“Afraid not. We're counting every shilling at the moment.”
“We'll manage it,” Adrian said.
“Then we have an understanding.”
Knightly went off to a staff meeting and Churchill ordered another brandy. “Is this man reliable?” he asked, eyeing Frank Buchanan.
“Oh, absolutely,” Adrian lied, hoping Frank would keep his mouth shut.
“Your old friend Geoffrey Tillotson, whose loss I still regret, spoke to me of you now and then in matters more important than stocks and bonds. If war comes as I'm sure it will, you may be contacted from time to time by a small cadre we're sending over to offset German propaganda. I hope you'll be helpful.”
“I'll try.”
“Prince Carlo Pontecorvo will be handling matters in California.”
Adrian, a student of the great game, wondered if Ponty's casual advice to sell planes in England and Churchill's prompt response were as accidental as they seemed.
On the ride back to the hotel Frank Buchanan was his usual erratic self. “Do you realize what he just asked you to do? The same goddamm stuff they pulled in the last war. Lindbergh's father wrote a book about it. They're going to drag us into it to save their imperialistic asses. Are you going to help them?”
“Yes,” Adrian said. “So are you. The day we get home, I want you to go to work on designing that bomber. Hire twenty extra people if you have to. We'll finance it out of the trainer sale.”
“Whose side are we on, anyway?” Frank said.
“Our side.”
“Where is it?” Frank said. “Give me a moral or spiritual location.”
“Beyond the rainbow,” Adrian said. “Where the pots of gold are waiting.”
“Why don't we make that our insignia?” Frank sneered.
“Not a bad idea. Give me a sketch.”
In the lobby of the hotel, Frank grabbed a piece of stationery and drew a plane flying above a crescent rainbow. Adrian thanked him and put it in his pocket, deciding it was pointless to try to explain to his chief designer how
little morality had to do with playing the great game, the hidden struggle for power that nations waged. Like Ponty, he felt a sentimental loyalty to England, a belief that despite her flaws she stood for something valuable. But the thrill of the game was a far more powerful motive.
At the hotel desk, the clerk handed Adrian a phone message.
Miss Beryl Suydam
05-03-421.
“Not
the
Beryl Suydam,” Frank Buchanan said, reading it over his shoulder.
“I met her years ago,” Adrian said.
Upstairs, his hand trembled slightly as he picked up the telephone and gave the operator the number. “Adrian,” Beryl said in that silky voice, unchanged by a decade. “A friend saw you in your hotel lobby. I couldn't resist calling you.”
“How nice,” he said.
“For one thing, you've got a plane that interests me. That SkyRanger? I think I could beat Howard Hughes's around-the-world record in it, with some help from the brilliant designer fellow you've got on your staff. What's his name?”
“Frank Buchanan.”
“Yes. Could we meet in the next day or two?”
Adrian decided they would meet without Frank Buchanan. He was anxious to visit de Havilland and a few other companies where he had old friends. While Frank rode a train out of London, Adrian met Beryl at the Savoy Grill. She arrived in a flight jacket and slacks and the headwaiter refused to seat them. She led him to a small Greek restaurant in Soho, a place full of shadowy corners. Someone played a zither in another room.
Beryl had changed little physically. The face was still the same lovely oval, the dark hair still framing it in a twentyish bob. “You don't look a day older,” Adrian said.
“You do,” she said. “Your hair.”
Adrian brushed self-consciously at his receding hair line. “They say bald men are sexier.”
“You'll never be sexy, Adrian. But you'll always be attractive to women.”
“Why?”
“Every woman likes to explore an enigma.”
“I don't think of myself as enigmatic.”
“You are. I didn't feel I could devote my life to solving you. Are you still married?”
“More or less. How about you?”
“You know I'm not married.”
“Not even in love?”
“Not at the moment.”
“You still think the Soviet Union is the hope of the world?”
“I've grown a bit more sophisticated. I think socialism is the hope of the world. Hasn't it arrived in Washington, D.C., under the flag of the New Deal?”
“Roosevelt isn't a socialist. He isn't anything. That's his problem.”
“Perhaps it's your problem too, Adrian. Not being anything eventually becomes distressing.”
“I'm not sure you're right about that. I know exactly what I want to be at the moment.”
“What?”
“Your lover again.”
Beryl did not display the slightest surprise or shockâwhich only made her more desirable. “Does that make any sense?” she said.
“We have quite a lot in common. Planesâmemories.”
Beryl raised her wineglass. “Let's rely on memories for the time being.”
In Adrian's middle-class hotel off Picadilly, memory created a bittersweet aura. Beryl's skin was still wet, glistening from the shower as they embraced. He licked drops of water from her small rounded breasts. His hand moved easily, knowingly, up her firm thighs.
“I've had other women. But I've never loved anyone else,” Adrian said.
“It's been the same with me,” Beryl said.
Over a nightcap they talked about her flight around the world. She had a backer lined up, the publisher of the
Daily Mail.
Adrian assured her the plane would be provided free of charge. He would put Frank Buchanan in touch with her the moment they got back to California.
“You're such a dear,” Beryl said, with a contented sigh.
“Tomorrowâdinner again?”
“Why not,” she said.
It was the old Beryl without her radical animosity, her war wounds healed by time or the progress of socialism. Politics were not important, Adrian told himself. Love transcended politics as it transcended time and space.
The next morning, Adrian was awakened by a call from George Knightly, the RAF officer who had come to the Athenaeum Club with Winston Churchill. “Could you spare a few minutes for another talk about that bomber?”
“My designer's off in the country visiting friends.”
“We can chat just as well without him.”
Adrian was sure Knightly was going to beat his price down to nothing to help save dear old England's ass. He was not going to let sentimentality bankrupt him. He arrived at the Air Ministry determined to bargain hard for every shilling.
Knightly shoved a chair beside his desk and tugged at his mustache. “This is a bit awkward but it has to be done. I take it you're an old friend of Beryl Suydam? That explains theâerâreunion last night in your room?”
“Why is that any of your goddamn business?”
“It shouldn't be. I gather she's quite a piece in bed, if half the hangar talk I've heard is true. But the fact is, old boy, she's a Soviet spy.”
“Absolutely ridiculous!”
“I wish it was. She's a marvelous flier. Quite a personage, you might say. But the evidence is rather overwhelming. Since you're going to be building a bomber for us, if things develop with Herr Hitler, I thought you should know.”
“Can you prove thisâthisâslander?”
“This may be a bit painful. But you've asked for it.”
Knightly took a folder out of his desk and handed it to Adrian. In it were a number of photocopied letters from Beryl to someone named Sergei. “You'd be most interested in the one on the bottom. She wrote it last night in the lobby of your hotel,” Knightly said.
The letter was on hotel stationery.
Dear Sergei:
The fish bit the moment I dangled the hook. I'm sure I can get you all you want on the light bomber in a week's time. He wants to marry me! That can be dealt with, of course. I'm inclined to go ahead with the round-the-world flight and see what else I can get from Frank Buchanan's files. I'll probe Adrian about that fighter plane tomorrow night.
Beryl.
“Sergei is her Soviet control. He's been working for us for several years.”
Adrian was too dazed and humiliated to do anything but nod.
“We've no objections if you want to go on seeing her for a bit. You might pass on some rather useful misinformation to her. Multiply the number of planes we're buying by the order of five, say.”
“Why?”
“We've reason to think it'll get to Herr Hitler via Moscow. The Germans have a covey of agents there. Trying to play the intimidation game a bit on our side. You might throw in some bull about orders with other plane makers. Heavy stuff.”
“I see.”
“She'll be doing her damndest to please you, old chap. Don't see how you can lose.”
Knightly's smile sickened Adrian. The man of course had no idea what Beryl Suydam meant to him. For a moment, Adrian contemplated something much more vicious than repaying deception with deception. He imagined murder. He saw his fingers around Beryl Suydam's fragile throat, his thumb pressing hard on the hollow he loved to kiss.
Bitch,
howled a voice that did not belong to him. It wailed down from the stratosphere, where Beryl had found the strength, the guile, to make him a fool.
Forethought rescued Adrian. Outside the air ministry, he stared at the traffic on the Thames and told himself this was simply another phase of the great game. He had been given a license to enjoy himself. He would use it to the full.
For the next two nights, Beryl played Delilah to Adrian's cunning Samson. When she whispered
I love you
at the climax, his mask almost slipped, he almost reached for her lying throat. When she did it again the next night, Adrian almost believed it. He wondered if Knightly knew everything. Was this woman secretly pleading with him to rescue her from deception?
How could he speak? Knightly had warned him it was vital to keep Sergei's double agentry concealed. He would not live twelve hours if Beryl discovered it.
Beryl lit a cigarette while Adrian poured her a brandy. She curled up on the bed, oozing charm. “I've heard wonderful things about the planes you're making.”
“âWant to make' would be better. We've had a hell of a time selling most of them. The competition is tough and the airlines are going broke. The Army and the Navy have no money. That's why this order for a thousand bombers from the British is a godsend.”
“A thousand?” Beryl said. “I wonder where they're getting the money.”
“I don't know and I don't care.”
“What other planes do you have?”
“A pursuit plane. It can outfly anything in the air.”
“I smell a speed record. Can you send me the plans?”
Adrian shook his head. “We're keeping that one in a locked file.”
“Adrian. You can trust me. I might even help you sell it to someone else.”
The lovely lips curled into a Cheshire-cat smile. She was devouring him in her lying mind. Adrian no longer had any doubt that Knightly was right. Still he could not let go of those whispered words.
I love you.
Was she, even in the slimy gutter of deceit, asking him to forgive her?
Adrian finished his brandy and told himself he was a fool. Take what you can get and forget the rest. Forget the soaring and adoring. From now on, Adrian Van Ness would enjoy his women without the emotional window dressing of love.
“I've got bad news,” he said. “I have to go home tomorrow. A labor crisis.”
He teased her left nipple until it came erect. “Once more for auld lang syne?” he said.
For a moment he was sure she knew. He wanted her to know. He let the coldness in his mind fill his voice, his eyes. But he said nothing. It would be much more satisfying to let her dangle on the hook of doubt for the next year as he made excuses about the round-the-world flight and fed her more misinformation about the light bomber and other planes. Revenge could be sweetened by timeâand more nostalgic encounters in hotel rooms.
But there was still a corner of Adrian's soul where
I love you
whispered, where memory wept and hope mourned.