“No one but me,” Phipps said.
“Don’t you want the lights on?”
“What? No, leave them off. Cassada may be coming.”
Dumfries gave a confused smile and struggled in with his bag. He stood looking at the empty beds and finally chose one against the wall. He dropped his things on it and brushed himself off.
“They’re not all moved out yet,” he said.
“I know.”
“I heard Captain Pine say some of them were going to stay over for the weekend.”
“Is that so?”
“They must like it down here.”
“I guess they do.” Munich. The blue twilight, trollies rocking along the streets and shop windows coming alight.
“I’d want to go straight home. A month, that’s long enough.”
“If it’s the same as last time they’ll probably have to go through town with a press gang to get them out of here.”
“With what?”
“A press gang. You know what that is?”
“Oh, sure,” Dumfries said. “I just didn’t hear you.”
He unzipped one side of his bag and took out a framed photograph of his wife. She came from a very fine family, he had mentioned more than once. Her father was a dentist. By profession, as Dumfries put it. They had carpet even on the stairs.
He put the photograph on top of the bureau, then dug into the side compartment and found his hairbrushes. He placed them beside the photograph. They were better for you than a comb, he had told Phipps.
“Why is that?”
“Have you ever seen a bald horse?”
“A bald horse?”
“It’s because they brush them.”
Phipps watched as Dumfries unpacked and put his clothes away, drawer by drawer, hiding his camera among the undershirts. The Russians must have them, too, Phipps decided. That was the only reassuring thing. He could almost imagine it, steep, terrifying battles high over Berlin and all the Eugenes crying their pitiful I’ve lost you’s, turning hopelessly through the confusion and heading off in the wrong direction.
Through the doorway then, holding in front of him a single bag as taut from things inside as a sausage skin, came Cassada, the bag hitting his knees as he moved. He reached out in passing and switched on the light. Dumfries straightened up, startled. Cassada looked from one of them to the other. “What are you doing, saving electricity?” he said.
He dropped his bag. “This is great, being down here, isn’t it?” He began to pull things out of the bag, dropping them everywhere, looking for something. Finally he took hold of a towel and snaked it out and around his neck.
“What do you think about going into town?” he asked, sitting down and hooking his finger into his bootlaces, jerking them loose.
“How?” Phipps said.
“Drive. I had an airman in maintenance drive my car down.”
“Yeah, maybe. I’m going to eat here anyway,” Phipps said.
“Me, too,” said Dumfries.
“What for?” Cassada asked, still trying to find something. “We can eat in town. You have any soap?” he finally said.
“Is that what you’ve been looking for?”
“Here,” Dumfries said.
“Toss it.”
Cassada trapped it against his chest with one hand and went to shower.
Phipps and Dumfries walked to the club. It was just becoming dark. The trees had some wind in them. The branches quivered. A good-looking cashier, a girl with a downturned mouth, was still working at the club, counting out money from the cash drawer with long fingers, converting military scrip into deutsche marks. She wore a thin, gold wedding band, perhaps to deflect questions.
Dumfries hesitated in front of her. “Hi, Marianne,” he said. Unsure of how to continue, he examined the movie schedule posted there, his belly stuck out like a brewer’s. “We just got down here today,” he said. “We took over from the 72nd.”
She nodded but did not comment. Dumfries thought of something.
“Say, remember that wine you once told me about? Spot-lease? Well, I tried some of that.”
“Oh, yes?”
“It was good. Boy, I like good wine. That’s one thing about Europe.” He was smiling like a jazzman, a meaningless smile.
In the bar, in the dim light the pilots sat together. The dice were rattling.
“Hey, Phipps. Come on, you want to play?”
“You can’t lose in a big game,” someone said.
“Where’s Roberto?”
Cassada was known as a demon player given to wild calls.
“He went into town.”
“Already?”
Dumfries came in after a while and sat beside Phipps.
“She’s a nice girl,” he said.
“The cashier? What makes you think she’s nice?”
“I’ve talked to her. I just think she’s nice. Most of these fellows don’t even know what a decent German girl is like.”
“Some of them know.”
Dumfries began to talk about the maid they had, he and Laurie, how nice she was. He described her habits, her love of cleanliness and visits to her parents. She was very shy. As Phipps half-listened he suddenly realized what it was about Dumfries: nothing bored him. And calling the tight-skirted cashier, owner of a siren’s body, nice. She may have been a lot of things but nice was not one of them. Cassada was probably already driving to town. Phipps wished he’d gone, too.
Chapter VII
In the early morning, before daylight, Isbell walked alone through the hangar past the planes being repaired, broken in two by the mechanics, the lines hanging loose, bleeding black into drip pans. The hangar lights were on though no one yet was working.
In the ready room Wickenden was posting his schedule as the members of his flight sat watching. Isbell stood near his shoulder for a few moments, unnoticed, then took the rag as Wickenden was writing and rubbed out the leader of the first two, Phipps, replacing it with his own name next to Cassada’s. Wickenden didn’t say anything. He kept on writing. Cassada sat stretched out in unconcern, his neck on the back of a chair and his legs in the G-suit chaps resting straight with only his heels touching the floor, doing everything he could not to look like the others. He’d watched Isbell without moving his head, out of the corner of his eye. It was just the way Godchaux sat.
Isbell said nothing to him but went into the next room, picked up his things and took them out to the ship. To the east it was becoming light, a great, forlorn light that seemed to sweep in from the steppes. The air was still, a sea-like calm. He laid his parachute against one of the wheels and began to walk around the airplane, starting at one wing and then following the fuselage to the tail, running a hand over the chilly skin as he went, sometimes patting it like a horse as if to calm it. He was entering the realm of his true authority. He had barely finished the walk-around when the horn sounded. He saw Cassada running out the door, pulling on his gloves as he went, the blare of the horn flooding around him, the crewmen coming after.
Quickly Isbell pulled on his parachute and climbed into the cockpit, fumbling for the safety belt buckles. The horn kept blowing in panic. The high whine of the engines starting began.
Off on the first scramble, early in the day, no finer time, cold and quiet, the smoke coming straight up from the towns. Munich was blue, deserted. The roads seemed dusted with chalk. The trains were running empty, the streetcars.
At altitude it was silent. The controller directed them north. Serene, pure as angels they flew. At Ingolstadt some clouds began, a thin, floating fence that went up towards Berlin, grey as a river. Cassada was in position just where he was meant to be, off to the left, looking past Isbell towards the sun and the unknown east. It was there the enemy lay, sometimes inactive, sometimes flying themselves on a parallel course waiting for the slightest violation of the invisible border, or lurking below the contrails, unseen. The controller would call them out but not always, and when the ground was covered by clouds there was always the slight chance of error, a mistake in position or which radar blip was which. The threat of the unexpected was always there. Come and get us, Isbell thought to himself. We’re here in the open, alone. Bring us down. Try.