Spitfire Girls (25 page)

His face fell. It was obvious Burt would not be there to greet her. Nor would her parents, and nor would Errol Carnaby.

Facing the huddled press, Edith smiled and waved for their accompanying photographers. She noticed there was no-one from Malone's firm, which seemed odd, because Beaverbrook had gone to such pains to liaise with the US affiliate. Everyone must be angry at me, she thought, smiling again for a popping flashgun. Her heart leapt when the reporters dispersed and she was able to extricate her German from the bowels of the Oxford.

‘You've peed in your pants, stupid Kraut,' she muttered, helping Hartmut out of the aircraft. They had been left alone, the ground crew – consisting of two World War I veterans and a black cleaner – chattering away to the reporters alongside the small terminal building.

‘Aren't you going to take me to your house?' Hartmut asked.

‘My father would think the coastal invasion had started,' she said, looking over her shoulder. Unzipping one of her pockets she withdrew a small handful of dollar bills and
thrust them into the top of his undergarment. He reached inside and salvaged the money, which had fallen down along his hairless chest.

‘Listen, Hartmut. By now my parents will know I have been having a romance with a Negro, because he can never keep his mouth shut. Burt Malone will be steaming because Britain has beaten us to it in distributing Raine's film. It's all my fault. Now Beaverbrook expects me to recruit Americans, then I have to go to Australia. He's paying for it, and Valerie Cobb is waiting for me to succeed. On top of all that, I'm goddamned if Jacqui Cochran is going to overtake us.'

‘What does this mean?' Hartmut was grinning, and Edith was becoming irritable.

‘Jacqui is only the best woman pilot in America, and she knows everybody, including the President. I want to beat her at getting an American contingent for Valerie Cobb's gang.'

‘Instead, why don't you marry me?'

Edith pushed Hartmut out of the aircraft, on to the wing. A small ladder had been provided, down which he climbed.

Edith could see Eddie Cuomo approaching. ‘Get moving, Hartmut,' she hissed, pointing towards the swampland at the edge of the airfield.

‘Who's your friend, Allam?' Cuomo shouted, running towards the Oxford.

Hartmut froze, his back to the radio man.

‘He's a maintenance man, Eddie,' Edith replied, slapping him on the shoulder and trying to manoeuvre him away from the scene.

‘Hey, boys,' he yelled, motioning to the others in the distance, ‘We've got a real-live stowaway down here!'

Edith was shaking, and Hartmut shut his eyes, slumping over where he stood, the orange flame of the oil refinery jets as bright against the sky as his rich head of hair.

‘Weren't you here a little while ago, sonny?' Eddie persisted.

Hartmut was speechless.

‘They're saying your pal Zuki spoke to the German American Bund – is that right?'

‘Listen, Cuomo, leave him to me, okay?' sighed Edith.

‘I need a story, baby,' he said, casting an avuncular look at the tired aviatrix. ‘You should feel lucky to have one friend left in this town.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘They made that coloured boy talk – and you're a scarlet lady.'

‘Who did?'

‘Malone's brother – the cop.'

The reporters had gathered around Hartmut, and Edith's fury grew: why had the German not made a run for it, to be absorbed into a place like Tinicum Island or Atlantic City? Hartmut was enjoying the attention, his stunning looks a dream for the press photographers. Edith focused on one of the figures fumbling with a large camera, his skinny arms and legs grotesque inside a baggy suit.

‘Stan Bialik,' she said, approaching him. ‘Why haven't you said hello?'

He ignored her, his face reddening and his fingers unable to organize the photographic plate.

‘Here – let me do it,' she offered, taking the camera from his grasp.

Bialik moved off, but with her free hand Edith pulled
at his sleeve, forcing him to remain by her side.

‘Don't go anyplace, Stan,' she murmured.

‘You two know each other?' Eddie asked, as Hartmut continued chattering.

‘Stan is our projectionist at the famous agency,' she replied, aiming the camera and shooting.

‘You'll have to pay her big bucks for that picture, Stan,' Eddie taunted. One of the other photographers aimed and shot Edith at work.

‘Will you please excuse us? Britain's Lord Beaverbrook has arranged a special meeting downtown with his American agents, and we're late,' she lied, ploughing through the sea of reporters and taking Hartmut by the arm, the feel of his steel flesh comforting against her fingers. With amazing speed she was able to scoop up her bags and scramble amongst stationary aircraft, winding a path to the rear of the terminal building. The reporters chased after the pair, but came to a halt when Edith found her favourite secret dirt passageway leading to the main street.

‘Believe it or not, we are going to have to hike all the way to West Philly,' she said, hurrying the German along. Now stripped down to his white long johns, he looked thoroughly comical.

‘What the hell did you tell those guys?'

‘I said I was a pilot and that I had come as your chaperone from Lord Beaverbrook.'

‘Gott in Himmel – wait until that appears in his own newspapers.'

That day Edith and Hartmut traversed the outskirts of Philadelphia, not wishing to accept offers of transport from
curious drivers, and by evening she was in a daze. It was with dread that she turned the final corner into Florence Avenue, having forgotten the magnificent Oxford the British had allowed her to fly, and from which its native girls were still banned. She had forgotten the remarkable transatlantic crossings and the meeting with Valerie Cobb. In Florence Avenue she was just a worried girl coming home to people who could no longer comprehend her, the eccentricity of her life more an embarrassment than a source of pride within the ethnic ghettos. She had become an uncontrollable leviathan growing bigger all the time, and Edith hoped her German guest would defuse hostilities and make her appear more containable. Guilt had begun to creep in once more, but she knew that debilitating sensation would have to be fought, or she would never again leave the Avenue, let alone play Queen of the Skies.

Lights were burning in her parents' living room.

Edith and Hartmut were cold and hungry, her stiffened fingers tapping on the front door. They could hear voices within.

‘It's open,' Kitty Allam shouted.

When Edith walked into her house she was greeted by bewildered looks and by a huge hug from her mother. Sitting uncomfortably in the corner chair was Burt Malone. In a fleeting instant Edith recalled her last encounter in this room.

‘Has anyone heard from Errol?' she asked boldly, Hartmut hiding behind her.

‘We don't discuss him here,' her father growled. ‘Who's your friend?'

‘This is Hartmut Weiss – he's a German Jew.'

The men exchanged handshakes in silence.

‘Where the hell is that film?'

Edith fumbled in her huge bag and handed Burt a British-made copy of Raine's film.

‘It's old hat by now, of course,' he said, laying it on the floor.

‘Isn't anybody going to congratulate me on crossing the ocean safely?'

Unmoved, Burt demanded:

‘What about the camera film you said you'd snitched from Fischtal?'

Bending over, she reached into a pocket of her bag and withdrew the leather pouch she had acquired what seemed an eternity ago. She searched, thrusting her fingers into the bag and then going back to the larger one, her breathing becoming heavier.

‘It's not here – Christ.'

‘Don't tell me you lost it.'

‘Let the girl have some rest, Mr Malone, and then she can bring it in to work tomorrow.'

‘I wrote to Burt and told him I was bringing hot camera film, and I keep promises,' gasped Edith, wanting to cry because she knew the film had disappeared.

‘Perhaps it fell out inside the Oxford,' offered Hartmut.

‘We'll search you in a minute, buddy,' Burt said, taking in the long johns.

‘Your friend needs a shower,' Kitty whispered, bending down to a crouching Edith.

‘I know. He peed in his pants and he stinks,' she shot back.

‘Hartmut, come with me,' cooed Kitty, leading him up the stairs.

Edith straightened up, facing the two men she feared most in her ghetto.

‘I'll find it, Burt. I promise.'

‘When you do, you'll have your job back.'

‘What do you mean, Mr Malone?' Julius Allam demanded, suddenly animated.

‘I've spent the past week handling nothing but aggravation caused by you, young lady. You have an exclusive contract with us. Now you're carrying on with Beaverbrook and that Cobb lady, while I'm left here without any help. Why have you double-crossed me? That's all I want to know.'

‘Raine and I met up and decided I 'd fly her home – if I hadn't done so, you wouldn't have even had that copy. No film at all. Nothing. Don't kid yourself, Burt – she knows it's explosive. If it pleases you, she's still in England, under what they call house arrest.'

‘Speaking of that,' Burt said calmly, ‘I bailed Carnaby out of jail – he's a good kid.'

‘Errol?' she blurted. ‘What has he done?'

‘He's tried to join up, is what he's done,' said her father, smirking.

‘Joined up – what?' She fought the tears that were sure to come.

‘For some reason,' Burt explained, suddenly gentle, ‘he thought you were gone for ever, so he tried to join up. They'll give him a civvy job and send him to a fleapit outfit down south, I bet. Imagine the rednecks listening to Blake.'

Edith was already halfway up the stairs, the horror of her task growing with each minute. The smell of her mother's excellent cooking made the thought of ATA and an American wing and the Australians seem unbearable. Her stomach fluttered as if she had stolen something valuable and was now about to confess to a judge. Here on Florence Avenue, in the house smelling of prohes and lock-shen, she could have been awakening from a dream, like the wizard's Dorothy – except that Edith still had to journey to Oz, and in a remote world caught up in war she knew the mission she had to fulfil might lead not to an emerald city but to atrocities no Coke-swigging young American could imagine.

But tonight she herself would take Hartmut for an icecream soda, while her homeland still drifted in cosy isolationist peace.

Travelling the roads of Norfolk and Suffolk like a tramp, Friedrich Kranz had become fascinated by the geographical schizophrenia of this island kingdom, and by the variety of plant and animal life growing wild in perpetual damp. Nothing had changed since Elizabethan times in certain villages, whose people wore modern clothing but whose slowness of uptake was mediaeval. Was it possible Germans were sharper, not necessarily intellectually, but in their grasp of reality? Might this strange island race someday grab hold of a Schicklgruber culled from their foggy fens and make him – or her – their human clamp on reality?

It had occurred to Kranz that most of the hysteria in the land of the Third Reich had been engendered by a reluctance on the part of the masses to take control of their individual destinies. No wonder America did not wish to enter such a war: every racial group had congregated within its shores, trying to assert one thousand different visions of reality, none of which was perfect, but each of which cried out ‘I am!' like kittens in a multicoloured litter. A land nurturing the spirit of the individual might endure and flourish, Kranz thought, more triumphantly than one overrun with eccentricity, or one commandeered by a failed artist.

Spending what seemed like his hundredth day on the road, Kranz was becoming aware of his appalling lack of cleanliness. Stealing into the abandoned bread van that had become his home, he could feel the comforting warmth of
late summer being sabotaged by the onslaught of his first English autumn.

Today, moreover, he had been beset, since awakening, with a feeling of disquiet. Thoughts of Valerie had been exceptionally vivid but he had tried to distract himself with the section of comic he had re-read so often since embarking on tramphood. In it the hero, Sir Sagramore, battled with First World War German soldiers and at the end of the comic the publisher had inserted a choice morsel of propaganda:

‘Don't trust that nice German family next door – they could be here to destroy our green and pleasant land!' There was no date on the cartoon sheet but Kranz imagined it had been sitting in the bread van for many years. Or was it recent? How he longed to read a newspaper.

Debating whether or not to spend another day incarcerated in his makeshift abode, he was jolted by another wave of thoughts: Valerie was doing something extraordinary today, and he would have to find out. If there were such things as brain waves, he was receiving them now from the woman he craved. Counting the money remaining in his wallet, and stroking his long thick beard, it dawned on Kranz that he could by now pass for a poor Hasidic Jew.

Had they ever seen such things in twentieth-century East Anglia?

Eight hundred years before, Jews were thriving in Norwich and were the proud possessions of the King, who had ordered his people to emulate this industrious sect. They had redeemed themselves, the King proclaimed, through centuries of virtuous work and should therefore be known no longer as Christ-killers.

Then the first Blood Libel had taken place.

Kranz chuckled at the thought of being the first Jew to walk the road to Norwich since those prosperous men, women and children, supposedly protected by the King, had been massacred, and their culture wiped out, by a raging mob in the capital of Norfolk. He remembered reading in a religious-history book that anywhere in Britain, a road named King Street would have been inhabited by that town's Jews because of the protection provided by the monarch. In this autumn of 1939 he would walk to Norwich and find a doctor to treat his rash, his sores and his painful throat, and he would also read a newspaper. After so many weeks he doubted whether anyone would think him alive. War was about to explode, and the uniformed services would have more important things on their minds than unwelcome aliens with false papers who quoted an unsuspecting MP as his sponsor and who stole aeroplanes from RAF installations.