Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  The house looked deserted, even abandoned. Blinds drooped at odd angles, curtains dangled. Cliff’s white Mercedes in the driveway was the only sign of life, and that might have been left behind by the fugitive she was seeking. Inside, the living room made her wince. Newspapers and magazines littered the couches. Ashtrays were full of butts. An empty Scotch bottle stood on an end table. The smell of liquor hung in the stale air.

  She flung open some windows and the terrace door. The sea wind swirled through the place, blowing papers every which way. Footsteps thudded in the study. Cliff stood there in his shorts, running his hand through his uncombed hair.

  “Hello,” Sarah said.

  He was not as gray as Dick Stone. Probably because he was getting touch-ups regularly. That was what a man did when he pursued a younger woman. But there were fault lines in his face that revealed age and loss—he was too much of a man’s man to ask a plastic surgeon to remove them.

  “I’m on the telephone,” he said.

  Sarah picked up the extension in the living room and listened to him talking to a man with a Texas drawl. He was telling Cliff he was not interested in a takeover of the Buchanan Corporation.

  “It’d be like rustlin’ a herd of starved longhorns, Cliff. I’d lose my shirt keepin’ you alive before I could get you to market.”

  Cliff started telling him about a new missile the rocket division was developing. He suggested Buchanan might merge with Northrop and the raider could take over both companies. He read him a glowing report on Northrop’s finances in a recent issue of Aviation Week.

  “Sorry, Cliff boy,” drawled the prospect. “I’m on the prowl for a drug company with a cure for arthritis. That sort of thing. You hear ’bout one, let me know. There’ll be a finder’s fee.”

  The line went dead. Cliff emerged from the study again, pulling on a pair of chinos. “What brings you here?” he said.

  “I’d like to come home,” Sarah said. “Is it possible?”

  “It’s still your house as much as it’s mine,” Cliff said. “That’s the law in California.”

  “Am I welcome?”

  “Give me one reason why you should be.”

  “I spent the last year in the desert looking at a Joshua tree. Eventually it started talking to me. It said go home and ask your husband to forgive you.”

  Cliff padded to the bar and poured himself a drink. Was he trying to blot her out in advance? Sarah looked past him at the windows opening on the Pacific and kept talking.

  “In order to do that I had to ask myself if I forgave him. The answer was maybe. There was another reason. The longer I looked at that tree raising those stubby arms to the sky, the more I began to realize how much I wanted to try to love you again as my husband—someone who tried to achieve certain things in his life and succeeded sometimes—and failed sometimes. The way I tried to love you and failed and tried again and succeeded. Then failed because of so many things. Peru, the Prince, Vietnam, Charlie—Billy. Things we didn’t expect. So we weren’t very good at coping with them.”

  “Who sent you here?” Cliff said.

  “Dick Stone called me. He told me about Adrian. Before he died, Adrian sent me a copy of the letter he wrote you, urging you to resign.”

  “That’s why Dick called you! Can’t you see that? He wants you to help him get rid of me. How the hell can you play Dick’s game and tell me you love me?”

  For a moment the whole room blurred. Sarah felt the wind blowing through her flesh into her bones, shattering them one by one. Was it finally ultimately impossible?

  “I’m playing my own game,” she said, her voice sounding as if she was shouting into a gale. “I’m trying to convince you there’s life after aerospace. There’s a life we can have together we never had except in fits and starts and failures.”

  “I don’t want your goddamn pity!” Cliff roared. “I want a woman who loves a man, not a has-been!”

  For a moment Sarah almost gave up. The wind tugged at more than her bones and flesh. It was blowing away everything, memory, hope, understanding. The word has-been seemed to abrogate both their lives. All Cliff could see was his corporate title. He did not exist outside it.

  She tried one more time, clutching the back of a chair for stability. “I don’t see a has-been. I see the man who brought the Rainbow Express back from Schweinfurt with more holes in it than anyone could count. I see a man who volunteered for another twenty-five missions because he was ashamed of something he’d done on that raid. A man who had the courage to do that—in spite of his fear—is a man I want to spend the rest of my life trying to love.”

  Cliff clutched his glass as if it were the only thing keeping him erect. “Who told you about Schweinfurt? Adrian? That son of a bitch—”

  “Dick Stone told me. He said he had enough confidence in my judgment—to believe I could share it with you—in the right way. He gave me this—for you. He found it in Adrian’s papers.”

  Cliff grabbed the envelope stuffed with the German protest. He flipped through the sheets of paper and slowly crumpled them into a moist mass in his big hands. He began breathing in deep gulps. Tears gushed from his eyes.

  “I should have told you. But I never thought you’d forgive me—I never had that much confidence. I was—”

  “Afraid. Not of me. But of your idea of me. Little Miss England, the hero-worshipping cockteaser. Afraid of that stupid idiotic girl who only knew what she could see and touch and kiss. You were so handsome—and I was so young. You were almost as young.”

  The wind was roaring through the room now, a gale, a cyclone. “Cliff—let’s say good-bye to both those sad wonderful people. Good-bye forever—without regrets. With affection.”

  He hunched over his drink, refusing to abandon his misery. “I lied to you.” “That was part of being in love. I lied to you too. Telling you I was in love with you when I was really in love with an idea, with the drama, with the heroic anguish of watching you take off and praying you back again.”

  Neither of them had moved an inch. They were like a pair of talking stanchions. Sarah felt the wind shoving her toward him but she was afraid he would flee.

  “You had a hero—now you’ve got a has-been,” he said, regret, ambition still gouging him. “Do you expect me to believe you love both guys? Why don’t you tell me to go down fighting? Why are we going to let that bastard Adrian Van Ness have the final say?”

  “You did go down fighting. In those hearings. That’s when I started to love you again. I saw you really didn’t believe you’d done anything wrong. I watched the rest of those hearings and saw why you played the game that way. Everyone else was doing it. In a sense—a very special sense—you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She walked to the bar and put her hand on his arm. “But in another sense you did. It was wrong. All those men you bribed—in Japan—Holland—Germany—they’ve gone to jail. They were breaking their laws, if you weren’t. We were both right—and both wrong that night in Lima. I didn’t—I couldn’t love you enough to explain it.”

  “Because of Billy?” he snarled.

  The wind almost flung her across the room and out the door. She had to cling to something and it turned out to be his arm. “You could say that. It wouldn’t be completely untrue. But he was only part of it. The other part was the way we’d failed—we hadn’t loved each other before he arrived on the scene.”

  He was facing her on the bar stool, listening, seeming to agree. He abruptly turned away. “Yeah,” he said, in the same bitter voice.

  A wildness swelled in Sarah’s throat. It reminded her of the night with Billy McCall in the desert. She had gone too far. She was not going to let this man escape her.

  “You know what I see us doing?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Learning to fly. Buying a plane and flying it together, all over the country, the world. I’d feel so close to Charlie. Closer than we could ever get on the ground—”

  A different man confronted her.
Defeated and full of an emotion darker than anger. An ominous compound of bitterness and violence. “You really want to fly with me? After what happened to Billy? That wasn’t an accident, you know. Somebody put that plane into that dive. I’ve thought about doing the same thing. I don’t know when the impulse will suddenly get too strong to resist. You ready to fly with that kind of pilot?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “I’m ready to fly with that kind of pilot.”

  “I mean it,” Cliff said. “I sat here half the day thinking about how to do it. Thinking about Tama—”

  Sarah walked past him into the master bedroom. In the back of a drawer full of old lingerie, she found Tama’s letter. I was wrong. The words glared up at her again, full of even more meanings now. She walked back to the living room and handed it to Cliff.

  “Your mother sent this to me the night she died. I saved it for some reason. Maybe so I could give it to you now.”

  “What does it mean?” Cliff said dazedly, clutching the blue-bordered page.

  “Whatever you want it to mean.”

  “Jesus,” Cliff said. “Jesus.”

  He ran his fingers over the words. “Sarah,” he said. “It means so many goddamn things. Wrong about marrying Buzz. Wrong about putting that son of a bitch in charge of my life. Wrong about trusting Adrian. Wrong about—”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, putting her hand on the paper too, letting all the wrongs she had committed and had been committed against her mingle in the words. “Maybe she’s saying she was wrong about what she did that night too. It would be so wrong for you to do it now and leave me without the only man I ever tried to love.”

  Tears streamed down her face. Cliff’s arms were around her. His lips were in her hair, on her throat. “Sarah, Sarah. It’s okay. It’s not going to happen now. You’re right. Everything you’ve been saying is right. Dick Stone can have the goddamn company and welcome to it. I’ve got you. That’s enough for me.”

  He was still the salesman, selling himself on the idea. She knew it would not be that simple. She knew there would be times when he would see an Aurora soaring into the sky or a Colossus rumbling toward a runway and he would hunger for the glory days. But she promised the good angels who had brought her here and given her the words of consolation and hope that she would not falter, she would not fail again.

  The telephone rang. They both gazed at it, recognizing it as an enemy, the world beyond these walls, intruding with a demand or a question. “Answer it, will you?” Cliff said. “If it’s Dick, tell him he’ll have my letter of resignation on his desk tomorrow morning.”

  “This is Mark Casey of the Los Angeles Times,” said the smooth voice in Sarah’s ear. “Is Cliff Morris there? We just got word of the crash of Buchanan’s experimental bomber. I was hoping he might have a comment on it.”

  It was an ultimate test. Why not find out now? For a moment Sarah wondered if she should remind Cliff of the night he had promised to build the plane as a memorial to Charlie. She decided not to take Dick Stone’s advice. She wanted this to be a test of what they had just said to each other, nothing else.

  She told Cliff who it was and why he was calling. All the implications flashed across his face. Here was his chance to destroy Dick Stone, to create a vacuum that the board of directors might ask him to fill, for want of a better candidate.

  “Hello, Mark,” Cliff said. “It’s a shame about the plane. I know. I agree. There are times when some planes seem jinxed. They break your heart along with your pocketbook. This is one of them—”

  Cliff was looking at Sarah as he said the next words. But she sensed he was also seeing something or someone else she could not share.

  “But these things happen in the aircraft business. One of the fathers of flight, the German, Otto Lilienthal, summed it up on his deathbed with a famous phrase—sacrifices must be expected. That’s our motto—it’s every planemaker’s motto. We’ll find out what went wrong and fix it so it won’t happen again. We’ll have another prototype of the BX ready to fly in a month or so.”

  They went out on the terrace, arm in arm. A mile or two at sea, a green plane was doing stunts. Loops, barrel rolls, immelmans. Writing his artistry on the blue dome of the sky. Sarah’s heart almost stopped beating.

  “That guy can fly,” Cliff said.

  “We’ll be doing the same thing soon.”

  “I’m not that good,” Cliff said.

  “Yes you are,” Sarah said, and almost believed it.

  DESTINIES

  Throughout the day, while the uproar over the crash of the BX swirled around him, part of Dick Stone’s mind was elsewhere—with Sarah in the house at Palos Verdes, trying to imagine what was happening between her and Cliff, realizing ruefully that he could not do it. No matter how well you knew a couple, there was a zone of intimacy they alone had experienced.

  At other times he traveled to San Juan de Capistrano to ask an old woman a crucial question. For some reason he postponed it, although disappearing for a couple of hours might have been the best way to handle the maddening mixture of condescension and scorn that descended on the company from the media and Washington.

  The Creature and his cohorts in Congress churned out a sickening mixture of jokes and sneers about the crash of the BX. Editorial writers and TV anchors rushed to wonder if anyone in the American aircraft industry knew what they were doing, citing a dozen other failed programs.

  Apotheosis, Adrian Van Ness whispered. It was perfect on-the-job training for a man who might soon become chief executive officer of an aircraft company. The media and the politicians were proving once more that Adrian was right in his cold-eyed assessment of them. Still Dick delayed his trip to San Juan de Capistrano. He found himself wondering if he really wanted to be CEO of this shot-up machine. Buchanan was an updated version of the Rainbow Express, staggering home on one and a half engines—with no one praying them in.

  That night, pacing his lonely house in Nichols Canyon, Dick told himself if Sarah failed with Cliff, he would step aside and let the Big Shot and the wreck go down in flames together. Apotheosis, Adrian whispered. Somehow it had a mocking sound. As if he was telling him to stop kidding himself.

  At 8 A.M. the next morning when Dick arrived bleary-eyed for work, his secretary handed him Cliff Morris’s letter of resignation. With it was a note from Sarah. “It’s your turn, Navigator.”

  It was time for his trip to San Juan de Capistrano. Following Hanrahan’s directions, Dick found Madame George in a comfortable cottage a block from the semi-restored mission. She was a withered chip of a woman but her mind was clear. Of course she remembered Adrian Van Ness. And Richard Stone. And Amalie Borne.

  “Dear Amalie. She was both the best and the worst of my girls,” she whispered in her husky baritone.

  “She told me a story—the night I met her,” Dick said. “She said she was Jewish—raised in Schweinfurt.” He choked out the rest of it, feeling like he was in a plane coming out of a 13 G dive that was turning his body and brain to mush.

  “I know the whole story. She told it to me in 1945.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Absolutely. I was in Schweinfurt myself for most of the war. A forced laborer imported from France. When the Reich collapsed, I met Amalie there, roaming like a wolf girl in the ruins. I went to her so-called protector and forced him to give me all the cash he had—or I would tell the Americans what he had done to her.”

  Madame George lit a cigarette. “I told the Americans anyway. The money got us to Paris. But Amalie. Dear Amalie—I tried so hard to help her forget the past, to live in the present, surrounded by beauty and love—”

  Tears streamed down Dick’s face, turning the room, the husky-voiced old woman, into a blur. “I loved her,” he said.

  “You were not alone,” Madame George said. “Prince Carlo—so many others loved her. She could not love anyone in return. It was as if those nights in the attic, the furnaces in the crematoriums had annihilated her heart. All anyone can do—al
l you should do—is forgive her.”

  “I do. I do,” Dick said, wiping his streaming eyes.

  Suddenly Jewishness was no longer an unwanted burden, it was part of his history because it was part of his love and that love justified everything, the bombs on German cities and the treachery over Schweinfurt and the embezzled money and the bombers and fighters and attack planes Buchanan built to defend America. His history was part of the pain of all history, pain that only love and courage could confront.

  Was this his apotheosis? To be both American and Jewish without regret or shame or hesitation? To be both so passionately they were one thing?

  Dick drove back to his house in Nichols Canyon. He walked through the empty rooms thinking of Cassie and the children. A huge corporation was crouched a few miles away, waiting to leap on his back. But he felt incomprehensibly free for the first time in a decade. He was ready to fly to Tennessee and tell Cassie the truth at last. Maybe she would laugh in his face. Maybe not. Whatever happened at tomorrow’s board meeting, it seemed almost unimportant now.

  Twenty-four hours later, Dick stood in the darkened boardroom of the Buchanan Corporation, finishing his first speech as president. “The hypersonic transport—the Orient Express—will fly people farther and faster than they’ve ever flown before. It will create the kind of revolution in air travel to the Far East that the subsonic jets have created in Europe. Imagine Japan and China only two hours away!

  “But this is not the final installment of my dreams for this company, gentlemen. I have one more to share with you, based on a plane we built—and mistakenly destroyed—thirty years ago.”

  He punched a switch on the slide projector and onto the screen glided a gigantic flying wing. “This is the transport of the future, the airlifter to end them all. It will be five hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip and it will carry as much cargo as a ten-thousand-ton freighter. We’re calling it the Buchanan.”

  The screen went dark. The lights came up. Frank Buchanan was sitting next to Dick. “You should have given me some warning, at least,” he said with a sad smile.