Amerika (25 page)

Just as flickering lights in a theater lobby signal the end of intermission, so did Pan Am’s GONG resonating over the terminal loudspeakers declare that the Lisbon clipper was ready to depart.

‘Okay, gentlemen, let’s start the parade,’ Fatt intoned as we prepared to leave the operations room. In reverse order of rank we proceeded down the curving, flower-lined sidewalk in perfect step; fourth officer, third officer, second officer, second radio officer, first radio officer, and so on up the hallowed seniority ladder through engineering and navigation officers until it reached me, just one car shy of the Grand Caboose himself, Master of Flying Boats James. J. Fatt commanding, whose footfalls sounded behind me like bass drums.

All for show? You bet. Andre Preister may have been a cold-hearted Dutchman with Baltic Sea water in his veins, but he knew how to put on a show for his paying customers. And with Trippe as his ‘producer,’ they made sure that before every flight Pan Am crews displayed an unparalleled measure of confidence, courage and safety for their passengers, who stood waiting for the second boarding bell that would let them share in the excitement, too.

It’s fun to watch a circus parade, but much better if you get to march with the clowns - meaning us. Am I being cynical? Yes. Is it an unfair assessment? Perhaps, but after years of doing this ‘March of the Confident Airmen’ to ease passengers’ fears, I believe that what we were actually doing was convincing ourselves too – at least a little.

The boarding crew, dressed in spotless white coveralls, saluted sharply as we passed. I noticed with a pang that LUFTHANSA had replaced the PAA letters formerly embroidered on the back. This sad truth was brought home even closer when I heard them calling out to each other in German. Even so, they seemed to know their job as one of them opened the passenger  boarding  door  over  the  port  sponson  and  waited  at  rigid attention for our crew parade to march across the aluminum boarding ramp that spanned the narrow space between the plane and the dock.

No hollow boom from our footsteps this time as we walked on the aluminum surface. The sponson’s fuel tanks were topped off with over a thousand gallons of one hundred-octane aviation fuel. That, plus twelve hundred gallons in our wing tanks, gave us over five thousand gallons for our engines to gulp for our fifteen-hour leap to Horta.

One by one the flight crew stepped into the open hatch and then down inside the lounge where Nawrocki and his steward waited with beaming smiles.

Fatt touched my sleeve. ‘Mind doing the honors with the passengers, kid?’ I got work to do.’

He maneuvered his bulk into the hatch, momentarily filling it entirely with Pan Am uniform blue, his broad pants bottom, like mine, shiny-bright from hundreds of hours in the cockpit. I turned to the boarding crewman, a young man about the age I was when I first got started in the business. ‘I’ll take it from here, pal.’

He looked blank. I didn’t know the word for ‘Beat it’ in German, so I tried using my thumb instead to show him where to go. That and a big smile did the trick. He scurried over to the edge of the sponson where it met the boarding ramp and resumed his stiff posture of attention. I had to admit, Lufthansa folks were no slouches when it came to style.

Old habits die hard: I re-checked my tie, fussed with my hat, and tugged at my uniform jacket to line up the buttons, Preister-style. My pants felt loose and I risked a quick five seconds to reach inside and tighten my belt another notch. I didn’t feel thinner, but I must have lost weight since I handed my rig over to Pan Am stores. Going through hell does that to a person. I was no exception. With that thought, my mind sensed an opportunity to start re-hashing what I’d been through during the past six months, but blessedly, the faraway boarding bell distracted it the way a pretty toy distracts a weeping toddler.

The twin doors of the Marine Terminal swung open just as the last of the double GONGS echoed across the water. A phalanx of dark-suited, no- nonsense men led the passenger parade, hats square on their heads, steps firm, shoulders back, ‘compliance officer’ written all over their stern, well- fed faces. Each carried a small, light blue Pan Am overnight bag for his personal belongings, like pajamas and toothbrush, for when he turned in at night. Everything else was in baggage.

I’m not a religious man, but my few years spent as an altar boy taught me that pomp and ceremony are the sizzle on a steak. No matter how thin that steak is, or even if it’s hamburger, if you’ve got enough candles, sweet- smelling incense, a decent choir and lots of stained glass windows, you can get most folks to believe in any damn thing you want. In Pan Am’s case, we wanted our passengers to believe that flying over three thousand miles of ocean at six thousand feet with nothing between us and destruction but four engines and a thin-skinned flying boat was the most natural thing in the world to do.

Boarding GONGS helped. Overnight bags helped, attentive stewards with ready smiles and heaping plates of food and drink helped, not to mention flight officers like me with premature wrinkles around their eyes. We were the high priests they looked up to. All we had to do is look back at them with a calm, almost half-bored look that said in effect,

‘This turbulent air that’s got you bouncing up and down? Almost ready to vomit? Scared out of your wits? Not to worry, my friend, it’s perfectly normal. You can tell by the way I’m looking at you with this half-smile on my face and a look of serene understanding that I know what I’m talking about. I’m a professional here to serve you, and everything is going to turn out just fine, you’ll see.’

That’s what I was keeping in mind I smartly saluted the first of the compliance officers  to  land  on  the  sponson  and  make his  way to  the boarding door.

‘Willkommen, mein herr
,’ I said with a happy grin.

He nodded curtly, grunted slightly, but said nothing as he heaved his fat legs up the small step stool and then squirmed inside. I kept my smile plastered on as the next group arrived, deep in discussion. They barely noticed my existence, so intent were they on some matter that, from the looks on their somber faces, must have been essential to the future of the Third Reich.

‘Good afternoon, captain,’ a gentle male voice said, and I turned to see a short, dark-haired, youngish man wearing a priest’s collar.

‘You must be Father Petrucelli,’ I said, quickly remembering his name on the manifest.

His eyes danced, ‘Please it’s Father Dominic.’

‘God’s business in Lisbon?’

‘Rome, actually.’ He patted his breast pocket.  ‘Providing Mussolini lets me in.’

I started to say something, but the Nazi compliance officer behind the priest cleared his throat impatiently.

‘Enjoy your flight, father.’

‘How could I not?’ He glanced up into the sky. ‘I’ll be with the angels.’

‘And a few devils, too.’

And so the boarding continued; a few kind words when I thought they were needed, a smart salute when it fit the bill, a simple nod, a wave, each gesture calculated to fit the needs of the particular person. And rightfully so. Trans-oceanic clipper passengers were paying top dollar and expected service to equal it, and God help you if they didn’t get it. But not all of them. In some cases companies were footing the bill, like The New York Times reporter for instance, who gave me a happy wink.

‘Ava James on my flight. How lucky can a man get?’

‘Not much more, I guess.’

‘Maybe we’ll be at the same seating.’ He gave me a look. ‘Think you could fix that up for me, captain? I’m a big fan.’‘

See what I can do.’

He glanced around, quickly. The next batch of passengers were far enough away for him to say quietly, ‘What’s it like flying a Kraut plane?’

‘Boeing built her. The swastikas are just paint.’

He shook his head. ‘Still can’t believe it. You?’

I shrugged my shoulders but kept my big mouth shut.

Thirty-six names on the manifest. Thirty-four souls-on-board so far, including Inspector Bauer who looked like a kid on a holiday as he fairly skipped across the sponson and darted inside without saying a word, but not without raising his eyebrows in a silent message of shared excitement. I acknowledged his gesture with a smile and a small salute.

On  the  other  side  of  the  plane,  engine  number  one  groaned  and spluttered into life. Fatt was getting down to business right on schedule. The boarding crew glanced at each other, readying themselves for the next step of their departure drill. I raised my hand and signaled the crew chief to wait. I pointed at the terminal and held up two fingers.

‘Zwei mehr
,’ I said.

‘Jawohl, kapitan.’

The whine of a generator overhead as the polished propeller blades of engine number four started turning. I grabbed my hat just as the cylinders caught and coughed a cloud of white smoke that quickly vanished in the brisk wind of the bay.

As if that were their entrance cue, Ava and Ziggy sailed from out of the Marine Terminal with two ticket agents on either side, chattering away but she shook her head dismissively and waved her hand in the air, holding a jeweled cigarette holder the way the Pope holds his crosier. The agents, ignored and vanquished, slowed to a stop while she sailed onward, victorious.

Naturally, Ziggy carried their overnight bags, leaving her free to glide along with imperial ease. Her left hand rose to guard her feathered hat as she encountered the slipstream from the idling engines. She nodded at the boarding crew who stood frozen at attention like white-uniformed Nutcrackers.

Ziggy darted across the boarding ramp to wait on the other side, his hand  extended,  as  though  Ava  were  about  to  alight  from  a  Venetian gondola. She strode forward, shoulders back, face angled just so for the non-existent cameras, her smile the happiest of sunrises, and as her eyes found mine, I couldn’t help but smile back.

‘Anchors  aweigh  and  all  that,’  she  shouted  to  be  heard  above  the clattering engine.

I saluted smartly. ‘Welcome aboard, Miss James. I hope you enjoy the flight.’

Her hand on my sleeve was light as a feather but I felt it all the same.

She rose on her tiptoes and her lips brushed my ear as she whispered, ‘Curtain up, my darling Sam.’

Open water looks the same no matter how high you fly. It’s not like land, where you judge your altitude in relation to how things look down there. Flying over water is like crossing a featureless desert; interesting for about five minutes, but after that, you start looking everywhere else but down - unless you’re a navigator like Stone, who had just used his Very pistol to shoot a flare down the tube next to his chart table. Now he was using a wind triangle to calculate our drift based on the smoke from the flare as it drifted down to the sea.

Pilots fly planes, but navigators tell them where to go. Stone was using dead reckoning to estimate where we were now in relation to a fixed point we had passed three hundred miles earlier.  He used time, speed and distance to make his carefully calculated guess, but wind was critical to his calculations. So he hedged his bets by measuring how the smoke drifted in relation to the wind as it fell through the sky. He returned to his chart table, bent over and made some tiny pencil notations on the chart unrolled before him.

I turned in my seat and called out, ‘Are we in Cleveland yet?’

He frowned at my lame joke as would any navigator worth his salt. I had been in his shoes years ago when, as a navigator, the fate of a clipper and her passengers often rested on my tired shoulders in the middle of a thunderstorm over Brazil when I wasn’t sure of where I was, and hoped to God the course I had plotted on the chart was correct. If not we would be flying into the side of some nameless mountain.

Minutes later Stone came up to our flight station with a slip of paper. On it he had written the compass heading: 110.

I said, ‘Can we take this to the bank?’

‘You can cash it, while you’re there,’ Stone said sharply. Then turned and walked away.

Fatt’s eyebrows rose marginally, but he said nothing. Neither did I, but we both noted the ring of absolute confidence in Stone’s voice. When it’s your job to tell people where they’re going and when they’ll arrive, you have to be as sure of yourself as you are that the sun will rise in the morning. Especially when you’re feeling just the opposite; that time, speed and distance be damned, something in your gut keeps saying, ‘You’re lost, pal, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ That’s when your voice has to strengthen, your eye sharpen, your shoulders square as you proclaim that this is the heading that will lead everyone home -- which made me wonder if Stone was selling us a bill of goods.

After letting that suspicion race through my carefully arranged list of possible actions to take if that were the case, I stuffed it away and dialed Stone’s heading into our Sperry autopilot. Fatt looked away, pretending he wasn’t watching but I knew he was. Masters of Flying Boats grow eyes in the back of their heads.

I unbuckled my seatbelt. ‘Got to see a man about a horse.’

Fatt cocked his head to one side but said nothing. We both knew I didn’t need to go to the head.