to make it out. It was a picture of a near-naked lady, smiling wickedly with an arm coyly covering ample breasts. Her hair looked like dreadlocks.
Dreadlocks?
Below the image, faint and peeling, a single word that made sense of the woman, her improbable hair and the mischievous, impish face.
Medusa.
Below that, stencilled in formal USAAF style, were three letters. Chris noted them down on a napkin and then dialled a number he’d pulled off the Internet a couple of days earlier.
A woman answered.
‘Hi,’ said Chris, quickly adopting a more authoritative BBC accent. ‘I wonder if you can help me? I’m making a documentary on the United States Air Force based in England during the war. It’s really a programme that follows the fortunes of the crews of several planes, you know? How they coped with the war, their personal experiences of it. That kind of thing. Are you with me?’
‘So far,’ the female voice replied.
‘I need a little information on the identity marker of a particular plane. Where it served, which squadron it was in, who its crew were… can you help me with this kind of infor-?’
‘I’ll put you through to the Crew Reunion Helpline.’
Chris shrugged. The old BBC documentary ruse wasn’t necessary, then.
‘Crew Reunion Helpline, what’s your Regimental Designation? ’ said another female operator.
‘My what?’
‘Regimental Designation.’
‘Would that be the letters on the plane?’ asked Chris hopefully.
‘Yes.’
‘The letters are L, then beneath that GS.’
‘Okay… just a second…’
Chris could hear the clacking sound of fingernails on a keyboard and in the background the sound of other voices and phones bleeping.
‘You get a lot of calls like this?’ asked Chris casually.
No answer. Obviously not part of the script.
‘Hello. The L denotes the 381st Bomber Group. The GS was the squadron identification code for the regiment. GS was Squadron 535. They were stationed in England from April 1943 to January 1945 and then in Germany until the squadron was disbanded in 1947. What was the plane’s name?’
‘Do you mean the nickname?’
‘Yes, sir, the nickname.’
‘ Medusa. ’
‘Medusa? Like the snake lady?’
‘That’s it.’
Chris heard the clacking sound of nails against plastic keys again. A pause. Then something else being typed. Another wait. Chris thanked God they hadn’t modernised their switchboard to employ an ‘on hold’ musak system.
‘Oh,’ said the female voice.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Not a problem, sir… it’s just never happened before. That record is flagged. I’ll need to talk to the supervisor. Can you hold?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
The line went silent. Chris looked out of the window again. The rain was easing off slightly but still coming down enough to drench him if he was going to have to walk back down the coast road to Port Lawrence. Mark had borrowed the Cherokee. He’d wanted to take the damaged helmet radio downtown to find a Tandy or a Radio Shack. He was convinced it would be a quick and easy fix, although when he was due back was anyone’s guess. ‘Downtown’ was twenty miles away.
There was a click, the call was being transferred.
‘Hello? I believe you were enquiring about a plane serving with the 381st called Medusa?’ A male voice.
Chris confirmed the name.
‘I’m sorry about the confusion,’ he sounded flustered. Like somebody unaccustomed to this kind of conversation. ‘The records show this plane went missing in a raid over Hamburg in 1944.’
‘Missing over Hamburg?’
‘Yes. Hamburg, Germany.’
Thanks for that.
‘The plane crashed?’ Chris asked, lowering his voice.
‘Probably, sir. Most MIAs were assumed to be crashes.’
‘So she wasn’t recovered?’
‘Well, no, of course she wasn’t. Like I say, the records simply list the plane as missing.’
‘What about her crew? Were there any survivors?’
‘The records show that all nine of them were also reported as MIA.’
‘None resurfaced after the war as POWs?’
‘I’m sorry, sir; all I can give you is what is printed here. We can send you a copy of the records we have for a nominal fee of ten dollars. Would you like to give me your name and address?’
‘Uh?… no don’t bother.’ All of a sudden he felt the urge to end the call very quickly.
‘Can I ask why you’re enquiring about this plane?’ the man on the end of the phone asked.
Chris hung up. Almost immediately he wished he’d attempted to slide out of that conversation in a casual, easy manner, rather than panicking as he had. Even more so, he wished he’d thought to withhold his number before dialling in. It left him feeling jumpy.
Coffee.
It’s one of those things that become increasingly insipid the more you have of it. The first mouthful of the first cup of coffee of the day was always sublime, after that it all goes downhill. Chris curled his lip at the bitter- sweetness of his fifth since lunchtime. It was black to boot, which didn’t help. He’d exhausted the supply of cream cartons from the guest room’s wicker basket of courtesy refreshments, but the coffee and the sachets of sweetener were still going strong.
He turned out the light on the bedside cabinet and carried his mug across the room in total darkness to the bathroom. He pulled open the bathroom door and entered the crimson twilight of yet another impromptu developing booth. The sink was an inch deep with developing fluid and on the floor in a shallow plastic tray was some fixative. Strung across the bathroom, dangling from a length of twine like an unlikely laundry line, hung photographs of the B-17. Chris ducked underneath it on the way to the sink, and placed his mug of coffee on a toiletry shelf above. He pulled out several sheets of photographic paper that had been exposed to the negatives he’d selected to print.
Chris was pretty sure that News Fortnite would pass on these prints of the co-pilot; they were too grim for their regular readers.
He slid the sheets of photographic paper into the sink and gently separated them in the fluid. Silently he counted to sixty as the sheets of paper slowly darkened and form and definition emerged from the white.
The first shapes to make sense were the symmetrical round black holes of the co-pilot’s eye sockets. Chris watched as the detail slowly emerged. A row of vertical lines that slowly became teeth, the lower jaw slightly askew where Chris had placed it last night.
The second sheet of paper revealed an image of the body taken from further away, showing off some of the cockpit, the steering yoke and the plexiglas canopy. It was a better composition in his opinion. It helped tell more of a story, placed the body within a context, grounded it within a simple visual narrative.
But it was the third sheet of photographic paper that really caught Chris’s eye.
Mark was sitting on the bed fiddling with a soldering iron and the guts of the damaged helmet radio housing when Chris entered his motel room unannounced.
‘Fancy going for a beer?’
Mark jerked, and a blob of solder missed its target. ‘Jeez, don’t you knock?’
