Aces (25 page)

“What do you mean by ‘eventually’?” Teddy asked.

“They need some work.” Gold told Teddy about the modified Standard he’d flown while bootlegging. “I think that plane’s plywood
skin, and turning the front cockpit area into a cargo bin, were good ideas. I’ve got some others: bigger wheels, engine modifications,
and so on.”

Teddy nodded. “Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“I do, and I could use somebody to help me do that work.”

Teddy smiled. “You proposing to
me
, as well?”

Gold laughed. “I love Erica, but I
need
you, Teddy. Why don’t you come in with me as chief engineer? That’s a grandiose title for doing exactly what you’re doing
now, except with airplanes instead of tractors.”

“Why me?” Teddy asked. “Must be plenty of good grease monkeys out there in California.”

“There are,” Gold agreed. “And as the business expands, you can hire as many as you need to work
for
you. But you’re not just a grease monkey, Teddy. I know that, because we’ve worked together. We came up with some great gimmicks
for that Jenny, and a lot of those modifications were your ideas. I know that you’ve got all kinds of interesting notions
in your head. What I want to do is free up those ideas, turn them into reality. The air transport company is just a beginning,
Teddy. What I
really
want to do is build new kinds of airplanes.”

Teddy thought about it. “No offense, but I don’t know if I could work for anyone. Not even you, Herm. I’ve been my own boss
all my life.”

“You’d still be your own boss in a lot of ways,” Gold said, but then he shrugged. “Look, you’d be working for me, there’s
no getting around that, but the work would be a hell of a lot more exciting than changing spark plugs. We’ll negotiate an
arrangement for splitting the profits on any new patents we come up with.”

“Patents!” Teddy chuckled. “Hell, I don’t know… Sure I can tinker around, but inventing things?…” He shook his head. “I don’t
think I can do it…”

“Yeah, you can,” Gold said. “I know what you’re capable of. Just wait until you read the books I’ve got back in Los Angeles.
Aeronautics, aerodynamics, engineering. You’ll see, Teddy. It’ll be like a light will go on in your head.”

“But what happens if it doesn’t work out?” Teddy asked.

Gold shrugged impatiently. “We can work something out… Like a lump-sum payment for you if you decide you made the wrong choice.
Hell, you could always open a garage just like this one in California. There’s just as many cars, and no Nebraska blizzards.”

“Speaking of the garage, it’d take me a while to liquidate this business,” Teddy said.

“You own the property?”

“No, I lease the garage, but I own all the equipment.”

“Then don’t liquidate anything but your lease,” Gold said. “We can use all these tools, and any vehicles you own.” Gold winked
at him. “You do still have the Harley?”

“Yep.”

“Bring it!” he said heartily. “Motorcycles were invented for California!”

Teddy’s green eyes got very serious behind his thick spectacles. “You’ve got that much faith in me?” he asked quietly.

“I’ve got that much faith in myself,” Gold said. “I’m brimming over with it. Come with me, Teddy. Catch the overflow.”

“You promise no tractors?”

“Not unless you can figure out a way to build ‘em with wings.”

In consideration of Carl Schuler, who had left the Lutheran faith, the minister conducted the wedding ceremony—attended only
by family and a few close friends—at the farmhouse. Gold considered the location to be a lucky break. He felt duplicitous
enough toward his bride by masquerading as a lapsed gentile. He didn’t want to further compound the sham by entering a church.

He knew that he should have told Erica about himself right at the beginning of their relationship, but he hadn’t, and as she
came to mean more to him, it had gotten harder and harder to take the risk of losing her by confessing the truth. Then they’d
made love. To tell her then had seemed impossible. Today they were getting married. Now it was too late; he could never tell
her.

He didn’t feel at all guilty toward his own race, or the religion that his people practiced. A man couldn’t forsake what he’d
never known.

He paid little attention to the minister’s ceremony; religion in general was unimportant to him. God was another story… If
there was a God, Gold couldn’t imagine Him thinking that what Gold was perpetrating was a sin. Gold deeply and truly loved
Erica, and she loved him. She was going to have his child. They would be happy together; a family.
That
was the
real
truth, not the dimly remembered origins of his birth.

That night, Gold made love to his new wife in her canopied bed. He told her how much he loved her, and that when they got
to Los Angeles he would take some of the money he’d borrowed from the bank in order to buy her an engagement diamond.

Erica wouldn’t hear of it. “I already know what I want for a wedding gift. I want you to teach me how to fly.”

GUNMEN FELLED IN BOOTLEGGING FRACAS—

Feds Say River of Hooch Flows across U.S. Borders—

Philadelphia Tattler

OUT OF THE ASHES: POSTWAR GERMANY’S
AIRLINES SERVE EUROPE—

Germans at Forefront of Efficient Commercial Aviation—

Fares to Rome, Paris, Moscow,

Cheaper Than French and British Competition—

New York Herald

UNITED STATES IMMIGRATION ACT PASSES—

Congressional Advocates Cite Need for Racial Purity—

Washington Gazette

NATIONALISTS GAIN IN CHINA—

Chiang Kai-shek unifies Kuomintang—

Boston Times

20,000 NATIONAL SOCIALISTS RALLY IN
NUREMBERG—

Vociferous Germans Hail Party Leaders—

Adolph Hitler, Herman Goering, Heiner Froehlig

Speak—

Los Angeles Tribune

LINDY DOES IT!

Charles Lindbergh Spans the Ocean—

The Spirit of St. Louis
Completes the First Transatlantic

Solo Flight—

Baltimore Globe

Gold was in his office when he heard about the plane crash. The telephone call came from his flight operations supervisor
at Mines Field, telling him that his Spatz F-5a passenger transport, incoming from Las Vegas, had turned itself into a fireball
while attempting to land in L.A. The plane had been loaded to capacity. All eight passengers and the two-man crew had been
killed.

Gold told the panicked supervisor that he was on his way to the airfield, broke the connection, then punched the intercom
button to buzz his secretary, a no-nonsense, middle-aged woman who pretty much ran the administrative and bookkeeping sides
of Gold’s operations. “Put me through to Teddy.”

“Yes, sir.” A moment later she came back on the line. “I’ve rung his office, and paged the shop, but Mister Quinn isn’t answering.”

Gold thought that his secretary was sounding pretty frazzled. Well, why not? He was feeling pretty goddamned frazzled himself.
“Find him,” Gold ordered. “Then tell him to meet me out at the airport. And call my wife. Tell her what’s happened, and not
to say anything to the reporters if they should call the house.”

“Yes, sir. And sir? We all feel terrible about what’s happened—”

Gold thanked her, and hung up. He sat in his chair for a moment, letting it sink in. In a way he’d been lucky: he’d not lost
an airplane up until now.
Ten people dead, and a brand new twenty-thousand-dollar airplane utterly destroyed
. His luck had certainly changed with a vengeance.

Gold’s stomach was doing flip-flops; his heartbeat seemed to echo, as if he’d become hollow. He wondered, calmly, if he were
suffering from some sort of emotional shock… He guessed that if he were thinking clearly enough to ask himself that, he probably
wasn’t.

His office was on the top floor. Skylights let in lots of natural light. The office had white painted walls, a bare wooden
floor, and a metal desk. Against one wall was a massive drafting table on which Gold did most of his work. The table was flanked
by a pair of glass-fronted bookcases crammed with technical volumes. Above the bookcases was a framed commendation for speedy
delivery of the mail from the postal service, newspaper clippings about his air transport business, and photographs of Gold
with Adolphe Menjou, Bebe Daniels, Ronald Colman, Will Rogers, and other Hollywood stars, all the photos taken in front of
his airplanes, just before the celebrity passengers boarded.

And there were photographs of his family: Erica in her helmet and goggles, smiling triumphantly from the cockpit of her Curtiss
biplane racer after participating at an air race at Santa Monica’s Clover Field; Erica horseback riding in Wyoming. There
was a photo of his two kids at the beach, with the nanny.

It was funny how there were no pictures of the family together…

His office had a view of the bay. The windows were open, and the tangy wind blowing off the sea was fresh and clean. He shielded
his eyes as he stared enviously out at the blue water flecked with golden light, dotted with fishing boats being escorted
by blizzards of gulls. The fishing boats trailed white, foamy wakes as they placidly chugged along. Life out there looked
very peaceful and simple…

He went into the washroom adjoining his office and rinsed his face with cold water. He was twenty-seven, but he looked much
older, and very tired, as he stared into the mirror. He smoothed down his moustache and thinning hair, straightened the knot
in his necktie, and then went back for his suit jacket. He left the office the back way, so that he wouldn’t encounter any
employees on his way out to the parking field, where he got into his Stutz Bulldog Tourer.

Gold had coveted a Bulldog ever since he’d first laid eyes on the roomy convertible built on the frame of a Stutz Bearcat.
Nineteen eighteen was the last year in which Stutz had built them, so Gold had been forced to settle for used, even though
he could afford most any new car. He’d bought this one last year, plunking down twenty-eight hundred for the trade-in, at
the Stutz dealership on Wilshire Boulevard. With Teddy’s help he’d lovingly refurbished it and then had the Stutz repainted
his colors: lacquered turquoise, with scarlet fenders the velvety hue of fine Burgundy.

As Gold drove to the airfield he couldn’t help thinking back on the last few years, on how hard he’d worked to build something
good. Now it looked like it might all crumble away…

That first year he and Erica lived in a small bungalow apartment within walking distance of the trolley line to Mines Field.
Gold had been in the cockpit of one of his De Havillands, somewhere in the air between Frisco and Los Angeles, when Erica
went into labor. A message had been waiting for him when he landed in Los Angeles. His wife was at the hospital. By the time
he got there, Erica had given birth to a daughter. They named her Susan Alice, after Erica’s two grandmothers.

In those days, Gold, along with Hull and Les, took turns doing the flying on their single L.A./Frisco mail route, but as the
business expanded to include mail and cargo delivery routes all along the West Coast, Gold found himself increasingly desk-bound.
He put Hull and Lester Stiles behind desks as well, in charge of recruiting and supervising the pilots who flew the military
surplus airplanes that Gold gradually added to his fleet.

Gold Express really began to prosper when it began to haul passengers. Most of them were Hollywood people, the movie stars
whose inscribed photos were not on his office walls. The flight accommodations were spartan. Passengers would dress in fleece-lined
overalls supplied to them at the hangar/terminal. Once aboard the modified surplus bombers, they would squeeze themselves
in as best they could among the mail sacks, to peer out through the porthole-like windows that had been installed in the fuselage.

Fortunately, show business people were game to try anything new, especially when it might get their names in the newspapers.
Gold got the idea to have the fleece-lined overalls dyed turquoise, to have “Gold Express” stitched over the breast pocket,
and his trademark centaur embroidered across the back. He let the passengers keep the overalls as a souvenir. Quickly it became
a status symbol in Hollywood to have a pair. The publicity garnered more business for Gold Express, allowing Gold to pay off
the balance of his original fifteen-thousand-dollar business loan.

He also bought a house, a
real
house, not a junky little bungalow shoehorned in among its neighbors on some treeless, sunbaked tract. He put down ten thousand
cash, taking out a twenty-five-thousand-dollar mortgage on a sparkling white Spanish Colonial on a quiet street, lush with
jacaranda trees and desert palms, in small-town Pasadena, ten miles to the east of downtown Los Angeles. The day he and his
family moved in was one of the most satisfying in Gold’s life.

Keeping on top of his business had forced Gold to drastically curtail his own flying, but Erica was spending enough time in
the air for both of them. She’d taken flying lessons at Santa Monica’s Clover Air Field. She’d quickly won her license, in
the process becoming good friends with another of her instructor’s pupils, a young woman named Amelia Earhart, who was always
looking for extra money to pay for her flying. Occasionally, once Amelia had her license, Gold let her fill in flying mail
and cargo when he was short a pilot.

It was Amelia who encouraged Erica to take part in a few local air meets. Erica did well and was bitten by the racing bug.
She badgered Gold into buying her a racer; Gold got a good deal on a state-of-the-art Curtiss Navy Racer that had been almost
totaled in a crash. Once his people had the Curtiss back together, Gold assigned Erica a mechanic full-time to take care of
the plane. A nanny was hired to care for Susan so that Erica could be free to haul her race-bird up and down the West Coast.
She rarely won a competition, which was fine with Gold, since the pilots who won the most were also the pilots who suffered
the most accidents, but Erica almost always placed well in the pack. That, in itself, was a notable achievement for a woman
racing against men. Soon she had a sizable collection of plaques and trophies. The fact that Erica was involved in a terribly
risky sport such as airplane racing upset Gold. On the other hand, he knew that he’d married a daredevil.