Turncoat

Chapter One

For everybody else in America it was the day JFK was killed in Dallas. For me, it would always be the day Lily's father turned up on our doorstep.

But first things first....

Something was wrong with my eyes. I could make out the peeling white farmhouse and the ramshackle outbuildings, I could see the sheep nuzzling the grass in the dappled shade of a clearing about twenty yards from where I lay in the thicket, flat on my stomach; I could see the slender, unnaturally still woman in the apron and the long blue dress, holding a basket propped against her hip and peering -- or at least facing -- in my direction. But it was all wavery and fuzzed over, as if I were looking through misted glass. I couldn't make out her face, or whether she was young or old, or what was in the basket, or whether or not she'd spotted me.

I knew that all I could do was lie there -- my legs didn't seem to be working right either -- and pray that I was hidden by the vines and brambles. I tried to remember how I'd come to be there, but couldn't quite put it together. We'd taken off from England that morning on another bombing run, headed for the benzol plant near Linz; I remembered that much. We'd completed the mission and made our turnaround. And then at about the Austrian border the flak had started popping, and then the Focke-Wulfs had shown up, and we were in big trouble. Three of them slipped through our escort of P-51s and screamed straight up at us, homing in as if they'd decided from the beginning that out of the whole350th Bombardment Group -- two dozen B-17s, plus three hundred additional bombers filling the skies around us -- it was us alone, the Betty G, they were after; nobody but us.

The next thing I knew...well, the next thing I knew, there I was lying on my stomach in the thicket, injured and frightened, looking at the woman without a face and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. I didn't remember our getting hit, I didn't remember Captain Slocum ordering us to bail out, and I didn't remember jumping, or getting rid of my parachute when I landed, or anything. I was starboard waist gunner. Had I even had a chance to fire? I couldn't remember that either.

I realized with a start -- probably it was the look of the farmhouse and the soft, rolling countryside -- that I'd come down in France, not Germany. She was a Frenchwoman! My heart came near to bursting with relief. Not only was I likely to be in friendly territory, I was in my native land. I'd been born in Lyon and spent most of my childhood there before my father brought us to the States.

"Madame!" I called, surprised to hear how feeble my voice was. "Au secours! Je suis un aviateur Américain. Mon avion a été démoli par les Boches."

Nothing. She just stood there without saying anything, without moving, as impassive as a statue, for a long time, and when she did begin to speak it was in a weird monotone, a chant, nothing like normal speech. The individual words were French, all right, but the sentences were gibberish, and I began to get a scary, queasy feeling that something was terribly wrong -- even more terribly wrong than it obviously was, I mean.

If only I could get out of these clothes, I thought. I was roasting. The waist gunners' slots were the coldest places in the plane -- no glassed-in turrets, just a couple of big rectangular open holes in the fuselage, and at twenty thousand feet oxygen was the least of our problems.

The temperature could get to twenty below zero, with a freezing wind that could crack your bones. So we had to dress accordingly, and I was still in my heavy leather flight jacket, overpants, and boots, and my heavy cap with the ear flaps pulled tight. I felt as if I were liquefying inside my casing of fleece-lined leather. No, I was liquefying. My ribs had begun to melt into a soft mush. I could feel them running out from under...

I'm hallucinating, I thought with a jolt. None of this is happening. I'm strapped into my bed in the mental ward at Kings County General, writhing and sweating, and dreaming the whole thing up. And not for the first time either. No. I've been here before: the same thicket, the same stony, faceless figure, the same torpid, dopey sheep. In another minute, the rest of the cast will come marching out from around the corner of the farmhouse.

And out they came. Sometimes they were rustic farm people, or soldiers, or policemen, but most of the time, as now, they were fussy-looking village functionaries of some kind in pince-nez, wing collars, and rusty black suits. They filed out two by two, six of them, muttering and wringing their hands, while some of them banged pots and pans together. Hallucination or not, the whole thing was scaring the hell out of me, and when the woman in blue began to move toward me -- to glide as if on rollers, not to walk -- I screamed. For a moment the scene shimmered, struggling to hold itself together. Then it fell apart into ragged pieces and I was staring at the light fixture on my ceiling, with the tattered, long-dead moth inside that I never seemed to get around to removing.

I was sweating, all right, and the twisted bedclothes proved I'd been doing plenty of writhing, but I wasn't strapped into any bed in the mental ward, and in fact I never had been. In a mental ward, that is...