Amerika (6 page)

‘Don’t tell them that.’

He replaced his glasses.  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.  The Gestapo has enough criminals for me to chase that will keep me busy for years.’

‘Minus
Herr
Ritter, of course.’

He laughed, his teeth were slightly pointed. ‘Why is it that people never think other people might be watching them? Especially when they’re breaking the law.’

‘Were you always a policeman?’

‘You mean before...’

’Yes.’

‘A police inspector in Heilbronn, Germany. South of Heidelberg. Do you know of it?’

‘No.’

‘No matter. It is a small, sleepy town with sleepy citizens and I loved working there.  But when Hitler came to power the nation woke up, and so did Heilbronn. Because of my experience and my knowledge of English I was made a Gestapo officer in their International Division. That, more or less, brings me to our present moment.’

‘Could you have stayed on in Heilbronn?’

‘I would have preferred to, but as
der Führer
commands, so must his citizens obey.’ He clicked his heels slightly and smiled. ‘Now then, just this final detail.’ He pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘If you two gentlemen would sign here, you can be rid of me at long last.’

‘This is the catch, right?’ I said.

‘I’m not familiar with that idiom.’

‘The part in your little fairy tale where we sign the papers but then end up in prison for the rest of our lives for some obscure reason.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is a Form 40-78, Personal Property Release form. It’s quite standard.’

I looked at it. ‘It’s all in German.’

‘Natürlich.’

‘It could be something completely different for all I know.’

‘Yes it could be, but it’s not. You can trust me on that.’

‘Can I?’

He drew himself up and frowned fiercely. ‘Mr. Carter you are pissing up the wrong tree.’

I smiled. ‘Where did you hear that one?’

He looked flustered. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘You mean ‘barking up the wrong tree.’’

‘Ja, das is richtiger!’

I exchanged looks with Orlando. He smiled and shrugged.

‘Okay I’ll sign.’

When I finished, I handed Orlando the pen and he did the same. When he finished he said softly, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’

Bauer tucked the signed form into his jacket. ‘And we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’

‘You know scripture?’

He winked. ‘Don’t tell the Gestapo.’

The box lunch the Nazis packed for our flight home was even worse than the meal we got in jail. And their bacon and egg breakfast? If you like your eggs cooked about twenty minutes and your bacon warm, slippery and half raw, right up your alley. Still, the cook who made it for us beamed at her  accomplishment,  and  who  was  I  to  fault  her  for  trying  to  make American food? I mean, she didn’t start the war, she was just a German civilian who’d came over with the troops and was doing her humble job.

I keyed the microphone. ‘Key West tower, Carter Air four-five is with you, requesting runway and wind.’

Orlando beamed. ‘Home sweet home at last.’

At last was right. Twelve hours overdue, but if my calculations were right, Mike Beamer’s lobsters were just arriving at the airport. With luck, Carter Aviation was going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and start earning some money. It had better. Our first loan payment was due in less than two weeks.

‘Carter Air four-five, be advised compliance aircraft landing naval air station. Report visual.’

Two familiar white airplanes, toy-sized at our altitude of two thousand feet, were on final approach for the Key West Naval Air station, two miles off our starboard wing. Key West’s smaller civilian airport lay three miles dead ahead.

‘Have visual, will comply.’

Orlando said, ‘Those Luftwaffe boys are everywhere ain’t they?’

Like National Airport in Washington, the Key West Naval Station had been designated a ‘Compliance Base of Operations,’ which meant regular patrols of German fighters zoomed in and out, while our U.S. Navy fighters sat  on  the  tarmac,  lashed  to  their  tie  downs  like  so  many  doomed butterflies.

This particular military ‘no-fly zone’ extended in a two-hundred mile radius to encompass the Florida Straits and Cuba, and up north well past Miami. With the airspace neutralized by fighter planes, Nazi U-Boats completed the compliance choke hold by patrolling the coastal waters.

If a submarine captain suspected an American vessel of violating the Neutrality Act, he’d send over a boarding party to check its manifest.  If they found anything illegal, a spread of well-aimed torpedoes would send the ship to the bottom. They sank five ships early on, but nothing for the past four months. No surprise there. Torpedoes have a funny way of convincing skippers not to go where they don’t belong.

I felt a flash of panic. ‘Key West Tower, do you have my flight plan on file? They were supposed to send you an updated version.’

‘Roger, we got it a couple of hours ago, and you’re cleared to land runway one eight, wind two-four-zero at ten.’

The airport came into view and I smiled like seeing an old friend. I had grown up in Key West and had watched it grow from a small, sleepy grass strip to the long, paved runway that it is today.

‘Carter Air four-five on final.’

The crosswind nudged me sideways and I crabbed slightly to keep the runway numbers planted on my windscreen. Any minute now the S-38’s long snout would block my forward vision, an annoyance that grated on my nerves every time I landed or took off.

‘I don’t know how ducks do it,’ I said. ‘Flying with their damn bills stuck out there in front.’

‘They ways of the Lord are past knowing.’

‘Thanks for clearing that up for me. Gear down.’

‘Nazi-repaired gear coming down.’

That cop Bauer was right; from the smooth clicking coming from either side, the mechanism was working perfectly. The Nazi mechanics really had fixed the gear.

Two hundred feet...the small blue and white shack attached to hangar number two, housing
Carter Aviation
, flashed past and the blur of a small figure running toward the taxiway. No time to wave, just time enough to feel my heart  lift  in  warm  happiness  at  seeing  my  daughter  Abby  again.  One hundred feet...fifty...cut the throttles. Get ready to swing the nose out of the sideways crab and flare for landing.

‘Lord you are the wind beneath our wings,’ Orlando droned.

‘Please shut up.’

Just above stall speed now, needed to make my control movements big and bold as she flirted with the idea of not flying anymore.  Her right wing began lifting into the wind, and I corrected, bringing her level just as she broke into a stall a few feet above the runway and stopped flying. The tires squeaked and spun into life, and at the same instant her steel tail skid touched the concrete and began screeching like a thousand banshees. I swung quickly off the runway onto the grass and the noise dropped off to a muffled rumble. The S-38, an amphibian, had been built in a time when dirt runways were common. Not anymore.

‘We’ve got to retrofit a tail wheel. That skid won’t last the week.’

‘I’ll get on it the minute you get back from your run,’ Orlando said.

I taxied alongside the deserted runway. This time last year, Key West Airport and Key West Naval Air Station had been two competing bee hives with civilian and military aircraft filling the skies day and night. Today a ghost town.

Orlando pointed out the side window. ‘Ground crew at your ten o’clock.’

Ten-year old Abby stood there, face dead serious, hair tucked beneath a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, outstretched arms holding two red flags as she gave me the ‘Continue approach’ signal. I applied a touch of power. The closer I got, the higher she raised the flags, until, just as my wheels reached the exact spot, she expertly snapped the flags into an ‘X’ over her head. I hit the brakes, and killed the engines.

She went from poised ground crew to little kid ran over to the cockpit. I managed to slide open the side window just in time for her to leap halfway inside for a hug.

‘Did you get lost, daddy?’

‘Very funny.’

‘You were supposed to be here yesterday.’

‘Uncle O and I got a little tied up.’

‘Grammy was worried.’

‘What about you?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘Truth?’

A beat. Her brown eyes as wide as Estelle’s and just as beautiful. ‘A little toward the end. But mostly not. Where’s my stay-at-home gift?’

I fished inside my jacket pocket and pulled out a small red lobster with the words,
Souvenir of Cranston, Rhode Island
painted on its tail.

Abby made a face. ‘Daddy, we have tons of lobsters in Florida. Mr. Beamer has a whole truck of them waiting for you.’

‘Pull on its tail.’

She gave me “the look,” but then did so and a tinny-sounding, mechanical voice inside said, ‘Let go my tail.’

She exploded into laughter, and pulled it again.

‘Try mine.’ Orlando reached over his enormous fist and opened it to reveal a grey clam with the same words painted on its shell.

Abby opened the clam and the same voice shouted, ‘Clam up!’

She screamed with glee. ‘How do they do that, Uncle O?’

‘When you’re done playing with them, we’ll find out.’

‘Let’s find out right now!’

I could already see the two of them, foreheads touching, like consulting surgeons over a patient, as they dissected the lobster and clam mechanisms to see what made them tick. Abby’s knack for mechanics and Orlando’s skills made these two dangerous.

‘Later,’ I said. ‘We’ve got lobsters to fly and Uncle O has an engine to fix, don’t you, reverend?’

‘I do, indeed.’

A month ago, we had bought a junked Wright Radial two thousand for parts. It would come in handy for scavenging, now that we had a plane to go along with it.

Abby said, ‘Can I fly right seat?’ Her face was hard to resist.

‘You remember up from down, port from starboard?’

‘Don’t insult me, daddy.’

‘Okay, then Officer Carter, let’s get those lobsters loaded!’

Rosie supervised the loading with the same precision as when she rolled cigars; no wasted effort, delivering maximum product in minimum time. Me? I was happy to be taking orders instead of giving them.

‘Don’t face the crates outward,’ she bossed. ‘Alternate back and forth. They fit better that way.’ She used a short piece of line to lash the crates together. ‘Give me another crate. We haven’t got all day.’

It had taken Orlando, me, Abby, and Lobster Mike, only a few minutes to unbolt the light wicker passenger seats and store them in the hangar. In their place bright yellow-painted crates took up every available inch in the fuselage. Filled with squirming sea-green lobsters, Key West’s best of the best, they soon would be on their way to Miami where ten restaurants eagerly waited.

Stooped over in the cramped space, Lobster Mike and I manhandled last of the crates forward to where Rosie impatiently waited.

Mike said, ‘Thought I was gonna’ be stuck with all these critters and no place to sell them.’

Rosie said, ‘Hurry up, you two, this ain’t a tea social.’

Abby called out from the cockpit, ‘Daddy, can I do pre-flight?’ Her headphones practically swallowed up her entire head.

Rosie said, ‘You are NOT going to let that girl fly right seat.’

‘Why not? She knows the controls.’

‘She’s ten years old, that’s why.’

‘I was ten when I wanted to fly.’

Her face grew serious. ‘That was then, this is now.’

I lowered my voice. ‘Look, mom, we’re starting over, okay? And the two of us need to talk. This will be a good time.’

‘In a plane at two thousand feet?’

‘Absolutely. If she gets mad, where’s she going to go?’

My mother tensed her lips, locked in thought, and then quickly nodded her assent. I’ll give Rosie credit: when comes time to change airports, she’ll kick rudder so fast it’ll make your head spin. Pop was completely the opposite. Sure, he’d change course eventually, but he’d keep considering and re-considering the alternatives long after the change had been made. I suppose that’s why he made such a good railroad engineer. He needed to keep his eye on the track ahead, and the track behind as well.