Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Occasionally Sarah’s husband stood in the doorway watching her, disgust on his handsome face. She was proving what he had suspected for a long time. She had never stopped loving Billy McCall. Sarah did not care what he saw. She could not conceal her pain, her terror.

  “Adrian’s resigning,” Cliff said, on the seventh day. “I’m the new president.”

  I was wrong, Sarah thought. To whom should she send her confession? Her older American daughter, Elizabeth, stoned on LSD and other drugs most of the time in San Francisco? Her straight younger daughter Margaret, studying Chinese history at Stanford? Or her son Charlie, everyone’s favorite halfback at University High?

  Would any of them understand her babble? I want to warn you against the way love can turn to hatred. The more violent the love the more violent the hatred. I did not believe anything so bizarre could happen to me until I killed him. I killed him and his innocent wife.

  “Get out of that goddamn bed,” Cliff said. “We’ve got work to do. Whatever happened in that plane, it wasn’t our fault.”

  Not your fault, of course not your fault, Sarah thought. You wouldn’t have had the patience or the guile to weave the web of hatred around them until the moment of helplessness, of vulnerability, arrived.

  I was wrong. She wanted to send it to Billy. He was the only one who would understand it.

  “Did you hear me?” Cliff said, looming over her. “Get up. Let’s get to work. I’ve got the job of a lifetime and you’re acting like someone in a fucking Greek tragedy. They weren’t the first people killed in a plane crash and they won’t be the last.”

  He was using his war, his male indifference to everything but victory, success, to ignore the impossibility of the crash being an accident. His big hand seized her arm and literally dragged her out of bed.

  “We’re in this together, right?” he said.

  Sarah nodded, fascinated by the way he used the argot of the criminal, the murderer, to confirm their partnership. It was thoroughly accurate, even if it betrayed his previous denial. It also underscored who was chiefly responsible for the crime. Sarah Chapman Morris was the real perpetrator. She had borrowed Cliff’s adolescent hatred and welded it to her thwarted love to create a death mechanism.

  Innocently, of course. Oh, so innocently hoping for the worst. Oh. Oh. Oh. How could she deny it? How could she ever purify her lost vicious heart?

  Sarah saw the future, exactly as it unreeled for the next four years. She would become a woman named Mrs. Clifford Morris. She would write invitations, serve on committees, chair benefits, court senators and congressmen, awe hotel clerks and banquet managers, travel to England, France, Japan, China, with her husband while he bribed people to buy Buchanan’s planes.

  She would go to endless Los Angeles dinner parties where the women left the table after dessert and had coffee upstairs, isolated in a splendid bedroom or dressing room with demitasse cups and rock sugar ordered from London and cinnamon sticks in lieu of demitasse spoons. On the hostesses’ elaborate dressing table there would be enormous bottles of Fracas and Gardenia and Tuberose. The dessert that preceded the retreat would invariably be served on Flora Danica plates and would be infallibly preceded by finger bowls on doilies. Wearing Pucci silks to the floor, she would spend these dinners trying not to suffocate while talking through spectacular table arrangements of flowers from their premier florist, David Jones.

  Some larger parties would be held in tents with pink lights and chili from Chasen’s. In fact, Mrs. Sarah Morris would become moderately famous for the size and style of her tent parties. Once, instead of chili from Chasen’s she served burgers from Jimmy Murphy’s. Between the dinner parties there would be lunches at places like the Bistro Garden and afternoons of committees, committees, committees.

  I was wrong. Maybe the only person who could understand it was the late Sarah Chapman Morris. Maybe she should send the letter to herself and put it in a drawer hoping to find it by accident in five or ten years. Maybe it would have the power to free her from hatred’s web.

  Once or twice childhood pleas for mercy formed on her grimaced lips. Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us But the words were murmured by a stranger named Sarah Chapman in furtive sleepless hours before dawn. By daylight and lamplight, the other person she had become, Mrs. Clifford Morris, wife of Buchanan Aircraft’s president, was much too busy to pray.

  For a week after the crash Adrian sat in his office unable to think, barely able to speak. At home Amanda wept and said unbearable things about getting what he deserved. He nodded his assent. He was numb. His only support was a voice that whispered from a vanished England: It does a man no good to whine.

  At the end of the week, Frank Buchanan burst into the office. He had not come to work since the news of the crash. “Have you learned anything?” he asked, his voice, his hands trembling. He looked like an Old Testament prophet, with his mane of white hair, a five-day beard.

  “I don’t know. Have you?” Adrian asked.

  “The futility, the stupidity of hatred. I was guilty of it, Adrian. But I never dreamt it would lead to anything like this.”

  Forethought, Adrian numbly told himself. He’s here to mock forethought, to ridicule all my gods. “I wished them happiness, Adrian. I truly did,” Frank said. “But my hatred of you permeated the whole thing. I’m resigning from the company. I’ve created enough evil for one lifetime.”

  For the first time Adrian was able to face the part his hatred had played in the tragedy. For a moment he almost conceded the limitations of forethought, admitted our mortal inability to control fate. He saw himself walking to Frank Buchanan and embracing the man he had hated for so long, asking his forgiveness in turn. Of course he did no such thing. The voice of the man still determined to play the great game remained in control.

  “Frank,” Adrian said. “The evil was created long before either of us was born. You can’t resign from the company. Without you there is no company, there never would have been one. Now it’s up to both of us to save it. I’m resigning as president. Cliff Morris will take over. I’m moving to Washington to make sure we don’t get massacred by that two-billion-dollar cost overrun.”

  “Amanda will never be happy in Washington,” Frank said.

  “Amanda will never be happy anywhere,” Adrian said.

  “Be kind to her, Adrian. If I hear even a hint of evidence that you’re mistreating her—”

  “She’s all I’ve got left too!” Adrian cried.

  They were enemies again. But Frank Buchanan was still working for the company.

  A month later, Frank sat beside Buzz McCall’s bed watching him die of congestive heart failure, liver failure, emphysema and a half-dozen other complications. Frank tried to console him with the thought that Sammy was waiting for him on the other side.

  “I hope not,” Buzz said. “That means Tama’ll be there too. Between them I’ll never get any rest.”

  He browbeat Frank into giving him a cigarette. “Dames,” he said. “We never figured them out, did we? None of us. Even Adrian.”

  “Especially Adrian,” Frank said.

  “What the fuck did Tama and Amanda have in common? That still baffles me.”

  “Womanhood,” Frank said.

  The word struck Buzz like a bullet. He closed his eyes and pulled on the cigarette. A few minutes later he slipped into delirium. He talked to Sammy, to Tama and other women. “Bitches, fucking bitches,” he muttered.

  Suddenly he was conscious again. He glared at Frank. “There’s only one thing I ever did to a dame I regret,” he said. “I helped the goddamn Brits kill that Commie spy Adrian was fucking. I felt bad about that. She was a hell of a pilot.”

  A moment later he was gone. A terrific tremor of grief and rage ripped through Frank’s body and mind. “Mother was right. You’re evil. It’s a different kind of evil from Adrian’s but it’s still evil!” he cried.

  He was talking to Craig as much as to Buzz. To Billy and all the other pilots who had turned fl
ight into a license to run wild on the ground. Another earthquake-sized tremor shook him. He seized Buzz’s dangling hand and kissed it tenderly.

  “But I loved you. I loved all of you,” he whispered.

  No one at Buchanan mourned Buzz. They were all too busy mourning Billy. “How could it happen?” the chief mourner, Sam Hardy, said over and over again. “Flying to fucking Catalina. How could that happen to Billy?”

  Hardy was still Frank’s favorite designer, already designated as his heir apparent. Typically, Frank saw only the man’s unique gifts and ignored Sam’s personal problems. His pursuit of one of the beauties of the Honeycomb Club had wrecked his marriage and turned him into an alcoholic. Kirk Willoughy had stabilized him with psychotherapy and Alcoholics Anonymous. Now he seemed to be coming apart again.

  Hardy had fallen off the wagon and had a brawl with his second wife, which had them teetering on divorce. He spent hours talking to Frank about Billy, apparently oblivious to the pain it caused him. There was nothing Billy could not do in a plane. There was no plane—or woman—he could not master. Hardy recalled nights of stupendous drinking with Billy at the Honeycomb Club and stuporous fucking in the dawn. He even remembered a song about a test pilot’s woes he had once sung to Billy outside the club at 3 A.M. When he got to the refrain: “Gee I’m glad that I don’t fly,” Sam wept.

  In an odd way the extravagance of Hardy’s grief steadied Frank. He began to suspect Sam was weeping as much for himself as for Billy. He was mourning the end of his youth, which Billy’s death seemed to confirm and even symbolize. Of course youth had been gradually expiring for a long time, as it always does. But in California it was easier to deny this obvious fact. A man with money could get a tan, put on a tank top and head for the beach in his convertible with a willing twenty-five-year old beside him. Frank stopped being a patient listener when Sam Hardy tried to translate Billy’s death into an obituary for the aircraft business. “Everyone knows the glory days are over. From now on this is just another big business, like making fucking automobiles,” Sam moaned.

  “That is absolute bullshit!” Frank roared. “As long as there’s a sky up there and men want to fly faster and faster and higher and higher in it they’ll be new planes to make. Stop feeling so goddamn sorry for yourself and get to work!”

  Was that Buzz talking? His way of saying good-bye? Frank hoped so. Hardy stopped drinking and had a whole new design for their high-performance fighter, the SkyDemon, on Frank’s desk within a week.

  Dick Stone also knew the crash could not have been an accident. He responded by becoming a workaholic. He could no longer believe he deserved the happiness Cassie and his son and daughter promised him. In death Amalie Borne’s shadow loomed like an impassable barrier between him and any possible promised land. Dick’s already heroic hours became a grind of inhuman proportions. Secretaries quit in steady succession until he finally found a Japanese-American who viewed his midnight hours as a challenge to her national reputation for stamina.

  Cassie stopped joking about being married to an aircraft company. She was married to one. The man she thought she was marrying had become almost transparent. She could not see any other reality in her life except Buchanan Aircraft. Inevitably, she began asking why.

  Watching the marriage unravel, Sarah began to wonder if Dick was her only hope of redemption. She did not understand the word or the idea. She only knew it had something to do with forgiveness. She somehow understood she could offer it to him—and he could offer it to her. How or when or where she had no idea. For the time being the skylark was in a cage known as Mrs. Clifford Morris, an entity Dick Stone could only regard with repugnance. She could hardly blame him. She had the same reaction every time she looked in the mirror.

  BOOK NINE

  LIGHTS! ACTION! CAMERA!

  The senator from Iowa’s puffy face was a study in righteous frustration. “Do you mean to tell me that you take no responsibility for wasting two billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money?” he screamed.

  Cliff Morris smiled patiently at the Creature. “Waste is hardly an apt word, Senator. We will soon have a fleet of transports that can airlift an entire army overseas. We simply maintain that the responsibility for their unexpectedly high cost should be shared by Buchanan and the Air Force. I only wish our project manager, former Lieutenant Colonel William McCall, were still alive so he could explain to you in detail how Air Force officers assured him again and again that they would share this responsibility. Billy was my half-brother—and one of my closest friends. He told me this repeatedly.”

  “Who were these officers?” the Creature bellowed. “I want them in this committee room. I want them court-martialed!”

  “As I explained to you, Senator, Colonel McCall died in a private plane crash—”

  The Creature ranted about corporate greed and military incompetence. The chairman of the subcommittee, the senior senator from Connecticut, home of Pratt & Whitney, who made the engines for the Thunderer and a lot of other Buchanan planes, rapped him into silence and said he agreed with most of what Clifford Morris had said. The country was on its way to having an airlift capacity second to none. Cliff smiled and thanked the senator. In Cliff’s head Billy McCall whispered: nice going, you lying son of a bitch.

  A half hour later, Mike Shannon slapped Cliff on the back as they descended the Capitol steps. “He never laid a glove on you.”

  Washington broiled in its usual June heat and humidity. They plunged into the air-conditioned white limousine at the bottom of the steps and headed for a reception at the Norwegian embassy. Norway had just bought a half-dozen antisubmarine versions of the Starduster to help guard NATO’s northern flank.

  Unreeling, it was another technicolor movie of Cliff Morris’s life—and this time he was both the director and the star. It was 1970—the second year of his reign. From the moment he became Buchanan’s president, he started playing the part.

  Gone was Adrian’s low-keyed patrician style. Cliff installed himself with a party at the Bel Air Hotel for five hundred people. He hired a personal public relations man and got himself and Sarah a stream of press clippings as they elbowed their way into Los Angeles’s upper class. He bought a magnificent new house on a Palos Verdes promontory and another one almost as splendid in the desert outside Palm Springs. He drove around Los Angeles in a white Mercedes licensed Buchanan 1.

  Gone too was Adrian Van Ness’s hesitation about betting the company. Nothing was too splendid or too ambitious for Buchanan Aircraft. The war in Vietnam devoured planes. The assembly lines churned day and night. Cliff announced they were abandoning their tacky Depression-era hangars in Santa Monica for glossy new headquarters in El Segundo, on the edge of Los Angeles airport. He saw a seller’s market with Cliff the salesman supreme. He was going to sell, sell, sell everything on Buchanan’s menu around the world.

  On the commercial airline side of the game, the view was very encouraging to a gambler like Cliff. The jets had created a revolution in air travel. Throughout the sixties, airline revenues climbed month by month as Boeing’s 747s and 727s and Douglas’s DC8s and DC9s flew crammed with passengers from nose to tail. The airlines were awash in cash and were practically begging the aircraft and engine companies to sell them new planes—especially ones that could fill a hole in the market. Cliff revived Adrian’s idea for a medium-sized wide-body. Hoping to stir Frank Buchanan’s enthusiasm, Cliff called it the Aurora, in memory of the airliner that was supposed to emerge from the Talus bomber.

  Dick Stone, eyeing the two-billion-dollar cost overrun on the Colossus, asked why, if there was a hole in the market, they had to fall into it. But Cliff was determined to succeed where Adrian had failed. The Aurora was given top priority. Hundreds of new designers and engineers were hired to go all-out on a prototype. Millions of dollars were spent on marketing studies and sales brochures.

  The days of one or two salesmen pitching a plane in the office of an airline president were over. Each airline now had a committee of
engineers and sales and marketing representatives almost as unwieldy as the Pentagon’s review boards. All these people had to be wined, dined, persuaded, while Dick Stone muttered about the outflow of cash.

  To keep him quiet, Cliff embarked on a world tour to sell the Colossus and the Thunderer to America’s allies. The Prince was summoned from his European haunts to join in the quest. The results were disquieting. Other aircraft companies had discovered the secret of Buchanan’s overseas success and were imitating them. As often happens, the newcomers did it better. Lockheed, for instance, hired Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to dispense their bribes. The going rate for persuasion soared with this influx of competition. At home it was matched by a runaway inflation in costs and wages as the country began paying for Lyndon Johnson’s cowardly decision not to raise taxes to finance the war in Vietnam.

  The Prince seemed to have lost much of his old enthusiasm for commercial combat. He complained endlessly about his liver. One night in Paris he got drunk and lost his savoir faire. “Why did you kill Amalie?” he asked. “Did she threaten to spill the beans, as you call it?”

  Cliff spent an hour trying to convince him that the crash was an accident. He did not succeed. The Prince found it hard to believe anyone like Billy McCall ever existed. He was a purely American phenomenon.

  The Colossus proved particularly hard to sell overseas because very few of America’s allies felt a compelling need to project their power beyond their borders. Italy, for instance, finally agreed to buy four of the giant planes, mostly because the Prince raised Buchanan’s under-the-table offer to astronomical heights. It would have been a personal insult to turn down such an inducement, one of the bribed politicians later explained. The huge craft were parked on a military airfield near Milan, waiting for another Mussolini to invade Africa, perhaps. There was no other visible use for them.