The Girl in the Blue Beret (20 page)

Then, as Marshall turned back toward the cockpit, the light flickered. A wisp of cloud washed past. Then another. Marshall hurried forward. Through the cockpit windows he saw a lovely drift of whiteness in front of them. Clouds. Webb burrowed into the mass. The lighting dimmed. They were inside a soft gray haze, concealed from sight.

“Thank God,” Webb said, as Marshall slid into his seat. “If this cloud-bank goes far enough.…”

He didn’t need to say more. If they could work their way west hidden within clouds, Jerry wouldn’t spot them.

They flew on, steady and cold and watchful. They alternated. Webb flew for a while, then handed off to Marshall. From time to time, they dipped below the clouds so the navigator could get a peek at the ground, to correct his position coordinates. The crew was grim and silent. Marshall refused to believe they might not reach base. The trip home should be simple now, a steady push into the west. Slow, maybe, but they would get there. They were having steak and ice cream at mess that night, rare treats.

“Webb, I need you to drop below again.” It was Campanello, the navigator.

“Roger.”

Webb took the controls from Marshall and eased back the throttles. The plane sank gracefully toward brightness below. She floated downward into the clear. Marshall was counting the seconds till they could climb again.

They depended on Campanello to guide them home. On the way over, there was no need to navigate. They had played follow-the-leader, the sky full of Forts all going in the same direction, and Campanello could take it easy. But now, with his compass, ruler, and a pencil, and only a few glimpses at the world below, he had to take them home by dead reckoning.

Lily
lifted up into the clouds again.

THEY HAD BEEN FLYING
more than an hour, disbelief masking dread. They were still swaddled in clouds when a Focke-Wulf 190 suddenly appeared alongside Marshall’s starboard window, materializing out of the gray mist. Marshall and the German pilot spotted each other at the same moment, and each froze. The Jerry’s leather helmet was pushed back, exposing a patch of bright blond hair. Then the FW-190 flipped and vanished.

“Bandit starboard!” Marshall yelled on the inter-phone just as he heard the guns open up.

“Where did that come from?”

“Did you see that guy?”

“Let’s get the hell home,” Webb said, muttering half to himself, half to Marshall.

How did the 190 find them? He would circle back, if he could. Marshall called to the gunners, “Don’t blink!”

It must have been sheer, lousy chance, he thought. Fighters were looking for them, but the chance of finding them in the clouds was one in a million. And finding them again, unlikely.

But the FW would alert others. More German fighters would be looking for them now. A straggler. A defenseless Yank.

“Those big Fritzes get ambitious when Goering threatens to send them to the Russian front,” Marshall said. “He promised them an Iron Cross for every Fort.”

They flew on, Webb maneuvering only a little, a slight zigzag in the clouds. There was a nervous babble on the inter-phone for a while, but it died down.

The silence of the inter-phone then was like the crew holding its breath. When Marshall wasn’t scanning the cloud-clogged skies, he steadied himself by methodically reviewing the compass, the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, making a constant inventory of the instruments. Could we speed up? Could we trim better?

Webb, exhausted, handed off to Marshall while he wrote up the data in his log. They seemed to be flying in slow motion. It was eerie, timeless. They pushed through the enveloping grayness, at times seeming not to move at all. Marshall’s eyes were stinging. He had to remind himself to blink. He had hardly noticed when they came down out of the sub-zero cold.

Slowly they groped their way, fighting the yoke and rudder pedals, trying to pile up the miles behind them. An hour of this. Or was it a day? Or a week?

The hands of the chronometer crept ahead but didn’t seem to have any meaning. The
Dirty Lily
skulked through the grog. They were slinking toward home.

We won’t die
, Marshall said to himself.
We might not die
.

Then the clouds began breaking up.
Damn
. Adrenaline pulsed higher. The vapor around them thinned, broke apart, and gradually evaporated. They were in the open.

It must be Belgium down there, unless they had angled down over France. No sign of the Channel, unless it was the blue haze on the horizon.

Farmland, a river, a village—a mile or so below. Marshall could make out a stone church. More villages and fields.

Campanello was calling through the inter-phone the name of the river below when a Jerry fighter bore in on them from dead ahead. Grainger yelled out, “Attack! Attack! Twelve o’clock level.”

—Grainger was shooting.

—The plane jolted.

—The Plexiglas nose cone shattered.

—Bullets smacked the back of the pilots’ control panel.

—Top turret opened up, then the waist gunners.

—The FW raced under them and was gone.

Wind screamed through the opened fuselage, and the
Dirty Lily
bucketed and shuddered. Marshall and Webb both grabbed their yokes, fighting a plane almost out of control. Their air speed was dropping dangerously.

Webb motioned downward. He and Marshall both pushed forward on their yokes. The crippled plane nosed down.

The top turret gunner called, “I think I got him!”

Tail gunner: “No, you didn’t.”

“Al’s hit!” Campanello yelled. His voice was thin and distant in Marshall’s headset. “Shoulder. And me. My leg.”

Webb yanked the yoke to the right. They pulled through a diving turn, then hauled back. Straining, muscling, Webb and Marshall leveled the bomber at about five hundred feet, maybe less.

“Bandit, ten o’clock high!” Top turret.

The guns were hammering again.

The FW—silver with red markings—raked their port side, nose to tail.

Hadley, the radio man, called out something that sounded like “running board.”

Chick Cochran was on the inter-phone from the waist. “We’ve got a fire back here!”

“Bail out, bail out!” cried Webb.

“No!” Marshall cried. “Too low!”

Webb leaned back and reached for his chute pack. Marshall clung to the yoke.

Marshall called to the crew, “I’m bringing it in.”

Marshall said to Webb, “It’s my airplane.”

He saw fields next to a village. He was going straight in. He yelled on the inter-phone for the ball-turret gunner to crawl out.

They crested a line of trees, then sank toward the dirt. As the plane skidded onto the field, the props ripping the ground, Marshall saw Webb slumped, head resting on his chest as if he had just nodded off for a quick snooze.

25.

M
ARSHALL HAD RARELY TALKED ABOUT THE PLANE GOING
down, and he hadn’t told Gordon all of it. He had never felt like taking credit for bringing the plane down safely. Webb was unconscious, perhaps already dead—exactly when, Marshall couldn’t say.

“An FW-190. A mean fucker,” Gordon was saying.

Marshall squirmed. “Your father had been hit. He was slumped over by the time we stopped moving.”

Gordon shook his head. “Damn.” He surveyed the room blankly. “That’s what’s called a bad day,” he said, forcing a laugh. He flexed his fists.

“Nothing was anybody’s fault,” Marshall said. “Your dad did one hell of a job. Nobody could have done better.”

Gordon called to the bartender, “
Garçon
—what do I have to do to get a refill?”

The bartender raised his eyebrows and turned his back. He made a show of dawdling before bringing the bottle.

“There’s certain things I’ve got against these Frenchies,” Gordon said to Marshall, after the bartender left. “Why they didn’t do the job in Vietnam. Why they hate us for doing the job they couldn’t do. We saved their ass in the World War Number Two, but they forgot about that. They have convenient memory. I tell this to my wife, and she says, ‘Gordon, you’re like a dog worrying a bone. Bury that bone and let’s go add another garage to the split-level.’ Or some other crap.” He laughed again, apparently struck by his own wit.

“Have you been married long?” Marshall asked.

“Linda and I got together after I came back to the States in 1970. Now, that was a bad scene for you, 1970. All those protesters, spitting on GIs coming home.” He swallowed an eye-popping slug of Scotch. “I had some problems with that war from the start, but I did my job. That’s American values.” Webb turned serious. “We had military discipline when I was a boy—lights out, reveille, spit-polish your shoes. When I saw my stepfather in the hall on the way to the goddamn bathroom, I had to salute! He was a career Army man, a colonel. I don’t know when he met Mom.”

He paused. “Then you see what I did to repay him—joined the Air Force!” Gordon rubbed his hands together. “The One-Oh-Wonder! Man, I was one afterburning bastard.”

Gordon asked Marshall a few questions about his father then—how he did takeoffs, what he liked to do on his time off. Marshall tried to paint a lively portrait, but he was flummoxed. It was hard to come up with stirring stories about Gordon’s father.

Then he remembered that he had bicycled into the English countryside with Lawrence Webb and a couple of other crewmates after a tough mission to Bremen. They had made a day of it, biking through peaceful country, racing on flat stretches.

“He was a speed demon on a bike,” Marshall said. “A One-Oh-Wonder.”

He declined another drink. After promising Gordon he would be in touch, he left. He walked to his apartment in the early twilight, shedding the alcohol and feeling his eyes grow clear again.

26.

H
IS MAIL CAME TO HIS APARTMENT NOW. IT ARRIVED IN A
locked cubbyhole in the lobby. Mary sent photographs of a trip she had taken to the Olympic Peninsula, and Albert sent drawings of a landscape plan for revising Marshall’s backyard with ground covers. No one would have to mow! he explained. Loretta would have had a fit, Marshall thought. Ground covers bring snakes, she would say.

He had received a couple more letters from the crew, in answer to his letter about visiting the crash site, and today he heard from Bob Hadley, his erstwhile escape partner. Hadley wrote from California, saying it had never occurred to him to return to the crash site, but he was glad that Marshall was searching for his helpers. Hadley wrote, “I didn’t know the name of the family that sheltered me in Paris. I didn’t stay there long, because everybody was starving in Paris.” He had no reaction to Marshall’s account of the boy’s father who was killed. But he was wondering if Marshall had written to Hootie Williams’s family. Hootie was single, and no one in the crew had kept in touch with his parents. Marshall thought about the Hootie he had known at Molesworth. He could whip the pants off everybody at poker. He could hold his liquor. He could sew. He could probably do magic tricks. Hootie always came up with something unexpected—and the last thing anyone expected was that he would lose his life.

Marshall opened a small package from Kansas, thinking it was from another of his crewmates, the flight engineer, James Ford. But the writer was James’s daughter, Sonia.

My father is ill and cannot reply to your letter, but he wanted me to send you this tape recording he made about his experience in France
after your plane crashed. It wasn’t until last year, when he was told he had lung cancer, that he decided to make this recording for my brother and me. When he was able to share his account it brought us closer together as a family, and we wouldn’t trade anything for this. I’m a nurse in a psychiatric ward and all I hear all day is far-fetched stories. But this tape tells a story that is both fantastic and true, and it is one I cherish. My mother did not live to hear it, but I have a feeling she did know some of it before she went. Dad sends you his best wishes, and he remembers with gratitude how you pulled him out of the plane
.

Marshall did not remember pulling Ford from the plane. Webb was lying in the dirt. Ford and Marshall together had hauled him out of the plane. Marshall had been over these memories so often that they had become only memories of memories.

He wrote a brief letter to Sonia Ford. He tried to remember if Ford was a smoker. They all were. He couldn’t listen to the tape recording until he added a tape recorder to his Parisian furnishings. But maybe he didn’t want to hear another version of the tale. The rendezvous with Gordon Webb had been unnerving, and it was playing in his mind still.

He was settling into his new, perhaps temporary, life. He made small talk with the grocer, the laundress, the butcher, the guy named Guy at the Everything Store. He tried to remember to carry a string bag for his purchases. The baker kindly sawed a loaf in half for him, saying a single person would let the bread go stale. Marshall had not always paid such attention to the small tasks of daily life, but it pleased him to economize. He remembered the Depression. He didn’t like extravagance. He was making nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year before he retired, and now with his pension and without Loretta, he had more than he needed.

But what did he think he was doing? He walked and walked. If he was really serious about finding Robert and the Vallons, he should be out doing research, he told himself. Instead, he was depending on Nicolas. He didn’t know what to do. Gordon Webb was flitting back and forth across the Pond and acting like it was a dipshit job. Marshall would have been happy to be in that seat, even as a co-pilot.

On the boulevard Montparnasse he saw an aged woman with pinched eyes and a doughy face holding out a bowl for coins. She was swathed in black, stooped, breathing with difficulty, agony on her face. She could be a war widow from World War I, he thought. And she would have lived through the Occupation. He recalled the women in black who had taken care of him. What this woman could tell him! He found change in his pocket and dropped it into her bowl.