Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “Perhaps. But people in the plane business like to live dangerously.”

  The fishy, garlicky odor of bouillabaisse began to fill the apartment. Annette opened a table before the sunny windows and they sat down to steaming dishes of it, with a Puligny Montrachet which Annette opened with a flourish that made Dick ashamed of his struggle with the champagne. They discussed recent German literature, notably the Catholic novelist Heinrich Böll, whom Amalie urged Dick to read. “Among his many virtues, he never was and never will be a Nazi,” she said.

  The wine flowed and Dick asked her how she came to Paris. For a moment she seemed to ponder what to tell him.

  “An American general brought me here—and left me when his wife arrived, after the war. For a while I almost starved. Then I met Madame George and began my ascent. I’m now as spoiled as my father ever dreamt of making me. Somewhere I like to think he’s smiling.”

  “Considering what you went through during the war, you’re entitled,” Dick said.

  She laughed and his body almost dissolved. It was more than her beauty, it was the mystery, the aura of hidden pain that surrounded her. Absurd romantic ideas crowded Dick’s brain. He would rescue her from the degradation of one-night stands with macho slobs like Gumpert. He would take her to America, convince her it was a refuge she could trust.

  Over dessert of profiteroles au chocolat, Amalie proclaimed their mission for the afternoon: to see Heinrich Heine’s Paris. Germany’s greatest romantic poet had lived in the City of Light for the last twenty-five years of his life in protest against the anti-Semitism and conservative politics that kept him in a frenzy of ambivalence about his fatherland.

  They began with a stroll down the Champs Elysées, the poet’s favorite boulevard, where he and his friend Balzac used to parade arm in arm. Then a taxi whirled them to the site of the glove shop in the narrow Passage Choiseul where Heine had met Mathilde, the nineteen-year-old peasant girl who would dominate—and ultimately destroy—his life. “I come here often to try to understand the way fate waylays a man,” Amalie said.

  “He loved her.”

  “He loved a great many women. Too many. Mathilde was woman’s revenge. She was all body and no mind.”

  Another taxi took them to streets where the poet and Mathilde had lived—Rue d’Amsterdam, the Grande Rue des Batignolles, the Avenue Matignon, where he died. In each site, Amalie meditated on Heine’s erratic, erotic life. Gradually Dick saw him looming over her, part guardian angel, part idol, part threat.

  “He was an old-fashioned romantic,” Dick said as Amalie recalled the poet’s last love affair with the adventuress he called Mouche.

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “He fell in love with almost every woman he met.”

  “We moderns don’t believe in love?”

  “Not that effervescent kind. We’re more inclined to make distinctions. Sex is not the same as love.”

  “How profound. Tell me more, Mr. Stone.”

  Confused by her sudden hostility, Dick blundered on. “We—we Americans anyway—believe in falling in love with one woman—and hoping the love will grow deeper and richer and more powerful as life goes on. For romantics falling was the most important part of love. I prefer the American approach.”

  “That’s so naive,” she said, looking up at the sagging shutters and crooked windows of the half-dozen nineteenth-century houses still standing on the Avenue Matignon. Once more Dick sensed he had gotten her attention.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “At the end, didn’t Heine wail, ‘Worte, Worte, keine Taten!’—words, words, no deeds. That’s the verdict on romanticism in my opinion.”

  “You don’t understand romanticism—or me!” she said, springing out of the taxi and striding down the street.

  In his bad French, Dick told the driver to pursue her.

  They kept pace with Amalie while he leaned out the window, reciting the rest of Heine’s disillusioned cry: “Immer Geist und keinen Braten/ keine Knödel in der Suppe.”—Always spirit and no roast, no dumplings in the soup.

  “You’re disgusting,” she said. “Disgusting and naive.”

  “How about dinner at Verfours tonight?”

  “I’m engaged.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Don’t you have airplanes to worry about?”

  “They can wait. I’ve fallen in love with you. But I want to get beyond Heine.”

  “There’s nothing beyond him. There never will be!”

  They continued to creep along beside the striding defiant Amalie for another block, while other taxis and cars beeped angrily behind them. Dick cheerfully recited more Heine. “Lass mich mit gluhnden Zangen kneipen, Lass grausam schinden mein Gesicht.” Let me be pinched with red hot tongs, let my face be flayed from my skull, only do not make me wait any longer.

  As they approached the Champs Elysees, Amalie’s frown vanished. When he tried “Noch einmal, eh mein Lebenslicht,” in which the poet prayed that before his “life’s light” was extinguished, he would be blessed once more by a woman’s love, she capitulated and got back in the cab. They did not say a word all the way back to her apartment. As she got out she said: “What time, at Verfours?”

  Verfours said a reservation was impossible. A face-to-face conference with the headwaiter and 150 dollars created a table. On the way back to his hotel, Dick realized he was supposed to be at a reception for Buchanan Aircraft at the West German embassy. He arrived as the party was breaking up. General Gumpert was still there, however, and was impossible to avoid.

  “That was a fascinating creature you found for me last night, Dick,” he said. “She spoke better German than I did, in spite of being born in Corsica.”

  “We thought you’d find her interesting, General,” Dick said. “Will you be seeing her again?”

  “We were supposed to go to Verfours tonight but she’s ill.”

  “Too bad.”

  “You’ve heard about the new crashes? The newspapers are going to crucify us, I’m afraid.”

  “I believe it was one of Germany’s aeronautic pioneers who said sacrifices must be expected.”

  “Does that include my career?” Gumpert said.

  “I hope not, General.”

  Behind his soothing manner, Dick was thinking: Fuck you, you Nazi bastard. He was appalled. Did Amalie Borne have something to do with it? Had she reawakened a primitive Jewish identity in his soul?

  Prince Carlo materialized to rescue Dick, an irony in itself. Dick instinctively disliked this urbane aristocrat. The Prince put his arm around Gumpert’s shoulder. “Never be discouraged by a defeat in love, General. Tonight we’ll go to a little place I have in the country, where complaisance is guaranteed. Would you care to join us, Stone?”

  “No—I have a previous engagement.”

  That could easily get him fired from Buchanan Aircraft.

  The Prince walked him to the door, sighing over the problems of the Scorpion. He was going to need more money—a great deal more—to deal with it. Adrian Van Ness had authorized another draft of three million dollars. Would Dick see that it was deposited in the Swiss account tomorrow?

  Dick fled to his hotel for a hasty shower and a dash to Verfours, where Amalie awaited him at their table, chatting with the headwaiter in flawless French. They were apparently old friends. After champagne cocktails, they feasted on truffles and pheasant under glass and a raspberry tart whose crust seemed mostly air.

  Amalie insisted on hearing more about Dick’s love life. Mixing irony and humor, he described the liaisons, the weekend flings, the one night stands of the Manhattan Beach aeronauts. He portrayed them as delayed adolescents—and did not mention Cassie Trainor.

  “Now, like Heine when he encountered Mathilde, you’re weary with debauchery and long for the simple affection of an unspoiled heart?” Amalie asked.

  “You could say that. But I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “How fortunate that we met,” Amalie said. “Perhaps I’m
was wrong about fate being a dark presence in our lives.”

  After dinner they lingered over a forty-year-old brandy Amalie selected. Dick tried not to look at the bill as he handed the waiter his American Express card. It probably exceeded his salary for the month.

  They rode back to the Faubourg St. Germain through the mostly deserted midnight streets. A soft rain had fallen while they dined; the macadam gleamed beneath the lampposts. At the apartment, Amalie fumbled for her key and Dick stood by the cab, wondering if he should pay the fare. “Ten francs, s’il vous plait,” the driver rasped, perhaps trying to tell him that any Frenchman who escorted a woman this beautiful to her apartment would follow her upstairs if he had to climb the facade.

  Dick paid him as the heavy door groaned open. “I have more of that brandy,” Amalie said.

  He kissed her as they walked into her apartment. She did not resist, but she did not respond, either. “It’s all wrong,” she whispered. “You must know that.”

  “I only know I love you.”

  “Shhh. Annette doesn’t approve of you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re too young. You can’t possibly be rich enough.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh. Can’t you see, can’t you hear?”

  “I only see a beautiful woman who doesn’t believe in American love.”

  “‘Lieb Liebchen, leg’s Händchen aufs Herze mein.’ Do you know that verse?”

  “Yes,” Dick said. It was the Heine poem that had resounded in his head over Schweinfurt, about a lover’s hammering heart becoming a psychic coffin.

  “That’s the literal truth about me. Nicht worte, worte. The truth.”

  “‘Tobende eile mich treibend erfasst,’” Dick murmured, kissing her neck. A wild unrest is desolating me, another line from one of Heine’s cries of romantic despair. Did he mean it? Was she using the other line to tell him of a twentieth-century despair? Dick only knew he could not retreat now. She was mystery and memory, Jewishness and the guilt of the navigator of the Rainbow Express. He pressed his lips against her pulsing throat and she seemed to crumple against him. The straight firm body dissolved into helplessness, sadness.

  Undressed in the shadowy lamplight, she was a landscape, a country of love. A flat soft stomach descended to full thighs, ascended to coned breasts. She reached out to him like a plaintive child as he lay down beside her. “Kommt, kommt,” she whispered. “Kommt feins liebchen heut.” Come, come, come sweet love today. It was from the first verse of one of Heine’s most famous song cycles.

  Entering her was the most profound moment of Dick Stone’s life. He felt like a conqueror of space and time, returning to the old world in his grandfather’s name with a new and bolder love for it, an American love that could both master and transform its tormented history. Amalie gave herself without reservation, shuddering, sighing, almost sobbing and at the climax retreating into a dark silence, to emerge with a small final cry.

  After another five minutes of silence, she whispered: “The brandy is in the armoire in the living room.”

  He returned with glasses and the bottle. She drank some and held out her arms to him again. “Now, now,” she whispered. “Now must come worte worte. Now that you’ve had the meat, Heinrich.”

  In the same slow insistent whisper, she began telling him the story of her six years in the attic at Schweinfurt. Accepting her had been an impulsive act of charity on the part of her parents’ friends, the Starkes. Soon she became a dangerous burden. Their attitude began to change. She could hear them arguing in the bedroom below her. Herr Starke wanted to turn her in, Frau Starke urged him to wait until Germany won the war.

  Then Germany began to lose the war. The Starkes’ son, who was the same age as Amalie, was killed on the Russian front. Mrs. Starke had a stroke during one of the air raids. Herr Starke, who was one of the managers of the ballbearing works the Rainbow Express tried so often to destroy, began visiting Amalie in the attic with less than compassionate motives.

  “He always reviled me while we did it,” she whispered. “Judenshit,” he would say. “Juden Juden Judenshit. Every other obscene word in the language.”

  Unreality seized Dick’s mind. The way Amalie was whispering the story somehow seemed more bizarre and horrifying than the story itself. Dick wanted it shouted. He wanted it broadcast over loudspeakers so that everyone in Germany, from General Gumpert to Heinrich Boll to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer could hear it. He wanted it put on every radio and television network in the United States. He wanted the entire world to confront the story of Amalie Borne.

  “Now do you see how impossible it is for us?”

  “I only see the impossibility of anything but marrying you, living with you for the rest of my life.”

  “The Prince would never permit it. He would ask for your job, your head.”

  “What does he have to do with it?”

  “I’m his mistress. Who do you think pays for this apartment, for Annette, for the cook?”

  “And he’d send you to Gumpert for—”

  “He had confidence in my ability to elude Herr General.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “I wish I were. I wish I could convince you how much I’m risking at this very moment. There must be a risk for you too.”

  “The hell with that. I can’t believe you prefer to be kept by that titled crook when you could come to America with me—”

  “I don’t believe in your America. What I see of your countrymen here in Europe makes me think you’re no better than us. Possibly worse, because you lie to yourselves about your goodness and virtue.”

  “That has very little to do with whether two people love each other.”

  “I’m not at all sure you’re right. In fact I suspect you’re wrong.”

  Desperation clutched at Dick’s throat. She was eluding him. “When can I see you again?”

  “There’s no point to it. Think about what I’ve said, what I’ve become—and you’ll understand.” She kissed him gently on the lips. “I’m sure you will. You’re an intelligent man.”

  In the meantime, Dick realized, they—or at least she—would have this Heinesque romantic memory. He struggled into his clothes and trudged into the dawn, resolved to defeat both the Prince and the poet.

  The next day, the last day of the air show, Billy McCall led a squadron of U.S. Scorpions in aerobatics that were the sensation of the week. Spain, Portugal, Italy, all expressed an interest in acquiring the plane. Adrian Van Ness was ecstatic. Everyone on the Buchanan team was pressed into charming the new customers. Dick found himself taking a Spanish general and his wife to dinner at the Ritz. As they chatted about Mexico and California, which the general had recently visited, there was a stir at the other end of the long narrow dining room. Amalie and Prince Carlo sat down at a table, along with Adrian Van Ness and another of Madame George’s girls, almost as beautiful as Amalie.

  The encounter only redoubled Dick’s resolve to convince Amalie of the possibility of American happiness. The following day, he telephoned her apartment. Annette answered. The moment she recognized him, she flung a stream of hostile French over the line from which he extracted the absence of Miss Borne. He rushed from the hotel to the nearest flower shop, bought two dozen roses and rode to the Faubourg St. Germain in a steady rain, almost suffocating himself and the driver with the scent in the airtight cab.

  The concierge allowed him to ascend when he displayed the telephone number in Amalie’s handwriting. But Annette barred the door, insisting Miss Borne was not at home. In fact, she was not in Paris.

  “Where is she?” Dick practically shouted, hoping Amalie would hear him.

  “Rome.”

  He retreated forlornly into the rain. At the Buchanan Chalet, exhibits were being dismantled, photographers, French public relations people, were waiting to be paid. Dick wrote out checks and tried to join in the exorbitant cheer that the success of the Scorpion had created. Adrian Van Ness came by, look
ing almost effervescent. “Did you get that money to the Prince?” he asked.

  “I’ll do it by the end of the day.”

  “Good. He’s off to Rome, where I think he’ll need it. You can’t get anything done in Italy without spreading a lot of it around.”

  “So I hear.”

  “He took that fabulous girl with him. He and Madame George have been feuding about her. She wanted a villa in Cannes. He was resisting the cost. So Madame sent her to entertain General Gumpert. The next night, Ponty heard she was at Verfours with some American.”

  Adrian smiled in a strange, almost wistful way. “You get a whole new idea of worldliness when you spend some time with Europeans.”

  The next day as Dick was checking out of his hotel, the desk clerk handed him a letter. The handwriting was strange—almost a child’s scrawl. He stuffed it into his pocket and did not read it until he was aboard the plane. On sky blue paper was one of Heinrich Heine’s best known love poems. But it was not a testament of love here. Amalie Borne was asking him, one last time, to understand.

  Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht,

  Ewig verlor’nes Lieb! Ich grolle nicht.

  Wie du auch strahlst in Diamantenpracht,

  Es fällt kein Strahl in deines Herzens Nacht.

  I shall not complain, although my heart

  is breaking

  Love forever lost! I shall not

  complain.

  However much you gleam in the diamond’s

  glow

  No light can reach the darkness in your heart.

  The DC-6 labored west toward America against a strong head wind. The pilot told them they would be at least a half hour late.

  No, Dick thought, as the engines throbbed in his head, no. He refused to understand. He would somehow penetrate the darkness in Amalie’s heart. She would be his talisman of forgiveness for the bombs, for abandoning Jewishness, an emblem of hope and triumph.

  Dick did not realize he was like a pilot trying to land at a strange airport in night and fog, talking to air traffic controllers in a language they did not understand.