For ten minutes, he lay and smoked. Then a couple of circular marks on the wall high up behind the wardrobe caught his eye. Swinging his feet lightly to the floor, he took a chair over to the wardrobe and examined them.
The marks were gouged right through the plaster through to the room next door. The top of the wardrobe still had a little white dust beneath the marks, indicating either that the hotel didn’t dust very often or that the marks were relatively recent.
Captain Abe Rockwell had earned his rank as a pursuit pilot in the United States Army. Before the war, he’d been an auto mechanic, then a racing driver. When war had broken out, he’d decided to switch trades. He’d thrown in his job racing cars. He’d wangled his way out to France as a mechanic attached to one of America’s newly formed flying squadrons. He’d fixed planes by day, and by evening more or less taught himself to fly. Despite being over-age and lacking either a commission or a college education, he nevertheless persuaded the authorities to give him a chance in the cockpit. He’d repaid their faith. His first victory over a German machine had come within two weeks. Another three months had seen his fifth victory – and his official recognition as one of America’s few fighter-aces. By the end of the war, he’d been promoted to captain, had command of a squadron, and had had nineteen victories officially confirmed. Of the American pilots to have survived the war, only Ed Rickenbacker had shot down more enemy planes.
Abe was a military man who’d seen plenty of combat, plenty of action. He knew what bullet holes looked like, and these were bullet holes.
Willard didn’t get headaches. He didn’t get them from heat. He didn’t get them from noise. He didn’t even get them after a jugful of martinis, when everybody else was looking as white and fragile as a porcelain teacup. But he had one now.
He stepped inside. The shades were down and the interior was cool and dim. Reflections from the pool outside trembled on the ceiling. Willard closed the door, and the voices grew small and distant. He had been holding a letter in his hand, which he let drop on the carpeted floor. The letter was from his accountant. A stunt plane they’d used but hadn’t insured had just smashed up. Another eighteen thousand bucks had slid uselessly down the pan.
He sank into a deep chair and sat slumped, hardly moving.
Willard felt lousy, when all the time he knew he should be happy. After all, he was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.
His great-grandfather had begun it all, manufacturing handguns and rifles for sale to the country’s wild frontier. The business had prospered. The Civil War had turned Thornton Ordnance into one of the country’s biggest profit-makers, one with international reach. The nineteenth century had been a good one for wars and the firm had benefited from every one. When the Great War had broken out in Europe in 1914, Thornton Ordnance entered its most profitable phase. Junius Thornton – Willard’s father – made money hand over fist. On America’s entry into the war, profits had doubled, then doubled again.
But it wasn’t just Willard’s family which had been touched with magic. He had been too. Willard had been a student at Princeton when Germany, in a fit of lunacy, began unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, thus propelling America into the war. Willard’s studies hadn’t exactly been going badly, but they certainly hadn’t been going well. Willard happened to meet a British pilot and saw the way the man had used his war stories to pull any girl he wanted.
And so, one sunny autumn’s day and with almost no prior consideration, Willard had taken the plunge. He’d joined up. He sought a pilot’s commission and got it. Within three months of that sunny October day, he was in France, a lieutenant in the US Army Flying Corps.
He hadn’t been there a week before he regretted it.
On his first flight over enemy lines, he was almost killed. On his second flight, he returned with bullet holes plugging his upper starboard wing and the tail mounting. Within three weeks, Willard could count four lucky escapes – and not one time when he’d even got a shot away at the enemy.
That had to change and it did.
By a fluke, Willard was transferred to the Ninety-First Squadron, under the command of Captain Abraham ‘Abe’ Rockwell.
Before letting his newest recruit out on patrol, Rockwell ordered Thornton to take to the air, twenty-five miles behind the lines, to take part in a dummy patrol and dogfight. Willard thought he’d done OK, but Rockwell had torn Willard’s combat-flying to pieces. Over the next two weeks, he’d reassembled it, from the ground up.
When Willard was allowed back into the air, he scored his first kill on his very first patrol. He wasn’t the best pilot in the sky, but he was no longer a dangerous novice. By October 1918, he’d brought down three German machines – just two short of the magical number, which would turn him from a fine pilot into an officially recognised flying ace.
Rockwell had seen the younger man’s desire and, in the first week of November, assigned him to fly against the enemy Drachen – gas-filled observation balloons, that rose from fixed steel cables a mile back from the collapsing German front. The assignments were simple and dangerous. Simple, because there was nothing easier than shooting at a giant inflammable balloon. Dangerous, because the Germans curtained their precious balloons with intense and accurate anti-aircraft fire. Willard accepted his assignment gravely. Before each flight, he was so afraid, he vomited secretly in the hangar toilet. But he’d hit his targets and escaped being hit himself. On November 8, three days before Armistice was declared, Willard downed his second Drache. A Drache counted the same as an airplane. By the time peace broke out, Willard Thornton was a flying ace. He returned to America, a hero.
He hadn’t been the bravest pilot, or the best. He hadn’t scored anywhere near as many kills as Rockwell or Rickenbacker. But none of that mattered. He was an ace – and he was stunningly good-looking. Up-close, far away, carefully staged or thrillingly informal: there just wasn’t an angle that made him look bad. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, wide-chinned, strongly built. His smile was terrific, his eyes enticing, his mouth full and kissable. He was dazzling to look at and he knew it.
Hollywood saw the potential and was quick to move. The studios fought to get his signature on a movie deal. One of the studios had a guy literally follow him round with a blank contract. Willard rose to the bait and signed.
His first picture had billed him as ‘Willard T. Thornton, America’s favourite ace’. A movie-going public, still enchanted with its war-time heroes, flocked to see it. For a few brief weeks, Willard’s had been one of the most recognisable faces in America. The second picture had sold well. The next two movies had done OK. The last two had sagged, flopped, sunk from sight.
But Willard had grown up a little. He knew enough to make a picture of his own – ‘Heaven’s Beloved, a picture of class’. He’d asked his father for finance. His father had put him in touch with Ted Powell, a Wall Street banker. Willard had made his pitch – and Powell had bought it. And although the picture was over-schedule, although Daphne O’Hara had just quit right in the middle of filming, although costs were out of control and his precious stunt plane had just crashed, Willard’s luck was staying the course.
Ted Powell continued to believe, continued to come up with cash. The original sixty-thousand dollar loan had mushroomed. First to eighty, then to a hundred, then to one-twenty, then to an ‘open-ended loan facility’ – banker-speak for don’t-even-ask.
Willard was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.
The Lundmark kid showed up at seven o’clock sharp, with a pot of coffee and a couple of rolls.
‘Feeding