“Ten-fifteen,” he said, compounding the lie. He didn’t want anyone to know about the plane ride. Spaight would keep it under his hat.
“I know a place to fill your belly.” Her long brown eyes flicked toward him. “Unless you’ve got anything else in mind you’d rather do?”
Alex shook his head.
Carol Ann had a shrewd quick way of smiling. “The Way the trains are these days you’d better get yourself around a good’ Southern meal.” She was a self-confident girl, a bit of a cynic and not much of a talker; they had met four weeks ago in a roadhouse bar and in a casual way they had filled needs in each other without talking about it. She didn’t know much about him and didn’t seem to want to.
The setting sun veined the clouds with streaks of marble pink. The hot wind raked his face and Carol Ann took the dips in the road too fast for the springs on the little car.
The Rio Grande was muddy and sluggish on his right. The landmark hills guided them into the dusty outskirts of El Paso-scrubby brush and the occasional billboard for Prince Albert Tobacco and the Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous. The car’s passage flushed a covey of quail.
Detour. Through a dry arroyo where flash floods had undercut the road. On the job a half dozen convicts in stripes worked with shovels and rakes and tar buckets, their dull Indian faces aglisten with oil sweat, and two flaccid killer guards with riot shotguns sat horseback. Their heads all turned to watch the girl behind the wheel.
She pulled into the dusty lot beside a stucco cafe festooned with red-and-white Coca-Cola signs. He held the screen door for her and went inside and let it slap shut on its spring. A deep-fried smell ran along the counter and the radio was twanging, Jimmie Rodgers the Singing Brakeman. They were all men at the counter, Mexicans at the back, all of them in Levi’s and high-heel boots and flannel shirts with the backs of their necks creased like old leather.
They took the booth at the front by the window where there was a little air. Fried steak, shucked corn, buttered green beans, a huge dollop of mashed potatoes with a two-spoon crater filled with lumpy gravy. The notice above the counter said We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone and beyond that there was a placard: Discussion of the President Is Prohibited. On the radio now an announcer was talking about Hank Greenberg.
Carol Ann said, “Well then, Coop.” She fancied he resembled Gary Cooper the movie star. “I’m not going to see you again. Am I?”
“Do you want to?”
She was eating, watching him. She made no direct answer to the question. She caught the counterman’s eye: “I’ll have another cup of that coffee if it’s handy.”
Gene Autry was singing Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Carol Ann stirred a lump of sugar into the coffee and fanned herself with the paper napkin. “If you ever get down this way you come and see me, hear?”
She was bony; he could see the tendons in her throat. The thin shirt hung from her shoulders and he felt sadness well up onto the back of his mouth. Her husband was a lieutenant with a construction battalion in Alaska. She lived in a drab quick-built apartment court north of El Paso near the river. She had two little girls, five and two. It was all he knew about her except that she was lonely and she was generous, giving fully of herself when it pleased her. It had been easy and quiet between them: neither of them wanted excitement. He hadn’t realized until now that it had been important enough to make him unhappy to end it.
“Where are they sending you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well you’ll handle it all right, now.”
He wasn’t sure. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to fix the rocking chair.”
“It’s all right, Coop.”
He paid the check and she drove him to the station. There was dust on his Oxfords and she insisted on treating him: the shoeshine boy slapped his cloth across Alex’s toes with the sound of distant artillery. Then it was time to tell her to go. He kissed her on the lips, gently. It was something he had never done with her in a public place before.
She said, “I am going to miss you, Coop. You take care of yourself, hear?”
After she left it occurred to him that neither of them had asked the other to write.
He took a taxi to the airfield and waited around the hangars for the Air Corps formation to appear.
5
There were six planes-the new B-24 Liberator type, long-range and fromidable. They gave him a waist- gunner’s seat in the third plane and showed him how to use the intercom and oxygen apparatus.
Everything he owned of any consequence was in the B-4 bag at his feet and except for the pistols none of it was of moment to him; he did not carry souvenirs of his life. It was one of the things that made him feel apart from the rest of his kind-the White Russian exiles with their passionate covetousness.
It was cold in the night sky. Through the turret perspex he watched the other planes bobbing slightly in the intangible balance of their staggered formation. The drone was hypnotic and soporific; in his mind he ran back over the tense telephone conversation with General Deniken-searching for clues to the things Deniken had left unsaid:
“Alexsander, you have been transferred to Washington. You’ve received your orders?”
“I’ve received orders, yes sir. I’m not permitted to discuss them.”
“I understand. Alexander, there is something you must do for me. I ask this in your brother’s name.”
He bridled slightly. “Yes?”
“You must go immediately to New York and meet with someone. You must do this before you report to Washington.”
“I don’t think there’s time for that, General.”
“Make the time. This is a matter of the utmost importance-it is vital. The Plaza Hotel in New York, do you know it?”
“Yes.”
“You must be there by tomorrow evening.”
“Will you be there, General?”
“No, they’re sending someone from Feodor’s group in Spain. I don’t know which of them it is. It may be your brother. It may well be Prince Leon himself. The matter is that important. I beg of you be there within twenty-four hours. I ask this in Vassily’s name.”
There was no way to refuse the old man. If the exiled shell of White Russia had a savior then A. I. Deniken was that man. He was the greatest White general of the Russian Civil War and he had been the last Supreme Ruler of All the Russias: to the White exiles and even to the surviving Romanov Pretenders like the Grand Duke Feodor he was the next thing to a Czar.
Put by Deniken it could not be refused.
In the early hours they took more than an hour to refuel at Wright Field in Ohio and then they were droning on through a dull summer morning, buffeting in the turbulence of the clouds. At three in the afternoon they came into McGuire Field. Captain Johnson walked back from the leading Liberator, a parachute pack trailing in his fist. “I’ve got to report in but I’m driving over to Philadelphia right away. If you want to hang around I’ll give you a lift to the Trenton station. It’s about an hour and a half on the train to New York.”
Alex waited for him in the PX canteen. Johnson collected him at three forty-five. He had a motor-pool Ford. Alex tossed his bag in the back seat and climbed in.
“My name’s Paul, Colonel. Most of them call me Papp-I’m four years older than the next oldest pilot in the Thirty-fifth”
Alex reached across his lap to shake hands. “I appreciate your trouble.”
“No trouble at all. Always bothers the taxpayer in me when we have to ferry those big jobs empty-seems like a hell of a waste of aviation gasoline.”
Johnson was a stocky man with blunt hands and short reddish hair and a square freckled face. He couldn’t
