“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...”
Did she know how arch that sounded?
“Jeez, what the hell’s left, Amy? I mean, no offense, but don’t you think the public’s interest in record-breaking flights has pretty much subsided? When you got airlines flying people coast to coast, like some Twentieth Century Limited of the sky, the bloom’s off the rose, my sweet, the novelty’s plumb wore off.”
Her eyes tightened. “It has to be something really big...”
“What are you thinking? What have you got cooked up under those Shirley Temple curls?”
Her expression turned pixieish. She tapped my nose with a fingertip. “What would you say to two oceans, Nathan?”
“What?... An around-the-world flight, you mean?”
She withdrew from my arms and flopped onto her back and folded her arms across her bare breasts, and stared at the ceiling as if it were the sky, her eyes alive with a dream. “A female Phileas Fogg... in a plane. Wouldn’t that set ’em on their ears?”
I leaned on my elbow and studied her like a moron stumped by a trigonometry problem. “Didn’t Wiley Post do that already?”
“Wiley’s not a woman...” She frowned in thought. “Only I’ll need something better than the Vega to do it. A bigger plane, with two engines...”
“Does G. P. know about this latest scheme?”
“Of course. He’s all for it.”
It was probably his idea.
“Isn’t it a little dangerous?”
Her response was lilting: “The most dangerous yet.”
“Jesus. What if it kills you?”
“I think G. P. would grieve — after he got a ghostwritten book out of it.” She tossed a wry little smirk my way. “Then he’d find himself a new young wife and get on with his life.”
“What about you? So, do you want to die, Amy? Does dying in the drink sound like a fun adventure?”
“If I should pop off, it’d be doing the thing I always most wanted to do. Don’t you think the Man with the Little Black Book has a date marked down for all of us? And when our work here is finished, we move on?”
“No,” I said, angry to hear such romantic horseshit coming from an intelligent woman. “I don’t believe that at all. If a guy with a scythe comes around to collect me, I’ll grab it from him and slice his damn head off.”
“Nothing wrong with that. I never said I was in favor of going down without a fight.”
“Amy, tell me, please, I’m just an ignorant workaday rube — what exactly would a flight like that do for the cause of aviation?”
Her full lips pursed into a kiss of a smile, which unfolded as she admitted, “Not a darn thing... but for the cause of women, everything... not to mention set me up with a reputation bigger than Slim Lindbergh’s, allow me to retire to a life of respect, an advisor to presidents, writing, lecturing — but at my own pace, perhaps a college teaching position...”
There was no talking to her. I was at least a little in love with her, and maybe somewhere in the back of my self-deluded brain I thought she might come back to me one day, when her final flight was over and she’d divorced that machiavellian bastard. But I wasted no more breath in trying to discourage her from reaching her goal, even if it did involve her staying with G. P. Putnam.
Who, on Thursday afternoon, spoke privately with me, though we were in the mammoth echoing United Air Services hangar.
We were not alone — Ernie, Tod, and Jim, the team of mechanics assigned to the Vega, were at work on Amy’s plane. But they were on the other side of the hangar, the clanking and clinking of their tools, and their occasional chatter, providing a muffled accompaniment to our conversation, just as oil and gas smells provided a pungent bouquet. Putnam and I stood in the shadow of the wing of Mantz’s bread-and-butter ship, the red and white Honeymoon Express.
I was wearing a lime sportshirt and dark green slacks, fitting in nicely with the casual California style; but Putnam was strictly East Coast business executive. His wide-shouldered suit was a gray double-breasted worsted that had not come off the rack; his black and white striped tie was silk and probably cost more than any suit I owned.
“Is she sleeping with that little cocksucker?” Putnam demanded, looking over toward the glassed-in office where Amy and Mantz hunkered over the desk looking at a map or chart, Commander Williams opposite them, pointing something out.
“No,” I said.
“You’re absolutely positive?”
“I was in the bushes looking in the windows, G. P.”
“Did you get pictures?”
“There was nothing to get pictures of. They had separate bedrooms. Then when Mantz’s wife filed divorce papers on him, he had to move out, and your wife went to the Ambassador.”
He gestured with open palms. “If there’s nothing between them, why has Myrtle Mantz named Amelia in this divorce action?”
“Because Paul Mantz can’t keep his dick in his pants and your wife’s been a houseguest. It’s a natural assumption.”