Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (37 page)

“Don’t you have a stomach, Maestro?”

Toscanini patted his middle. “Very strong. Always.”

“You’re very fortunate.”

“Maybe am just happy because soon I have clean underwears!” He laughed hoarsely.

“Okay, guys,” Vern announced. “Gonna climb to some smoother air! We want everybody to be happy.”

The little plane rose another couple of hundred feet, fighting through some dark clouds, and suddenly—miraculously—the turbulence ceased. The currents turned smooth, then smoother. My stomach was immediately becalmed, as if I had ingested a wonder drug.

“Should be basically okay from here on,” Vern announced. “Can’t guarantee it, of course.”

Toscanini looked at me and smiled. “You were almost to vomit, Boston Blackie.”

“Me?” I said incredulously. “No way. I just like to turn colors as a party trick.”

The old man nodded happily. “You still have stomach of a young man. And you,
cara mia
…” He gazed at Barbara.

“I’m not a great flyer, Maestro.”

“You are great everything,” he said, and blew her a kiss. You had to hand it to him: At eighty-three, he still had all the moves.

At ten minutes of twelve, we landed at Pittsburgh to refuel. Maestro elected to remain inside the plane and enthusiastically began to wolf down a bologna sandwich, but Barbara and I were eager to disembark. It was an enormous relief to feel solid ground beneath my Florsheims, to let the westerly breeze dry my sweat-soaked suit and shirt. The skies over Pittsburgh were gray and unpromising; a procession of planes ascended regularly into that ashy sky and I watched them with a strange mixture of agitation and relief. Barbara and I walked a prudent distance from the fuel pumps and lit up our Luckies. I had no appetite whatsoever, but the cigarette tasted shockingly good.

“Nervous, honey?” Barbara asked me.

“I’m past that.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you reach a point where you think you have all the information you’re ever going to get and you hope that’s going to be enough to get you through whatever happens.”

“And what do you thinks going to happen with you and me?”

She asked the question very simply; it was just a fastball over the outside of the plate and I could take it or swing at it, but it was probably a strike either way.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Sure you do,” she said evenly. “You think it’s over. You think you’re too old for me, you think I’m too dangerous, you think I could never stick with one man for very long.”

“That’s what I think?”

She took a drag from her Lucky. “Mmm-hmm. That’s what you think.”

“You’re right. That’s what I think.”

She tossed her cigarette to the tarmac and ground it out.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” she said without looking up. “That’s all I’m asking. Give me a chance.”

I couldn’t think of an apt reply. Over her shoulder, I saw Vern waving at me to return to the plane.

“Pit stop’s over, sweetheart,” I told Barbara. She hooked her arm through mine and kept her head tucked into my shoulder all the way back to the plane.

*    *    *

The flight from Pittsburgh to New York was smooth enough to allow for generous and prolonged slumber. Toscanini partook of the opportunity, beginning his rhythmic snoring somewhere west of Harris-burg. I was dog-tired, but there was as much chance of my falling asleep as there was of my doing a Mexican hat dance out on the planes wing. With each mile approaching Idlewild, my innards tightened a little more. Barbara occasionally reached over and clutched my hand; her palm was as moist as mine.

“I see water, Jack,” she said suddenly. “What’s that?”

There was indeed a large body of water looming in the distance.

“Vern, what’s that lake?” I shouted to the pilot.

“Delaware Water Gap,” he hollered back. “We have about an hour and a half, hour forty-five to go. The tailwinds aren’t much to speak of today, otherwise I could get you there a little quicker.”

I checked my watch. It was twenty past two. This was going down to the wire.

I wasn’t asleep, but I was clearly lost in my thoughts, staring out the window and noticing that we were flying over fewer farms and more clumps of squat suburban houses, when I felt a tapping on my shoe. When I looked up, Vern was speaking to me in a sort of stage whisper.

“’Bout a half hour, Mr. LeVine. Maybe you want to start rousing the troops here.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, and rubbed my mouth.

This was it.

I was able to make them out at about three hundred feet. As we made our final descent, I could see the lights, the stalks of microphones, and the crowd of reporters and photographers standing on the tarmac beside the General Aviation Terminal. It looked to be a hell of a turnout, maybe a hundred in all.

“Jack,” Barbara said in neutral but charged tones.

“The press, baby. Out in force.”

Maestro was strangely impassive, running a comb through his hair as the plane approached the runway.

“Welcome home, folks,” Vern announced, touching the Pacer down at precisely seven minutes past four. As we taxied toward the terminal, I saw another private plane, larger and fancier than ours, spinning to its final stop like a housefly dying on a windowsill.

“That’s a Piper Clipper PA-16,” Vern announced. “Little bigger than this one, and a bunch slower.”

Two flunkies in windbreakers were industriously rolling a red carpet across the tarmac. We kept going.

“Where do we stop?” I asked Vern.

“They want me to tuck it next to the terminal, about a hundred yards from this Clipper.”

“Can we get any closer, like fifty feet?”

“We can try.” Vern radioed the tower while I looked out the window. As we taxied toward the terminal, I could see that I had underestimated the press turnout. Stuffed behind a rope barricade, their numbers looked to be closer to a hundred and fifty, including newsreel cameramen.

I heard Vern listening to some rapid-fire static from his radio and then he said, “Roger,” which I didn’t know that grown-ups actually said. He turned to me and shook his head. “We can’t be closer than a hundred yards from the Clipper,” Vern called out. “They say this is a special event of some sort, and that’s the best slot they can give me.”

We were now passing the Clipper. The plane had come to a final stop and had shut off its engine, but its door remained shut. And now I saw why—a limousine the approximate length of the
Queen Mary
was cruising slowly across the tarmac, headed toward the cluster of microphones. The limo bore a flag on each fender: one bearing the ever-popular Stars and Stripes, the other bearing the less-sacred colors of the Radio Corporation of America.

I had no doubt that David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, was inside that limo.

“What’s our plan?” Barbara asked me.

“We get out and walk toward the microphones.”

“You’re serious.”

“Totally.”

The Pacer PA-20 kept rolling, a little bumpily, across the tarmac, until we finally reached our designated slot. Vern shut off the engine and the plane fell shockingly silent. I stood up as straight as I could, which still only allowed me the posture of Quasimodo, and handed Vern the rest of his dough. He thanked me and put the money in his shirt pocket without even glancing at it.

“Got to file some papers inside, then maybe I’ll come out and see what all the excitement’s about.”

“Hope it’s not too exciting,” I told him. “In any case, thanks for everything. You just helped save Western civilization, at least for the next couple of weeks.”

“It was my privilege.” He got out of his seat and pushed the door open, then helped get Maestro out of his seat.

“Va bene,
” the Maestro told him. “You are better pilot than Smiling Jack from funny papers!”

“Thank you, sir. Was an honor to fly you, and if you wouldn’t mind …” Vern thrust a sheet of paper in front of the old man, which Maestro happily signed. Barbara crawled over the front seat and watched. Vern reverently folded the sheet of paper, put it inside a leather case he kept in the cockpit, then turned and opened the door.

“You folks just give me a second.” The pilot lifted a cover and pulled out a three-step metal staircase, which he lowered out through the doorway.

He disembarked.

“Okay, guys!” Vern called out, and then the three of us, hunched over like question marks, made our way out of the plane and down the staircase and onto the tarmac. The pilot shook each of our hands in military fashion.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Good luck to you,” I told him. Vern turned and headed toward the General Aviation Terminal.

And there we were.

I extended my arms.

“Show time, ladies and gentleman.” Barbara took me under one arm, and the Maestro grasped the other, and we began jauntily crossing the tarmac, like we were off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.

EIGHTEEN

The limo had come
to a stop and the man who liked to call himself “General Sarnoff,” in deference to his unbloodied but heartfelt service to the nation in the recent war, emerged from the vehicles depths and strode toward the microphones. He was a compact man with the build of a college wrestler; his broad and muscled arms could barely be contained by his dark blue pin-striped suit. Sarnoff’s story was the stuff of corporate legend: the young Jewish telegraph operator—on duty the night the
Titanic
went down—who had battled his way to the top ranks of American corporate titans. He had cultivated a reputation for both pugnacity and excellence, for financial acumen and cultural overreaching. All of the above had led him to this bizarre moment of the double Toscaninis. Sarnoff slipped behind the microphones, pulled an index card from his jacket pocket, studied it, and then folded it in his hand.

“Stop here,” I said to Barbara and Maestro. We were now about fifty yards from Sarnoff. “I don’t want to make a move until the double comes out.” The three of us slipped behind a gasoline truck and listened as Sarnoff’s amplified voice boomed out across the airport.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is a great day for lovers of good music and a great day for the National Broadcasting Company and the Radio Corporation of America,” he announced. The doors of the Clipper were still shut; it was obvious that this had all been carefully programmed. “Our beloved Maestro has returned to us in good health, ready to assume the reins of the great orchestra which he built and which has been such an enormous source of pride to all of us at RCA. Now, before he steps out, I have been asked to inform you that Maestro is unfortunately suffering from a severe bout of laryngitis….”

“Nice,” I said to Toscanini and Barbara. “The ringer comes out, mutely waves his arms for the newsreels, and then they hustle him into the limo.”

Sarnoff was still going. “So please join me in welcoming this great man….”

“Let’s do it.” I said. The three of us stepped out from behind the gasoline truck and started marching toward the stand of microphones.

It was thirty yards away.

Sarnoff had turned to the airplane. “Welcome, Maestro!” The door to the Clipper swung open and out stepped the ersatz Toscanini, happily waving both of his hands. Standing just behind him was Giuseppe LaMarca, blinking nearsightedly into the predictable but nonetheless blinding explosion of flashbulbs.

We were fifteen yards away.

The faux-Toscanini stood and waved very convincingly at the cameras, pointing to his throat in mock dismay. I turned and looked at the genuine article standing to my right. He had never laid eyes on his double before and was genuinely astonished; he squeezed my arm tightly, and then his face turned so red it was nearly purple. He let go of my arm and began to shout at the top of his fine Italian lungs.

“Infamia! Vergogna!
”

What happened next perhaps took ten seconds, but time had slowed to surreal and outsized units. All the clocks seemed to stop.

“Vergogna,
David!” he screamed again. “Shame!”