Her Last Flight(35)

Once they reached eight thousand feet, Sam leveled off and turned his head to wink at Irene, as if they’d just gotten away with something mischievous. The radio crackled. Irene turned her attention to the receiver, while Sam turned his attention to the controls. It was the Long Beach naval station, acknowledging her transmission and wishing them Godspeed.

Because the Long Beach naval station already knew what Mr. Rofrano was now announcing to the reporters gathered in the makeshift press room of the airfield cafeteria, while they ate their grilled cheese sandwiches and smoked their cigarettes, passing the time before the scheduled return of the Centauri from its test flight.

The Centauri would not return to Burbank that day, after all. Sam Mallory and Irene Foster had just begun their historic flight to Sydney.





Hanalei, Hawai’i





October 1947



What I didn’t tell you about that Spanish fellow, the one who told me where to find Mallory’s wreckage, was that we were lovers. Or maybe you’ve guessed? I mean, it wouldn’t be out of character for me, and in times of war we are all prone to do reckless things, like take lovers we know will probably die.

We met at an airfield outside Paris, not long after the Allies retook the city from the Nazis. Those were heady days. The journalists all found digs at the Hotel Scribe (and they say the press doesn’t have a sense of humor) where we proceeded to drink the bar dry. That’s another story. I did try to refuse the assignment to photograph Allied airplanes landing and taking off from this French airfield, which only last week belonged to the Luftwaffe, but that didn’t work out so well and Raoul Velázquez de los Monteros was the officer assigned to show me around.

Naturally I was curious about the name. It turned out he’d flown for the Republican Air Force during the civil war in Spain, and when the game was up in early 1938, he fled over the Pyrenees to France and offered his services to the French air command, vowing revenge on Fascists everywhere. Two years later, when the Fascists overran France, he was forced to flee again, this time to join the Royal Air Force, and that was more or less how he wound up escorting an American photographer around the Orly Air Base, ten miles southeast of Paris, on a beautiful early September day in 1944.

You will comprehend that Velázquez did not think much of lady journalists and even less of lady photographers. Moreover, he had been seconded to this American base as a kind of liaison officer after surviving an improbable number of combat tours and was not especially happy in that role. He was gruff with me, which I found endearing. He was not exactly handsome and not exactly tall, but he had this oddly graceful stockiness to him, and a brusque, efficient manner that softened by degrees as we toured the hangars and the tower, and he told me what I could photograph and not photograph. At the time, I wore my brown hair cropped short and no cosmetics at all—maybe a swipe of lipstick, when I could find any—and I must have looked like a different species from the sumptuous Polish mistress he kept in London. (Although possibly she kept him; I was never quite clear on that point, and tellingly he had no money except his RAF pay.) Still, despite all that military bristling we ended up sharing dinner at a cheap little café near the air base, where the delighted proprietor kept refilling our glasses with all these magnificent vintages he had kept hidden from the German occupiers for four long years—resistance takes many forms, you understand—so that one thing led to another and we ended up in bed. C’est la guerre, as the French say.

I was so pleasantly surprised! Not only was Velázquez a generous lover, he had the gift of stamina, even on the outside of two or three bottles of wine. We met often over the next several weeks. I used to snuffle the fur on that barrel chest of his and soak up the pungency of him. My Spanish bear, I called him. He taught me the Spanish phrase for that, which I forget. Anyway, one night I mentioned to him that I was breaking a rule of mine, sleeping with a pilot, and he demanded to know why I wouldn’t sleep with pilots when after all they were the best lovers in the entire world, and eventually we got around to the subject of Sam Mallory. He went quiet and reached for his Gauloises, a habit he had picked up when he fled to France, and smoked without speaking for some time. I had far better sense than to interrupt him. When you’ve been chasing photographs as long as I have, you know when your subject is about to reveal some vulnerable secret.

“I knew Sam Mallory,” he said at last. “He taught me how to fly at the beginning of the war, at the fighter school in El Carmoli on the southern coast of Spain.”



At three o’clock in the afternoon, Lindquist breaks off to go collect the children from school. She seems to have forgotten that I’m not to be trusted, or maybe she thinks that these things she’s told me, these confidences, have won my loyalty. Before she leaves, I ask if I can take her picture, and she doesn’t even hesitate. Go ahead, she says. She’s vain enough to turn the right side of her face to the camera, however.

When she leaves, I turn restless. I read the notes I scribbled in my notebook. I rise from the wicker sofa on the lanai and return across the short stretch of lawn to the cottage, which has been faithfully cleaned by Lani, the housekeeper. I toss the camera and the notebook on the bed and take the key for the suitcase from my pocketbook. The key fits; the lock clicks. But when I lift the lid, I know right away that someone’s been inside, someone who has been very careful to leave everything as she found it.