Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

25.

April 1945

“Aw, don’t make a big deal of it,” Corie said the next day over lunch at a diner in Union Square when she heard about his relocation. “We’ll figure out something. I guess you left a note for me with Mr. Li, huh?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know how else to get a signal to you.”

They were jammed together at a crowded Kresge counter where waitresses with little pointed paper crowns bustled about refilling coffees, taking orders, delivering armfuls of plates, listening to complaints with the supercilious and dismissive airs of those who heard the same song day in, day out. “I want to take you up in an airplane if you’re game,” Corie said.

He sat sideways with his legs dangling and his hands lightly folded, looking at her in amazement. “I’m game. What do you do, stow me away with the baggage?”

“No, silly,” she said finishing her coconut custard pie. “I can get orders cut for you. Do you have overalls?”

“Me?” He laughed, looking down at himself in his black dress uniform. “I have khakis if that helps any.”

She frowned. “Yeah, maybe we can pretend you are some kind of visiting hob-nob. You know, a nabob.”

“U-huh. A nabob hob-nobbing on Nob Hill. That’s a sob story and a half.”

“You’ve been reading too many dictionaries,” she said.

“I bet you don’t even know what a nabob is.”

“Opposite of a yes-bob?” She radiated mock-sullenness. “Okay, I was doing the crossword puzzle. I do it every day. And I do own a dictionary.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said, rubbing her back. “Okay, kid. Say when.”

“When.”

“What, now?”

“Tomorrow. Meet me at the Embarcadero, six a.m. sharp. Dress warm.”

Mystified, he said: “Okay, if you say so.”

She awaited him on the dock as promised. She wore a baggy flight suit. Her hair flew from under her garrison cap, and aviator sunglasses glinted over her features. Tim had requested the day off, since he had some leave time saved up, and Teague had been happy to comply. “Get your mind off your misery,” Teague had said. “Big plans?”

“Just a little outing on the bay.”

“Ah...” Teague had said, “great fishing. Just watch for mines and submarines.”

“Thanks, Sir.”

So, here he was the next morning while the marine layer rolled in thickly in gray clouds, and drizzle peppered the cold sides of gray warships anchored all around. He wore his khakis, a brown leather bomber jacket, and a garrison cap. As a lieutenant commander (the equivalent of a major in the Army and Marine Corps), his insignia of rank were gold oak leaves. He and Corie saluted each other with little winks of their eyes. No kissing here, or they could technically be court-martialed.

“Glad you could make it,” she said grinning.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“I think you’ll have fun.” She handed him a set of folded papers. “Your orders. Don’t lose them.”

He glanced at them, reading the formal gobbledygook signed by some adjutant at some unidentifiable place that was not a unit and not a place of duty but an acronym floating in space, and put the papers in his inner jacket pocket.

A launch pulled up alongside the dock and a petty officer raised his saucer-capped head to peer over to see where his passengers were. Two sailors in denims climbed up and fastened a ladder to the dock.

Carrying a heavy looking bag, Corie saluted the flag and then the little bridge. “Permission to come aboard.”

“Permission granted,” said the petty officer, saluting her. She climbed down the ladder, and the petty officer took her bag. Tim followed, feeling well familiar with the routine after having done a tour of sea duty, much as it had ended in being torpedoed and beached.

In a minute or two, the launch heeled about and speeded along Pier 45, hooking right and traveling about several miles along the shore east and then south to the docks near the Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco Bay. There, Tim saw a huge silvery shape at anchor, along with several smaller seaplanes. “What is that?” Tim shouted over the noise of the motor and the waves while wind whipped their hair and made them squint. The object seemed big as a zeppelin.

“That’s what we’re going up for a ride in,” she shouted back. “Don’t worry—it’s too big to make you air sick or sea sick.”

He stared in amazement. “That’s a Pan Am Clipper!”

“Yes,” she said as the launch slowed and glided in to a dock. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“You constantly surprise me,” he said as they clambered up onto a wooden pier. “What next?”

They walked along, returning the salutes of enlisted members and junior officers. The place was crawling with civilian technicians and people in suits, Tim observed. She told him: “Just stick close to me and keep your mouth shut, okay? I’ll make up for the rudeness later when we are alone. Meanwhile, look wise and follow me.”

He followed her but said under his breath: “How do I look wise?”

“Look like you know a lot but never say much.”

“Oh.”

“However,” she added, “talk if spoken to.”

She signed in at an office, delivering a copy of her orders, and picked up a flight plan in an oilcloth folder. Tim tagged along, staying close, and nobody questioned him, even as they walked toward the gangway by the enormous Clipper. Technicians were still doing some tests in the cockpit, and Corie waited on the dock. “Truthfully,” she said, “this thing is going to be a relic. I can feel it. Some guy is building a big spruce plane down near Los Angeles, biggest ever made, but I think it’s all going to be history soon. You wait and see.”

Tim shrugged. “I don’t know much about aviation. This is still the most glamorous airplane that ever flew, if you ask me.”

“Stiff competition from the DC-4.”

“Maybe. But this thing can take off and land on the ocean, and it’s got enough engines so that I don’t need to worry if one goes out.”

“Balderdash,” she said. “You fly from A to Z. You don’t need to land on water in-between. You land in a city, at an airport.”

“If you say so.”

“What makes me fry,” she said, “is that I know after the war they are going to tell women like me to pack up our bags and go home and cook and raise babies.”

“Nothing wrong with babies.”

“You want to have one?” she asked threateningly.

“I’d have to think about it.”

She turned to other topics. “So, we women get to test these blasted things to make sure they are safe for the men to fly, and then the guys get all the glory. One of these planes actually flew President Roosevelt around for a few years.” A shout came from the small, high windows of the cockpit. She waved back. “Okay, here we go.” As they walked up the gangway, she told him: “I don’t know what they’re testing, and I don’t care. Neither do you, Tim. Just enjoy the ride. They tell me to go left, I go left. They tell me to go right, I go right.”

“No parachutes?” he asked.

“We won’t be flying high enough for it to matter if we bail out,” she said. “Just hang on to your seat and enjoy the ride.”

Tim sat on a small fold-out stool in a corner of the cockpit, cross-corners from the left cockpit seat, where Corie as commander sat. Several civilian technicians sat at various navigational controls, and a rather plain, very good-natured red-haired woman of about 40, a reserve WAF captain, shook hands with Corie and then took the co-pilot’s seat. Meanwhile, in an area blocked off with plywood sheeting in the converted passenger decks, Tim heard conversation and laughter but that was another world—and he was too enthralled being part of the flight crew to even think about whatever secret War Department research the plane might be up to. Maybe something involving the mine fields offshore, he thought; or submarine detection; whatever it was, his interest was in Corie who looked competent and in charge as she waved to the dock crew. The co-pilot and technicians got the four huge engines revving near takeoff speed. Although Tim didn’t feel a thing, the dock seemed to be moving away. The engine noise was deafening until Corie slammed her side window shut and the co-pilot did the same.

Tim found a commercial brochure in a door pocket, touting the plane’s characteristics. The Boeing 314, nicknamed the Airborne Palace, was the largest passenger plane built to date, with a wingspan of 152 feet or 46.3 meters. The world’s first manned flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903, by comparison, had lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet—and could have been made in one hop across the China Clipper’s wings with room to spare. The plane was 28 feet high and over 100 feet long, could carry over 40 tons at about 183 miles per hour for a distance of 3500 miles / 5635 km cruising at 13,400 feet / 4085 m, with a passenger load of up to 74 and a crew of 6-10. Pictures in the brochure showed luxurious interiors with attractive women in jaunty uniforms serving coffee or offering pillows to smiling passengers. For a moment, Tim realized how much the world had lost in the Axis rampage. The brochure was yellowing with age, probably printed in the late 1930s, and pictured a lost world. Maybe not an entirely true world, since it had been ravaged by the Great Depression, but there had been that wonderful world of the imagination—Art Deco buildings, China Clippers, zeppelins, air mail, radio dispatched police cars, automats for the futuristic service of food—all changed forever in the grinder of the war effort. Then again—he might never have met this intriguing woman.

He stared with admiration at Corie, who wore a broad grin as she sat relaxed holding the C-shaped wheel. She looked thoroughly at home among the galaxy of blinking lights, toggles and other switches, gauges, dials, and other gadgets right out of Buck Rogers. Even wearing aviator glasses as she was, Tim could see the gleam in her eyes and the joy in her features—sunglasses, garrison cap, earphones, and all.

He helplessly gripped a safety handle, and looked out over the tiny waves a half mile below as the great plane described a gigantic loop over the Pacific Ocean. Two hours and many turns later, when it was getting boring—even though one of the technicians had made coffee and someone else had brought donuts, so nobody was starving—the Golden Gate Bridge glided by far below, and Corie banked south to descend toward the docks across the bay from Oakland.

“Well,” she said driving a borrowed Navy admiral’s black staff car on the way to the V/BOQ, “what did you think?”

“I’m still speechless. One of the smoothest rides I’ve ever had. Like mom’s pumpkin pie.”

“I do make a decent pie, in case you ever wonder.”

“I don’t doubt it. Is there anything you don’t do first rate?”

“If there is, I’m not telling.”

She waited in the car while he ran in and changed out of his uniform into a casual dark suit and coast with a nice charcoal hat and black shoes.

He found her ignoring several ogling young Marines, who scattered when he approached the car.

“Don’t you look spiffy,” she said as he settled in. She looked at her watch. “Five o’clock. Want to grab some dinner?”

“Sure. How about a nice steak and the works. I’ll buy a bottle of champagne.”

“What for?”

“To tell you you’re special.”

“Aw, you’re just a swell guy,” she said visibly touched.

She wasn’t hard to please. A little went a long way, and that made it easy to do little things to make her happy. He liked that, though like a whole lot of things he kept it to himself. This was going to a wild ride, he thought as they drove up to Nob Hill. It was his turn to wait in the car while she changed into civvies. She came out soon after, skipping along in something resembling a toned-down bobbysocks outfit with midcalf denim dress, wool socks, and loafers. She wore a dark blue cloth overcoat with high shoulders, and a lighter blue cap with a jaunty little feather in one side. She’d put on a bit of red lipstick, blush, and white-gold earrings, and she looked lovely. He praised her heartily. “Want to drive?” she asked in turn.

“If you’d like me to.”

“I would. I’m a little tired.”

“Do you get tired driving one of those football fields around in the sky?”

“Not while I do it. I’m so hepped up I can’t stand it. I have electricity running through me from my fingers to my toes. Afterwards, I could just curl up and sleep by the fireplace.”

“If you had a fireplace.”

“One of these days,” she said with a sigh, and he did not say anything more. He drove out toward Half Moon Bay as darkness fell. It was a quiet, comfortable ride, and suddenly, she curled up against him. He noticed her arms slinking around his right arm, and her head nestling against his shoulder. She pulled her knees up so that her feet were under her, and didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to.

He didn’t need to either, and didn’t. For a while he thought she was asleep. Coming down Route 1, with beautiful city lights on the left and ships at sea on their right, and stars from one end to the other, he whispered: “See all that?”

“M-hm,” she said, nodding so that he felt her chin move on his forearm.

“You’ve been awake the whole time.”

“M-hm,” she said again, nodding so he felt her chin again.

Maybe this would go on forever. Maybe it was just a brief interlude. He resolved to say nothing. The worst thing to do in the face of magic was to say anything. Just run with it, he thought—so the padre with the bump on his noggin in the London Tube would have said.

They went for a long walk on the beach, holding hands. They made small talk as if there were no large concerns in the world. The moon rose, and they laughed—the moon in Half Moon Bay, but it was a full moon, and it left its quicksilver in the myriad rocking waves that quietly came and went on their pillows of kelp. This was the same sea that had come and gone in places like this around the world for billions of years, for eons in which the short span of humans and the far longer span of dinosaurs were but blinks of an eyelash, time so vast it was impossible to comprehend. Tim told her about a telescope that was being built for a mountain called Palomar down in San Diego, which would let astronomers look millions of light years into the deepest seas of space.

“And what do they expect to see there?” she asked.

“You and me, holding hands, walking on the beach of some ocean while the moonlight is rippling around in the tide.”

“That’s nice. And then what will they know?”

“Nothing more than if they came here and looked at us right now.”

She stopped and stepped close to him so that her chin was near his heart. “Do we know anything more than they do?”

He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling the soft skin under those cushioning pads. He pulled her close. “It’s all rather secret,” he told her.

“Like Government work?” she said playing along.

“Yes. It’s all a secret language that’s spoken like this.” He pulled her to him, surprised at how she stood sharply on her toes and thrust her mouth hard against his. She put her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her, almost knocking him over backwards. They kissed for a long time like this, as the waves moved in and out with a steady sloshing sound like two hearts beating in unison.

“Is that how it’s spoken?” she asked when they stopped for air.

“You do everything very well,” he told her.

She ran her fingertips over his face like a blind person trying to feel what she could not see with her eyes, maybe the landscape of his soul or the inner gardens of his mind. “I’m jazzed up when I fly,” she said in a thick, numb voice while her eyes betrayed the fear of betraying her innermost truths. “I get so jazzed up that I feel it in my fingertips and in my toes.” She ran her fingertips over his lips, slowing in the wetness of his mouth, then around the strong line of his jaw testing him as if he were a work of art, as if there were no part of him that she did not want to touch and savor. “I get tired afterwards but I’m crazy while I fly. Will you drive for a while, Tim?”

He held her close, knowing they were going down to a long, smooth landing that would take all night and end in a shower of sparks, a wheel of stars, a long moan, a crayon drawing full of wonder, a holding of hands, a twining of fingers, a language of looks, an alphabet of silences punctuated by sighs. They never let go of each other after that. They walked to a little place near the beach and had beers and Mexican food. They strolled along the boardwalk and had ice cream—she a vanilla stick with chocolate coating, he a strawberry cone studded with chopped walnuts. They fed ice cream to each other and sat on the low wall looking at the Big Dipper wheeling across the heavens as if someone had flung it, while fishing schooners with furled sails and winking stern lights bobbed slowly a quarter mile offshore. They walked silently, with linked arms, back to the car, and he drove all the way back to Nob Hill. She curled up against him and fell asleep until they got into the city. She sat up, yawning and stretching and looking around.

She blew into his face. “Is my breath bad?”

“I don’t smell a thing. My nose is still full of sea air. I think I smell fish, but it’s not you.”

She sat up and looked into the mirror behind the passenger side visor. Licking the tip of her pinkie, she touched up her eyebrows.

“Going someplace?” he asked.

“Home.”

“Thank God. I’m so tired I could roll over right now. I was afraid you were going to ask me to go dancing.”

“Not tonight, Tim.”

“Sure.”

“I want you to come up and sleep with me.”

“And whoever owns this land cruiser?”

“He’s an old fart of an admiral. I happen to know he is in Hawaii with his mistress on a so-called inspection tour. He won’t be looking for it tonight.”

Tim parked on a side street near the Hotel Auger, and they walked to the hotel arm in arm. Which was where made one tiny misstep that he didn’t quite realize until days later, and she was too tired to be aware. After parking the car, they walked down a shadowy sidewalk under great sprawling eucalyptus trees. He was barely aware of the buildings looming beyond the tree shadows, until she gave a sharp tug to the left. “Come on.”

“Huh?” But he followed, and she led him down a walk, through a gateway lit on either side by large copper-banded lanterns holding milky orange Art Deco bowls, and into a courtyard. He looked up, and realized that they were in an annex of the Hotel Auger that he hadn’t known about. She moved with the practiced ease of someone who had gone this way many times. She led him into a curving cloister walk, covered with masonry arches above, with round grayish lamps set into the peak of each arch. On one side was a building—presumably another hotel—and on the outside of the C-shaped walk were arches that were largely blocked with criss-cross lattices and old bougainvillea. The place smelled of moss, water, loam, and jasmine. Broad-leaf ivy rattled around wall sconces, old bronze lanterns in hybrid Japanese and Art Deco patterns. Coming around a corner, they stepped through a narrow opening and emerged in the familiar courtyard of his former residence, the Hotel Auger.

“Ya gotta know the ropes, honey,” she whispered in a low, seductive voice as she unlocked the stairwell entrance of the private wing. Peering cautiously left and right, she took his hand and towed him up the stairs. They sneaked through the étage door, and quickly around the corner into her apartment. Only a dim bulb glowed in the hall, otherwise the apartment was lit from outside.

“Made it,” she said, wiping her forehead again with her wrist as last time. Then she turned. “Meg?”

No answer.

She looked across the kitchen, swallowed as if surprised at something, and said: “She’s not home. She’s out for the night.”

He looked at the sink, the ice box door, the cabinets, all glimmering mutely in moonlight. “What, did she leave a note I don’t see?”

“I know her,” Corie said. “Don’t worry.” She fretted. “Do you mind?”

“Mind what?”

“That I asked you up?”

He shook his head. “I want to be here with you.”

She became business like for a moment. “You can use my toothbrush if you’d like. Want a nightie?”

“Oh please.”

“Just kidding.” She showed him the bathroom. “You go first. Use my toothbrush.”

A quarter hour later, he lay in her bed wearing his underclothes while she turned off the light and puttered around the room a minute longer. She wore a filmy gown and socks. “My feet get cold,” she said giggling as she crawled up into bed.

He put his arm out and pulled her close. She wasn’t quite so passionate just then, but more jocose with a serious edge. He watched her head float above his as she eyed him, resting her palms on his chest. “You know, Tim, that there are things about me and this place that you don’t know, if that makes any sense. Some of it would surprise you and maybe disappoint you, but I want you to be happy with me while we are here in this place now the way things are with us right now.”

“That’s a long preamble.”

“I care very deeply about you.”

“I’m open to whatever happens.”

“And I know what cannot happen.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why can we not fall in love?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Is that not what you are looking for?”

“Tim, I am going to take the fifth amendment. I am offering myself to you here, now, with a warning label on my ass. See?” She stood up in bed, turned, lifted her night gown, and pulled down her flimsy underpants to reveal a perfectly heart-stopping small rear end.

“I don’t see the label, but I’ll take your word for it.”

She bounced to a seated position. “I thought about this very seriously.”

He pulled her toward him. Her passion was surprising. She pulled his shirt apart with her hands and kissed him on the middle of the chest, then on both nipples, and worked her mouth upward along his neck to his mouth. As she did so, she lay on top of him and reached down into his pants with both hands to grasp him in the warmth of her palms while working her tongue around in his mouth. He wrapped his legs around her, and his strength made her moan. She liked it when he drove. He pulled her over onto her back. His hand strayed down, over the outward spiral of her belly button, over the silken plain of her belly, and she reached down with both hands to push his hand along. Outside, he heard wind rustling in trees like the tides that rolled massively over Pacific kelp beds under the moon’s astonished gaze. He and she swam tumbling through lubricants, sea things, crystal shining moonlit splashes, making sweet jazz as they sank into exhausted sleep.