Trophy for Eagles (28 page)

In Madame Dompnier's bedroom, Monique's hysterics had come under control when she realized that the gift of the country house was really a small matter. She finally comprehended that the main house was saved, and that this would be her inheritance.

"Wait, there's more."

Madame leaned forward, her equilibrium distressed by the hard full circle of her emotions from unending hatred of the Hafners to what was going to have to amount to love.

"Bruno gave me the cash for the country house's mortgage. It is
free and clear, just as this house is. We are free at last, able to live a little." His mind leaped forward to the cognacs he would cellar, the
Armagnacs he would drink.

Madame's voice was dry and brittle. It was too good to be true.
"And what do we have to do? What is
^:
this about that wretched warehouse in Marseilles?"

Pierre raised his eyes heavenward. This woman would have thrown Jesus's wine away because she hadn't tested the water.

"He has an import-export business of some sort. I will help him with it. It will be like old times."

Monique spoke up. "I will help too. I like Marseilles."

Downstairs in the library, Bruno was excited.

"Charlotte, this is the best deal we've ever worked. We have a
legitimate business in France, just when there are wars starting in
Spain and in Africa."

"You don't know anything about French law or French customs. Why do you think you can do business here?"

"That's the beauty of it. Don't underestimate old Pierre—he's
very shrewd. And that midget lawyer of his, Petit, he knows his way
around as well."

"Does he know the kind of business you are in?"

"Of course! I told him right off, and he approved. He even made a suggestion. There are nationalists in Libya who want the Italians out. He knows how to reach them. The man is a gem."

"And Monique?"

Bruno was momentarily confused, thinking Charlotte had learned about Monique's romps with Dusty. Then he realized she was talking about Monique's role in the project.

"Pierre says that she's dependable. Look what she did organizing
this wedding! It was perfect. I'm going to put her on the payroll, too."

Charlotte was silent. "Well, I can't fault you on a thing, although I damn near dropped my drawers when that jungle bunny jumped in the door."

"She was good—she livened things up after all the poetry and singing."

The only dissonant note of the evening was when he announced that Dusty and Murray were staying behind to set things up in Marseilles.

*

En route to Paris/December 19,1930

Stephan was having trouble with the Voison that Charlotte had given them as a wedding present from her own funds. It was new, and try as he would to keep the speed down during the break-in
period, it would leap ahead, reflecting his own anxious desire to put
Orleans behind them and to get started on their married life.

He glanced over at Patty, and she was crying.

"Why are you unhappy?"

"This is supposed to be my only wedding, and Bruno Hafner insisted on being the bride."

Stephan laughed. "Cheer up. If you have a funeral, he'll insist on being the corpse, as well."

She turned on him, furious. "I'm serious, Stephan. I doubt if
your mother and father even remember that I was there. They fell in love with Bruno, probably the only two people in the world, count
ing my mother, who ever did."

Stephan shifted down to thread his way around the war memorial
in the village square, then accelerated.

"Nonsense. They know Bruno bought his way in. You are their daughter now, the mother of their grandchildren."

Patty burst into tears.

"It's not going to be much of a honeymoon. My period just started."

Stephan looked at her in dismay, not because of the honeymoon.
He had wanted the baby. They had been on a honeymoon for three years—and no pregnancy. Was there something wrong with her?

Or perhaps with him?

***

Chapter 5

Wright Field, Ohio/March 11, 1932

Winter played its usual final dirty trick on Ohio, sweeping frigid
wind across Lake Erie to change a well-intentioned warm-air mass into a glistening sheet of ice. The ethereal beauty of budding leaves nestled in crystal ice jackets like green flies in clear amber was lost
on drivers whose cars had careened into ditches.

Shedding water like a seal, Major Henry Caldwell sprang upstairs
two steps at a time to the new offices of the Design Branch. His
thin-soled brown shoes were caked with mud, victims of the endless
construction and reconstruction going on at the new base. He winced when he pulled off his trench coat. "I fell on my ass out there; it's solid ice from Cleveland to St. Louis."

"Just be glad you're not flying, chief. Anyway, don't worry about it. Hoover is going to straighten the weather out right after he fixes
the economy."

Hadley Roget sat imperturbably in the Sears herringbone suit he
had bought two years ago and faithfully worn to work every day since. The clothes fitted his slender frame no better than the bureaucracy suited his taste.

He tossed a standard Army manila folder to Caldwell and stretch
ed back in his swivel chair, cradling his unruly white hair in lean fingers, blanched clean of grease and oil by the months of paperwork. The folder carried a green coordination sheet on its cover, a penciled stepladder of recommendations for rejection.

"Here it is again, Henry, all signed, sealed, and disapproved."

Caldwell, slender and hard-muscled, a tightly wound bundle of
energy, hefted the folder. Inside were Roget's carefully drawn plans and calculations for his radical "fifty-five-foot wing," named for its proposed length. Two years ago, knowing that Roget Aircraft was
skating along the familiar narrow line demarcating starvation and oblivion, Caldwell had hired him for $250 a month—big money at Wright Field—on the basis of a sketch and a letter describing an idea.

Roget and Bandfield had devised a lightweight steel-tube framework stiffened with corrugated aluminum skinning and
streamlined with a smooth stressed-metal covering. It was lighter,
stronger, and easier to fabricate than older designs, and while it
would be especially good for larger aircraft, it could be adapted to
fighters as well. Their problem, the same one facing almost every company in the industry, was a total lack of capital to build an airplane using the new method. Caldwell had agreed that it would
revolutionize construction techniques, and he wanted the Air Corps to benefit. However, in its customary infinite wisdom, headquarters
had turned it down a second time.

"I don't know what to tell you, Hadley. I went to bat for you.
They even told me I was out of line!" He paused to control himself,
his anger evident. "I think the fuckers believe I have an interest in your company!"

He let his fury simmer. "There must be political pressure to stay with conventional construction. Keystone has powerful Congressmen in their corner, and all they can build is fabric-covered biplanes. "

Hadley knew the big lumbering Keystones well. They staggered along at eighty miles an hour with crew members sticking out in the
wind as in a World War Gotha. When: they crashed—which was often, given that they couldn't fly on one engine—they turned from
airplanes into grinding masses of splinters and wires that chopped their crews into hamburger.

Roget's voice was raw. "Yeah, and with 1917 performance. Even
the Hafner A-11 is sixty miles an hour faster than the Keystones, and carries almost as many bombs."

The A-11 had been a bitter pill for him to swallow, for it had
beaten the first Roget aircraft ever entered in a military competition.
He and Bandy had put their heads together to build a militarized metal version of the Rocket they named the Rapier, and they thought they had a winner. Instead, for reasons he knew Caldwell
would inevitably tell again, the A-11 won. It was a good-looking
single-engine attack plane, with a ring cowling and huge spatted
fairings over the landing gear, the first military product from Haf
ner's booming Long Island factory. Its performance was no better than the Rapier's, but its steak had more sizzle.

Caldwell realized he'd stumbled onto treacherous ground. When the A-11 had beaten entries from Curtiss, Douglas, and Roget
Aircraft, there had been hell to pay in all the aviation journals. He
covered his dismay with a chortle that was half lust, half glee. "Just
like Charlotte Hafner is sixty miles an hour faster than the competi
tion. You should have been here the first time she showed up."

Roget had heard the story three or four times, twice from Caldwell. He didn't interrupt, knowing that the major was trying desperately to steer the conversation to neutral territory. They both knew
that what had to come later was going to be painful.

"Hafner Aircraft had submitted an unsolicited bid for an attack
bomber. We gave then the usual stiff arm—Christ, you know how we get crazy bids three or four times a week from oddball outfits."

It was a second gaffe; Roget Aircraft had clearly been an oddball
outfit in the eyes of Wright Field's brass before they got to know
Hadley.

"We knew who Hafner was, but the company had no military track record. Then one day we get a call that the Hafner airplane will be in at ten o'clock on June 1. Nobody thought anything about it."

Caldwell loosened his tie. Roget liked him for many reasons, not
least of which was that he wasn't spit-and-polish. A green patina
shrouded the brass on his uniform, his shoes weren't shined, and he needed a shave. Usually he had his ancient terrier, Bosco, with
him; the two looked remarkably alike, except that Bosco was rarely
hungover and usually had a better haircut.

"Exactly at ten o'clock, this black bullet roars across the field at
nought feet, I mean
nought
feet. I was in operations, looking right
out at the field, and there was no daylight between that ship and the
ground."

Caldwell's voice had gone higher still, and his arms and hands were cranked showing the maneuvers the A-11 had been going through.

"For twenty minutes it plays a tune on the goddam tarmac. At the
end, the airplane pulls straight up, the engine is shut off, and the pilot makes a dead-stick landing out of a half loop, rolling right up on the apron to stop."

Roget could see the next scene.

"We all run out there, ready to tear a strip off the pilot, and who pops out? Charlotte Hafner, hair streaming back, tits bulging out of
a half-buttoned blouse, looking better than Jean Harlow. Christ, she
had that airplane sold before we even knew the price. What a saleswoman, what a pilot."

Roget articulated what everyone had been quick to suppose. "Did
you sample that, Henry?"

Caldwell's voice dropped an honest octave. "Me? Hell no! It was there, you know that, we all knew it, but I'm not so crazy as to screw
somebody I'm buying from. If I ever have to pay for it, it will be straight over the counter. But I wouldn't have minded. She's a great-looking woman."

Roget believed him; people like Caldwell were the real blood and
guts of the Air Corps, working for peanuts, doing what they thought was right regardless of the effects on their careers. Charlotte could
have taken her blouse completely off and it wouldn't have influenced Caldwell.

"She's the brains of the outfit. Bruno Hafner is the muscle, but he
spends his time running guns."

Roget lapsed into silence. He'd gotten to know Charlotte pretty well over the last year, over Bandfield's violent objections. Bandy
didn't want to have anything to do with Hafner Aircraft, never
having gotten over the miserable chain of events of 1927. Hadley
could never bring himself to believe that Hafner had started the fire that destroyed the original
Roget Rocket.
He felt that Bandy's unrea
soning hatred stemmed from the fact that Bruno Hafner had been
rescued while poor Millie Duncan had disappeared, drowned some
where in the Pacific.

Bandy was never the same after the search was finally called off,
his depression finally generating an almost eccentric insistence on
safety in airplanes. The obsession, if that was what it was, had good and bad effects; without it, they never would have come up with the
new wing design.