Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (16 page)

"You know," he said slowly, "I haven't forgotten in a long time. I haven't blanked out in three years." Not since the Great Passenger Derby. And that had been more than three years. "Sometimes I've gotten that drifting feeling." It was hard to put into words. "Like the world is getting less and less real. But it never goes all the way. It's just weird for a few minutes and then it stops."

"That's good, darling." She hooked her foot around his calf, snuggling up close.

There were other differences, big ones. "I used to have trouble sleeping. I'd stay up until two or three in the morning, reading and listening to the radio, trying to keep my mind busy. And then I'd be dead the next day. But that doesn’t happen anymore." And there was a reason for that, a real clear one, and she ought to know it. "You keep me talking and playing and here."

He felt her smile. "It's easier to sleep with someone else," she said, which was one of those typical Stasi answers. Maybe it was about him and maybe it was about her. Sometimes she'd jerk in her sleep, suddenly starting awake wide-eyed. It would wake him up and he'd turn on the radio, listening to the static crackling softly while they settled back again, talking about something silly.

"I need you," he said.

"Well, you have me." She squeezed a little tighter. "My big dog."

He bent his face against her hair. "Where would you like to go tonight?"

"It's a bit warm for Amazons of the Yukon," Stasi said contemplatively.

"Unless the Yukon is suddenly tropical."

"The atmosphere isn't really conducive to huddling together for warmth," she said. "Something more appropriately tropical. Terry and the Pirates?"

"Isn't that for kids?" Mitch asked. "It's a comic strip."

"Maybe. Maybe not." She ran her fingers up his back lightly and he felt the goosebumps follow them. "Terry may be a perfect innocent, but I bet Pat's been around the block."

"Yeah, old Pat does seem to have a fairly unhealthy fixation on the Dragon Lady."

"Unhealthy? I think he's just a good red-blooded American boy," Stasi said. "A big, handsome fellow who probably isn't as nice as he seems."

"That could be," Mitch said. "Hard not to notice the Dragon Lady. Especially the way she keeps tying him up."

"Perfectly innocently, of course," Stasi said. "I always tie men up perfectly innocently."

"I bet you do." He tilted her chin up, a long, lingering kiss, just tasting. Oh yes. Deep and slow, and then trailing down her throat. "I'm sure the Dragon Lady can think of some awful things to do to poor Pat."

"Hundreds, darling," she said. "It could take weeks and weeks."

There was a sudden crash in the next room as if someone had thrown a book at the wall, the sound of raised voices swearing in German.

Mitch lifted his head and took a deep breath. "Ok, that's getting annoying."

"Whoof," Stasi said. She rolled off to the side, staring up at the ceiling with a martyred expression.

The voices rose further, enough that the words would have been completely understandable if they hadn’t been in German, and Mitch considered banging on the wall with his fist. “Goddamnit, Jerry." He started to get up, but Stasi put a hand on his arm.

“Wait,” she said. “This won’t last too long from the sound of it.”

“What?” Mitch stopped. “I didn’t know you spoke German.”

“Of course I do, darling.” Stasi reached for her cigarette case and holder on the bedside table, and Mitch held the lighter for her. The flame flared suddenly in the dark, casting interesting shadows across her bare breasts, and she shifted to keep the ash off her and the sheets. "School was German language only, even in primary school."

He passed her the ashtray, his voice studiously casual. "Where was that exactly?"

Her smile widened as she blew out the first puff of smoke, pleased that he'd caught her out just a little bit but not willing to give more. "St. Petersburg, darling. At the palace of my dear cousin Nikky. The Czar, you know."

"Of course," Mitch said with a grin. "Not somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

"I can't imagine what you mean."

Something thumped against the wall again, and Mitch winced. “So what’s Jerry so worked up about?”

Stasi drew in a long lungful of smoke, narrowing her eyes. “At the moment, it’s — well, something about the trench, the test trench where they found the rock. And how they’re going to lay out the grid? There are a lot of technical terms that I’ve never heard of.”

“I should tell them to shut up,” Mitch said. "If we can be quiet, they can be."

“No, wait,” Stasi said again. Radke’s voice rose, lighter and sharper than Jerry’s. “Professor Radke seems to feel that Professor Ballard is simply being difficult. Perhaps because he has not been laid recently enough.”

“What?”

Jerry said something, his tone just as cutting, and Stasi blew a smoke ring. “And Professor Ballard says that if Professor Radke can only think with his dick —“

There was a different, doubled thump, the sound of a body hitting the bed and the headboard hitting the wall.

“— Perhaps he should be in a different profession.”

It was a little too easy to imagine what was going on in the other room, Radke sprawled on the bed, flushed and angry and aroused, Jerry teetering on his wooden leg… And none of that train of thought ought to be pursued.

More German, the voices mingling, and Stasi drew in a last breath of smoke, then set the cigarette and ashtray aside. “Professor Radke says that he is not the one who is thinking with that organ, but if Professor Ballard thinks his dick is so big —“ She rolled to face him, curling a knee over his thigh, and Mitch swallowed hard. “Is it, darling?”

“Is what?”

“Is it a big dick?”

“I really wouldn’t know!” Except that he had seen Jerry naked, and… yeah. Stasi ran her foot lazily up the inside of his knee, and Jerry spoke again, his voice rough with passion.

“Ah,” Stasi said. “Professor Ballard suggests Professor Radke put his mouth to better use. And I think —“

There was another thump, and she smiled. “Yes, I think Professor Ballard wins that round.”

“Christ, Stasi,” Mitch said, and she pushed up to straddle him, so that his eyes were level with her breasts, swinging free in the half-light through the rainy window screen.

“So I believe Pat was the prisoner of the Dragon Lady," Stasi whispered, her shadow falling across him.

"Something like that," Mitch said, and she bent to kiss him as he leaned up into her.

W
illi shifted to a more comfortable position, careful not to touch Jerry’s wooden leg in the process. Now that they were sharing a bed, he had been permitted to see Jerry without it, had seen him struggle with crutches in the middle of the night, and seen the laborious process of getting it on and off and tending the stump, but there had been no real discussion of it. A war wound, he had gathered, and he had to admit to a certain embarrassed relief when he found that Jerry had been on the Italian front. He himself had been too young to see combat, though he had been called up in the last year of the war, just turned seventeen and bewildered by defeat, and he was unreasonably grateful that it hadn’t been his people who maimed Jerry. That brought him too close to the report that he was supposed to make — someday soon, too — and he shifted again, feeling Jerry move to accommodate him. It was very strange to be sharing a room — a luxury, yes, but also dangerous. Jerry’s friends were far from stupid. Not that he thought they were going to say anything, but it always made him nervous to put his safety in other people’s hands. A careless word could ruin him — there was very little chance their social circles would cross, but even so.

“Perhaps we should be more discreet,” he said softly, and felt Jerry laugh.

“I wouldn’t worry. Nobody else speaks German.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Reasonably.” Jerry disentangled himself and pushed himself to a sitting position, reaching for the cigarettes he’d left on the nightstand. Willi took one when he offered, and accepted a light as well. Jerry leaned back against the headboard, his clothes still undone, the wooden leg dangling off the edge of the bed, and took a long draw on his cigarette.

"Reasonably?” Willi repeated, and began putting himself to rights.

"Well, I know for sure Al and Mitch don’t speak German, and I’m pretty sure neither Lewis nor Stasi does either.” Jerry released a lungful of smoke, his eyes slitted in sleepy pleasure. “Al speaks Italian, though, and Mitch speaks French.”

"Where is Mrs. Sorley from?” Willi asked. She was the one he should worry about, sharp and knowing like any number of girls he’d known in Berlin, in the life. Not all of them had been women, either — not that drag would bother Jerry, but Willi didn’t know how he’d take the idea that his friend’s wife reminded him of those people.

"She says she’s Russian,” Jerry said. “A countess, darling!” The mimicry was fond, and Willi was glad he hadn’t said anything. “But I’ve no idea. I think she maybe spent some time south of the border — Tijuana maybe? But she’s a good egg. She really is, in spite of the act.”

"It’s quite an act,” Willi said. She and her husband made an odd pair. He looked so wholesome, so entirely American, big and hearty and good-looking, everybody’s comrade. If this were a film, Mrs. Sorley would be taking him for a ride, using him for everything she could get, but he’d seen the way Sorley looked at her when he thought no one was watching, amused and deeply appreciative of her games. Sorley was no dupe, and she was no moll, and that, he hoped, meant they were less of a danger. No, ultimately it was the Seguras who worried him. Not so much Mrs. Segura, he’d known plenty of women like her, brilliant, focused, utterly determined to succeed in a man’s world, and aviation was certainly that. Segura, though… It was the way he watched that betrayed him, Willi thought, showed him for one of those quiet, unpredictable men who were utterly deadly in a fight. He’d been surprised when Jerry said it was Sorley who was the fighter ace, not Segura. He didn’t want to trust his secrets to Segura, not without knowing where the man stood. “You’ve known them a long time,” he said instead.

"Yes. Gil — Mrs. Segura’s first husband, the man who founded the company — I knew him in the war. When I lost my foot, I was pretty sick. They took me in.”

"So that didn’t happen during the war?” Willi asked, greatly daring, and gave a soundless sigh when Jerry shook his head.

"No. I mean, obviously, I was wounded then, in the Veneto — caught a piece of shrapnel in my foot, of all things. But then it got infected, and finally it had to come off.”

There was a much longer story there, and a painful one. Willi grimaced in sympathy. “They knew about you, then?”

Jerry laughed again. “Gil and I were lovers. Yes, they all know about me. And, no, they won’t say anything.”

And what did Mrs. Segura think about that? Willi wondered. She didn’t seem the sort to marry without passion. But that wasn’t something he could ask Jerry, not without offending him, and instead he stubbed out his cigarette and began to get undressed. Jerry watched him, smiling slightly, and Willi couldn’t suppress a pleased shiver. It had been far too long since he’d had this sort of affair.

“You might have warned me about all the children,” he said, and pulled his undershirt over his head.

“Ah. Well. I didn’t realize there would be this many.”

"Didn’t realize?” Willi looked doubtfully at him over the tops of his glasses. “Really?”

Jerry made a face, putting aside his own cigarette. “It’s complicated. Dora — the other three are actually the children of a man who used to work for the company, for Gilchrist Aviation. Mitch said Patterson up and left them, so he and Stasi took them in. That was just before they were going to leave, so…”

“They brought the children with them,” Willi said. Take three abandoned children with them halfway across the Pacific, away from everything familiar — though of course the father had worked for Gilchrist, so they weren’t entirely strangers to each other. “Well, why not?”

“They could hardly leave them.” Jerry hauled himself upright and began undressing, turning his back as he did so.

Willi averted his eyes, reaching for the notebook he’d left at the side of the bed. Jerry had made it clear he didn’t want help, and didn’t particularly welcome any attention at all, so he flipped back through the pages, looking for the notes on the black stone. He’d made Jerry draw it for him, knowing that Jerry knew no Chinese, and couldn’t shade the image toward the desired result, and now as he looked at the neat pencil lines it was all he could do not to swear aloud. Surely those were characters; and just as surely they proclaimed “the navel of the world.”

The rain beat on the tin roof, louder now as a new squall worked its way through, and he got up, still not looking in Jerry’s direction, and opened the window to let in a breath of gloriously cool and fragrant air. Willi let his head fall back, closing his eyes, and heard the scrape and thump as Jerry got his crutches under him and made his way across the hall to the bathroom. The navel of the world.

It wasn’t proof. Not when there was nothing else to indicate a Chinese presence. Everything else was utterly, ordinarily Polynesian, an absolutely typical village. Although the dancing floor seemed perhaps larger than he would have expected, and there was that odd mound to the north, where he would have expected to find an observatory in a Chinese town. It was probably nothing, though, a natural formation. They’d barely begun digging there.

But if it was… He shivered in the rain-sweet breeze, letting his imagination roam. If it was man-made, if it was an observatory terrace, and if the writing on the stone was real… The treasure fleets had sailed, that was incontrovertible, attested to in Chinese sources and in Indian records as well.
Wind Raker
had been real, and her mission had been to find the navel of the world.

And if he went back to Berlin with such a claim, half his colleagues would mock him for his credulity, and they’d be right to point out how weak his evidence really was. The ones who’d believe him were in the Nazis’ pocket; they’d twist his find to claim it proved that Aryan supermen — or Tibetans, probably; the idiots were fixed on Tibet as a source of all mystic nonsense — had explored the world first and best. He grimaced, tasting bile. He’d had enough of that in China, had seen what so-called scientists were willing to do to make their bizarre theories seem plausible. To be associated with them would label him a crackpot, just as mad as they were.