Authors: Walter J. Boyne
He snorted. "Too bad, but it serves the high and mighty bastard
right."
Charlotte stared at him. It was an appalling attitude even for Hafner, and with difficulty she pulled herself together, conscious
that there was work to be done. She tried to shift his emotions with
the same precise control that Murray used in changing gears in the
Duesenberg. Her conversation was a matador's cape, switching his
boiling anger from subject to subject until she could find safe
ground, the narrow emotional zone where they could talk sensibly.
For the moment it seemed safe, his mercurial anger suppressed by the bad news about Lindbergh. She could sense almost to a
degree how well he was containing the rage of his self-hate, storing
it like steam within a boiler, sometimes releasing it in a tirade of anger, sometimes converting it to a synthetic friendliness that portended evil.
Charlotte had learned to use the blackness that consumed him,
offering him alternative targets and stoking his ego with the safety
valves of prospective new triumphs. She knew that he wanted to cloak himself with achievements that would match what he had done in combat. It was too bad there wasn't a Blue Max for
business, some bauble of reassurance that would satisfy him. She
wondered what it was that combat did for him that nothing else—not success, not drinking, not sex—could do.
In a normal voice, she said, "We've settled all the legal questions
regarding licensing Hadley Roget's wing."
It was the wrong note. Hafner's face suffused with anger at the
mention of the name.
"Those jake-leg engineers have never built anything worth flying. Why the hell you paid him good money for a metal-wing design, I'll
never know. I'm a better engineer than either one of them, and Bineau is twice as good as both of them put together!"
She jumped on the opening. "Armand disagrees! He likes their wing concept. Let me show you what he's proposing."
Bruno tried to resume the offensive. "Did you do what I told you
and tell Bineau about his raise, about getting a share of the profits?
We have to keep him sweet—he's priceless."
She nodded. "Yes, and he's delighted. And as long as we let him
build the airplanes he wants, he'd work for bacon and beans."
Charlotte pushed a button and two golden oak doors opened into
a luxurious indirectly lit conference room paneled in the same light
wood as her desk. There was a stage and podium, and a glass case
along one wall. In it were jewellike scale models of the Hafner products, past, present, and future. The Mead & Wilgoos engine line, the Premium propellers, a Hafner trimotor in Federated Air
lines markings were all neatly modeled in the same scale. There was
even a clever diorama of the harbor in Marseilles, a frowsy tramp
freighter moored at a distance, a lighter with ominous-looking covered boxes en route to it.
"Jesus Christ, Charlotte, I wish you hadn't talked me into spend
ing all the dough on this palace. We're getting overextended."
"Who taught me that it takes money to make money? You've outgrown the junkyard look. You deserve it."
She sensed her control over him return as he savored her compliment. He stroke forward to loom over the display table, where two
models were covered by green baize drapery.
Bineau and two other Russians walked in, followed by seven
members of the senior engineering staff. Rhoades brought up the
rear. After some small talk, Bineau went to the podium. As fluent in
English as in French or Russian, Bineau cloaked his engineering in
flowery language worthy of a poet.
Bineau ancestors had been brought from France to Russia by Peter the Great and there prospered immensely. The son of a brilliant engineer and courtier in St. Petersburg, Bineau had been
educated at the Imperial Naval Academy before working with Igor Sikorsky at the Russian Baltic Car Factory. When the war came, he had flown with Alexander de Seversky in a Baltic Sea bombing
squadron. A heart condition, probably brought on by the excessive
zeal with which he combined his engineering and his combat flying, placed him in the hospital for six months. Then he was sent to France as a part of a Russian plane-buying commission. He
stayed there after the 1917 revolution, eventually joining his col
leagues in the fertile aviation fields on Long Island.
It was a universal mystery how he could not only stand working
for Hafner, but actually seem to enjoy it. Bineau was shielded from
Hafner's usual wrath by both his ability and his demeanor. The Russian never raised his voice or seemed anxious, no matter what the situation, and he gave Hafner the same elaborate but sincere courtesy that he extended to all.
The truth was that Hafner was in awe of the man, impressed with
his brilliance and fascinated by his personality. Bineau's manner of
speech was perhaps the key. His voice had the range of a Barrymore,
and he modulated it constantly in perfect accord with his subject. Most ingratiating of all, he had a way of inviting agreement, his
merry eyes beckoning you into a complicity in a delightful, well-
intended secret.
Bineau's two principal colleagues, Barinov and Kalinin, were
beside him. Barinov spoke English well enough, but Kalinin used a
Russian-French-English patois that Charlotte termed Exasperanto.
The two men always let Bineau do the talking, and so did Charlotte
for an engineering briefing.
"Captain Hafner, I freely and gladly admit that the basis of what you are about to see derives from Hadley Roget's wing. We will be
the first to use the structure, but you can expect, as night follows the
day, that our competitors will adopt it."
Hadley's design had been as simple as Bineau was elegant, not
only solving the problem of adequate strength, but giving space for
fuel, equipment, and even retracting the landing gear.
With his customary flourish, he uncovered the first model, announcing with bravura, "The Hafner Skyshark."
Bruno was visibly moved. "Jesus, that's beautiful!"
Armand pointed to the model's nose. "Two guns, and a stream
lined turret that protects the gunner from the slipstream." His voice
was lilting; you could almost see the wind around the model.
Charlotte chimed in, "At two hundred and twenty miles an hour, he'll need it."
Bineau went on, "But, Captain Hafner, I want to tell you again that without Roget's wing it wouldn't be possible to get speed like that in an airplane this big—it has a seventy-foot span, and will weigh almost thirteen thousand pounds fully loaded."
While Bruno was leaning down, admiring the lines—he'd long
since learned not to risk a knuckle rap by picking up one of Bineau's models—Armand pressed a switch, and the gears extended and then
retracted.
Bineau continued, "I want to pay tribute to your staff for the concept and the hard engineering behind it. My colleague Alexander Kalinin did the stress work, making full use of the inherent strength of the design. Sergei Barinov is a genius at the drafting board and in the wind tunnel."
Kalinin stepped forward, clearing his throat. "You vill note de
deep fillets on de wing, and de boot"—the word seemed to have ten
o's—"on de horizontal stabilizer."
Bineau's enormous white eyebrows semaphored disapproval at
Kalinin's intrusion, and he said, "Yes, certainly, and we believe these will both boost speed and eliminate flutter."
The small team of Russians had spent thousands of man-hours on
the theoretical calculations, and were scheduled to have almost a thousand hours of wind-tunnel time at New York University and Langley Field. The only downside to Bineau's report was that the
new 650-horsepower engines would not be ready until the following
April.
Hafner nodded in eager agreement. "When the Skyshark flies for
the first time a year from this June, we are totally confident of its success," Bineau concluded.
Hafner asked the usual questions on performance and costs, and
was pleased by the answers. Bineau stressed that although the Air Corps had rejected the wing when Hadley offered it, the Corps
recognized its mistake now, even after purchasing a service-test quantity of, the Boeing B-9 bomber—thirteen, including the prototypes.
Bineau became absolutely evangelical. "This airplane will sweep
the B-9 off the board. It is to laugh! The B-9 is no longer competi
tive. "
Charlotte broke in. "I've saved the best for last. Major Caldwell says that if our projected performance figures are met, he will guarantee a production order for at least one hundred Skysharks."
Bruno slipped his arm around Charlotte, and even as she remembered the passionate night long ago in Passaic, when he had made
exactly the same gesture, she had to steel herself not to cringe.
"Honey, let's send Caldwell a car, maybe a Model A convertible."
Rhoades spoke up for the first time. "Bruno, if you do that, he'd
regard it as a bribe and you would never get another order from him
or from the Air Corps. You don't need to bribe him—you've got the
best airplane."
Hafner smiled. "You're right. I was thinking about the old days of
the fighter competitions in Berlin, when Fokker would make sure that all the pilots were taken care of."
Bineau continued, "Bruno, we not only have the best airplane,
we have the best airplanes. The next aircraft is without question the
result of Charlotte's perseverance."
He bowed low to her, extending his arm in a graceful sweeping
movement as if he were wearing a sword and a plumed hat. If anyone else had done it, it would have been impossibly phony.
Bineau made it perfectly natural. "I said we were too overworked,
that no one could do it, not even our staff. In her gentle way she insisted, and we hired a few more people."
Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, he produced the second model.
"Voila,
again, the Hafner Skyangel," he said, unveiling a sleek passenger transport. Only the bomber's fuselage had been changed;
everything else was the same. "A crew of three and ten passengers
cruising comfortably at three miles a minute. It will drive the Fords and Fokkers and even our own trimotors from the sky, and all the
single-engine transports with them."
Charlotte watched her husband's expression change from the
embarrassment Rhoades's comment on bribery had caused to one of choirboy hopefulness. She felt she could risk reminding him of her
role in the project.
"Bruno, do you remember the night you called me from Oakland, and said we could build transports with our own engines and props? This is it."
She let him absorb the idea. "We'll build the transports on the same line with the bombers, and won't take orders from anybody
until we reequip the Federated fleet with maybe sixty or seventy
airplanes. We'll have the industry tied up."
Hafner's entire physical demeanor changed, the years and inner anguish both slipping from him equally. Prospective success gave him a roaring rush of pleasure. For the moment, the entire world was golden, and the people in the room were the agents of his
harmony. Only at times like this did he find in life the strength and
pleasure that mortal combat had given him.
He grabbed Charlotte's arms and whirled her around. "What a doll baby you are!" He turned to the group, smiling broadly. "And Armand, you're the best thing to come from Russia since caviar."
He shook the hands of the other engineers, and even slipped his arm around Rhoades's shoulders.
"Dusty, did you ever think you'd see anything like this?"
"Russia lost a great designer when we snared Bineau, and there's
nothing that Charlotte can do that would surprise me. I've heard you call her 'champ,' and champ she is."
Bruno sustained his upbeat mood the rest of the morning while he went over their holdings with Charlotte. The engineers left, pleased that they had pleased Hafner, and the room which had
seemed so wastefully opulent when he walked in now seemed just
right. Charlotte had a stack of journals, gray-bound with green spines, each labeled in gold letters.
She handed him summary profit-and-loss statements and an interim balance sheet. "You can see this is a tough time. We need money for current operations, and I don't see it coming from anywhere but capital."
He nodded.
"We're losing money every day on Federated with the trimotors.
They're too slow and don't carry enough people."