Authors: Walter J. Boyne
Wever had brought him to see Milch and Goering almost immediately, and then later, in November, he had had a short private audience with the Fuehrer in Munich. Goering had been thor
oughly charming, attributing to him at once the crash-landing tactic they had used at Strasbourg. Altogether everything had been most
satisfactory. Hitler had been friendly, amazingly well informed, and
positive about both the need for the four-engine bomber and the new fighter. Either the man was brilliant or he had been carefully briefed. It didn't matter—either case boded well.
Hafner carefully dusted one of the benches that were placed in profusion along the sidewalk and sat down. His was provided in honor of "Corporal Anton Dietl, 1899-1917." Some wet-behind-the-ears
Landser,
dead before he was aware of life,
killed in a crash, and Udet was already circling
like a wolf, trying to scuttle the big-bomber concept.
He reached down and felt the small cylinder in his pants pocket.
He never went without it, never left it anywhere. In it were the photos and the plans for the Hughes racer. There was a duplicate hidden in the garden shed of the house. The plane would make a
good fighter and be a perfect encore to the bomber when it was underway. And if it didn't, if that
Schweinerei
Udet sabotaged him,
he would offer the fighter to someone, Focke-Wulf probably. He had flown the Messerschmitt—a fine plane if they were always going to fight within the borders of the Reich! It had no legs, no
range. The Hughes racer, scaled up slightly to carry military equipment, would be a far better bet when he found the right company to
build it.
Hafner yawned and stretched, scratching himself under the arms at length. The truth was that he wasn't cut out for political intrigue. He considered himself a simple soldier. He had asked for combat duty in Spain, a squadron of fighters. The lust for combat roared through him, sitting him upright. He anticipated the old rush of pleasure in the headlong attack, the clattering guns, the bucking airplane ahead of him, shedding parts, bursting into flame. That was what he wanted, that was what he'd craved so long. And then Udet would be hard put to attack him. And his thoughts about modern warplanes would have a greater authority, enough perhaps
ultimately to undermine Udet. He was far better qualified for the job than Erni. Despite the rapidly growing war in Spain, he'd been
kept out of sight for the last three weeks, while the great Lindbergh
had been conducted on a triumphal tour of the resurgent Reich.
Apparently Lindbergh had accepted everything at face value. Each night, Hafner had gone over the recordings of all of Lindbergh's
telephone calls, to see what opinions the famous flyer had formed.
Lindbergh was clearly impressed by most of what he'd seen, but had
said things about Goering's girth that had to be deleted in the official
transcripts that went to "Der Dicke" each morning.
A pain crossed his stomach; he belched. If he didn't watch it, he'd be catching up to Goering. The German food was as good as he had remembered, the beer even better. He'd put on five kilos since he'd arrived, but the wise German tailors had made provision for a little
gain in all his trousers.
The bellyache caused him to notice that his hands were locked together, almost cutting off the circulation. "Too tense," he muttered. "That's what's wrong with my gut." He forced himself to think of America, to think what he missed about it. Not Charlotte. He had not missed her for a moment; Lili Behrens more than made
up for her. Not the work; his aircraft factory had become a zoo, with
Bineau, before his illness at least, always a problem. The stupid
competitions, the arguments with the airlines, were always annoying. The U.S. Army was difficult to deal with, but a
Dummkopflike
Mahew even more so.
He stood, snuffed out his cigar, and carefully placed it out of sight
beneath a pile of leaves. He felt a sudden poignant sadness when he
realized that in recalling America, the only thing he missed was Nellie, his darling Nellie. As soon as he was settled in, he'd get another dog. The Kaiser had kept dachshunds; he would too.
*
Washington, D.C./November 10, 1936
Sitting in the hard oak-bowed chair outside Lieutenant Colonel
Caldwell's overheated office, Bandfield squirmed apprehensively in
a little pool of sweat. Just off a long series of flights, he hadn't had a
shower in two days, and his skin felt as crawly as the pit of his stomach. In the past week, he had managed to antagonize his wife even further, annoy the Army, and apparently infuriate his old friend Charles Lindbergh.
An imperturbable white-haired warrant officer, his stained tan
shirt sleeves ringed with perspiration, said, "It shouldn't be too long
now. With the business in Spain, the colonel's been on the phone all day."
The American embassy in Madrid had been abandoned two days
earlier, and the military had been put on a conditional alert. The German Condor Legion, all "volunteers," had been bombing the
city every day, and the Loyalist government had fled to Valencia. According to the briefing Caldwell had given him the week before,
when he'd presented his report on his trip through Germany, Americans were fighting for the Loyalists in the International Brigade.
That's what I ought to be doing, he thought. Anything would be better than the way things had gone the last six months. On the Coast, Roget Aircraft, in what had almost become an American
aviation business tradition, had closed its production line, and was staying in business on a small scale only by subcontracts for parts
from Douglas.
At first, Patty had leaped at the idea of a trip to Europe, hoping with him that it would put some life back into their marriage. He had ruined it by his insistence on pursuing the subject of Hafner's
whereabouts. Instead of being a grand tour of the bright lights, a sort
of early second honeymoon that might have brought Patty closer to
him, it had turned into an endless, frustrating series of receptions and dinners, broken only by his forays into the field to look at airfields and factories.
The Germans had recognized Patty in her own right, and seen to it that she was feted by the German women flyers, led by Hanna Reitsch. Hanna was a tiny woman with a great wide grin and a fanatical belief in the Nazis; she soon wore Patty into a pro
pagandized frazzle. Patty had endured the first few days, then lapsed
into a stoic acceptance.
Only the idyllic flight back on the
Hindenburg
had briefly restored their good humor. Initially ill at ease on the gigantic airship with its softly undulating motions, she had quickly taken to the quiet, attentive service.
They had cast off into gray skies from Frankfurt at five in the
morning and followed a course that passed over sleeping Germany,
across Belgium, and down the English Channel. Patty had moved from side to side, watching first the French, then the English
countryside unfold. He had sat holding her, and toward evening, as
the light dimmed, he had cupped her breast in his hand, softly rubbing her nipple through the folds of silk and cashmere.
They had a wonderful dinner in the airship's dining room, so sparingly decorated that it might have been Japanese. Fueled by
good German wines and his earlier caresses, Patty insisted on going to bed early. Their cabin, separated from others by walls of light
weight aluminum and fabric, had an upper and lower bunk.
She kissed him passionately when they entered.
"I don't think we can make love, honey—our neighbors will hear
us."
"I don't want to make love. I'm too hot to make love. I want to have sex, silent sex, silent, sloppy sex, silent, sloppy, sucking,
sensual, toe-in-socket sex." She pushed him toward the lower bunk,
whispering, "Take off your clothes," as she shucked herself out of her own.
"Lie back." He did so, and she put her lips to his ear. "No talking.
No gasping.' Just kissing till we come."
It had never been harder to be silent, but the restraint added a bizarre surrealistic dimension to their loving. They were floating
over the Atlantic, separated from the water only by a few inches of
aluminum and fabric, working quietly and assiduously to gratify each other, slowly transforming the entire compartment with raw, heated sex. Then, as always, they transitioned into lovemaking, slow, ecstatic, and still totally silent.
Later, they lay whispering in each other's arms. "What's happened, Patty? Why are we so different now, since the crash?"
"We're not any different. You're just going through your male revenge mode, your silly pilot's need to win."
He didn't answer. She said, "I was jealous for a while. I thought
you were still in love with a dead woman. But that's not it. Hafner's
beaten you—or you think he has—a few times, and you can't stand it. It's so stupid. He's a criminal, a killer. How could you and he ever compete on any equal terms?"
"We did in Peru, and you're right, he beat me again."
"Equal terms? You were flying with two broken legs, and he was
an ace from the war. Equal terms?"
The words gave him comfort—but not relief.
The next day they realized that they might not have been as quiet as
they had thought. The crew was unusually jolly and friendly, and the airship commander, Dr. Hugo Eckener himself, made a point
of stopping by at breakfast and inquiring how they were enjoying the
trip. Later he gave Bandfield a personal tour of the
Hindenburg.
The more the grand old man of dirigibles explained how safe the gigantic Zeppelin was, the more convinced Bandfield became that the ship was a floating bomb, depending entirely on a superb crew and benign weather to keep from blowing up. The
Hindenburg
had been far more comfortable than any plane, train, or surface ship Bandfield had ever ridden, but he knew he wouldn't have another peaceful moment until they had disembarked in Lakehurst, New
Jersey. He didn't tell Patty about his worries until the trip was over.
The phone rang, jarring him from his romantic recollections. He turned back again to thoughts of his mission, trying to anticipate what Caldwell and Lindbergh would have to say.
His one abiding impression of the trip through Germany was that
his hosts, from Udet down, had been consummate actors. He had
asked Udet's aide, a bright-looking young lieutenant named Helmut
Josten, if he knew what had happened to Bruno Hafner. The aide
had blushed slightly, saying that he'd never heard of the man; it was
obviously a
verboten
subject. Even Udet, always so cordial and
correct, had simply looked blank and changed the subject abruptly.
Josten, speaking perfect English with an American accent, had taken him for a tour of the well-built factories, paternally laid out
with housing and recreation for the workers. Modern aircraft were
moving swiftly down the assembly line at a rate much faster than in
America or England.
At one plant, Josten had brought him to a "secret door." They
had gone down a flight of stairs piercing a good six feet of concrete,
and there, totally idle, was a complete duplicate of the factory
above. All the machine tools, the conveyor belts, everything stood
ready for a work force to begin. Josten had pulled him inside one of
the empty glass-windowed offices that lined the factory side.
"And look," he had said, pointing toward a drafting table. "Sharp
ened pencils, one hard, one medium, one soft. We are prepared for anything!"
It was impressive, but too slick. Bandfield had seen immediately that the electrical cables for the machines were all too small to carry
the current they would have required. It was obviously a Potemkin
factory, good for impressing visiting dignitaries and for storing ma
chine tools until they were needed.
Slim hadn't spent much time working in a modern factory. The
discrepancy wouldn't have been obvious to him. He was probably
better able to analyze the personalities of the German leaders.
Patty had her own ideas about them. As soon as she and Bandy had arrived in Berlin they had been invited to a reception that sent her antennae twirling like a bumblebee at a honey tree. Standing in the reception line, she had kept up a running
sotto voce
com
mentary on their hosts. Patty saw—as he had not—that underneath
the cordial smiles of the young Luftwaffe and foreign ministry officers was an agonized need to be correct.