“Well, everything but my camera, if I can find the pieces.”
“I’m sorry…. Was it an expensive camera?”
“That’s your husband’s problem, ’cause it’s going on the expense account. So G. P. wouldn’t care about you and Toni Lake getting friendly?”
“Well…I’d rather you didn’t mention it to him. I learned some nasty things, from Toni, about what G. P.’s been doing to my colleagues, and I’d like to try to remedy that, but from within.”
“He wouldn’t mind you sleeping with her, but talking to her is another story.”
“Something like that.” She looked up at me. The blue-gray eyes were wide and clear; she had no makeup on at all and I never saw a lovelier face. “Will you protect me?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t just mean by withholding information from my husband. I mean, will you unpack and stay, till the start of the Mexican flight?”
“Why?”
She pushed up on her hands and put her face so close to mine, the tips of our noses nearly touched. “Why not? We can spend some time together…. We’re pals, remember?”
“I remember.”
She began chewing on my earlobe. “Besides, what if G. P. didn’t write those notes? Somebody else might be lying in wait to sabotage my plane. I have enemies, you know.”
“Sure. G. P.’s made you plenty, sounds like.”
She kissed me; by the end of the kiss, she was back on top of me, a lanky woman in a man’s pajama top and no bottoms.
“Will you stay?” she asked.
“Well, your husband did hire me to be your bodyguard.”
“That’s right.”
“So, uh…I guess I have a responsibility to guard your body.”
She nodded. “Day and night.”
“You know, that isn’t the throttle…”
“Sure it is…. Don’t you want to go for the record?”
“Is three times your record?”
“Four would be.”
“Four?”
“My goodness, have you forgotten? You’re not my first tonight….”
“Oh, you are a dirty girl underneath it all…. What you need is a real man in the cockpit….”
She yelped at the funny filth of that, and laughed and laughed, even as I slipped another lambskin over my throttle and prepared for another flight.
7
The flight was scheduled for April 19, a Friday night, according to a strategy worked out by G. P. Putnam that would have Amy reaching Mexico City on Saturday afternoon, in time for a story in the Easter Sunday papers.
Mantz had installed in the Vega his various new and improved gizmos, several engineers from neighboring Lockheed had worked their technological magic as well, and mechanic Ernie Tisor pronounced the plane in shipshape condition, ready for the five hundred gallons of fuel that with other special equipment would send its weight up to a staggering six thousand pounds. Amy took the fully loaded and fueled-up Vega up for numerous test spins and seemed delighted at the way the plane handled. I declined to accompany her.
Meetings at the Mantz bungalow ceased, Paul having moved out at Myrtle’s request, and resumed in Mantz’s office at the United Air Services hangar. There, Amy spent many hours with Mantz and Commander Williams going over charts and maps (Rand McNally overviews of the United States and Mexico, and state maps of both countries); she would have to compute her position from compass readings and elapsed time using tables that showed distances covered at various speeds. Mantz created specific exercises for her in the blind-flying trainer based on Williams’s charts, and she dutifully carried them out.
But she and Mantz continued to have the occasional row, as when she complained about the inconvenience of a trailing antenna for her two-way radiotelephone, which she had to unwind from a reel under the pilot’s seat, after takeoff, and then reel in again before landing.
“Listen to Papa, angel,” Mantz said condescendingly, “and take it along.”
“With our weight problems,” she said, “why bother with it?”
“Since you’ve never learned how to use a telegraph radio, and you don’t know how to take celestial sightings, it’s your principal aid to navigation. Or were you planning to pack a Ouija board?”
He laughed at his own joke as she stomped off—but that was the end of it, and she agreed to take the trailing antenna along. No matter how she may have resented him, Mantz was the final authority on all technical matters.
On Tuesday night, with G. P. Putnam due to arrive the next afternoon by train (he liked to fly even less than I did), his wife and I said our goodbyes in the cabin at Lowman’s Motor Court where we’d spent every night together following the incident with Myrtle Mantz and her .32. Officially, Amy had moved from the Mantz bungalow to the Ambassador Hotel, but my cabin was her home away from home.
We were in bed. She was in the crook of my arm and we were both naked and rather melancholy. I don’t suppose either one of us had any illusions that our affair was anything but a passing if memorable moment in our lives. But several weeks of intimacy had made us a couple, and it was difficult to let go.
“Myrtle Mantz is suing for divorce,” she said.
“Stop the presses.”
“I’ve been named as corespondent.”
“I’m sorry…. You can’t be surprised.”
“No. I’m not even worried about the bad publicity. Myrtle’s own disgraceful behavior lets the world see exactly what she is…but I don’t know how G. P. will take it.”
“Why do you care?”
She gazed up at me like a worried child. “What are you going to tell him, Nathan?”
“How about, I’m convinced his wife isn’t having an affair with Paul Mantz because she’s having one with me?”
She frowned and laughed. “You’re terrible.”
“He’s terrible. If you believe he’s the kind of man who would send threatening letters to his own wife, if you find his business practices disgusting, if anything tender you might once have felt for him has gone completely cold, then you have a responsibility to yourself to dump the son of a bitch, pronto.”
“Quite a speech.”
“Thank you.”
She twirled circles in my chest hair with a forefinger. “So. Are you suggesting I dump him and move to Chicago? We could raise little Hellers. I could take in laundry, a little sewing…”
“No,” I said, not appreciating her sarcasm; like most sarcastic people, I only appreciated my own. “I’m looking for something in a wife a little less interesting than a woman who flies six thousand pounds of fuel and aircraft over the Gulf of Mexico in her spare time.”
“Really?”
“You don’t need G. P. anymore. You’re more famous than Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. You hang around with the President and Eleanor, for Christ’s sake. You’re at a stage where you can attract all kinds of backing and sponsorship without the help of that slick operator.”
She leaned on an elbow, her expression solemn. “I don’t approve of everything G. P. does…”
“No kidding.”
“But he put me where I am, and he knows how to keep me there. He doesn’t push me around, Nathan, I can handle him; there are going to be some changes made about how he goes about things—”
“But not a change in management.”
“No. I’m going to stick with G. P.”
“Even if he sent those notes?”
“Even then.” She smiled a little. “But someday…who knows?”
I snorted a laugh. “Laundry and little Hellers?”
“Who can say? I only have a few good years in the air left in me, a few good flights…and then it is my firm intention to leave G. P. Putnam behind and find myself a tropical island. Maybe it’ll be a tropical island in Illinois.”
I slipped an arm around her, gathered her close. “Why don’t you quit now? Or at least after this Mexico City flight…”
She shook her head, no, and though her eyes looked right at me, they were distant. “I need to go out on something bigger, Nathan. Something with wings so wide it’ll carry me to the end of my days…”