TWENTY-FOUR

THIS TRIP HAD been planned, orchestrated, and choreographed. Tensely, Dickie drove us up the Henry Hudson and across the George Washington Bridge, then north on Route 17, surely one of the tackiest strips on the Eastern Seaboard, also one of the most congested. That was part of the choreography, use the congestion. Dickie bobbed and weaved. Suddenly I noticed we were not the only yellow cab in North Jersey. There was another in front, identical to the one behind. The three began to exchange places randomly as opportunity allowed, a kind of automotive shell game, three-car monte. Without notice or signal, Dickie swerved into the Parkway Diner; one cab followed while the other continued north.

“We change cars here,” said Dickie, driving through the parking lot and behind the building, where a big blue Buick waited with driver. The second Checker parked beside us between two hulking dumpsters.

“You drive,” said Calabash.

“No, this other guy drives. That’s how Pine’s got it set up—”

“You drive.” Calabash got out of our cab and headed for the Buick, but its driver, a bullnecked fellow, alighted to meet him. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.

It was a short punch, no more than ten inches from start to finish. The bullnecked guy’s head snapped back, ending further debate. His knees buckled and he dropped in a quivering heap. De mean side of Calabash, who climbed back aboard. “Now drive,” he repeated, and Dickie offered no argument. Wisely, the other cab driver stayed in his car.

After some tricky jinks and turns, we picked up the Thruway at Suffern, but we didn’t stay on it long. We took the scenic route to the southern Catskills, and it was somewhere near Saugerties, on an empty country road, that we turned off to the airfield.

East Coast Aviation, said the sign in faded red letters nailed to a telephone pole, flooded corn and stunted alfalfa fields on either side, the mountains up ahead. I squeezed Sybel’s hand across the seat. Dickie began to prattle about his limited sphere of responsibility, a service employee not privy to the decision-making process of his betters. Then Calabash asked, “How many men dey got out here?”

“Jeez, I don’t know…Pine and Bert. Bert’s his mechanic. It’s like an airport. People come. Go. Jones came last night. Chucky.”

Jones? Jones was here?...What did that mean?

“Dey armed?”

“Armed? Jeez, I don’t know. Everybody’s armed now days. I mean, this ain’t no ambush. I mean, if Pine wanted you popped, he ain’t gonna drive you way the fuck and gone out to his own property to do it, right? I mean, right?”

There it was. The airstrip.

“Slow down,” Calabash ordered, replacing the gun in Dickie’s ear.

“Aw, jeez—”

Calabash explained the process to Dickie. When Calabash called for a halt, Dickie would get out of the car and walk beside it as Calabash drove the rest of the way. Then Dickie was to serve as a shield behind whom we would walk slowly, directly to Jellyroll. Any divergence from that plan and “You be suddenly dead.”

The puddled road curved around the end of the grassy strip lined with single-engine airplanes tied down against the cold, gusty wind. There were two buildings, a low-slung cement one not much bigger than a mobile home topped by a control tower made of girders like a fire observation tower, with a glass-enclosed crow’s nest; nearby there was a large metal hangar painted powder blue. Red letters along the eaves said East Coast Aviation.

As we approached the hangar, Calabash ordered Dickie out, and we covered the last hundred yards at the pace of his stiff walk. There was no one about, but then this was no weather for recreational flying.

We stopped in front of the hangar. The door was open, and inside was a huge black twin-engine airplane. It seemed familiar, but I couldn’t make out its lines. Two men were up on the wing, poking at the starboard engine. They looked up when we arrived. One of them was Harry Pine.

When I stepped out of the car behind Dickie, Jellyroll sprinted from the hangar with a single bark, his tail spinning circles as he ran. He leaped at my face, and I crouched down, a lump in my throat, to ruffle his ears. I picked him up and squeezed him. He was fine; somebody had even brushed his coat. He greeted Sybel and Calabash in turn.

“Thank you, Jesus,” muttered Dickie as he scurried back to the car.

Harry Pine climbed down from the wing and strode out to greet us. All smiles and glad hands. His face seemed more misaligned now than when I last saw him, his jawline particularly out of whack. “You got an airplane dog here, Arthur. I can’t hardly keep him out of ‘em. Sybel, always a pleasure to see you. Hope your jailhouse experience wasn’t too scarring. Bunch of Nazis. You must be the bodyguard.”

Calabash ostentatiously shifted the automatic from his right hand to his left and then shook hands with Harry Pine. “Calabash is de name.”

“Calabash. Well, I heard a lotta fine things about you. Looks like you’re pretty well armed there, Calabash.”

“Dat’s true.”

“Well, you won’t be needing firepower today, but if you’re ever looking for steady work, you know where to come. Let’s go into the hangar, get out of the rain, have a drink, and I’ll show you my pride and joy.”

His pride and joy was a Martin B-26 Marauder, a fearful medium bomber that made its appearance about 1943. It was fast, maneuverable but dangerous. I had never been near one in the flesh, but I had seen pictures and read books. Short, thin wings made the B-26 difficult to land. If your landing speed dropped a tick below 170 miles per hour, she stalled and dropped with the aerodynamics of a calliope. Pilots called her the Widow Maker.

Her long flat-black nose stretched out over our heads. The fuselage bore no numbers or identifying marks.

“Hey, Bert,” Pine called up to the man who stood atop the enormous engine nacelle, “come on down, meet my friends, have a bracer.”

The hangar was spotless. A spare engine was mounted on a wheeled rack. It looked mean.

“Is that the original R-2800?” I asked.

“Whoa, Arthur, you know about the R-2800? You hear that, Bert? Arthur knows what he’s looking at.”

Bert, a tall, gawky fellow who looked as if he’d just stepped off the Grapes of Wrath set, appraised me critically, wiped his hands on a spotless rag. “He’s kinda young, ain’t he, to know about the 2800?”

“They got books, Bert.”

Pine poured bourbon neat into five unmatched mugs and passed them around. “Yeah, Arthur, we got two originals in her right now. Two thousand hp on either side.” He poured water from a cooler into a sixth mug and put it down for Jellyroll, who lapped up half of it. We stood under the looming black wing and drank our bourbon. Pine explained in loving technical detail the modifications he’d made to his “Bird,” expanded tankage that increased her range to something over three thousand miles, new propellers with finer pitch control, and fuel injection. “Bert here keeps her in the air. Bert’s a genius.”

“Yeah, well,” said Bert, Adam’s apple churning modestly, “there ain’t many of these birds around no more.”

“Like to see her inside? I had to make a few modifications, but I left the cockpit just like she was. Come on.”

“I’ll wait here,” said Sybel.

“Aw, come on, Sybel. Let an old flyboy impress a pretty lady with his macho machine.” Pine smiled and ducked beneath the belly of his black pride and joy. He opened a round hatch and pulled down an aluminum stepladder.

I wanted to see inside. So did Jellyroll. He bounded to the foot of the little ladder, and Pine hoisted him aboard. “Ladies first, after the dogs.” Sybel climbed aboard and disappeared inside the dark hull. I followed, and Pine motioned for Calabash to follow me.

“After you,” Calabash said to him.

“Sure, Calabash.” Pine climbed in, then Calabash.

It took a moment for our eyes to adjust to the gloom. We stood on the flight deck aft of the pilot’s compartment, where the navigator and the flight engineer might have sat. Six airline seats, three on either side in tight rows, had been added, but that was the only visible compromise to amenity. The compartment was unpaneled. The thin alloy outer skin curved around the spars and ribs. You could even see the rivet heads.

“Listen to this music,” said Pine with boyish delight. He went forward and sat in the pilot’s seat. I leaned over his shoulder to watch him fire up the big radial engines. The port propeller turned slowly two or three revolutions before it exploded into a blur. Needles jumped behind tiny glass dials. The right engine roared to life with an angry spit of blue flame. The airplane shook and vibrated, and Jellyroll seemed to love it. “Come on, sit down,” Pine shouted at me. I sat in the copilot’s seat on the right side, Pine and me sitting shoulder to shoulder. Then he tapped my knee and pointed out the left side of the windscreen.

A black car had pulled up beside the Buick that brought us. Four men in suits got out simultaneously and stood beside the open doors in the drizzle. They watched us. I couldn’t see their expressions, but their body language didn’t look friendly.

“Who are they?”

“Boombotts,” he shouted.

“What? Boombotts? What the hell’s that?” I shouted back.

“Hoods, wiseguys, La Cosa Nostra, no sense of humor. I don’t want to talk to them right now. Here, use these.” Harry Pine passed me a set of blue Sony headphones. He put on an identical set. “Now we don’t have to shout.” His voice seemed to be inside my head. I didn’t like the intimacy. He pushed both throttles forward, and we began to roll.

“Hey!” Calabash demanded, leaning into the pilot’s compartment. “What’s dis?”

“Take it easy, Calabash. We’re just taxiing out to the other end of the runway where we can chat in peace. Got Boombotts to port.”

“Boombotts?”

Pine taxied past their car, and they watched without moving a muscle until Pine intentionally kicked the tail around ninety degrees, brushing the Boombotts with the prop wash, a blast of dusty, hot air that must have been moving about two hundred miles an hour when it hit them.

There was no mirror on my side, but Pine was looking in his and grinning like Peck’s Bad Boy.

“You don’t fly this thing off of this airstrip, do you?” I ventured tentatively.

“Of course. Where do you think I fly it from?”

“But it’s so short,” I said.

“Short. Yes, it is.” He giggled and pulled on a Mets cap that had been hanging on a hook with the radio headphones.

“Wait, you’re not—”

“Sit down back there, buckle up.”

He was.

Both engines screamed, but Pine kept the brakes full on. RPMs climbed steadily. The airplane churned and bucked to go. The tail seemed to rear in frustration. Pine popped the brakes and shoved the throttle full forward; Bert’s props at maximum pitch ate through the wet air. The acceleration jerked me against the seat back.

Trees! A mature forest ahead! Now I could distinguish oaks from elms, too close, white knuckles. Everything changed. We were airborne and over the treetops. Pine gently drew the wheel toward his belly, and daylight turned to darkness and turbulence, rain. But then we burst into sunlight, the first I had seen in weeks, still climbing.