“Even if that’s true,” I said quietly, trying for a reasonable tone, “what the hell can we do about it? This flight’s more important to Amelia than her husband — she knows what’s riding on it.”
Mantz’s sneer spelled out his contempt. “Let me tell you about Gippy Putnam — I say to him, we got to paint the Electra’s rudder, stabilizer, and wing borders a nice bright red or orange, to make it easier to locate the bird if it goes down. He refuses. He says it’s gotta be Purdue’s colors — old gold and black!”
I shrugged, sipped the beer. “He’s always cut corners for the sake of promotion.”
Mantz’s brow furrowed. “She almost died on the Atlantic crossing, did you know that, Heller? It’s not just an exciting goddamn story for her to tell at those lectures — it happened, and it almost killed her. Storms, and mechanical malfunctions, engine on fire, wings icing up, plane damn near spinning into the ocean.”
“I know,” I sighed, hating the truth of what he was saying, “I know.”
“If your wife narrowly escaped with her life like that, how anxious would you be to send her back up in the sky, on a flight ten times more dangerous? And yet Gippy’s pushed her into this suicide run...”
Lefty O’Doul swung at another Dean high fastball and struck out.
“You were part of it, Paul,” I said softly, no accusation in my voice.
But his face clenched in pain, anyway. “You think I don’t know that? Listen, I love that girl...”
“I thought you had a new fiancée.”
Myrtle Mantz had won her divorce decree last July, after plenty of embarrassment for Paul and Amy in the papers. Paul Mantz had steadfastly maintained, however, that theirs was strictly an employer/employee relationship.
“I love her like a sister,” he said irritably. “Why do you think this is eatin’ me up like a goddamn ulcer? I’m tellin’ ya, Gippy sold her out.”
I frowned at him. “How? Who to?”
“I don’t know exactly. That’s what I want to hire you to find out.”
“I don’t follow this. At all.”
The Giants were at bat. Burgess Whitehead had singled, Hubbell had sacrificed him to second, with Dick Bartell up. Dean half-turned to second, then with no stop in his fluid motion, pitched one at the plate, which Bartell reflexively swung at, popping out to left field. But the umpire called it a balk, and Dizzy Dean threw his cap in the air and charged toward the umpire to talk it over. The crowd went crazy with rage and glee.
“Look,” Mantz said, having to work his voice up a little, “let’s just start with Howland Island.”
“What is Howland Island, anyway?” I asked. “I never heard of the damn place before this flight.”
“Nobody had, except some military types.”
“Military?”
From the field, Dizzy Dean could be heard yelling, “I quit!” to the umpire, and he trundled toward the dugout. An uproar from the stands soon built into a thunderous chant: “We want Dean... We want Dean... We want Dean...”
Mantz really had to work to be heard over that. “That’s the part of this thing that’s putting that nosedive feeling in the pit of my stomach. See, the original plan was to use Midway Island for refueling — that’s a Pan Am overnight stopover for Clipper passengers. They got a hotel there and even a golf course...”
“We want Dean...”
“Sounds ideal.”
“We want Dean...”
“Yeah, only there’s nowhere to land, no runway. Midway’s strictly a seaplane port, by way of a sheltered lagoon.”
“We want Dean...”
“So why didn’t Amelia pick a seaplane for her flying laboratory, instead of the Electra?”
“We want Dean...”
“Actually, the Electra could’ve been fitted with pontoons... but those are expensive, many thousands of dollars.”
“We want Dean...”
Mantz continued with a nasty smile: “Now you know, Eleanor Roosevelt damn near has a crush on Amelia; and FDR feels about the same way. So Gippy had Amelia write the president for help and permission to refuel the Electra in-flight over Midway... which by the way I considered inadvisable unless it was completely unavoidable.”
Dizzy Dean, giving in to the crowd’s urging, strode from the dugout back onto the mound.
I had to wait for the applause to die down before I could say, “That sounds expensive, too.”
“Not if you can stick the government for it.”
“And FDR okayed that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What does the government get out of it?”
Bartell singled to right; Whitehead scored, tying the game. The crowd roared in dismay.
“That’s where Howland Island comes in,” Mantz said. “And to answer your question, Howland Island is a desolate dab of nothing in the middle of nowhere, half a mile wide and one mile and a half long, covered with seagull shit.”
“Just what is Franklin Roosevelt’s interest in a bird-shit repository?”
He threw a hand in the air, rolled his eyes. “Hell, I don’t know the politics, or the military ramifications, not really. But Howland and a couple other little islands are just about the only land between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands.”
“So what?”
“The Marshall Islands belong to the Japanese. There’s talk of the Japs and military expansion in the Pacific. This is all over my head, Heller, but even for somebody who doesn’t read anything but the funny pages, it’s not hard to figure: Uncle Sam musta needed an excuse to build a runway on Howland.”
“And Amelia was it.”
Down on the field was a flurry of play, and the crowd groaned in agony. Runs on hits by Lou Chiozza and Joe Moore had the score Giants 3, Cards 1.
Mantz said, “I heard G. P. say the government shelled out over three hundred grand, sending the Coast Guard dragging five-ton tractors over reefs and shoals... just as a courtesy to this famous civilian aviatrix, to aid her on her world flight.”
I had to smile at what seemed like outrageous string-pulling and manipulation of the government on G. P.’s part. “That doesn’t sound like a sellout to me, Paul. Sounds like you scratch my back, I scratch your back.”
“It didn’t bother me, either, at the time. G. P. wasn’t even that secretive about it. Oh, he’d say, ‘Now this is confidential,’ but he got a kick out of telling how he’d conned the taxpayers into paying for Amelia’s landing strip.”
Hubbell was down there striking Cards out so quickly, it was hard to keep track.
“So,” I asked, “why does it bother you now?”
Mantz’s eyes narrowed. “This change of direction in flight plan — the first try was east to west; but now, all of a sudden, it’s west to east.”
“Yeah — Amelia told me it had to do with ‘changing weather conditions.’”
He smirked and shook his head. “That’s the story G. P.’s handing the press — ‘a seasonal change in wind patterns.’ It’s baloney — hardly any ‘seasonal change’ happens in weather along the Equator, and zero change in wind direction. Prevailing wind’s always east to west, the opposite of wind in the northern and southern hemispheres... Hell, that’s why she chose flying east to west, in the first place!”
I was barely following him. “I don’t know beans about flying, but it seems to me, bucking the prevailing wind is stupid.”
“That’s as good a word for it as any. And switching the flight plans to west to east meant everything from the previous attempt had to be scrapped — creating all kinds of problems, adding huge expense in a situation where scrimping would seem mandatory.”
“What kind of added expense and extra problems?”