The Last Mission

by William Kennedy

  There was water. Through a momentary break in the clouds, I could see wave tips and the unmistakable ripple of windblown sea.

  “There it is! Water! We’re over water.”

  “You sure?” But even as he was asking me, another window flew past and gave me a glimpse down at the ocean.

  “There, look!”

  “Jesus! Oh, thank you, Jesus…thank you.”

  He lowered the nose and almost instantly we broke out of a five-hundred-foot ceiling over open water. No ice floats, nor even small floaters—just colorless sea beneath us and a metallic sky above, seen through light that was heavily filtered.

  A cheer went up through the cockpit as we leveled off at three hundred feet, and then the navigator was screaming, “I got the beacon. I got the beacon. Bearing zero three zero. I got the beacon.”

  Another wild cheer. We could see enough so we wouldn’t fly into the side of a mountain. We had a bearing to the field. And if we were picking up the beacon at this low altitude, we had to be pretty much on top of it.

  I called the flight commander, but there was no answer. Then I called for any station on this frequency. Two planes responded with faint signals. We set up a relay so we could pass the message on from one plane to another. “All clear at four hundred feet. We hear the Cape Farvel radio loud and clear, bearing zero three zero from our position. Suggest turn to south before descending.”

  If we were that close to land, it was possible that some of the other guys were already approaching the coastal mountains. Better to head them back out to sea before they came down through the clouds.

  The bombardier’s finger jabbed toward the left just ahead of the spin of the number-two propeller. “Look. That’s land isn’t it?”

  I passed the binoculars back to him and he steadied his elbows against the pilot’s shoulder. “Yeah. Breakers up against rocks. Over there, too. Yahoo!”

  Boatswain’s Mate Latterly came up and leaned through the cheering officers. “Hey, you found it. Nice going!” He was as calm as if missing the airfield was only as inconvenient as missing a bus. We felt like we had been rescued by the hand of God. Latterly figured we were a little smarter than the Lightning pilots were. Probably neither was true.

  We followed the beacon, watching the land to our left move closer and become much more distinct. I called the Cape Farvel tower and an American voice answered instantly in an Appalachian accent. “Hey, good hearing from you. We were getting a little worried about you guys.” The land jutted out in front of us. We could see two crossed runways. Some of the smokepots were starting to burn.

  As we swung inland for our approach, we heard our other planes reporting fair visibility at three hundred feet, then they began reporting their bearings to the beacon. The numbers covered half of the compass rose. We were in a fifteen-mile arc, coming at the runway from wildly different angles, but we could sort it all out. We were all going to make it.

  Miraculously, the swagger returned to our walk. The sneer of nonchalance curled our lips. Once again, we were thirty-mission aces.

  “We have reached our cruising altitude,” the steward’s voice announces. “The captain is turning off the seat-belt sign, and you are free to move about the cabin.”

  The captain, I think. All he has to do is push a couple of buttons and the plane will fly itself all the way home.

  Now

  I open the envelope of John Browning’s memoirs and set the pages on the seat-back tray. I thumb through and find references to the Mary Brock case, and then go backward—page by page—until I had reached the first report of a dead body in the Norwich auto garage. I read about the two children playing in the ruins who had come upon the stiff, colorless corpse and their mother’s report to the police. Constables arrived at the scene, searched the area, and came to the obvious conclusion that the victim had been in the building when the escaping German Dornier bomber dumped the bombs intended for a high-priority target. “How do you figure?” they had asked rhetorically. What were the odds of this woman being in that building at the precise moment when the German flyer pulled the lever to lighten his plane? “When your time’s up, it’s up,” one of the constables philosophized, but Browning wasn’t comfortable with the coincidence. For one thing, he wrote, the victim was a woman who wouldn’t typically be hanging around an auto garage. For another, she was dressed for an evening out and the auto garage wasn’t a likely place for a date. Had it been a man in greasy coveralls, Browning would have looked no further. Instead, he decided to call in a medical examiner.

  The doctor saw the case as entirely routine and sent back a report that was intended just to fill out a file, but Browning found the red flags. The woman had died from a massive wound to the back of her head, not at all unusual for someone caught in a collapsing building, but there wasn’t another bone broken, or even a bruise. Another problem was the range of time given for her time of death. Even at its farthest date, it was still several days after the garage had been bombed. The medical examiner had shrugged. “Can’t be all that precise in these things. Bottom of a building. Cold winter weather. Decomposition could have proceeded a bit more slowly.”

  Browning had likened his thinking to the task of breaking a bundle of sticks. Take the facts one at a time and they were easily explained. Might not a prostitute use a room above a garage for her entertaining? And couldn’t she still be waiting for her customer to arrive? Or perhaps he had just left. That would explain why she was in a garage alone at night. It was even possible that the rafter that had crushed her skull had also held up the rest of the falling debris. That might be why there was no other damage to the body. While there was a fire following the explosion, she might well have been shielded from the heat and flames by a fallen ceiling. There was a possible answer for everything. But when you put all the sticks together and tied them into a bundle, they weren’t so easily broken. All these unusual events, occurring in one woman’s death, defied logic. Browning had launched a homicide investigation.

  A receipt in her handbag had led to her apartment, and the photos and letters in her apartment had suggested her fondness for American flyers. Her bank statement had also been revealing, showing sources of income well beyond her known means. And that, according to Browning’s memoirs, had led to the interrogation of anyone who knew the woman. The sergeant summed up the profile of Mary Brock that had emerged, and the links that suggested flyers from the Bridge as her likely killers, and those links had brought Browning to me.

  I’m reading about our meetings, with Browning going more toward his impressions and opinions than he could in the official file. He found me polite, helpful, but basically uninterested in running down Mary Brock’s killers. He was sympathetic to my position: responsible for keeping him happy, but also keeping him out of Air Force business. I was more concerned about his priorities than most of the Americans, but, he lamented, there was simply no one in authority—British or American—who wanted this case pursued.

  Browning spent an entire chapter speculating on the reason. The Yanks and the Brits were blood brothers—the closest possible allies in the war against Fascism. Information about American flyers murdering an English girl wouldn’t help the war effort.

  “For God’s sake,” Browning was told over and over again, “it’s just one woman, and probably a tart at that. Your job, old boy, is to keep everyone fighting Germans.”

  Another problem he outlines is the well-guarded border between U.S. authorities and English law. The American air bases were cities unto themselves. Ten of our bomber bases would rank in the top fifteen cities of East Anglia. A fifth of the region’s population wore American uniforms. The Army officers governed these population centers, and they were not about to hand authority over the British. Meanwhile, the English police forces couldn’t very well ignore the activities of twenty percent of the population. Neither side wanted to raise the issue of who was actually in charge.

  Mary Brock was a problem to everyone, and both sides were bringing pre
ssure to bear on Sergeant Browning. Or at least that’s the way he sees it in his memoirs. But the problem that Browning focuses on is that a killer is slipping through the cracks and going unpunished. And, as he writes, “ignoring a murder makes much of the rhetoric about the nobility of allied goals seem a bit pretentious.”

  As I turn the pages, Browning ignored the advice of his superiors and pressed on with his investigation. He took full credit for linking the Mary Brock murder with an ongoing investigation of a scam that English women were working on the American flyers, not so much as a swindle as a callous disregard for the pressures that the aircrews were under. Instead of selling their favors, the women used them to convince the Americans that they were sincerely in love and the flyers expressed their commitment by naming the ladies as beneficiaries of their military insurance policies.

  It was literally a case of taking candy from a baby. Most of the young men had been plucked from Depression homes where they had no dependents or any money to spend on insurance. Nearly all had listed their mothers as beneficiaries. All they had to do was stop in the clerk’s office and change their insurance assignments to prove their devotion to the young lady. At the rate we were losing pilots, a woman who managed her time properly might get half a dozen checks a month.

  Browning had identified several women who were working the scam, despite their use of bogus identities. Whittingbridge was hardest hit. Browning acknowledged that an American officer—I seemed to fit the references—turned up sixteen flyers killed in action whose insurance had recently been changed to an English woman. He was focusing on the Bridge because I was providing at least some measure of cooperation. He suspected that the numbers might be just as high at other bases if he could find some way to get at their records.

  Then came the bombshell that jolted me upright. An associate of Mary Brock’s had been working one of the other bases. Immediately after Mary’s murder, Browning had brought her up short and made her part of the investigation because “she obviously knew how to compromise American flyers.”

  I sit openmouthed, staring at the scribbled text. I realize that I am no longer breathing and that the queasiness in my stomach is growing to full-blown nausea. Browning is describing Angela. She was a close friend of Mary Brock’s. She was introduced into the case—or at least to me—shortly after Mary’s murder. She certainly knew how to compromise at least one American flyer. If she was the agent, then I was the victim, and much of what has lived within me all my life was stage play. The words I hear over and over again were lies.

  It’s late in the evening when I land in New York, tired, despite what the clock tells me, because my body knows I’ve been up for sixteen straight hours. They’ve been difficult hours. My past life has crashed with the intimation that Angela wasn’t the girl I knew. My present life is hurtling toward destruction because of the danger my son faces. Every hint of peace has been drained out of my body.

  Happily, Kit has a limo waiting, and I finally doze off on the way to her home in Westchester. She greets me as if I’ve been away for years, even though it’s less than a week since she dropped me at the airport. “Good trip?” she asks.

  I nod. “Shorter than I expected, though.”

  “But you solved your mystery?” she asks hopefully.

  “No, if anything I’ve complicated it. Now I’m not sure which side I was on, but there are records that should help me untangle the mess.

  “Do you have to go back?”

  “I want to go back. There are people that I need to…understand.”

  It’s then I realize that I’ve begun to blame Angela and Todd, as if they had both set out to destroy me: Angela by turning my life in England into a fabrication; Todd, for upsetting my life in America. I have to try not to do that, especially with Todd.

  He arrives in the morning, appearing at the door only minutes after Kit’s husband has departed for his commuter train. Todd is in his forties, as the gray in his hair clearly testifies. But the jeans and a leather jacket, coupled with the ponytail that hangs from his baseball cap, put him in his twenties, the age he was when he stopped growing. Todd never figured out that antisocial protest gets boring in middle age.

  “Guess I’ve screwed up royally,” he says by way of greeting.

  He seems surprised that I would offer my hand, and he slaps at it rather than taking it and holding it. The gesture, which was born in his generation, acknowledges my presence without making any commitment of lasting friendship, then he peels off the leather jacket to reveal a T-shirt that celebrates a band tour.

  “Screwed up,” I agree, “but not fatally. My lawyer thinks he can argue it down to a suspended sentence with community service.” Todd smirks at the irony. The rest of his life is already pledged to community service for one court or another. I doubt if he has yet worked off the time for pouring red paint on the equipment in his college science laboratory.

  Kit hugs her brother and then sets us up in her kitchen with bagels and coffee. She excuses herself to run a few errands, discreetly leaving us alone to talk. We waste a few minutes chatting about my trip before Todd gets to the subject at hand.

  “When I said I had screwed up, I wasn’t thinking about me,” he begins. “I was thinking about you having to come back from England. It seems like I’m always screwing up your life.”

  Years back I would have accepted that as a fact. I probably would have even exaggerated the deflection he had caused in my straight line of success, but now I know that isn’t true.

  “I didn’t need any help in screwing up my life,” I confess to him. “I did that all by myself.”

  He looks stunned by my admission.

  “You’ve got your own baggage to deal with,” I continue. “You don’t need to add any of mine.”

  He nods, but he’s still trying to formulate some sort of apology. “I know I don’t make things easy for you. I have this knack of being a pain in the ass.”

  “You never bought into the system. You always thought there should be something more. Your mother admired that in you. I guess I always resented it because I had bought in. You know. ‘What’s good enough for me ought to be good enough for him.’ But that’s my problem, not yours.”

  He shakes his head as he laughs into his coffee. “Well the ‘something more’ isn’t selling CDs at a music store.”

  He could say the same about promoting a rock band, being a technician at a recording studio, composing music, playing a guitar, managing a fast-food stand, driving a taxi, selling health foods, stacking library books, or any of the other hundred or so professions he has tried. Some he quit in a huff; others he just gave up. There were a couple where he was asked to leave. The “something more” hasn’t shown up yet.

  “You’ll need to make an appointment with the lawyer,” I say, getting us back to the reason for our meeting. “He’ll want your side of the story.”

  “My side of the story is plain stupidity. I went up to Washington Heights. There’s only one reason why white guys ever go there, so the narcs didn’t have any trouble finding me. And then I bought from the first guy who came along. Grade school kids are smarter than that.”

  “What did you buy?”

  “Just some pot.”

  “They arrested you for buying pot?”

  “They must have been having a slow week.”

  Todd doesn’t think he has a drug problem. He says marijuana is as harmless as a bottle of beer, and that he is only a recreational user. And that’s probably true, as long as he has a stash at hand. But when he runs out, he’s about as recreational as an alcoholic is. He does dumb things to replenish his supply.

  The drugs started in the sixties, about the same time he became socially conscious and began to despise the material world. He was in high school at the time, and the abruptness of his change in direction gave Kay and me a bad case of whiplash. One week we had an honor student in chinos and a sports shirt; the next week we had a class-cutter dressed like someone who would sleep in a doorway.
One week he was proud of my service in the Air Force; the next week I had become a child-butchering fascist. That’s when my footlocker was put in the attic.

  By his senior year he had two suspensions for drug possession. On his eighteenth birthday, the police put his name on a folder and began keeping the records they weren’t allowed to keep when he was a minor. Todd did his best to keep the folder full. In college he became a campus protester, vehemently opposed not only to the Vietnam War, but also to the formal curriculum, class attendance, examinations, dormitory rules, intercollegiate sports, sexual segregation in the locker rooms, ROTC, and drug restrictions. For three years he did nothing in the cause of a degree, but satisfied himself by being a constant pain in the ass to anyone in authority. The school must have considered all this part of the educational process, because they never kicked him out. They must have been proud of his achievements, because they kept sending tuition bills.

  And we kept paying them. Kay said it would be wrong to abandon him, and that at least the college gave him a place to live. I kept hoping for the end of the war and the return of sanity to the campus. He’ll come out of this, I told myself.

  They were still fighting at the end of Nixon’s first term, and Todd had decided that Canada would be a lot more comfortable than Southeast Asia. It was probably at this juncture in our lives that I failed him most grievously. Naturally, I didn’t want him going to the jungle to be destroyed, but I couldn’t encourage him to shrink from his duty. He said I was still playing war hero from my days as a pilot, and that he saw nothing admirable in dropping bombs on women and children, but I wasn’t thinking of my own time in the service. After all, I had survived. I was thinking more of all the flyers that had been shot to pieces, vaporized, or burned alive. It seemed an obscene waste of their lives if the next generation answered the call by fleeing to Canada, so I never gave him any encouragement or support. I didn’t even join him for breakfast the morning that he and another young man left for the border, nor did I listen a few years later when he tried to explain all that was wrong with the Vietnam War. Instead, I was forgiving like the father in the Bible. I welcomed him back even though he had wasted his inheritance and lived with the pigs. Todd took forgiveness as an insult. I saw it as a way to end his alienation. We never connected.