"I'd rather be asleep." He shook the reporter's hand. "Any place around here we can get some ham and eggs?"
The launch pulled up to the dock in the fog. Out in the harbor a ship finished cleaning its bilges and was turning to steam back southward.
There were three men on the mooring: Fred and Ed and Filmore. One man stepped out of the launch with a suitcase in his hands. Filmore leaned down and gave the guy at the wheel of the motorboat a Lincoln and two Jacksons. Then he helped the guy with the suitcase.
"Welcome home, Dr. Tod."
"It's good to be back, Filmore." Tod was dressed in a baggy suit, and had on an overcoat even though it was August. He wore his hat pulled low over his face, and from it a glint of metal was reflected in the pale lights from a warehouse.
"This is Fred and this is Ed," said Filmore. "They're here just for the night."
"'Lo," said Fred. "'Lo," said Ed.
They walked back to the car, a '46 Merc that looked like a submarine. They climbed in, Fred and Ed watching the foggy alleys to each side. Then Fred got behind the wheel, and Ed rode shotgun. With a sawed-off ten-gauge.
"Nobody's expecting me. Nobody cares," said Dr. Tod. "Everybody who had something against me is either dead or went respectable during the war and made a mint. I'm an old man and I'm tired. I'm going out in the country and raise bees and play the horses and the market."
"Not planning anything, boss?"
"Not a thing."
He turned his head as they passed a streetlight. Half his face was gone, a smooth plate reaching from jaw to hatline, nostril to left ear.
"I can't shoot anymore, for one thing. My depth perception isn't what it used to be."
"I shouldn't wonder," said Filmore. "We heard something happened to you in '43."
"Was in a somewhat-profitable operation out of Egypt while the Afrika Korps was falling apart. Taking people in and out for a fee in a nominally neutral air fleet. Just a sideline. Then ran into that hotshot flier."
"Who?"
"Kid with the jet plane, before the Germans had them."
"Tell you the truth, boss, I didn't keep up with the war much. I take a long view on merely territorial conflicts."
"As I should have," said Dr. Tod. "We were flying out of Tunisia. Some important people were with us that trip. The pilot screamed. There was a tremendous explosion. Next thing, I came to, it was the next morning, and me and one other person are in a life raft in the middle of the Mediterranean. My face hurt. I lifted up. Something fell into the bottom of the raft. It was my left eyeball. It was looking up at me. I knew I was in trouble."
"You said it was a kid with a jet plane?" asked Ed. "Yes. We found out later they'd broken our code, and he'd flown six hundred miles to intercept us."
"You want to get even?" asked Filmore.
"No. That was so long ago I hardly remember that side of my face. It just taught me to be a little more cautious. I wrote it off as character building."
"So no plans, huh?"
"Not a single one," said Dr. Tod.
"That'll be nice for a change," said Filmore. They watched the lights of the city go by.
He knocked on the door, uncomfortable in his new brown suit and vest.
"Come on in, its open," said a woman's voice. Then it was muffled. "I'll be ready in just a minute."
Jetboy opened the oak hall door and stepped into the room, past the glass-brick room divider.
A beautiful woman stood in the middle of the room, a dress halfway over her arms and head. She wore a camisole, garter belt, and silk hose. She was pulling the dress down with one of her hands.
Jetboy turned his head away, blushing and taken aback. "Oh," said the woman. "Ohl I-who?"
"It's me, Belinda," he said. "Robert."
"Robert?"
"Bobby, Bobby Tomlin."
She stared at him a moment, her hands clasped over her front though she was fully dressed.
"Oh, Bobby," she said, and came to him and hugged him and gave him a big kiss right on the mouth.
It was what he had waited six years for.
"Bobby. It's great to see you. I-I was expecting someone else. Some-girlfriends. How did you find me?"
"Well, it wasn't easy"
She stepped back from him. "Let me look at you." He looked at her. The last time he had seen her she was fourteen, a tomboy, still at the orphanage. She had been a thin kid with mousy blond hair. Once, when she was eleven, she'd almost punched his lights out. She was a year older than he. Then he had gone away, to work at the airfield, then to fight with the Brits against Hitler. He had written her when he could all during the war, after America entered it. She had left the orphanage and been put in a foster home. In '44 one of his letters had come back from there marked 'Moved-No Forwarding Address.' Then he had been lost all during the last year.. "You've changed, too," he said.
"So have you."
"Uh."
"I followed the newspapers all during the war. I tried to write you but I don't guess the letters ever caught up with you. Then they said you were missing at sea, and I sort of gave up."
"Well, I was, but they found me. Now I'm back. How have you been?"
"Real good, once I ran away from the foster home," she said. A look of pain came across her face. "You don't know how glad I was to get away from there. Oh, Bobby," she said. "Oh, I wish things was different!" She started to cry a little.
"Hey," he said, holding her by the shoulders. "Sit down. I've got something for you."
"A present?"
"Yep." He handed her a grimy, oil-stained paper parcel. "I carried these with me the last two years of the war. They were in the plane with me on the island. Sorry I didn't have time to rewrap them."
She tore the English butcher paper. Inside were copies of The House at Pooh Corner and The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit.
"Oh," said Belinda. "Thank you."
He remembered her dressed in the orphanage coveralls, just in, dusty and tired from a baseball game, lying on the reading-room floor with a Pooh book open before her.
"The Pooh book's signed by the real Christopher Robin," he said. "I found out he was an RAF officer at one of the bases in England. He said he usually didn't do this sort of thing, that he was just another airman. I told him I wouldn't tell anyone. I'd searched high and low to find a copy, and he knew that, though."
"This other one's got more of a story behind it. I was coming back near dusk, escorting some crippled B-17s. I looked up and saw two German night fighters coming in, probably setting up patrol, trying to catch some Lancasters before they went out over the Channel."
"To make a long story short, I shot down both of them; they packed in near a small village. But I had run out of fuel and had to set down. Saw a pretty flat sheep pasture with a lake at the far end of it, and went in. When I climbed out of the cockpit, I saw a lady and a sheepdog standing at the edge of the field. She had a shotgun. When she got close enough to see the engines and the decals, she said, "Good shooting! Won't you come in for a bite of supper and to use the telephone to call Fighter Command?" We could see the two ME-110s burning in the distance. `You're the very famous Jetboy.' she said, 'We have followed your exploits in the Sawrey paper. I'm Mrs. Heelis.' She held out her hand."
"I shook it. `Mrs. William Heelis? And this is Sawrey?' 'Yes,' she said."
"'You're Beatrix Potter!' I said."
"'I suppose I am,' she said."
"Belinda, she was this stout old lady in a raggedy sweater and a plain old dress. But when she smiled, I swear, all of England lit up!"