Authors: Walter J. Boyne
Patty was offended by his preoccupation, and properly so. She had come to her own accommodation to the idea of her mother's death, had grieved deeply and then bounced back. He hadn't been
able to help her at all—quite the reverse. Within a few weeks of the accident—the murder—she had tried in every way to get him out of
his frustrating depression.
Their sex life had virtually ended. He was not impotent, they
could come together for some banal relief, but the rollicking enjoy
ment was gone in his own despair.
She had insisted that his obsession with revenging himself on Hafner, and thus avenging Millie's death, was abnormal, and he
had agreed to see a psychiatrist. Long, expensive sessions had not helped. Patty was turning from him to her own career, seeking from
flying what he could no longer give her.
He shook the thoughts away. "This is the important stuff." He tapped his finger on a headline: "Fighting Intense at Alcazar." "Have you heard about Americans volunteering to go fight for the Loyalists?"
"Get that out of your head, Bandy, that's your old man talking. We have problems here that are more important than a bunch of spies fighting each other."
"It's more than that, Hadley," Bandfield said, ignoring the slur. "Caldwell's been briefing me, and the Germans and Italians are
helping Franco out. I've got the urge to shed this paperwork and go
do something useful."
Hadley was no dummy. "So that's it. You'll go to Spain and work yourself out of your depression, eh? Bandy, you're nuts. You've got
to snap out of this. Don't go thinking about doing any fighting. That's a young man's game. You'd get over there and some squarehead would shoot your ass off."
Bandfield tuned him out as Hadley launched into one of his endless dirty stories, this one something about the British army wearing red coats so that the blood from wounds wouldn't scare people, and the Italian army wearing brown pants for a similar reason. Roget was annoyed when he didn't get the customary pro-forma laugh, and raised his voice.
"If you want to do something, sell one side or the other a whole bunch of airplanes. We've gone from bad to critical here."
The remark brought Bandfield back to the sorry present. "Who would have believed it, Hadley? That accountant guy came with a
resume from the bank that was good as gold, and references from
some of the best people in town."
"Yeah, they should have been good—the schnook wrote them all
himself."
During the last year, Bandfield had acquiesced to the new
arrangement with Patty, submerging himself in a flurry of work
attendant to the tidal wave of publicity that had deluged Patty's
record setting. The good part was the income—she had contracts to make more money in 1936 than Roget Aircraft was going to earn. Every magazine carried pictures of her, usually dippy-looking pas
tels, enthusiastically endorsing Ivory Soap, Congoleum floors, Johnson's wax, and Auburn cars. She had refused to do cigarette advertisements, despite an offer from Camels that had made both their heads swim.
He had resigned himself to trailing his wife around, answering
questions about her life, her breakfast-food preferences, whether she
really drove an Auburn, or if she really used Pond's. He also had to
ward off the handsome male would-be movie stars who had
swarmed out of their back-alley dormitories just to get photographed
as background in her publicity tours, and who all tried to interest her in their "careers."
To help out, he had hired a bright young man, Gerald Rosson,
three years out of Columbia University, as their "chief accountant."
That meant he supervised two clerks and took the load off Bandfield's back.
He'd also taken approximately $62,000 in cash before departing for parts unknown.
Roget grunted. "I told you we should never have hired that guy. He was too damn polite."
Bandfield pointed to the stack of correspondence on his desk.
"Well, he politely left so much fucking bad news that I can measure
it with a ruler."
Rosson not only had departed with the cash, but apparently in his
brief two-month stay had run a brisk business ordering tools and
materials and reselling them, neglecting to pay the vendors. Roget
Aircraft's credit rating, which had taken so long to establish, went sour in a six-week period. Bandy, who had spent years watching every nickel he had, had let his preoccupation with Hafner and
Patty's new career goad him into turning the place over to Rosson in
blind faith.
Hadley leaped in, anxious to make a point. "It's not all that crook's fault, either. Look at these!" He picked up a handful of letters and pawed through them. "The union is talking crazy—our
labor rates are already higher than anyone else's in the industry, and
they want a five-cent-an-hour raise!"
Bandfield agreed with him inwardly. A nickel an hour didn't sound like much, but even with the reduced work force, it would cost $250 a week, almost $13,000 per year! And Douglas was walking away with every sale that came along because of their prices. It didn't make sense and shook his faith in unions. The country's unemployment rate was nearly 20 percent—and his people wanted a raise.
"I told you we should never have let them in the shop."
"Hadley, do you realize how fucking helpful it is for you to tell me all you told me, when the goddam business is coming down
around my ears, and I'm acting like some sort of water boy for my
wife?"
Hadley nodded with some satisfaction as Bandfield went on, "If
I'd always done what you said, we'd never have gotten big enough to
go bankrupt. We'd have just gone bust in your old barn, the way we
always did."
It was true. Old Roget's mistakes would have kept them from getting big. Now they were so large that they had to have new contracts as an addict had to have drugs. Every contract that came
in was immediately sent to the bank for discounting, and they lived
from hand to mouth, scraping just to meet the payroll. The $62,000 that Rosson had embezzled was the steel beam that broke the camel's back.
"We've been down before, Bandy. We'll get back up."
"Maybe. I don't know if it's worth it. You might have had the
right idea, just building airplanes you liked to build for yourself, and
fixing cars on the side for expenses."
Bandfield sighed. "I don't see how we'll survive much past the end of November. We're going belly-up unless we get a contract from somebody."
They moved to the window that overlooked the assembly bay. Compared to the days when they had started building the RC-3s, it seemed empty of workers. The rampant competition from Douglas
had eaten up the market. They had to get another order for at least ten RC-3s, or they were out of the manufacturing business for a while. The worst thing, of course, was letting the people go. They
might be able to get some subcontracting work from somebody, but
there was damn little of it around. The staff could see what was happening—the better engineers and foremen had already left, picking up jobs where there were some live contracts.
The only bright spot was the tour the Air Corps had set up for him
in Berlin. It offered the prospect of encountering Hafner, and was
the one thing besides Patty that made life worth living. He had had
enough of managing and running an aircraft factory to last a lifetime. The Air Corps problems were challenging, and for some reason the Air Corps listened to him.
Bandfield smiled painfully at the irony—the worse business got,
the more famous he became and the more people paid attention to him. His old English teacher at Salinas had seen an article he'd
written for
Popular Flying
and had written to compliment him, not
hesitating to point out a few grammatical errors. Caldwell had invited him to Fort McNair to speak to the War College.
Much of it was a rub-off from Patty's success. In the last six months, she had completely eclipsed Earhart, Ruth Nichols, the
whole lot of women flyers. God, after years of struggle, to wind up
being his wife's spear-carrier. Still, the money wasn't bad.
*
Berlin, Germany/August 23, 1936
Sunday in Berlin. Lieutenant Colonel Bruno Hafner, anxious to get away from the Olympic hoopla, walked dejectedly along Unter den
Linden, the wash of heat offset by the shade of the trees. It was hard
to believe that the year that had begun so well was ending with such
a totally shocking, impossible turn of events. Everything at the beginning—quietly removing his company funds, causing the crash, the furor roused at Luftwaffe headquarters by Howard
Hughes's setting the speed record in the racer—seemed to have been
orchestrated solely for his benefit.
He had embraced Nazi Germany, and the Fatherland had seemed intent on returning the favor. Symbolically, he had discarded everything he had ever owned from America. Over time, as he was able to replace them, he had shed all his clothes, wallet, cigarette cases and lighters, shoes. Everything was gone. In their
place he had purchased the best of everything from the shops along
the Kurfurstendamm.
And the house, a villa in Berlin-Zehlendorf! He had made arrangements to pick it up very reasonably from an emigrating
Jewish couple. Udet had said it was too showy, that it would cause
jealousy. Good. In his experience, for every jealous person there
were four or five sycophants anxious for any crumbs. As a counter
point, he had not bought a Mercedes; instead he'd acquired a little BMW 315/1 that would have fit in the trunk of his Duesenberg. A Mercedes would come later, perhaps a 500K
Sportwagen.
The advantage of having money was enormous; he could entertain on a scale far beyond his rank. And not needing to be promoted for economic reasons, he didn't have to conform so slavishly to the
Luftwaffe's viewpoint. He could take an outsider's view, and get
promoted even faster.
The difficulties had started almost at once. After initially welcom
ing him and getting him established, Udet became infuriated when then Colonel Wever arranged for a private interview. He had not
wished to alienate Udet, but events made it necessary to go around
him.
Ah, Wever! There had been a man! He had been quick to see the value of the bomber plans. Hafner selected a Monte Cristo cigar from the leather pouch he carried, cut it carefully, and lit it
reflectively as he let his first conversation with Wever run again
through his mind.
At the outset he had been nervous. Wever was an upright gener
al-staff type, the best of the breed. Hafner wasn't sure how he'd regard a man who had left Germany after the war, when it was in such terrible distress, and then betrayed his new country.
It was a pointless worry. Wever clearly thought of him as the
German patriot he was. He had the detailed drawings for the Hafner
bomber spread out in front of him.
"Ah, Hafner, these plans can be the basis for our Ural bomber! It
is exactly what we need. But that is not the only reason you are so
welcome."
He had leaned forward, anxious to learn what this little man, with his nose and chin like a Punch and Judy doll, wanted.
"Please understand that this is not a criticism of our leadership." It was a remark that clearly forecast a criticism. "Unfortunately, most of them are fixed on the continent, bound up by Haushofer's
geopolitics. Not one of them has traveled very much. I don't believe
Hitler has been farther than the front lines of France. Goering went
to Sweden for a while. Udet, God bless him, has traveled the world
around, but has never seen past his cockpit or his barstool."
Wever had leaned forward and rapped savagely on the plans with
the flat of his hand.
"But you have seen the United States, know how vast it is. You
understand what it can produce. What we need from you is a sense of scale, to break us out of this Thirty Years War mentality."
The rest of the conversation had gone even more pleasantly. Hafner was to have the best of both worlds, a
Geschwader
to command, when the time came, and influence with the staff.
Characteristically direct, Wever came right to the point.
"Udet is out of his depth. I'm going to depend upon you for
advice. He views the dive bomber as if it were a universal panacea!
He even wants twin-and four-engine types to be able to dive-bomb."
Hafner was genuinely surprised. A twin-engine dive bomber was stretching it; one with four engines was quite absurd, even for Udet.