Trouble on His Wings (2 page)

“Okay,” said the mate,
standing at the tiller. “Prepare to give way. Give way all together! Stroke!”

Johnny sighed with
relief and watched the brawny sailors heave-ho on their oars, sending the
lifeboat on its crazy, tipsy journey back to the side of the drifting steamer.
Johnny grinned a little to himself. It wasn't everybody that could stop a ship
like that.

Tackles were hooked
into the boat fore and aft, and blocks creaked as they were lifted up the
palisade of rusty steel toward the boat deck. The
davits
swung, first one, then
the other, and the lifeboat was over the side and back into its cradle.

A thunderously
scowling man wearing tarnished braid, fastened upon Johnny. “What's the idea? I
thought your ship was coming down, but it's flown off by itself! Is this some
new kind of a ———, ———, ———, ——— stunt?”

“Johnny Brice, of
World News. Get your picture in all the theaters, Captain—”

“News! Why, you
young—”

“Ah, ah!” warned
Johnny. “Ladies present, Captain.” And he slid out of the irate mariner's grasp
and through the crowd.

As he went, a young
lady suddenly backed out of the crowd and appeared to be on her way into a
passage. The movement attracted Johnny's eye and the girl looked as though she
was unhappy to be noticed. Johnny decided that it might be shock from the
wreck. She was too beautiful to be swimming around in the ocean and scorched by
flame.

“World News,” said
Johnny. “We bought some pictures by radio. Whoever's got 'em, trot 'em out.” He
spoke to the crowd but he noted that the girl was more uneasy than before,
though reluctant to retreat. Her wide blue eyes were almost frightened, strange
in their intensity upon him.

Several passengers ran
to get their salvaged films. There were plenty of rolls, thanks to the penchant
of tourists for movie cameras.

“Sight unseen,” said
Johnny. “Five hundred dollars a roll.”

A little fat man
wearing nothing much more than a blanket, but gripping his precious film,
stared at Johnny with disbelief. “You won't even have to see if it shows in the
pictures?”

“Somebody was bound to
get some,” said Johnny. “Come on, the rest of you. Shell out.” He took his
checkbook in hand and started to write.

Ten minutes later he
had spent three thousand dollars of company money and had a questionable batch
of film rolled up in his rubber bag.

“You're a fool,”
snapped the captain, still peeved. “You could have bought all this when we
docked. You won't get it there any sooner.”

“Oh, won't I?” grinned
Johnny. “Collect from the company for the delay. World News pays for its
exclusives.”

The amphib was
hovering in the sky and Johnny turned to the passengers. Again he noticed that
the girl shrank back, though her appearance and not her conduct made the bigger
impression upon him. In this mob of out-of-shape men and variously misbuilt
tourist women, all in blankets or borrowed sailor clothes, the girl was the
only one whose poise was not shattered by exterior appearance.

Johnny moved over to
the rail, taking the captain with him. “Have you got a Mrs. Felznick aboard? A
sort of lumpy old dame, I think. She'd have her hands full of jewels if she
drowned, unless she let go.”

The captain had melted
ever so little under the persuasive smile of the young man. It was said in the
business, that Johnny could talk and grin his way through the place to which
all newsreel cameramen probably go. Calling an officer of the ill-fated
Kalolo,
the captain put the question.

The man, singed and chagrined
at the loss of his ship, shook his head impatiently. “Just finished compiling
the list. We haven't any such name aboard this ship—and we haven't our
passenger list, though there's a duplicate in the company office. I seem to
remember the name, but—” he swallowed hard. The loss of passengers was too
heavy upon him, “But I guess she must have been among the dead.”

“The old man is going
to take this hard,” muttered Johnny. “Thanks, Skipper, for the lift.”

“Huh?” said the
captain.

Johnny had acted before
anyone else realized what he was doing. He went over the rail in a long, clean
dive, far out from the ship, so as to miss the propellers—if he could. He came
up and saw the side terrifyingly close to him. He struck out as fast as he
could, rubber container clutched against his side. The steamer swirled on past
to leave Johnny floundering and half-drowned in the boiling wake. He fought to
keep afloat, spluttering and coughing. The world was a tangle of green
mountains, snowcapped with froth, and all the peaks were falling in upon him.
He turned about wildly to locate Irish and found that he faced the stern of the
slowing steamer. And as he looked he saw a white figure perch on the rail and
soar seaward, straight into the propeller boil. He had no time to speculate on
the identity of the mad diver, he was too occupied with the possibility that he
would be keeping company, in a moment, with a chewed-up corpse.

“And me without a
camera!” he swore.

The steamer had
stopped its way for a moment, but now, with a sizzling sea curse the captain
rang for headway and the SS
Birmingham Alabama
departed from Johnny's
life, just as abruptly as all things parted from a man in such an unstable
career.

He heard an engine
barking and bellowing as a cunning hand worked the throttle to keep the nose
into the waves. A wing was a few feet from Johnny and he thankfully struggled
toward it. As it dipped, he grasped it to be pulled bodily out of the sea with
the ship's next lurch. Ducked twice, he finally made the catwalk to find Irish
wildly pointing to starboard.

“What's the matter?”
shouted Johnny. And then he needed no answer. Somebody was swimming strongly
toward them and Johnny understood that the propellers had been cheated of a
meal.

He edged out on the
wing and extended a hand, and then, from wonderment, almost withdrew it.

“What the hell are you
doing out here?” snapped Johnny.

The girl he had so
favorably noticed was too exhausted to speak as he hauled her up on the wing.
Irish was wailing from the pit, madly jockeying stick and throttle to keep the
overweighted wing up, crying to them to come inboard, before they all drowned.
The ship was going like a bucking bronco, and each smash of the waves seemed
hard enough to be the last.

Johnny gripped the
leading edge and worked himself along, pulling the girl by the arm. Presently
she was helping him as much as she could, and they came to the cockpit, dizzy
with so much erratic motion, blind with spray and half strangled by the blast
of the slipstream. Johnny boosted her into his cockpit and climbed in with her,
slamming the hood down before they shipped any more sea.

“Take off!” he bawled
to Irish.

The amphib floundered,
plowing water as it strove to get up speed. Gradually Irish, by a process of
hauling back and easing off on the stick, got the plane to traveling crest to
crest. At last, with a smoothness which was pure pleasure by contrast, the
amphib was in the air, picking up speed.

The SS
Birmingham
Alabama
went under their wings, the captain shaking his fist from the
bridge. But neither Johnny nor Irish even bothered to look.

The girl was shivering
and Johnny gulped with embarrassment. In all the commotion he had not realized
the scantiness of her costume. She had had but a few ounces of clothing left
when she had cast aside her blanket. The shipwreck had found her in bed and
only her silk lounging pajamas had been salvaged. But sea water does not tend
to improve the modesty possibilities of silk. Johnny pulled a leather jacket
out of the locker behind his head and draped it around her. Then he pulled a
thermos of coffee and a cheese sandwich from the seat locker under him. She
gave him a grateful glance with those blue eyes of hers which warmed Johnny far
more than the coffee he poured for her.

They were too tired to
raise their voices to the volume necessary for speech behind that yowling
engine, but speech didn't seem very necessary at the moment. They sat munching
the cheese sandwich, each with half, and sipping the coffee, gingerly held so
that the air bumps would not slop it, and were grateful. There is a welding
quality to great danger mutually experienced.

Irish, popeyed from
the inner pressure of the questions he ached to ask, razzed the engine
unmercifully on the homeward journey. Johnny glanced at the watch and noted without
surprise that they had been gone two hours and five minutes from Long Island
and there was the East River, swarming with traffic, under them. Irish was
volplaning
down to a landing, picking his way through the puffy tugs and
importantly waddling ferry boats. Skirting the stern of a disdainful steamer,
he let the amphib settle. She had no more than touched when he gunned her
toward a ramp.

A moment later the
wheels were down and bumping against underwater concrete and Johnny threw back
the hood, standing up. “Here's where we stop,” said Johnny.

She clutched his hand
in terror. “No! NO! Don't make me get out! Please don't make me! You didn't
save my life just to make me lose it!”

Johnny looked at her
in wonder.

“Why did you think I
took such an awful chance?” she wept.

“Publicity,” said
Johnny. “It's all right. We'll fake—”

“NO! Please! No! No
publicity. Don't mention that you saw me. I don't think anybody saw me dive
from the stern of the steamer. That's why I risked the propellers and swam
underwater most of the way to your plane. Don't let them get me, please,
please, please!”

Perhaps it was the
tone of her voice. Perhaps it was because she was beautiful even to
beauty-surfeited Johnny. Perhaps his thirst for mystery, news and trouble
caused him to act as he did.

“If that's the way of
it,” said Johnny, “it's okay by me. Hell, I mean . . . shucks, I wouldn't turn
you over to anybody.”

“Don't say you've even
seen me,” she begged, her small mouth quivering as though she was about to cry.

Seeing that what she
had been through had brought her close to hysteria, Johnny was swift to
acquiesce. Holding his rubber container, he stepped down to the wing.

“Irish, you've got to
take off right now for Long Island. Make sure nobody sees this girl. I'll be
back as soon as I deliver these.”

“Who is she?” cried
Irish eagerly. “What's her name? What'd she almost bump herself off for? How
come she don't want nobody to see her—”

“Take an order without
questions, for a change,” said Johnny.

“Okay,” said Irish,
after making the effort and winning.

The girl had dropped
out of sight in the cockpit, but now she called to him again. “If you value
your life, you won't mention my presence with you to anyone. They . . . they'd
get you too, for helping me.”

“Not to a soul,” said
Johnny, hurrying away.

“Gee,” said Irish as
he turned and started for his takeoff.

Johnny, water still
running from him, got behind the wheel of a car parked in a garage near the
ramp. Careening it out into the street he started full-speed uptown. A traffic
cop saw him at the next corner, started to stop him, recognized him and
abruptly headed his machine in the same direction, opening his siren wide to
clear Johnny's way for him.

A few minutes later,
Johnny skidded his car to a stop before the World News building and leaped out.

“Thanks!” he yelled to
the cop.

“Don't mention it,
Johnny!”

Johnny scorned the
elevator and thundered up to the third floor, bursting into the office of Frank
Felznick. He presented the container with a swoop that flirted water over the
desk.

Felznick, a tall
bundle of nerves with deep, electric eyes, pushed all his buttons at once and
grabbed the container, opening it to pour out the eight- and sixteen-millimeter
rolls. All his doors opened at once and he threw the precious film into outstretched
hands. The doors slammed and a newsreel was on its way to the making.

“You got any word of
Louise?” said Felznick quickly.

Johnny hesitated, and
then shook his head. “You sure she was on the
Kalolo
?”

“I don't know. I told
her to take it. God, Johnny, you understand that? If she's dead, I'm the one
that's responsible. I chose the boat.” He rummaged in a cluttery desk drawer
and finally hauled out a crumpled and unframed photograph, staring hopelessly
at it.

“Maybe she didn't take
it,” said Johnny helpfully.

“It would be the first
request of mine she ever obeyed,” said Felznick. “She was over there spending
all her money on phony titles and I said Paris was no good for her. I talked to
her on the phone. Half an hour I argued with her. I told her to take the
Kalolo
.”