Trophy for Eagles (7 page)

"No. He's the guy flying the converted Keystone bomber?"

"Yeah. He and his copilot, Wooster, went in at Langley. Killed
them both."

"Jeez, maybe solo is better."

Neither man said what he really thought, that while two men might be all right in the cockpit, two men were one too many when it came to sharing the glory.

"Bandy, great talking to you. I've got to go fiddle with my prop
pitch setting—I change it every day whether it needs it or not."

"What are you going to do tonight, Slim?" It was Bandfield's first
trip East, and he wanted to see New York.

Lindbergh's face crinkled into a grin. "How about coming to
town with Mother and me? We could have some fun. We're driving
in at about six."

Lindbergh saw Bandfield hesitate and thought that it was because
he was short of money. Actually, Bandfield had met Lindbergh's
mother, and had found her overpowering, too domineering to spend an evening with. Her arrival had spurred the attention of the
reporters, and Lindbergh spent a great deal of time with her. Yet the
field was boring and he might never get to New York again. Lindbergh pressed him.

"Look, Jack Winter's invited us out to dinner. He's a stockbroker,
a friend of my backers in St. Louis. He told me to bring along
anybody I wanted, especially if he's crazy enough to fly. He buys airplanes like Heinz buys pickles, and I'm sure he'd like to find out
about yours. How about it?"

"You're on—is what I'm wearing okay?"

It wasn't even close, but Lindbergh said, "Sure. I'll pick you up at
eighteen hundred—six o'clock, to civilians like you."

Even the tabloids could get only so much mileage out of Peaches
Browning, gangland slayings, and mysterious women in black who
claimed to be married to Rudolph Valentino, so the little band of airmen clustered on Long Island turned into a journalistic mother-
lode. The newspapers seized upon aviation everywhere as grist for
their mills; a safe arrival was noticed, but an accident got two-column headlines. If a really lucky reporter could find a wife who
had witnessed her husband's fatal crash, there were lead stories for
two days.

As a result, Roosevelt and the adjacent Curtiss Field became magnets for tourists. Where before no one but pilots or mechanics could be found there now surged hundreds of onlookers during the week, thousands on the weekends. Security became a problem for the flyers as well as the crowd. One man, intently peering into his camera, unable to hear the warning yells of the crowd, had backed comically step by step into the idling propeller of an Eaglerock
biplane. The shattered propeller sliced off the tail of his coat and his
pants, sending his wallet in an arc to land on the wing of a Jenny. One more step and he'd have been a true half-ass for life, a candidate for the Keystone Komedy hall of fame.

The crowds were generally well-mannered and benign, but their curiosity and their numbers caused damage. Fingers somehow poked their way into the fabric of the ordinary transient planes staked out on the flight line, and finally, to keep the strangers out, guards had to be posted around the hangars where the various race planes were housed.

The guard at Bandfield's little hangar nodded as Murray Roehlk laid his enormous shoulder to ease the door open. Murray was shaped like a Packard radiator: square, sharp, and sloped-shouldered. He was five and a half feet tall, and almost that wide, his bulk emphasized by a suit cut to hide shoulder holsters and conceal his disproportionately long arms. They hung gorillalike yet
ended in delicate tapered hands that could fix anything from car
buretors to altimeters. Hafner was a demanding employer who kept
most people at their distance, but had gradually gained an equally high regard for both Murray's ruthlessness and his intelligence. Rhoades handled the airplane mechanics, the engine, and the controls, but Murray did all the instrument work.

As Hafner focused more on building airplanes, Roehlk had begun to take over the arms sales. Murray didn't like dealing with foreign
ers too much, but he got a kick out of dealing with the gangsters.
Hafner had always provided the best guns at the lowest prices, earning a reputation in the underworld that served him well. Mur
ray knew he was good with the mob, selling them all the tools of the
booming bootleg trade, from Thompson submachine guns to hand grenades. He liked the responsibility and the associations, though they left him little free time for his hobby, building his own radio sets.

Inside the hangar, Murray fumbled until he found the switch. A
dozen goosenecked lamps hanging from the rafters blinked on, illuminating the gleaming blue
Rocket.
Hafner and Fokker followed
Roehlk inside.

"Lieb Gott
—what a ship!" Fokker was a tough competitor; he pursed his lips in envy, seeking as he always did something to
complain about. "Look, they're using a plywood monocoque body,
like on the old Albatros."

Hafner ran his hand over the fuselage, a smooth plywood oval
streamlined from nose to tail. The high cantilever wing, also covered in plywood, was melded to the fuselage with a deep,
sinuous fillet. On his Bellanca, the landing gear was fastened to the
wing and fuselage by a wild interconnecting jumble of struts. A
single streamlined surface connected the landing gear to the Rock
et's fuselage. The windscreen faired the fuselage contours into the leading edge of the wing in a smoothly flowing curve.

"What do you think, Herr Fokker?" The two always reverted to their correct wartime relationship, as if to reject the informal Amer
ican style.

"This must be twenty-five miles an hour faster than any other
plane on the field. The wing is just like mine, looks like the same airfoil even. He can make it to Paris in thirty hours or less."

Hafher said nothing, but knocked his fist against the smooth metal cowling. "It might overheat. I'd rather leave the cylinders uncovered."

Fokker shook his head. "No, they've done this right. He'll win if he gets off when the others do."

Hafner's eyes met Murray's as they walked out the door, and he whispered an aside: "I still think it will overheat."

Later on the afternoon of the sixteenth, Bandfield stood in the foul-smelling latrine using a rough red shop rag as a towel. He
shrugged with disapproval at the image peering out of the cracked sepia-toned mirror, edged at the top with a "Chew Red Man Tobac
co" sign. He was tired after too many days of eating in airfield cafes,
too many nights without sleep, too many times without a chance for a decent bath or even a wash. He walked into the operations lounge
and flowed onto a battered couch, letting his wiry frame spread out.
He ran his fingers through hair weeks overdue for cutting, realiz
ing that his clothes were wrinkled and he didn't have a tie. His regret
that he'd accepted Lindbergh's invitation faded as he automatically listened critically to the sound of an engine being tested outside.
Bandfield had earned his college expenses by knowing what engine
noises meant. Hadley had helped him fix up a repair truck that carried all his tools and parts, and taught him to be an intuitive mechanic, one to whom the engines spoke their own language.
He'd worked his way through Berkeley fixing cars, mostly Model Ts
but sometimes more sophisticated foreign cars, and he found himself making more money on the Cal campus than his dad did back home. His dad had been his hero, a romantic figure crusading for just causes, like the plight of the farmers and lumbermen. His dad
was always for the laboring man—as long as he didn't have to put in
ten hours a day laboring. On the campus, Bandy's native politics
were viewed as radical and inconsistent with the good living he was
making with his repair truck.
A horn sounded outside the operations shack, and Lindbergh
bounded in the door, carrying a gray tweed coat and a green-striped
tie. "I thought you might want to borrow these—Jack Winter said he'd take us somewhere fancy."

*

Manhattan/May 16, 1927

Fancy in Salinas had been the Country Club Inn; Bandy had never dared set foot inside. His heart tumbled when he found out that
fancy to Jack Winter was the Waldorf Astoria. He'd been quite
comfortable on the ride in, listening to Lindbergh's serious dis
cussions with his mother on how he was to behave in Paris. He'd
gawked at the tall buildings on their walk from the garage up 34th
Street to the rambling twin buildings that formed a hotel so fabled that they'd heard about it in Salinas.

The gorgeously decorated Peacock Alley, the Waldorf's multi
colored showcase for the celebrating rich, more than lived up to its name, and his eyes fastened on a glittering passage of laughing, confident young women borne on the arms of equally happy young
men in evening clothes. He felt a constriction in his loins when he saw, in the window of a diamond-bright jewelry shop, the collar of
his borrowed tweed coat riding up around his plaid flannel shirt,
pushing his tie askew. He was glad it wasn't a full-length mirror, for he knew that the bottoms of his wrinkled black pants were riding an
inch above his high-top brown shoes.

It was like a movie trip down death row, a brilliantly lit struggle to
get to the point of execution. The noise was deafening, a constant ripple of laughter and chatter, of fleeting names he'd never heard, places he'd never been. He had to steel himself not to turn around and catch the ritzy-looking couples pointing at him and grinning.

The walk became a jelly-legged nightmare as he straggled beside
Mrs. Lindbergh and Slim, his feet, suddenly feed buckets, flopping in wide arcs to left and right. He was an ambulatory contradiction, the clownish focus of attention of a crowd of rich bastards, not one of whom would look at him. He hated them all, began to hate the
Lindberghs, who didn't seem to see them, and most of all he thought he hated Jack Winter, the man waiting at the entrance to
the restaurant, standing at the top of the little flight of stairs carpeted
inches deep in luxury.

Winter and his wife were both smiling broadly. As the three of them approached, the pair seemed to grow in size, Winter's faultlessly cut evening clothes blossoming to block out the light behind them, his patent-leather hair glistening as brightly as his patent-
leather shoes. His wife, dressed in a low-cut orange silk dress and a matching turban, was simply, starkly, beautiful. An orange-tipped
white fringe, a feathery python, curled around her neck and down her arms, seeming to caress her with a life of its own.

Bandfield glanced from one to the other, speechless, wondering
what on earth they were making of him, this country bumpkin from
the West. Winter, his diamond studs holding their own in a fierce competition with the chandelier, pumped Lindbergh's hand while
his wife and Mrs. Lindbergh exchanged near-miss kisses. Winter's
dazzling grin plainly said that Bandfield was dressed well enough for
him. Mrs. Winter, straight out of a Woodbury's soap advertisement,
pressed his hand, murmuring her name, Frances, which he promptly forgot.

And with her name went all of his concerns about clothes, place, and time, for from behind Winter emerged a shy young woman,
looking as desperately anxious as Bandfield felt. He had had many
girlfriends, had made love to many women, and had almost been engaged once. But he had never been prepared to be poleaxed, to
feel himself fall irrevocably in love with any girl before he had even
learned her name.

"Millie, I believe you know Mrs. Lindbergh. May I present Charles Lindbergh and Frank Bandfield? Gentlemen, this is our niece, Mildred Duncan."

She held out her hand, and Bandy said, "I'm really glad to meet you," in a tone that made everybody believe him.

Winter's laugh was joyous and genuine. "Frank, Millie is gaga about flying, and I wanted her to meet you both."

As the Lindberghs and the Winters watched, Millie flowed naturally toward Bandfield amid the crackle of ice breaking, hesitantly
offering her arm for him to take. Their mutual embarrassment slipped from them like the red slips from the sky after sunset, and
they became instantly at ease with each other even as they forgot the
others. Winters winked at Lindbergh and took his mother by the
arm, and they went to eat, shepherded to their table by a headwaiter
whose fawning would have sickened Bandfield had he noticed.

Bandfield stepped back before they sat down to really look at Millie. She was molded into a blue chiffon dress, its soft flowing
lines broken at top and sides by knotted white scarfs. He had never
seen anyone more lovely. The room became multidimensional. The one that counted was the hot earnest level where he learned all about Millie. On the next level were the Lindberghs and the Winters, who tried in vain for a while to include them in their general conversation. Winter wanted to find out about Bandfield's airplane, but after getting a few short yeses and nos, gave up. The third level was the room, filled now with friends, including the snooty waiter who was asking him what he wanted to eat.