The Rocketeer (9 page)

As they moved toward two empty seats, the announcer of the newsreel that was unspooling on the screen intoned, “But as rumors of war haunt the Continent, Herr Hitler claims to be working for world peace . . . and the sovereignty of nations.”

Cliff glanced up and saw the Nazis giving Chancellor Hitler that annoying, stiff-armed salute. It bugged the hell out of him. He’d had a lengthy argument with Malcolm about it one day at the Bulldog Café, when Malcolm—who’d been a pilot during the Great War—stated that Hitler could blow hot air all he wanted, but that he would never dare to start something really big because the Krauts had learned their hard lessons back in 1918. The world had kicked their tails and could do so again at any time, and that knowledge would keep the Germans in line.

Cliff, on the other hand, hadn’t been so sure. There was something in the pictures and newsreels he saw of Hitler that gave him chills. Chills and an uneasy feeling that the world was becoming a trickier place to live with every passing day.

As Cliff and Jenny seated themselves, the image on the screen changed as a zeppelin with a bold swastika painted on its tail descended from the skies over someplace or other. The announcer said with incredible cheerfulness, “And just to prove he’s a swell guy, here comes the chancellor’s latest goodwill gesture—the mighty airship
Luxembourg,
on a coast-to-coast friendship tour of the United States.”

Jenny and Cliff divvied up the snacks as the zeppelin’s captain and crew mingled with an excited crowd on the screen. “First stop, New Jersey,” said the announcer, “where the locals turn out in droves to meet Captain Heinrick and the crew. Winning friends the old-fashioned way—with good German chocolate!” Sure enough, the German airmen were handing out candy bars to eagerly grabbing children.

Cliff shook his head in disgust. Kids would do anything for a few slabs of candy, and here this stupid newsreel was making that seem like a good thing. To top it off, the Heinrick guy turned and waved to the camera as the announcer said, “Welcome, boys! Look us up when you get to Hollywood!”

There followed afterward a trailer for a new Errol Flynn picture,
The Adventures of Robin Hood.
There was a quick shot of Olivia de Havilland saying to Flynn, “You speak treason!” Cliff chuckled to himself. She’d said the exact same thing to him in
Captain Blood.
Apparently Errol never tired of talking treason, and she never tired of hearing it. Flynn seemed like a decent enough duck. Anybody was better than that Sinclair creep.

After that came a trailer for a new cliffhanger entitled
The Return of Milo Flint,
which looked to be a two-fisted detective flick, and then Cliff settled into the seat as the movie began and Neville Sinclair’s name appeared on the screen in huge letters.

Jenny nudged him. “You’ll love this.”

“I love it already,” muttered Cliff. “If I loved it any more, I’d be in the hospital.”

The nurse emerged from the patient’s room and walked toward the police officer who was seated at the nurses’ station, adjusting the dials on a radio. Spooky music came on, followed by the sounds of ominously creaking doors and hollow, evil laughter. He looked up and asked her, “How’s he doing?”

“I just gave him a sedative,” said the nurse. “He’ll sleep like a baby.”

Inside the hospital room, Wilmer, in heavy traction, lay dozing in bed. The only sounds in the room were his gentle snoring mingling with the creepy radio organ music filtering through the door.

Then, slowly, the window slid open, the breeze billowing in the curtains. A massive figure crept into the room, moving with a quiet that was in remarkable contrast to its size. It approached the sleeping form of Wilmer and then, with a large thumbnail, cracked a match and held the faint illumination up to Wilmer’s face.

The man—if such a word could be used—who peered down at the sleeping gangster, looked like something out of a Boris Karloff film. A neanderthal brute in a badly fitting pinstripe suit. His massive jaw was distended, his cheekbones were flat, and he didn’t have eyebrows so much as a heavy ridge that sat over small, sunken, piglike eyes.

He reached up and clutched one of Wilmer’s traction cords in a meaty hand, and gave it a sharp yank.

Wilmer’s groggy eyes fluttered open, and then his pupils dilated in horror.

He recognized the creature looming over him, even in the poor light. He’d seen him once, but that one time was more than enough to make an indelible impression. He’d been called Lothar by that Limey fruit that Eddie had been contracting with. Lothar—a name out of a horror flick. Went with the face.

“It’s you,” muttered Wilmer. “Tell your boss I don’t answer to nobody but Eddie.”

Lothar eased his massive hands beneath Wilmer’s body and then lifted him easily.

Wilmer gasped, having no control of the situation at all. The eeriness of the moment was heightened by the creepy music that was pouring out of the radio in the hallway, and suddenly Wilmer was even more afraid than when he’d been staring down the front of a plane that was hurtling toward him. More frightened than when the feds had been firing on him. More frightened than any time he could remember in his life.

“Okay! Okay! Ease off,” he gasped. “I pulled a switch, see? I got the dingus stashed good . . . at the airfield. Hangar three. Some old plane . . .”

And then he felt a horrible pressure begin to be exerted on him, a pressure as horrible as the satisfied, evil grin that played across the man-monster’s lips.

“No!” gasped out Wilmer, and for the umpteenth time the thought went through his head,
I was going to quit! This was my last job!

At the nurses’ station they heard the screams but thought they were coming from the radio. They sounded a bit too loud, and the cop reached over to lower the volume, but before he could do so the program went to a commercial . . . and the screams kept on coming.

It was then they realized what was happening, and the cop charged the door of the room where Wilmer was supposed to be sleeping. Wilmer, the man whom he was supposed to be guarding. Wilmer, who had talked endlessly of this being his last job and going straight.

The cop shouldered open the door, his revolver drawn, with the nurse directly behind him. Her hands flew to her mouth and she screamed.

The cop winced at the sight.

This had indeed turned out to be Wilmer’s last job. However, he had not gone straight. In fact, he was just the opposite: he was hanging suspended above the bed, dangling from the traction gear, his body bent backward in half. His eyes were dead and staring.

The cop rushed to the open window, where curtains were fluttering like ghosts. He peered out into the darkness. Nothing.

He pulled back into the window, turned, and went to call his chief. His superior was not going to be the least bit happy to hear this.

And on the ledge above, a massive pair of wingtip shoes shuffled off into the night.

T
he Bulldog Café was a stone’s throw from Chaplin Airfield and the second home—some would say the first—to a number of the fliers in Bigelow’s Air Circus.

There had never been a café more accurately named than the Bulldog, for that essentially was what it was. It had been done up to resemble a large white and black canine, a full story high, sitting on its haunches. Its eyes were wide open in a perpetually surprised expression, as if amazed that anyone would actually come there to eat. A pipe stuck out of its mouth with a sign reading
OPEN
hanging down from it. The exterior had the word
EATS
painted in big letters on either side, and down the front of its left and right front legs were the words, respectively,
TAMALES
and
ICE CREAM
, which, so claimed some cynics, were indistinguishable from each other the way that Millie, the owner and head cook, prepared them.

The door to the café was situated smack in the fake animal’s belly, and at that moment a large, genuine bulldog was scraping at the door, asking to be let in.

Millie, wearing a gingham dress with white apron, came to the door in response to the animal’s pathetic whining, but her face was stern. “Forget it, Butch,” she said. “I’d let you in, but that genius over there”—she pointed in annoyance in the direction of Cliff Secord, who was seated opposite Jenny in a booth—“had to go and feed you some beef jerky. You know what that stuff does to you. I can’t have you in here stinking up the joint.”

Butch whined for sympathy and lay down on his side, looking pathetic and questioning.

“I know, I know,” said Millie in irritation. “Was up to me, I’d’ve thrown Cliff out with you. Thought he was being funny, Mr. Secord did. But he’s here with his girl and all and, well, you know how it is.”

Butch looked up at her and obviously didn’t know how it was.

Millie sighed. “Wait here.” Moments later she returned with a large soup bone which she tossed to Butch, and the obnoxiously homely dog caught it in his large mouth and trotted away, satisfied with the transaction.

Millie walked back to behind the counter, but not before stopping to give Cliff a quick rap on the head with a frying pan. This drew amused laughter from Skeets, Goose, and Malcolm. “Hey!” Cliff protested.

“That’s for giving Butch the beef jerky,” she said.

“I could get amnesia or something!” Cliff told her, rubbing his head. “Forget how to fly, or where I live or my phone number or something.”

“Phone number!” said Jenny suddenly. “Oh, thanks for reminding me, Millie. I’ve got a new phone number.”

“Wish she’d picked a way to remind you that was easier on my noggin,” Cliff said.

“They changed the number on the pay phone at the boardinghouse,” she said. “We were one digit off from a movie theater, and people kept calling and asking us for the times.”

Cliff patted himself down. “Anybody got a piece of paper Jenny can write her new number on?” he called out.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, and she got up and went to the wall next to the café’s phone. Nearby were framed photos and other aviation mementos. And around the phone was a series of various phone numbers written right on the wall. Jenny pulled out the pen she always kept with her, not wanting to be caught short the first time someone might ask for her autograph, and wrote ‘Jenny’ on the wall, followed by her number and, as always, her trademark heart with the arrow through it. Then she put the pen back and returned to the table.

By this point Cliff had recovered enough from the unexpected visitation on his skull by a skillet to remember what he’d been in the middle of saying. “Oh, the Sinclair film!” he said.

“Yeah, you were tellin’ us about it,” Goose said.

“Right. Right. So . . . get this, fellas! At the end of the movie he flies over the enemy trenches and drops a bottle of champagne!”

“Let me guess!” said Goose. “It hits the general and we win the war, right?” This drew a chorus of guffaws from the fliers. They were used to the Hollywood depiction of themselves as all-powerful heroes, but giving good booze to the bad guys . . . uh-uh.

Privately, Jenny had thought it was a bit much herself, but she was the one who had chosen the movie and talked it up, and she felt constrained to defend it. “It was symbolic!” she said. “He was being chivalrous!”

“Where’d he get it?” asked Skeets. “The champagne, I mean. They didn’t have liquor stores at the front.”

“Not that I can recall,” Malcolm said thoughtfully, giving the impression that he was actually trying to remember if there had been liquor stores. “Would’a been nice . . .”

“It doesn’t matter
where
he got it, the point is . . . oh, forget it,” Jenny said in exasperation. She turned to Millie, figuring a woman would understand. “It was so romantic, Millie. I cried and cried. Neville was wonderful.”

“ ‘Neville’?” said Cliff, making no attempt to hide his irritation. “Guy’s never been
up
in a plane, much less flown one.”

“Who cares?” said Millie. “He’s a living doll.”

At that moment Patsy, Millie’s ten-year-old daughter, approached Malcolm. With her brown hair in braids and her general tomboyish attitude, she reminded Millie so much of herself at that age that she found it hard to believe she wasn’t staring into a mirror that showed the past. Patsy, wearing a plaid shirt and blue overalls, was carrying a little tin airplane with a broken wheel.

Malcolm smiled down at her. He’d remembered the day she was born, and now here she was, more like a genuine person every day.

“Malcolm, the wheel came off,” she said.

“Lemme see, princess,” said Malcolm. “Give it to me, we’ll fix it up.”

“Give it to Cliff, he’ll fly it,” laughed Goose. Jenny looked at him in mild confusion and Cliff shot Goose a look that immediately shut him up.

Malcolm, meantime, said to Patsy while studying the plane, “Did I ever tell you about the time I got shot down by the Red Baron?”

Patsy innocently began to nod her head, rather emphatically. But then she caught her mother pointedly shaking her head and giving her the “be polite” stare. So Patsy instantly shifted gears and started shaking her head just as Malcolm looked up.