Piece of Cake (36 page)

“You're absolutely right, Sticky,” Cattermole said in a nasal drawl. “It really is very, very sad.”

Todd got in and out of the changing room as fast as he could. He bundled his uniform together and headed for the airmen's quarters. CH3 walked with him. “You have a natural ability for that game,” he said. “You ought to develop it.”

Todd said nothing.

“I mean, with your skill, I bet you'd soon beat any of those clowns back there. They're not so hot.”

Todd ducked his head against the flickering rain. He went around a corner and almost collided with his commanding officer.

“Hello, hello!” said Rex. “What's the rush?”

Todd stood stiffly, hugging his uniform to his chest.

Rex was wearing a trench-coat and carrying an open umbrella. His other hand twirled a leather leash. He took a pace back and examined Todd. “Been playing football?” he asked cheerfully. “Who won?”

“Squash, sir,” CH3 said. “I invited LAC Todd to play squash.”

Rex turned his head and peered, as if he had not seen the American before. “Did you, by God?” he said. “Did you really?” He looked at Todd again. “What a frightfully friendly thing to do. And did you find the leading aircraftsman a satisfactory playmate?” The dog Reilly came galloping across the grass and began busily sniffing ankles.

“It was a good game, sir,” CH3 said.

“Oh, I'm sure it was a splendid match.” Reilly pissed on Todd's right foot. “No quarrels, no bad temper, just the two of you, alone, grappling with each other, like the athletes on some Greek vase.”

“Is that all, sir?” CH3 said. “Because in case you hadn't noticed, it's raining, and your dog has just urinated on this airman.”

Rex laughed. “Reilly? No, not possible. Reilly wouldn't do a thing like that, would you, Reilly? Reilly didn't really disgrace himself, did he, Todd?”

LAC Todd stared wretchedly past Rex's left ear.

“Jolly good,” Rex said. “Keep up the football. Got to stay fit to beat the Hun, eh? Carry on, Todd.” As the airman disappeared
into the darkness, Rex said: “I'd like a little chat later on, Yellow Three. Come, Reilly! Off we go.”

“Hello,” Corporal King said. “Been swimming?”

Todd dumped his uniform on his bed and found a towel.

“I thought you were playing squish at the Ritz,” King said.

“Fucking stupid fucking cunt,” Todd said.

“Sorry I spoke.”

“Not you. That fucking Yank.”

“I told you it wouldn't work,” King said. “You wouldn't listen.”

“I'd like to kick his fucking stupid head in,” Todd said. “He doesn't know his fucking ass from his armpit.”

“Just as long as you do,” King said, “and just as long as you keep away from both of them. Right?”

When the pilots assembled for drinks before dinner they discovered that the bar was free. By that time everyone had seen Jacky Bellamy's newspaper story; what they didn't know, until the adjutant told them, was that Baggy Bletchley had just telephoned from Headquarters to say that Rex had got the DFC for leading the attack on the Dornier. Tonight, drinks were on the CO.

After dinner CH3 was playing backgammon with Skull when Jacky came over and sat beside them. Without looking up, CH3 said, “No comment and that's final.”

“I just want to watch.”

“No, you want a story. You people always want a story.” He rolled his dice and made a move.

“Unless you're playing for the Crown Jewels there's no story here, is there? Who's winning, anyway?”

“Don't tell her,” CH3 warned Skull. “You'll end up in the sports section of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
with your name misspelled.”

“I'm surprised at you,” she said. “I really am. What happened to the First Amendment? Aren't you fighting for things like the freedom of speech?”

“Not me. I'm in this for the money.”

“Eleven shillings a day?” Skull said.

“You don't mean to tell me it's gone up
again
?” CH3 rolled his eyes.

“I can't believe that you want to see newspapers abolished,” she said. “So, if they're desirable, why not help to make them better?”

“I don't want to see sewers abolished either, but … Look here,” he said to Skull, “are you sure you want to do that?” Skull nodded. “Then I re-double you,” CH3 said.

“I accept.”

“There's a difference, surely,” she said, but CH3 refused to be drawn. He played fast, slapping the counters around the board. “Okay,” she said, “I don't defend everything that appears in every paper, but I think it's unreasonable for someone as newsworthy as you to expect
not
to be news.”

“I don't play in your backyard,” CH3 said. “Why should you play in mine?”

Skull said: “What exactly did you do? If it's not an impertinent question, which I realize from what you say it must be, so I withdraw it.”

“I made my garden grow.”

Skull looked at Jacky Bellamy. “When I knew lie was going to be here I checked the record,” she said. “Youngest American male to win a gold in the Winter Olympics. Bobsled. Also climbed a couple of mountains that nobody had climbed before. Won a few ocean races. That sort of thing.”

“Goodness,” Skull said to him. “You
were
busy.”

“I was, and it was all my own business. Nothing I ever did made a damn bit of difference to anyone but me.”

“Look, you really can't be the judge of that,” she said.

He ignored her. “Which is why I never talked to people from newspapers. They were going to get it all wrong anyway. They always do. They sell their papers by telling people what they want to hear, and believe me that's a long way from the truth.”

She sat up. Her voice was still calm but her eyes were wide. “You mean for example reports about this war? About cities getting bombed, civilians getting killed?”

“I mean like the sort of junk you just wrote about us.”

“How can it be junk? I wrote what I saw.”

The game had stopped.

“Sure,” he said. “You saw the Dornier get hit and crash and they're all dead. That's fact. What you wrote about the way it happened, that's junk.”

“The
way
it happened?” She was puzzled. “It was a perfect interception, that's all there was to—”

“Wrong. That Dornier should have got away. Our tactics were terrible. We took half a year to get into position—all that wheeling and shifting and re-arranging formation, it was like Aunt Phoebe's dancing class.”

“It worked.”

“What did you call it? Aerial chess? Hooey. It wasn't even aerial hopscotch. We didn't stalk that thing. We clumped around the sky like a herd of cows. We didn't use the sun, we didn't use height, we came in dead astern one after another as if we were taking it in turns to go to the lavatory.”

“But it
worked
”

“They must have been asleep.” Skull was listening carefully. So were two or three nearby pilots. “Those black-and-white wings of ours make this squadron stand out like a checkerboard. Any normal bomber crew would have spotted us first time we banked and gone like hell for home, but they just chugged along. Something was wrong, mechanical failure, oxygen, food poisoning, I don't know what, but that wasn't a normal Dornier 17. It was half-dead when we hit it. An angry canary could have brought it down.”

That was too much for the listening pilots, and there were muttered protests. Jacky Bellamy sat back in her chair and looked at him seriously. CH3 said: “Now aren't you sorry you asked?”

She shook her head. “Asking is what the job is all about.” She got up and walked away.

“Whose throw is it?” CH3 asked. Skull looked at the dice and frowned. CH3 sighed and scraped the counters into a heap. “Bloody woman,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later they had built another game to a beautifully balanced struggle when a mess servant told CH3 the CO would like to see him in his office.

The adjutant and Jacky Bellamy were there too, comfortably seated. “… and that was the end of him!” Rex was saying as CH3 came in. They chuckled. “Well now, Mr. Hart.” Rex took a pipe from a little rack on his desk and squinted into the bowl as if something might be hiding there. “My spies tell me you have been spreading alarm and despondency, contrary to section tiddly-pom of the Defence of the Realm Act.”

CH3 said nothing.

Rex began shredding tobacco and filling his pipe. “You have been trying to persuade Miss Bellamy that our successful destruction of an enemy bomber, without loss to ourselves, was a piece of monumental incompetence and an act of folly without parallel in the annals of the Royal Air Force.” He stuck the pipe in his mouth.

“No, sir.”

“Ah. You mean there is a parallel? Tell me about it.”

“No, sir, that's not what I mean, and you know it's not what I mean.”

“Oh. Do I?” Rex switched the pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Well, since you seem to understand me better than I understand you, perhaps you'd care to explain yourself.”

“All right. Her report made the interception look like a triumph of military aviation. She suggests we won because we outflew the enemy. I don't agree. I think our tactics were lousy and we won because we were lucky.”

Rex lit his pipe and studied the American through the smoke. “I see. Now tell me, Mr. Hart. Would you say that the Air Staff, who saw fit to commission you and equip you with a Hurricane, are experienced and intelligent men?”

“I guess they do their best.”

Kellaway uttered a little high-pitched snort: whether of surprise or amusement it was hard to say.

“But their best is not good enough for you. The Air Staff created the system of Fighting Area Attacks to destroy enemy bombers. I used one such Attack. We destroyed one such bomber. You, however, feel that we should have acted otherwise.”

“Yes.”

“You think that the combined and unanimous opinion of the Air Fighting School, the Air Staff, and the Commander-in-Chief Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, is wrong?”

“Yes.”

“You think that a pilot officer with less than a month's experience in France is qualified to rewrite the Manual of Air Tactics?”

CH3 breathed in deeply through his nose.
“Yes”
he said. He heard the ice-cubes tinkle in the adjutant's glass.

“Why?” Rex was getting impatient. He tossed his pipe into a huge glass ashtray. “What makes you so amazingly qualified?”

“Spain.”

“Not good enough. Spain was a scruffy little civil war. An insurrection. No proper front, and lots of garlicky peasants getting their heads blown off because the anarcho-syndicalists wouldn't take orders from the Marxist-Trotskyites. Typical dago shambles, in fact.”

“The Germans learned a lot from it.”

“Your side lost, I believe.”

“That's not the point. We should take advantage of the German experience and—”

“My dear Hart, I'm here to smash the Hun, not to imitate him. Now, if you have any specific tactical proposal to make, I'm prepared to listen.”

CH3 thought for a moment, and shook his head. “Let's not waste each other's time, sir. If you're convinced the official tactics are right, you won't budge whatever I say.”

Rex stared at him for several seconds. “A piece of advice, Hart,” he said. “While you are in my squadron, if you cannot speak courteously, then better to remain silent. That's all.”

Skull had gone to bed, but Fanny Barton, Flip Moran and Moke Miller were still at the bar. “I take it you have been suitably chastised, young man,” Moran said. “Have a drink.”

“More than chastised,” CH3 said. “I have been converted. I'll take a beer, thanks.”

“Converted to what?” Barton asked.

“The new air tactics. Haven't you heard? From now on we're to attack the enemy in alphabetical order. I tell you, it's revolutionary.”

“But we won't know the Jerry pilots' names,” Miller objected. “Or am I being dense?”

“Don't worry, that's only on Tuesdays and Fridays. Mondays and Thursdays we take off in order of height, shortest first and tallest last, and we attack in order of age, starting with the youngest. Shouldn't you be taking notes?”

“The pencil's broken,” Moran said.

“Also there's a relationship between altitude and inside-leg measurement, but I've forgotten what exactly. I'm afraid Rex became a little incoherent after he chewed my head off and swallowed it.”

“Don't expect any sympathy from me,” Barton said. “You asked for trouble and you got it.”

CH3 sipped his beer.

“Let's face it, old boy, you were talking a lot of balls,” Miller said.

CH3 grunted. “I suppose the whole thing is a grim warning never to speak to the press.”

“You can't blame Jacky,” Moran said quickly. “If you say her story's all wrong, she's got to do something. She has to go to the CO. You gave her no choice.”

“You don't particularly like newspaper people, do you?” Miller asked.

“That's got nothing to do—”

“All right, let's forget it,” Barton said. “You've just put up a small black, CH3, that's all. It's not wildly important. Let's all forget it.”

Moran nudged the American. “You know what they say in England,” he told him in his heavy Ulsterman's voice. “If you can't say anything nice, then for the love of Christ don't say anything at all.” He nodded sternly. “Begorrah,” he added. “Whatever that means.”

Next morning Area Operations sent the squadron to patrol a section of the Maginot Line south of Strasbourg. The weather was a strange mixture of gusty rainstorms and bright, warm sunshine. When they flew through rain the clouds towered and overhung them, leaking blackness as if soaked in ink. When they reached sunlight the clouds became sparkling white terraces, hugely spaced. They were only at five thousand feet but the air was sharply cold.