Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (75 page)

"Don't you think you might still?"

Mitch snorted. "Dead last? With only two legs to go? We had our one good trick, and we've used it. It put us number one. That was what we had. That was the game plan."

"Then you'll have to find another one, won't you?" Her eyes had dark circles under them but she sat there in her ruined dress, thin and beautiful and indomitable.

"It was the White Terror, wasn't it? In Hungary," Mitch said before he could stop himself. "On the Austrian side of the war, not the Russian."

She looked away, glancing out the window as though some of the scenery was of passing interest. "Darling, one revolution is very like another."

"I'm just saying," Mitch said, groping for the words through his throbbing head. "If it was the Austrian army, I don't hold a grudge that way." An Austrian shell over Austrian lines, but that was how it went. Not her fault, no more than anyone else's in the world gone mad.

She looked at him sideways. "You're a lunatic."

"Pretty much," Mitch said, and closed his eyes.

Chapter Seventeen

J
erry glanced over his shoulder. Mitch was leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, while the soi-disant countess calmly fished a battered pack of cigarettes out of her purse and fitted one into a slim black holder. Mitch’s cigarettes, Jerry was willing to bet, and turned his back before she could expect him to offer a light.

Alma and Lewis had left the cockpit door open, clipped back against the forward bulkhead, and Jerry braced himself in the frame, leaning awkwardly in. The position made his leg ache, but he doubted they could be heard over the engine noise.

“What the hell?” he said.

Alma didn’t take her eyes off the horizon, but the set of her shoulders and her white-knuckled grip on the wheel betrayed her fury. Lewis glanced warily over his shoulder.

“We found Mitch,” he said, with the air of a man struggling to find a silver lining, and Jerry stared back at him.

“So I see. Stinking of rum and with extra baggage.”

“Baggage.” Alma’s voice was a snarl. “I’d like to murder them both.”

“Did Mitch say what happened?” Lewis asked. “He told us he couldn’t remember.”

“It was the necklace,” Jerry said. “He wanted to borrow my toothpaste, and it fell out, and — Al, you know what that thing’s like.” He winced then, unsure of how much Alma had told Lewis, but Lewis nodded.

“It’s strong,” he said. “Really powerful.”

“After that…” Jerry shrugged. “He got drunk. He ran into whatever-her-name-is.”

“She said she found him on the Algiers Ferry Landing,” Lewis said.

Jerry whistled.

“Yeah,” Lewis said. “She said she tried to get him to stop, but he was bound and determined he was going to get to a house called Eden. Which turned out to belong to somebody who he’d known in the war —”

“And who, incidentally, was the man who hired Miss Rostov to steal the necklace,” Alma interjected.

“It was some sort of family heirloom,” Lewis said. “And somebody sold it? I’m not very clear on that part. But she says the guy pulled a gun on them, and that’s how she and Mitch ended up hiding in the cemetery.”

“Of course they did,” Jerry said.

“That’s assuming we can believe a word that woman says,” Alma said.

“I think that part’s probably true,” Lewis said, frowning. There was something in his expression that made Jerry frown in turn.

“What else did she say?”

“She said this guy — Lanier, his name is —”

“Jeff Lanier?” Jerry interrupted. “He was in the Lodge in Italy — before you joined, Al, he got transferred right after Mitch was shot up. He should — he must have known what the necklace was.”

“Maybe?” Lewis shook his head. “That’s not the important thing. Miss Rostov said he told her that Mitch was the Axeman.”

Jerry took a deep breath, bracing himself against the frame of the door as though he was warding off a body blow. The New Orleans Axeman, the South’s bloody answer to Lizzie Borden, eleven people hacked to death in their beds and the shadow of the devil and his music over it all… Not Mitch. It couldn’t be. Except he’d been in New Orleans at the right time…

“I don’t believe it.” Alma’s voice was flat, her eyes fixed on the horizon. “You can’t seriously believe that.”

“I don’t want to,” Jerry said, and it was the truth. The trouble was, it made a kind of dreadful sense. Mitch had been missing for a year and a half, Gil had said, eighteen months of occasional telegrams and scribbled postcards, and when he’d finally fetched up in Colorado Springs, he’d had thirty dollars in his pocket and no real memory of where he’d been. Mitch wasn’t a killer; if he had murdered those people, he would have to have been under such a terrible compulsion that his only possible defense lay in a failure to remember.

“Mitch wouldn’t,” Alma said. “He doesn’t like killing. He never did.”

That was true, Jerry thought. Mitch didn’t take any particular pleasure in the kill. But he was more than capable of it, the ace with seven dead men. “You might as well say I couldn’t kill,” he said, and this time Alma did turn, one quick glance in his direction.

“I said he wasn’t a killer,” she said. “No more than you are. That’s different and you know it.”

“I do,” Jerry admitted. “But, Al —””

“Yes, he was missing,” she said. “Yes, he — he wasn’t well when he came home. And yes, he told me, told Gil, that he couldn’t remember where he’d been. But that doesn’t make him a murderer. And it certainly doesn’t make him the Axeman.”

“It also doesn’t prove he isn’t,” Jerry said. “I’m sorry, Al.”

“I don’t believe it,” Alma said again. “Not Mitch.”

Jerry looked at Lewis. “What do you think?”

Lewis shrugged. “I don’t know him like you do, so — I just don’t know. I had a dream," he said slowly. "Months ago, when we first talked about entering the race. It was about jazz and New Orleans — I see that now. I didn't recognize the city when I dreamed it because I'd never been there. I think — I think it was a memory of the New Orleans Axeman."

Alma took a deep breath. "Did you see a killing?"

"No." Lewis shook his head. "I didn't. I just saw the streets and the rain and heard the music. I didn't see anyone actually die. I don't even know for certain it was Mitch."

"But you don't know it wasn't."

"I don't know either way," Lewis said. He glanced at Alma, his face lined with exhaustion from the sleepless night. “And — I’m sorry, Al, but I think we’ve got other things to worry about right now. There’s got to be a way to get us back in the race.”

“I’m damned if I see one,” Alma said.

“We’ll think of something,” Lewis answered, but his voice wasn’t as certain as the words.

Jerry tightened his hold on the frame as the Terrier lurched under him. “First we get to Pensacola before noon,” he said. “Then we see.”

M
itch leaned back in the seat, his eyes closed. He wouldn't bet two bits on their chances now. Two bits. That's what a girl was worth in Budapest in 1919. Twenty five cents, the price of a dozen eggs today. He'd seen the bread lines. He'd seen the cost of food skyrocketing a hundred times, every loaf of bread going through the ceiling, the currency becoming worthless. And when it did, so did people.

Mitch had been transferred right after the Armistice between Austria and Italy. For the last few weeks he'd had command of the squadron, taken over after Gil was wounded, taken his best shot. He did ok. He must have, because they made him a brevet major and sent him to Budapest, military attaché to the diplomats who were supposed to turn a cease-fire into a peace treaty. Just who they were supposed to make a treaty with was a good question. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was over — just last week — the end of four hundred years of near absolute monarchy. The new government, the Hungarian Democratic Republic, lasted not quite five months. He'd been there all of them, except the last week, when the diplomatic personnel had been pulled out when it got too dangerous. Another day, another revolution, this time Communist, and a Red Terror that lasted five months. Then the counterrevolution, a White Terror that in turn sent more waves of refugees fleeing, had more neighbors killing neighbors.

Mitch was long gone by then. He didn't remember quite where he was, but it wasn't Budapest. That had been the winter before.

Mitch kept his eyes closed, listening to the sound of the Terrier's engines. It wove in and out of his dreams, half dozing. Sometimes Stasi said something to someone else and it took him back, the sound of her voice, that particular accent.

"Two bits, soldier? Anything you want for two bits?" She was fair, not dark. She didn't look a thing like Stasi, that girl on a rainy night in Budapest thirteen Februaries ago. Not a thing like her, bundled in a scarf against the cold, drops standing like icicles on her hair where it escaped in the front.

Two bits was almost nothing. It would be warm inside. Everything would be warm, and maybe…

Her room was tiny but big enough, her pressed up against the door, arms passionless but her face so pretty, the soft touch of her hair, the color flaming in her thin cheeks. She ought to have been intoxicating, rather than a mistake, like everything that happened after.

The Terrier shifted, beginning a long, slow banking descent. He knew her, his Terrier, felt the change in movement in his gut, and Mitch opened his eyes.

"We're arriving in Pensacola," Stasi said, glancing over from the other seat, her legs folded in front of her in their tattered silk stockings.

"I know," Mitch said. "I can feel it."

A
lma brought the Terrier down onto the long runway, pointing the Terrier’s nose into the wind, all her attention on the feel of the plane as she slowed toward stalling. Station Field was part of the Navy base; the runways were paved, impeccably maintained, and she let the Terrier drop onto the tarmac with hardly a bounce.

“Just gone eleven,” Lewis said.

Alma allowed herself a sigh of relief. She’d been certain she could get them into Pensacola before noon — it was only about a two hour flight, after all — but the way things had been going, she’d been tensed for further trouble, engines or weather or almost anything. She turned the Terrier toward the hangars, following the flagman, and winced as she saw the crowd still waiting, filling the temporary bleachers and crowding the roof of what had to be the administrative building.

“Looks like we might have made up a few minutes,” Lewis went on. “Maybe ten?”

“That’s good,” Alma said, but the words felt hollow. The press would be waiting, and the race authorities — what the hell was she going to say to them? More important still, could she be sure Miss Rostov would go along with them, and not go running to the papers with what would be the biggest scoop of the race? No, she thought. That wasn’t going to happen, because Miss Rostov knew perfectly well that they’d accuse her of stealing Henry’s necklace in the first place.

There was no time to do more than be sure the Mitch was awake and capable of walking on his own before Lewis opened the cabin door and they were besieged by reporters. Lewis let the stairs fall into place, nearly hitting several of them, but they pressed in close, while a referee worked his way though the mob. Alma braced herself — she knew she looked like hell, the same clothes she’d worn the day before, the black eye in full bloom — and fixed her attention on the referee.

“Mrs. Segura,” he said, and stopped. “Sorry, I’m Theo May.”

“Mr. May,” Alma said, warily, but held out her hand. The organizers could still throw Gilchrist out of the race; they’d still been arguing about additional penalties when the Terrier took off for Pensacola.

“I have a wire from New Orleans,” he said. “The sponsors have agreed that you will not be disqualified for the late start.”

Alma reached out to grab the stairs’ narrow rail. “That’s good news.” Her lips felt stiff. Lewis pressed closer to her, steadying her.

“And they’ve also agreed that no further penalty will be assessed,” May said. “Given that you’d already lost a significant amount of time.”

“Also good news,” Alma said. It felt as though a weight had lifted from her shoulders. The situation was bad enough, but at least it wasn’t going to be any worse. And somehow they’d figure out how to make up time… After the mail drop, she reminded herself. Lewis was going to have to fly that, not Mitch, but Lewis was just as experienced on the mail runs. He could handle it, even if the Terrier wasn’t exactly the ideal plane for it.

“Mrs Segura!” That was one of the reporters. “Mrs. Segura, exactly what did happen? Why the late start?”

“Just a minute,” Alma said, and looked back at May. “Thank you, Mr. May. Was there anything else?”

“The mail drop begins at noon,” he answered. “You’ll be starting sixth, so you can expect to start at two-thirty.”

Dead last, Alma thought. The only people behind them had already dropped out of the race. She forced a smile anyway. “We’ll be ready,” she said.

“Good luck,” May said, tipping his hat, and turned away.

“Mrs. Segura!” That was another reporter, hat pushed back on thinning hair. “Can you tell us what happened last night?”

Alma took a deep breath.
She could almost hear Gil’s voice in her ear: if you’re going to tell a lie, Al, make it a whopper.
“Gentlemen.” She raised her voice to carry over the buzzing voices.” “Gentlemen! I know everyone wants to know what happened to us —””

“Why the shiner?” somebody yelled, and she ignored him.

“— And I’m very willing to tell you, as I hope it may help the police turn up the malefactors.”
A whopper, Al, but not necessarily the big words.
She lifted her hands again, begging for silence, and the reporters quieted reluctantly. “Last night, my co-pilot, Mr. Sorley, left the hotel to run an errand, and someone slipped him a Mickey Finn. Fortunately, Miss Rostov, here, recognized him and realized he was in trouble, and called me and my husband at the hotel. With Miss Rostov’s help, we were able to find Mr. Sorley, but as we were trying to get him back to the hotel, we were jumped by a gang. Or at least I assume they were a gang. In any case, we were attacked, and — well, you see what happened.” She spread her hands in what she hoped was a disarming gesture. “We’re going to have to work hard to get back into the race, and I suspect that’s exactly what was intended.”