Last Plane to Heaven (14 page)

First Ferris Roubicek had come into her life. Then he was gone again, leaving her with a broken heart, a failed business, a Japanese invasion, and a coin.

She wasn't sure the coin wasn't the worst of the whole business.

The scrape of chair legs prodded Springfield McKenna out of her reverie. “You still here?” asked a rough Aussie voice. Which was good, because her Dutch was crap; mostly useful for talking to bartenders and sailors.

Springfield peered up to discover that to her surprise she was mildly drunk. Otherwise Captain Waldo Innerarity, Royal Australian Air Force, wouldn't have looked so good to her.

No way.

Not even for a moment.

He wasn't all that bad a view to take in, she had to admit. Tall for a pilot, with the shoulders of a shore patrolman and pale blue eyes like the Andaman Sea. Ruddy from sun and drinking, brown hair with enough of a kink to argue about where all his ancestors might have come from. All of that just made him more interesting to think about.

But looking good? Waldo? She'd have sooner kissed her brother.

“You're out of uniform,” Springfield said. Which was true but pointless. Waldo wore canvas trousers and a short-sleeved linen
barong Tagalog
. The embroidery looked a little queer on him.

“Uniforms might be pretty unpopular around here soon.” Waldo threw himself down in the chair with reckless disregard for the stresses involved and signaled the bartender for a drink. The Hotel Hindia-Belanda knew how all its regulars took their booze.

Springfield was pretty sure that the Indonesians and New Guineans in Merauke hated their white masters with an indiscriminate abandon, but at least around the hotel they smiled and kept their opinions behind the kitchen doors. She was careful never to order any food that could easily be spat in on the way to the table.

Sometimes one just had to trust the cook.

“Not all of 'em,” Springfield finally said, realizing she hadn't been holding up her end of the conversation. “Jap yellow could be all the rage for the next season's fashion.”

Waldo nodded and reached for the coin on the table. She snatched it away before his big, oddly delicate fingers could close on it.

“What you got there, lass?” he asked. Inerarrity's voice went oddly soft, as it did so often when he spoke to her. She knew what
that
meant, coming from a man like him.

“Nothing anyone here cares about.” That, at least, was true.

“Been taking payoffs?”

She had to laugh. “In American nickels? One at a time? You're out of your mind, flyboy.”

He leaned forward as a sweating glass of gin garnished with a sliver of mango tapped on the table. Springfield avoided the waiter's eye. Waldo bit his upper lip, then asked, “So if you ain't being paid, why are you still here?”

She met his stare with a level gaze of her own. “Everybody's got to be somewhere.” The verbal equivalent of a shrug.

“Not every somewhere is in fear of Jap bombings. Or patrols. The boys had a shootup two nights ago in the hills not forty miles east of here.”

“So I heard.” Rumors, rumors.
The Japs are coming.
“They've got a lot better things to do than knock over one-horse towns where the horse died.”

He smiled like moonlight on the Torres Strait. “You've got a lot better things to do than sit around waiting for one-horse towns to be knocked over.”

Springfield thought that one through for a moment. “Are you propositioning me, Leftenant Innerarity?”

His smile blossomed to a grin. “Hell no, Sheila. A man ain't that daft. But I am trying to save your damned fool life. If you want a seat out of town, I'm flying over to Darwin in two days. Hitch a ride, see what comes next.”

The name slipped unbidden from her lips. “Ferris Roubicek.”

Waldo frowned. “
Mr.
Ferris is gone from these parts three months and more. Last seen on a Chinese steamer heading for Ceylon. And well understood not to be coming back.”

“I'm tapped out,” Springfield admitted. “Ferris took me good. I was running a pretty solid business in spice and batik, even with the war coming. Maybe especially because of the war. But he … promised…”
Confidences whispered under starlight as the insects whined against the netting.
She tried again, her head growing hot and tight under Innerarity's infuriatingly sympathetic gaze. “I made a bad deal, Waldo. I'm living on the last of my credit now.” She turned the hobo nickel over in her hand, felt its patina through her skin even under the table and out of sight.

Somehow it all came down to the damned coin. Yet she hadn't been able to get rid of it yet.

The words “until death do us part” sprang unbidden and unwelcome into her mind.

“All the more reason to leave, eh? Seat's yours, no need to pay.”

“Not in coin,” she replied.

With those words, his face closed and his frown drew tight. Springfield knew she hadn't been fair, but damn it, this was
Waldo.
Not someone who had any right to have an interest in her.

“Besides,” she added. “The Japs might never get here.”

He stood up, tossed back his gin in one huge gulp that must have burned all the way down. The mango slice tumbled into his mouth with the booze. “You just keep telling yourself that, Spring. Who knows? Might even be true.”

With that, the lieutenant left, taking his big shoulders and his manly ways with him.

After a while, Springfield signed her chitty and trudged up to her room. Doubtless the waiter would report what he'd heard to Inigo van Damme, the manager. Then the manager would ask, again, about her bringing her bill up to date.

She was fairly certain they wouldn't take a lone skull-faced nickel in payment.

*   *   *

That night Springfield McKenna had the dream again. Japs in their mustard-yellow uniforms and peaked hats walked the muddy streets of Merauke. The city was under occupation, the Dutch and Australian defenders vanished as surely as if they'd never been here. There weren't even blood spatters or bullet holes. Just Japanese soldiers everywhere. Stolid. Silent. Shuffling. Staring at her with empty eyes.

They all marched to the beat of some distant tin drum. A rattle that carried from the hills outside of town all the way down to the portside slums along the banks of the Maro River. Even the endless nightly concerto of insect and bird and jungle screech had quieted in the face of that beat.

She heard that noise. Metallic. Small. Sly. It carried everywhere. It informed her heart and doused her hearing and set her thoughts to smoldering.

With a sweaty, fetid start, Springfield realized she was awake. But the beat that had carried through her dream of invasion still echoed.

It was the nickel. In her bureau drawer. The coin was rattling. Marching like a tiny army of its own through her dreams and through her life.

She slid from her bed and tugged on a pair of airman's coveralls. In the sticky heat of the New Guinea night, Springfield didn't even bother with foundation garments or makeup. She just dressed swiftly and angrily, then took a discarded cigarette tin in hand and stood before the bureau.

Inside, the skull-faced nickel rattled on its own. Counting time. As if it were one of those deathwatch beetles.

“You bastard,” she hissed, though Springfield couldn't have said whether she was talking to Roubicek or Innerarity or her father or who. She yanked the drawer open with a savage tug and captured the dancing nickel in an empty tin. It rattled a moment, then fell quiet.

“You bastard,” she repeated, and stalked out into the night.

*   *   *

It wasn't far from the Hotel Hindia-Belanda to the waterfront. Though in truth, nothing was far from anything else in Merauke. She scuttled the few blocks, keeping to the deepest shadows where possible.

As she approached the dockside, a single shot echoed. Springfield froze. She wasn't especially afraid of men with guns, but she had a lot of respect for what they could do in a careless moment. The only thing stupider than being shot in a war zone would be being shot by accident.

“Damn it all.” Springfield froze next to a stack of fish traps that reeked of rot and creaked slightly in the wind questing off the night's water.

A voice called out nearby, indistinct but with the overtones of Dutch.

Someone answered cautiously from farther down the docks.

A short laugh, barked with the clipped nervousness of a man under pressure.

Then another shot.

Her nerve broke. She ran back toward the Hotel Hindia-Belanda, cigarette tin clutched so tightly in one hand that the metal was being crushed. When Springfield reached her room, she dumped the coin out on the scarred marble top of the bureau amid the grimy doilies and empty atomizers. The skull grinned up at her.

“I should have known it wouldn't be that easy,” she told it with a glare.

Waldo's offer of a seat on his flight was looking better and better. She absolutely hated that.

*   *   *

Rumors the next day were of Japanese spies on the waterfront, and graves being violated at the cathedral. Springfield was hard-pressed to see how those two could be connected. That didn't stop people from speculating.

She used her copious free time to pack one small valise. It wouldn't do for van Damme to think she was leaving with her bill unpaid, after all. And nothing a woman wanted or needed in Merauke was going to be too hard to replace in Darwin, or wherever she wound up.

Lieutenant Innerarity wouldn't be footing her bills, Springfield promised herself.

She packed her last pair of silk stockings, a few necessaries, and one nice red dress. Just in case. With her dark hair and pale complexion, the color was striking, setting off her green eyes to great advantage. At least, that's what her mother had always said. Springfield figured she'd need all the advantages she could get.

Her gulden were pointless outside of the Dutch East Indies. Let the hotel staff squabble over the small stack of coins. She still had two hundred American dollars, the last of her working capital remaining from Ferris Roubicek's taking of her wealth and pride.
That
was what she couldn't give to the manager. What she couldn't afford to lose.

A few clothes, a little money, a nail file, and the nickel.

That was it.

Half a decade working here in the islands, a place where being a woman wasn't an automatic disqualification from business, by virtue of her being an American. All she had to show for five years was a valise that could have carried half a dozen newspapers. A little money and a red dress.

Even the rest of the clothes she'd leave behind. She'd meet Waldo at dawn in her coveralls.

That dealt with, Springfield decided to go out. She couldn't stand spending the day under the suspicious eyes of the waiters and the bartender. Everyone knew the white people were one panic away from leaving.

*   *   *

That night, she dreamt again of Japs in the streets. They shuffled as they walked, dragging their feet and staring downward as if afraid to say anything that might compromise their fealty to their emperor. They were everywhere in Merauke, filling the streets as if division after division had landed and overrun the place. Shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, the soldiers moved in eerie silence except for the beat of their one tin drum.

She refused to wake up for that damned coin.

Absolutely refused.

*   *   *

In the end, Springfield awoke for Waldo Innerarity. Or at least his knock.

“We've got to get moving, love.” His voice through the door was low almost to the point of being indistinct.

Her ride out. The dreams, the shots. It was over here in Merauke, her whole party done for. Ferris Roubicek had blown out the candles, but even the cake was nothing but crumbs now.

Springfield had slept in her flight overalls. She tugged on a pair of men's low quarter boots, ran her hands through her hair twice, grabbed her valise, unlocked the door, and threw it open.

“I—” Waldo swallowed his words as he stared at her.

“Ain't seen a woman before, flyboy?” She chucked him under the chin. “Let's go before the manager busts me.”

“Too late, I am afraid.” Van Damme stepped up behind the lieutenant. “You cannot be leaving us without a settlement?”

“Not at all,” she began sweetly, but Waldo elbowed Inigo in the gut, effectively ending the discussion. Springfield shot him a wild look of thanks. She reached into her valise for the skull-faced nickel, intending to leave it for a tip, but all she could think of in that moment was the marching Japanese in their endless, mindless numbers.

“Get out while you can, van Damme,” she whispered, the best tip she knew to give him. But Innerarity was already tugging her arm away, away, away.

*   *   *

The RAAF flying boat looked like a real beast as it floated at the dock. Beyond, over the hills east of town, the sun pearled the eastern sky the color of the inside of a compact. “Short Sunderland,” Waldo said, as if that meant anything to her. “The boys are aboard already. Don't say nothing you don't have to, it'll go easier on us all.”

Springfield felt a sudden and unexpected attack of cold feet. She stood on the dock, looking up at the looming side of the aircraft. Something whirred—bilge pump, starter motor, she had no idea.

She felt as if she were being invited to climb into her coffin.

“Waldo…” Springfield whispered.

“Come on, Sheila.” He tugged at her arm. “We've got to be away before the sun comes up.”

Before anyone sees me getting on the airplane,
she thought. Then she remembered Inigo van Damme gasping on the floral carpet in the hotel's upstairs corridor.

She was committed now.

“I'm ready,” Springfield whispered, mortified at the squeak in her voice.