Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (26 page)

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.

TWENTY-FIVE

W
E FLEW DUE north by the compass for several minutes, which Pine measured on his weighty Rolex, then turned westerly for about five minutes. The sky was cobalt, deep purple at the outer reaches, and the tops of the low, dirty clouds billowed white pillars that rose five thousand feet above us. I was frightened, but that was nothing new, a given; yet sitting there beside Harry Pine in this vibrating living relic, I felt something else rare to reclusive temperaments like mine, something like exhilaration. I didn't ponder the landing to come, a short, forest-ringed field, limited visibility, aboard an unforgiving killer. Or perhaps I did, and that only contributed to my exhilaration.

I thought about my father in a kind of evocative, detailless way. Since I never laid eyes on him, that was typically the way I thought about him. Now the airplane summoned him up, the olive drab, the dials and flickering needles, the monotone roar of the engines, Harry Pine himself. Airplane things, airplane smells of oil, paint, and other liquids in unique combination, airplane views of earth and sky—these were the final things my father experienced. I glanced at Harry Pine. He flew with his fingertips and toes, he activated things, deactivated others, rolled trim wheels, adjusted and anticipated with practiced, economical movements. This is what he was born to, said The Hawk. Pine grinned at me and said, "We're gonna buzz some Boombotts."

"Huh?"

"Sure, liven up their day. See, this is the Italian Alps, the area down there. More Boombotts than hemlocks, the dumb fucks. They come up for the weekends with their wives and mistresses and psychos, leave the cars running just in case." He turned in his seat and shouted, "Hey, you folks back there, you're just gonna have to take your seats. You got this airplane all out of trim."

Sybel and Calabash settled into the seats along the port side. Jellyroll flopped in the narrow aisle, never taking his eyes off me. Is this all right? his eyes asked me. How would I know?

Pine edged the wheel forward—instant acceleration—and we nosed back into the dirty, turbulent clouds. I searched the olive instrument panel for the air-speed indicator. I could hardly see the engine, whose propeller tips arced two feet from my right ear. Pine flew calmly on instruments. Sybel shouted something in a tight, throaty voice. Raindrops, one by one, materialized on the windscreen, to be sucked away in the rush of air. They fascinated me. But what if this murk held, opaquely, right down to the granite mountaintops? I'd read the books. These conditions killed. The pilot grows confused in the absence of ground orientation, fucks up, stalls, spins in, dies. Film at eleven. Yet Pine was not confused. I looked at him, his profile, long, straight nose and brow, cool, keen eyes moving in counterclockwise circles over his instruments. This man was not the sort to fly us into a mountain; despite white knuckles and stiff legs, I
knew
he wouldn't do that. He was talking to me. What was he saying?

"Huh!"

"Casa Palermo."

"Casa Wha—!"

"Casa Palermo. That's the name of the place we're gonna beat up—" He flipped his sunglasses up on his forehead.

Then the dive steepened, screaming down through visibility like that in a cup of two-day-old instant coffee. Then he began to show off. He plucked a Baby Ruth bar from his shirt pocket, bit off the wrapper, and casually munched, flying one-handed. He passed
half to me, but my fingers wouldn't hold on. It bounced off my knee and fell to the floor. "You don't like Baby Ruth, Arthur? There—" he said as we punched through the bottom of the rain clouds in direct line with the Casa Palermo. I saw several buildings, twin swimming pools, a city block's worth of tangent tennis courts, and clots of people sitting in chaise lounges under umbrellas.

We went in at umbrella level. What sort of person sits around a swimming pool on chaise lounges in weather like this? We were low enough to see their heads flash up toward the onrushing typhoon. Maybe 350 miles per hour. Screaming. I saw them panic and dive beneath their seats or bolt in terror, slipping, sliding on the wet deck like Keystone Cops. Mortality on the wing. The crazy
casa
vanishing beneath the black nose.

Pine giggled. "Boombotts don't grasp subtlety." The skin at the comer of his eye crinkled and danced.

We climbed back into and above the roiling rain clouds, up into clarity seldom seen from the ground. Pine pulled on the shades.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Place called Dutch Frigate Shoals."

"Where's that?"

"Northeastern Bahamas."

"Bahamas? Bahama
Islands?"

"That'll give us time for a nice long chat. We got all the amenities aboard, head, running water, movie."

"No. Take us back,
now."

"Well, the fact is you don't have a long list of options, Arthur. Sure, you could ask Calabash to wad me up like a ball of cellophane. Wouldn't take much effort from a man like that. Can you fly a B-26?"

I tried another approach. "If you plan to kill us, you better plan again. The FBI
wants
you to kill us so they have cause to swarm all over you."

"They're out of luck, Arthur. I don't often kill my employees. Bad on morale. However, I have a bone to pick with you on that score, the employee score. You failed to tell your old boss about Jones and the late Ricardo's treachery. Or maybe you didn't think it worth mentioning I had rats aboard?"

"How could I have known? I didn't know that until Cobb told me after they let us go."

"Interesting. Now why do you suppose he'd do that?"