Mysterious Aviator (4 page)

He glanced at me. “I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed a job so much as that, taking it all round. It was damn hard work. But it suited me—the life did.”

He stopped talking, and remained staring moodily into the fire. I realised that the next episode had proved less prosperous and left him to himself for a bit. The fire was dying
down; I got up and threw a few more lumps on, and raked the ashes from the hearth. I settled down into my chair again and lit a pipe. It was about four o’clock in the morning.

“What happened next?” I asked. I wanted to hear the end of this story if it meant sitting up all night.

He roused himself, and smiled a little. “What happened next,” he said quietly, “was that Mollie left me.”

I wasn’t prepared for that, though on his own showing nothing was more probable. I said something or other, but he went on again without listening.

“It was my fault, of course. We’d never been able to have a proper home, or the kids we wanted. And one way or another I’d given her a rotten time of it. We hadn’t lived together for two years when that happened. There was a cousin of hers, a chap in the Navy … She was still a girl, you know—a good bit younger than me. I went down to see her at her people’s place.”

He was quiet for a minute, and then he laughed. “I came away out of it as soon as I could. There was a girl at Gloucester who got me out of that mess. Worked in an office there. She was a damn good sort, an’ her name was Mollie, too. I took her to the Regent at Cheltenham, and we spent a night there, and I sent my wife the bill. And presently I got a notice that she was suing for divorce….”

He sat brooding in his chair for a bit then, staring into the fire, immersed in memories. But presently he roused himself again.

“That killed my luck,” he said. “After that happened everything went wrong. We started off again from Gloucester to do the south coast, and at every place we went we showed a loss. At every ruddy place. Places like Taunton and Honiton, where we’d been really busy a couple of years before—if we got a dozen of them into the air it was all we did. People seemed to have got tired of it. We carried on that way for a couple of months, and then the directors got tired of it too. I brought the machine up to Croydon to be sold, and that was the end of that.”

He lit another cigarette. “I hadn’t got a home to go to then,” he said.

He said no more than that, but something in the way he said it revealed to me something of what that meant to him. I know now that he was a man of little stamina. In all his roving and uncertain life since the war he had always had a base, somewhere to retire to, to be alone with his wife and to regain his self-respect. I think his wife must have been a great backbone to him. He wasn’t the sort of man ever to make a name for himself alone, and in the loss of his wife he had suffered a grave injury.

“I had about fifty pounds in hand, and while that lasted I hung about Croydon touting for a job. But there wasn’t much doing there. Stavanger gave me a few odd taxi trips to do for him, but nothing regular. And then I went and did my Reserve training, and that carried me on for a few weeks.

“By the end of the summer I was on the street,” he said. “It was either earn something or starve then. I got a job in a garage, as a fitter. In Acton. Two pounds ten a week.”

He grinned unpleasantly at me. “Temporary, of course. Just till something else turned up. I suppose that’s how everyone looks at it when they go down the drain.”

He told me about his life in the garage in little short, cynical sentences. From something that he said I gained a very clear impression that he had been drinking heavily ever since his wife left him, a circumstance which probably accounted for his failure to get a flying job. Unlike the other failures to which he likened himself, however, he hated the garage enough to rouse himself to get out of it. Possibly he gave up drinking—I don’t know about that. At all events, he told me that he began to look about for a chance to get out of the country. He thought that if he could get out to Australia he might be able to pick up a job in aviation again. He said he wanted to get out of England.

He could have got a free passage to Australia, but he didn’t know that.

And then a queer thing happened to him. He used to take
a packet of lunch to work with him from his fifth-rate lodgings in Harlesden, and every other day he bought a copy of the
Daily Mail
to read in the lunch hour. And there, one day, he read an article about the Red Menace.

He lit another cigarette. “Bit of luck I got the paper that day,” he said. “I might have missed it. God knows what would have happened then—I was about through with fitter’s work. It said in the article that the Russians were building up the hell of an air service that was getting to be a menace to the whole of the rest of Europe. I’d heard somewhere or other that they were enlarging their service, but I’d no idea till I read that bit in the paper that it was anything like that. And then it went on to say how they were getting hold of British ex-officers and sending them out to Russia to train the Red Army in the latest tricks of aerial warfare, and what a sin and a shame it was that Englishmen should go and do that, and how the Government ought to stop it. It went on like that for a couple of columns. It said that they were paying as much as a thousand a year to these chaps.”

He lifted his eyes from the fire and stared across at me. In the firelight and the shadows of the room there was a momentary pause. “Well,” he said at last, “so they were.”

I stirred in my chair, a little uneasily. “You went after it, then?”

“Like a knife. So would you have done.”

He read that at lunch time, and he abandoned the garage and went straight off to the Public Baths in the High Street and had a sixpenny hot bath. Then he went back to his room and got out the most respectable of his old suits, and found he had a visiting card left, and he went straight off to the Soviet Embassy in Chesham Place.

He sat there in my armchair, staring into the fire for a minute and fingering the matchbox on his knee. “And it was all quite true,” he said. “I’d got away from all that muck, just when I was beginning to think I never would.”

The tone of relief in which he said that silenced me abruptly. It silenced me then, and it has done so ever since. For him, service with the Soviet meant a deliverance from hell, and a
chance to get away and make a fresh start. That was a great injury that his wife did him when she went.

It was a sort of Polish Jew who interviewed him. He took Lenden through it pretty thoroughly, asking him the most searching questions about his war service. He was particularly anxious to know whether he had had any experience on postwar single-seater fighting machines. Lenden had done half an hour on one of the earlier Siskins, and made some capital out of that; for the rest he judged it better to speak the truth.

They sent him away with instructions to come back next day. In the interval they must have looked up his record at the Air Ministry in some occult manner, for they told him quite a lot about himself that he hadn’t mentioned before. Then they gave him a pretty stiff medical examination, and then they photographed him. And finally they presented him with a contract, drawn up and ready for him to sign; eight hundred a year for a two years’ engagement, with repatriation at the end of it. He signed it on the spot, and they gave him thirty pounds salary in advance.

“You could have knocked me down with a feather,” he said. “But they’ve treated me damn well all through. I know they’re dirty dogs in other ways, of course. I’ve seen it—a damn sight too much of it, out there. But they’ve always given me a square deal, and I don’t mind saying so. Jews mostly—all that I’ve had anything to do with. And you mostly get a square deal in business from the Jews.”

In three days’ time they sent him his passport and some tickets. He went out to Russia indirectly, travelling under an assumed name. There was a place up on the hills behind Ventimiglia, he said, the villa of an Italian profiteer, that seemed to serve as a centre for their activities in that part of Europe, and it was to this place that he was told to go. He reported there in due course, and the next day he was sent on through Austria and Poland into Russia. He had a fair command of languages that he had picked up through flying about the continent, and the travelling didn’t present many difficulties. From San Remo he travelled on a forged American passport.

They sent him first to Moscow. He did a little flying there, and in about ten days’ time he was sent on down to Kieff, where they were forming a squadron for instruction in advanced fighting.

“We’re a pretty mixed crowd,” he said. “Most of the instructors out there are Germans, but there were a couple of English there before me, and one or two French and Italians.” He shifted in his chair. “Never hit it off very well with the other two English out there—not my sort. The Germans aren’t a bad crowd, though. There’s one chap there that I got to know pretty well—a fellow called Keumer, who comes from Noremburg. Married, with two or three children. Like the rest of us—couldn’t get anything to do in his own place. Used to fly a Halberstadt in the war—in our part of the line, to. He’s a damn stout lad. We live in pairs out there, in little three-roomed huts, and after a bit I went and shared his place.”

He stared reflectively into the fire. “Kieff’s a good town,” he said. “It must have been better before the Revolution, but it’s a good spot still. They put us out beyond Pechersk, with the aerodrome about a mile from the river. Not much to do away from the aerodrome. You can go into the town—they lend us a car whenever we want it—and eat a heavy meal with the Germans. Or you can go toying with Amaryllis—there’s any amount of that to be had for the asking. Or you can go to the cinema and see Douglas Fairbanks and Norma Talmadge and Mack Sennett pretty well as soon as you can see ’em in London, with Russian sub-titles. And eat crystallised fruits. I tell you, there’s a glut of crystallised fruits in that town. You can’t get a proper cigarette for love or money, but you can get those damn things pretty well chucked at you. It’s a local industry, or something.”

He went on to talk for a long time about the type of machine that they had out there, and the ability of the Russian pilots. He was of the opinion that the best pilots were the Cossacks, and he said that the Russians were concentrating on trying to turn the best of their cavalry into fighting pilots. He thought that that was sound, and he had a very high opinion of their ability. The
trouble was that they were so illiterate. Everyone coming to that course was supposed to be able to read and write; in actual fact their best pilots could do neither with any accuracy. Many of them had their horses with them; there were horse-lines along one side of the aerodrome.

“They fly into a fight … like riding a horse. No theory about it; but they’re good. They’ve got a feel for the machine from the very first. It’s a natural genius for the game. And they’ve got any amount of guts.”

There was a very long silence then. He sat there in that chair before the fire, staring at the coals, his hands outstretched upon the bolstered arms, his long black hair falling down over his forehead in the half-light. I thought that he was shivering a little as I watched him.

“That went on till about six weeks ago,” he said at last. “I had a pretty good time of it out there, taking it all round. My pay comes regularly, and I send a good bit of it back to England. I arranged that before I signed the contract, and they stuck to their side of it. The money gets through all right. And I like the work. I’d have been there still, but for this job.”

I leaned forward and knocked my pipe out slowly against the palm of my hand over the grate. I knew that we were coming to the root of it now.

“This is for them?” I asked.

He didn’t answer that at once. “They’ve grown to trust me pretty well out there,” he said. “More than the others. They came along one day about the middle of last month, and made me an offer. They wanted a long night flight, or rather a series of night flights, done outside Russia. They offered me a thousand pounds sterling, with all expenses, as a fee for doing it.”

He paused, irresolute.

“Where’d you got to fly to?” I asked.

“Portsmouth,” he said laconically.

I had guessed something of the sort, I suppose. At all events, it didn’t come as much of a surprise.

He went on without looking at me. “I’m getting to the end of my time out there. I’ve saved a bit, of course—about a couple
of hundred pounds. But that’s not capital. It wouldn’t go any way if I was out of a job. I tell you, half a dozen times in the last three years I’d have been on my feet if I could have raked up a thousand or so. Dawson wanted me to go in with him in that show of his in Penang, you know.” I didn’t know, but I was silent. “And I couldn’t, and he sold out to the Dutch as a going concern at three hundred per cent. And then Sam Robertson gave me a chance of going in with him on the Argentine Survey, and he’s doing damn well, I hear. And I’d have liked to have been with Sam again….”

I cut him short. “Why did they choose an Englishman?”

He laughed. “Bar the English and the Germans, I don’t suppose there’s a pilot in Russia that can lay a course properly, night flying. Not to call a pilot.

“They wanted a set of flashlight photographs taken from the air,” he said. “Of Portsmouth.”

The scheme, as they put it to him, was worth the thousand as a pilot’s fee alone. There was the devil of a lot of risk about it. He was to take a machine from Kieff and fly by night across Poland and Germany to a place near Hamburg, where he was to land and wait during the day. On the next night he was to fly to Portsmouth, do his job, and return to Hamburg before dawn. The following night he was to return to Kieff.

If anything went wrong he was to land and burn the machine, and get away back to Russia with the plates by land.

I stared at him incredulously. “I never heard of night flying like that,” I said. “It’s absolutely crazy. Do you mean to say you took it on?”

He smiled a little bitterly. “I wanted that thousand. You see, I’m getting towards the end of my time out there. Yes, I took it on. I made damn sure about the money, though. I had it paid into my bank at Croydon by the Trade Delegation, and I wouldn’t stir a finger till I had a letter from the manager about it in his own handwriting. That made it as certain as it could be—and when I got that I carried on with the preparations.”