louvre—”

  Her mockery was exquisite—and touching because it included herself. The reference to Madame George explained everything to Dick, of course. In the past week he had paid astonishing sums to Madame George for the services of her beautiful creatures. He should have known—in fact, he must have known—this woman was one of her stable.

  The word stable suddenly seemed impossible or at least intolerable. “Americans need just as much cultural help, perhaps more,” he said.

  “Oh, no. You are the conquerors. Have you not mastered culture too?”

  “Not really,” Dick said, smiling. “What’s your name?”

  “Amalie.”

  The name of Heinrich Heine’s first great love.

  “Why do you live in Paris?”

  He was fumbling for conversation, trying to prevent her departure to General Gumpert.

  “Because Madame de Stael said here a woman can live without being happy.”

  “Can I see you again, after you’ve improved the general’s culture?”

  “Why?”

  For the first time in his life, Dick spoke to a woman without even an attempt at calculation, saying exactly what leaped to his lips. “Because you’re so beautiful.”

  A wisp of a smile played across her mouth. It was impossible to tell if she was pleased or bored by the compliment. “Are you Jewish?” she said.

  “What difference does that make?” he snapped.

  She shrugged. “You don’t look it. But then, what is a Jew supposed to look like? I’ve never quite understood that question.”

  “You’re Jewish?”

  “I’m not supposed to answer that question. Or better, it should never come up.”

  Cliff Morris slapped Dick on the shoulder. “Hey—is this General Gumpert’s dinner date you’re monopolizing, Stone?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said. Dick began to introduce her to Cliff and realized he did not know her last name.

  “Borne,” she said.

  The name of one of the many German Jews Heinrich Heine both hated and admired. Dick watched Cliff lead her through the crowd to General Gumpert, whose angular face was consumed by anticipation at the sight of her.

  Cliff drifted back to the bar. “Two more fucking Scorpions crashed this morning,” he said. “Adrian told Madame George to send us the top of the line.”

  For the rest of the party, Dick could not take his eyes off Amalie Borne. Occasionally her eyes strayed around the room but she never missed a beat in her conversation with Gumpert. The general was obviously absorbing immense amounts of culture.

  The party began to wind down. Dick realized he had lost all interest in finding himself a date for the night. There were plenty of available women, journalists and public relations assistants and models from a dozen nations at the air show. With a little effort, a man could line up a different adventure every night. He turned his back on Amalie Borne and retreated to the bar to order Buchanan’s favorite, Inverness single malt Scotch.

  Dick drank the swill and brooded about his erratic love life. He had talked Cassie Trainor into going to college and she wound up getting a full scholarship to Stanford, putting an end to their nights and weekends at the Villa Hermosa. Cassie had wept at the thought of leaving him—but she took the scholarship. Now they were occasional lovers—she had others in Palo Alto, Dick was sure. He had more than a few among the swinging singles of the Villa Hermosa.

  He felt a hand brush his suit-coat pocket. When he turned, Amalie Borne was going out the door with Gumpert and Adrian Van Ness and Tama Morris. In his pocket he found a small white card with a telephone number on it.

  Dick called the next morning at 10:30. A maid with a heavy French accent was barely polite. It took several minutes to persuade her to let him speak to Miss Borne. Amalie’s dusky voice finally came on the line. Dick suggested lunch at Verfours, a five-star restaurant. She said it might be better if they lunched at her apartment. Natalie, her cook, was making a bouillabaisse.

  The apartment was in the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain, in one of those huge buildings with immense doors reinforced by black-iron grillwork, guarded by a concierge. The elevator rose with the serene majesty of an ascending balloon. The French maid greeted him at the door with a frown. She was about forty, with the face of a gorgon on Nôtre Dame. She led him down a short hall to a sunny living room, where Amalie was seated on a dark red couch, wearing a blue peignoir. A bottle of champagne tilted in a silver ice bucket on a nearby secretary.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I hate to go out to lunch. Dressing to Madame’s standards is too exhausting to do more than once a day.”

  “Of course.”

  “After lunch we’ll roam Paris a bit, if you’re in the mood. I walk a minimum of five miles every afternoon. What do you do for your aircraft company?”

  “I keep track of the money.”

  “Ah. A man of importance.”

  “Not really. I have very little say on how it’s spent.”

  “But you will, eventually?”

  “Possibly.”

  “What is your fascination with planes? You like to live dangerously?”

  Dick shrugged. “The test pilots are the ones who take the real chances.”

  “From what General Gumpert was saying last night, everyone who flies your planes takes chances.”

  “That’s true of the plane he’s buying. It’s very fast and very dangerous.”

  “And you enjoy the vicarious encounter with death this plane creates?”

  “Not really.”

  “You don’t despise the Germans? You haven’t deliberately sold them a plane that will kill their new pilots?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not here to find out if General Gumpert was sufficiently entertained to forget the recent crashes?”

  “No!”

  She smiled as if this was amusing. “Would you like to open the champagne? Or shall I call Annette?”

  “Allow me.”

  The wire was recalcitrant. It took him five minutes to free the cork. Finally they raised their glasses and Dick said: “To Heinrich Heine.”

  “Ich grolle nicht,” she said, referring to one of Heine’s most famous love poems, which began: I won’t complain although my heart is breaking.

  “Tell me how and why you lived in Schweinfurt during the war.”

  “You know the story of Anne Frank, the girl who hid in a Dutch attic? I lived a similar existence in Schweinfurt. The Nazis took my parents away to a concentration camp in 1939 when I was eleven. My mother left me with their dearest friends, the Starkes, whose house was at the end of our street. They hid me in their attic for the entire war.”

  “Why did you pray every time we bombed Schweinfurt that we’d kill them—and you?”

  She gave him a puzzled smile. “I don’t understand?”

  “You told me you did that—at the air show yesterday.”

  “Oh! It was so noisy. You must have misunderstood me. I prayed the very opposite. Those dear devout people saved my life. I told the whole story to General Gumpert last night. He broke down and wept. Imagine? A famous fighter pilo
t, with one hundred and fifty kills to his credit, weeping in this very room, after his fourth bottle of champagne, because I made him ashamed to be a German?”

  She’s lying, Dick thought. I’m not going crazy. That is irony you are hearing, savage irony of the sort Heinrich Heine used in his prose, when he was demolishing an enemy. “Remarkable,” Dick said. “Perhaps you should write a book. It might make some people think better of the Germans.”

  “Perhaps I will when I’m old and feebleminded. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “I thought all Americans married at twenty-one and had dozens of children.”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “You must tell me what went wrong. I collect misalliances. It’s helpful as well as amusing.”

  “My wife talked baby talk to me. I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Why didn’t you simply tell her to stop?”

  “I didn’t think she would—or could. She was a Jewish princess.”

  “You mean she was spoiled by indulgent parents.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “I had parents like that. You should have been more understanding, compassionate.”

  He shook his head. “She made me realize I didn’t want a Jewish wife.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s hard to explain. My grandfather went to his grave in 1939 believing German anti-Semitism was a passing thing, a minor flaw in a nation that had produced the greatest music, the greatest literature, the greatest philosophy of modern times.”

  “My grandfather—and my father—believed the same thing,” Amalie Borne said.

  “I want to prove to myself—and perhaps to others—that Jews can be Americans first—now that Germany’s failed them.”

  “Fascinating,” Amalie Borne said.

  For the first time, Dick felt he had gotten her attention. It was also the first time he had ever tried to explain his feelings about Jewishness in such detail to anyone—including himself.

  Amalie held out her glass for more champagne. “But ultimately perhaps as foolish as the dream of German assimilation?”