Trophy for Eagles (32 page)

Patty rarely drank, but the going was getting steadily rougher and she had fortified herself at lunch with extra wine and even accepted
an Armagnac from her father-in-law's traveling collection. The spirited conversation turned on shared events of the two families
from years ago, and she had time to think. Over a long series of
suppressed giggles, it became manifest to her how impossibly funny it was that Angelique's first boy looked just like Stephan. Stephan's father pressed her to tell what she was laughing about, and Patty was
amazed when her observation terminated the afternoon in a flurry of flouncing dresses, children pulled along by their arms, and a rising round of shouting in French too fast for her to understand.
They might have forgiven her if she had not laughed again when
Angelique's firstborn, following her down the stone stairs, stepped on the hem of his mother's skirt and pulled it down.

In the words of P. G. Wodehouse, Patty had sunk to the rank of a
fourth-class power—and she didn't care.

Even the pleasure she found in the flying lessons that Stephan continued to provide was diminishing. She was now an expert
instrument pilot, as fully qualified as Stephan himself, but he would
not permit her to engage in any record flying. As a result, the
France she had loved so much now stultified her. Stephan wanted a
conventional French wife, proper in bed, bountifully fertile, and oblivious to his
cinque d. sept
requirements. She was unconventional, tired of being proper, not certain that she was the
unfertile partner, and painfully aware that he was seeing a young widow each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

It was not working out.

She loved him still. Perhaps the new job would help them adjust.
And she knew him well enough to know that he too was terribly worried that he might be at fault, that he might be the sterile
partner. It was an inadmissible subject of discussion, but she was so
familiar with his turn of phrase that his concern was evident.

He slid the Bugatti to a stop in a spray of gravel, the fast car's
inadequate brakes just managing to dig in before the rough board fence was reached. He parked in the lot adjacent to the low-lying sawtooth-roofed buildings of the Caudron aircraft factory. Put up during the war next to the very field where flying had first been
nurtured in Paris, it was now decaying, just as aviation itself was
decaying in France. She thought that part of Stephan's irritation might be caused by the unending chaos of the French air force and its manufacturers.

The old Stephan showed through, and he smiled at her.

"Come,
cherie,
let me show you what I'm going to be doing. I made arrangements for a guard to let us in."

At the gate a one-armed, enormously fat Breton, obviously an
ex-poilu
eking out a disability pension, grunted at them as he turned
massive keys in plated locks that would survive for years beyond the
lifetime of the fragile wooden doors they protected. He led them down long narrow hallways, the unpainted framework dimly glowering in the lapped edges of the pools of light from widely separated forty-watt bulbs, to the experimental area. Without a word, he turned on the overhead lights and plopped down in a
chair, his expression saying that they could do what they wished, he
was going to rest.

Patty had visited her mother two years earlier, and been given a
tour of the Hafner factory. It had been spic-and-span, and the experimental shop had glistened like an operating room. She was appalled at the Caudron plant, with its sawdust-littered floor, open cans of thinner, and ancient belt-driven machines granular with encrusted machine oil. But in the center of the room, its wings
supported on ordinary wooden sawhorses, was a beautiful airplane.

"This is what I will test. If it does what they say it will, I'll fly it in
the Coupe Deutsch races, and then perhaps we'll take it to America,
to Cleveland."

"It's beautiful, Stephan."

They walked around it. A low-wing monoplane, with retractable landing gear and an enclosed cockpit, it was covered with mats to
protect the glistening deep-blue finish.

"It looks very fast, Stephan. Will it be safe?"

He nervously pursed his thin lips.
"Oui.
A bit tricky perhaps, on
the approach, but otherwise all right. I'm looking forward to it."

"Have you had any second thoughts about leaving the air force?"

"No, I should have gone years ago, but there was nothing I could
do in flying that would have been as satisfying. This will be."

As they made the progress back toward the car, she slipped her arm in his.

"Stephan, I'm sorry about the business with Angelique. I meant no harm. I was just feeling sorry for myself, and drank too much."

He squeezed her arm against his side with his own.

"How can I be too unhappy about not having children? Who
knows if it is my fault or yours? But you shouldn't have been unkind
to Angelique; her husband will never let her forget. It may even
affect his feelings for his son. And you know that I never touched
her."

They walked in silence. He felt a little better for having raised the
issue of America. There was a doctor there, he had been told, somewhere in Texas, who could do wonderful things for fertility
with the glands of unborn animals. He could never admit it to Patty,
to anyone else, of course, but he was going to go there and take a course of treatment.

Patty was pleased with the mention of America as well. To make
up, she vowed to write Angelique's family and apologize.

*

Farmingdale, Long Island/May 9, 1932

Murray slowed the big Duesenberg down to avoid the group of workmen slouching along on their way to the plant, each man
carrying his lunch in a string-tied, newspaper-wrapped package. He
knew how glad they were to have the jobs the A-11 provided. Production had been winding down, and the orders Hafner had secured in South America would give them a few more months of work.

As he drove slowly up the Hafner Aircraft Company's circular
drive, he noted with approval that mallards were mixing in with the
domestic ducks. They swam in tight circles in the pond that re
flected the new administrative section Charlotte had built in front of
the old Aircraft Corporation plant. Bruno was asleep in the backseat, exhausted from a bad crossing on the
Mauritania,
his dachshund, Nellie, blissfully dozing at his side. He had gone straight
from Peru to Buenos Aires and then to Germany for a six-week stay
on "family business." When Murray had picked him up at the pier, Hafner had nonetheless been jubilant, in a better mood than Murray had ever seen him in, despite the fatigue.

As he parked the car, Murray reflected that life had worked out far
better than an utter realist like himself could have expected. He had
grown up in northern Queens at College Point, his dad a rough
brawler who neatly combined working at a brewery and owning a
beer garden, an economic combination that ultimately caught the eyes of the brewery accountants and earned him a six-year jail
sentence. High school had never been Murray's real goal, and what he learned in the streets proved to be invaluable to Bruno, who had
given him almost total authority to run the armament side of the
business. It was a bonus he had never expected, but was glad to deal
with. He knew that a lot of Hafner's faith in him came from his
facility with instruments and other sophisticated devices. His specialty was what the mob euphemistically called "pineapples." As a
hobby, he was enamored with radios of all sort. He had picked up
his first radio knowledge from a correspondence course, finding that
he read "radio" as some people did the comic pages, and that any small electrical or mechanical device was an open book to him. It
had often puzzled Murray that he liked to use his hands for two
totally different sorts of things. He used them as battering rams, to
punch out positive responses from recalcitrant people who didn't wish to do what he or Bruno wanted, and he also used them as tweezers, to pick at some delicate thing and make it operate.

Fully awake by the time Murray had switched the Duesenberg's
ignition off, Bruno Hafner bounded up the stairs two at a time, waving Charlotte's telegram and clutching the dog under his arm. He bowled past Dusty Rhoades without a word, burst into her
office. She was standing at the window, behind a molded wood desk
stained in a blond finish that matched her hair almost perfectly.

"What's this about Santos changing his mind?"

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, then dropped her hands to rub his shoulders. "Relax, Bruno. Everything's okay.
Glad to see you." Her words were soothing, and he responded to her
gentle massaging touch across his shoulders.

In Peru, Santos had become greedy, and wanted a little more on his end. The deal before had been 10 percent of the gross for twenty-four aircraft. When he protested, Charlotte upped the ante
to 15 percent of the gross for forty-eight. She knew he'd have to cut
some more people in at the Peruvian War Minister's office, but was
sure the sale was firm.

"Thank Christ! I risked my neck for that order, flying Bandfield
into the ground." The remembrance of the flight still gave him pleasure; it could have been improved only if Bandfield had crashed.

Her expression didn't change. She watched him closely, in nervous anticipation, trying to guess how he felt. Before he left for South America, Bruno's moods had been swinging more wildly than ever before. He seemed to need a victory of some sort every day, a reaffirmation of his skills and intellect, or else he plunged into ugly depression and lashed out at everyone. Ominously, the
duration of his moods was changing in inverse proportion to his
successes. The more he achieved, the more Hafner Enterprises prospered, the more difficult he became. Good news lifted him
higher for shorter periods; bad news cast him lower for longer times.

The variation in tempers was defined by what was left of their sex
life. He wanted her now only occasionally, either when he was at a
peak of euphoria and felt expansive, or when he was in a black pit of
depression and sought to degrade her with a quick, brutal coupling.
The old incandescent passion was long gone; now she provided him
only indifferent conjugal service in either mood. Her own burning sex drive was diminishing, apparently assuaged by her business success.

And by Dusty. She would never have believed that he could come to mean so much to her. Somehow, over the last year, she
had fallen in love with him, and was totally unable to explain why.
She knew this had to do with his drug habit, something she was
resolved to rid him of. Amazingly, given her experience and appe
tite, she even loved the fact that over time he had become a lousy lover who sometimes suffered from impotence, sometimes from premature ejaculation. It didn't matter. She loved the whole man for a change, not just the sports equipment. The drugs had made
him passive, no longer especially eager to fly, apparently content to
work at the plant just to be with her. He wasn't an engineer, but he had good instincts and knew the material suppliers so well that he always got good enough prices that Bruno never questioned his value.

Yet Bruno's presence had the same depressing effect on Dusty
that it did on her. When he was away, Dusty became progressively
more ardent; as soon as Hafner came back, Dusty began to withdraw
guiltily into a shell. It was understandable, for just dealing with
Bruno was a never-ending psychological battle. She kept control of
him by playing constantly switching subjects, changing roles, some
times contradicting, sometimes being silent. Charlotte based her tactics on his mental state, making positive suggestions for the business when he was up, slipping in negative thoughts about people and events she was against when he was down. Now she sensed it was time to divert his attention, to soften him up for the excellent briefing Bineau was about to give.

"Did you hear that they found Lindbergh's baby? He'd been dead
for some time."

The press had treated the kidnapping in the most tasteless, sordid
style, and Hafner had reveled in it. He'd always considered Lindbergh to be an intruder who had taken his prize, and the public never let him forget it. The year before, at a black-tie dinner honoring Orville Wright, the crowds had swarmed around Lindbergh, ignoring Hafner.