But Mr. Holmes had pointed out that if he used his powers in that way, it wouldn't be Earl Sanderson who would pay the penalty. If Earl Sanderson were seen reacting violently to provocation, innocent blacks would be strung from oak limbs throughout the country.
Earl gave Mr. Holmes the assurance he wanted. Starting the very next day, the two of us went on to make a lot of history.
* * *
The EFD was never a part of the U.S. government. Mr. Holmes consulted with the State Department, but he paid Earl and me out of his own pocket and I lived in his apartment.
The first thing was to deal with Perón. He'd gotten himself elected President of Argentina in a rigged election, and was in the process of turning himself into a South American version of Mussolini and Argentina into a refuge for fascists and war criminals. The Exotics for Democracy flew south to see what we could do about it.
Looking back on things, I'm amazed at our assumptions. We were bent on overthrowing the constitutional government of a large foreign nation, and we didn't think anything about it . . . Even Earl went along without a second thought. We'd just spent years fighting fascists in Europe, and we didn't see anything remarkably different in moving south and smashing them up there.
When we left, we had another man with us. David Harstein just seemed to talk himself aboard the plane. Here he was, a Jewish chess hustler from Brooklyn, one of those fast-talking curly-haired young guys that you saw all over New York selling flood insurance or used auto tires or custom suits made of some new miracle fiber that was just as good as cashmere, and suddenly he was a member of EFD and calling a lot of the shots. You couldn't help but like him. You couldn't help but agree with him.
He was an exotic, all right. He exuded pheromones that made you feel friendly with him and with the world, that created an atmosphere of bonhomie and suggestibility. He could talk an Albanian Stalinist into standing on his head and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—at least, as long as he and his pheromones were in the room. Afterward, when our Albanian Stalinist returned to his senses, he'd promptly denounce himself and have himself shot.
We decided to keep David's powers a secret. We spread a story that he was some kind of sneaky superman, like The Shadow on radio, and that he was our scout. Actually he'd just get into conferences with people and make them agree with us. It worked pretty well.
Perón hadn't consolidated his power yet, having only been in office four months. It took us two weeks to organize the coup that got rid of him. Harstein and Mr. Holmes would go into meetings with army officers, and before they were done the colonels would be swearing to have Perón's head on a plate, and even after they began to think better of things, their sense of honor wouldn't let them back down on their promises.
On the morning before the coup, I found out some of my limitations. I'd read the comics when I was in the Army, and I'd seen how, when the bad guys were trying to speed away in their cars, Superman would jump in front of the car, and the car would bounce off him.
I tried that in Argentina. There was a Perónist major who had to be kept from getting to his command post, and I jumped in front of his Mercedes and got knocked two hundred feet into a statue of Juan P. himself.
The problem was, I wasn't heavier than the car. When things collide, it's the object with the least momentum that gives way, and weight is a component of momentum. It doesn't matter how strong the lighter object is.
I got smarter after that. I knocked the statue of Perón off its perch and threw it at the car. That took care of things.
There are a few other things about the ace business that you can't learn from reading comic books. I remember comic aces grabbing the barrels of tank guns and turning them into pretzels.
It is in fact possible to do that, but you have to have the leverage to do it. You've got to plant your feet on something solid in order to have something to push against. It was far easier for me to dive under the tank and knock it off its treads. Then I'd run around to the other side and put my arms around the gun barrel, with my shoulder under the barrel, and then yank down. I'd use my shoulder as the fulcrum of a lever and bend the barrel around myself.
That's what I'd do if I was in a hurry. If I had time, I'd punch my way through the bottom of the tank and rip it apart from the inside.
But I digress. Back to Perón.
There were a couple critical things that had to be done. Some loyal Perónists couldn't be gotten to, and one of them was the head of an armored battalion quartered in a walled compound on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. On the night of the coup, I picked up one of the tanks and dropped it on its side in front of the gate, and then I just braced my shoulder against it and held it in place while the other tanks battered themselves into junk trying to move it.
Earl immobilized Perón's air force. He just flew behind the planes on the runway and tore off the stabilizers.
Democracy was victorious. Perón and his blond hooker took off for Portugal.
I gave myself a few hours off. While triumphant middle-class mobs poured into the street to celebrate, I was in a hotel room with the daughter of the French ambassador. Listening to the chanting mob through the window, the taste of champagne and Nicolette on my tongue, I concluded this was better than flying.
Our image got fashioned in that campaign. I was wearing old Army fatigues most of the time, and that's the view of me most people remember. Earl was wearing tan Air Force officer's fatigues with the insignia taken off, boots, helmet, goggles, scarf, and his old leather flying jacket with the 332nd patch on the shoulder. When he wasn't flying he'd take the helmet off and put on an old black beret he kept in his hip pocket. Often, when we were asked to make personal appearances, Earl and I were asked to dress in our fatigues so everyone would know us. The public never seemed to realize that most of the time we wore suits and ties, just like everyone else.
When Earl and I were together, it was often in a combat situation, and for that reason we became best friends . . . people in combat become close very quickly. I talked about my life, my war, about women. He was a little more guarded—maybe he wasn't sure how I'd take hearing his exploits with white girls—but eventually, one night when we were in northern Italy looking for Bormann, I heard all about Orlena Goldoni.
“I used to have to paint her stockings on in the morning,” Earl said. “I'd have to make up her legs, so it would look like she had silk stockings. And I'd have to paint the seam down the back in eyeliner.” He smiled. “That was a paint job I always enjoyed doing.”
“Why didn't you just give her some stockings?” I asked. They were easy enough to come by. GIs wrote to their friends and relatives in the States to send them.
“I gave her lots of pairs,” Earl shrugged, “but Lena'd give 'em away to the comrades.”
Earl hadn't kept a picture of Lena, not where Lillian could find it, but I saw her in the pictures later, when she was billed as Europe's answer to Veronica Lake. Tousled blond hair, broad shoulders, a husky voice. Lake's screen persona was cool, but Goldoni's was hot. The silk stockings were real in the pictures, but so were the legs under them, and the picture celebrated Lena's legs as often as the director thought he could get away with it. I remember thinking how much fun Earl must have had painting her.
She was a cabaret singer in Naples when they met, in one of the few clubs where black soldiers were allowed. She was eighteen and a black marketeer and a former courier for the Italian Communists. Earl took one look at her and threw caution to the winds. It was maybe the one time in his entire life that he indulged himself. He started taking chances. Slipping off the field at night, dodging MP patrols to be with her, sneaking back early in the morning and being on the flight line ready to take off for Bucharest or Ploeşti . . .
“We knew it wasn't forever,” Earl said. “We knew the war would end sooner or later.” There was a kind of distance in his eyes, the memory of a hurt, and I could see how much leaving Lena had cost him. “We were grownups about it.” A long sigh. “So we sa
id goodbye. I got discharged and went back to work for the union. And we haven't seen each other since.” He shook his head. “Now she's in the pictures. I haven't seen any of them.”
The next day, we got Bormann. I held him by his monk's cowl and shook him till his teeth rattled. We turned him over to the representative of the Allied War Crimes Tribunal and gave ourselves a few days' leave.
Earl seemed more nervous than I'd ever seen him. He kept disappearing to make phone calls. The press always followed us around, and Earl jumped every time a camera bulb went off. The first night, he disappeared from our hotel room, and I didn't see him for three days.
Usually I was the one exhibiting this kind of behavior, always sneaking off to spend some time with a woman. Earl's doing it caught me by surprise.
He'd spent the weekend with Lena, in a little hotel north of Rome. I saw their pictures together in the Italian papers on Monday morning—somehow the press found out about it. I wondered whether Lillian had heard, what she was thinking. Earl showed up, scowling, around noon on Monday, just in time for his flight to India: He was going to Calcutta to see Gandhi. Earl wound up stepping between the Mahatma and the bullets that some fanatic fired at him on the steps of the temple—and all of a sudden the papers were full of India, with what had just happened in Italy forgotten. I don't know how Earl explained it to Lillian.
Whatever it was he said, I suppose Lillian believed him. She always did.
* * *
Glory years, these. With the fascist escape route to South America cut, the Nazis were forced to stay in Europe where it was easier to find them. After Earl and I dug Bormann out of his monastery, we plucked Mengele from a farm attic in Bavaria and we got so close to Eichmann in Austria that he panicked and ran out into the arms of a Soviet patrol, and the Russians shot him out of hand. David Harstein walked into the Escorial on a diplomatic passport and talked Franco into making a live radio address in which he resigned and called for elections, and then David stayed with him on the plane all the way to Switzerland. Portugal called for elections right afterward, and Perón had to find a new home in Nanking, where he became a military adviser to the generalissimo. Nazis were bailing out of Iberia by the dozen, and the Nazi hunters caught a lot of them.
I was making a lot of money. Mr. Holmes wasn't paying me much in the way of wages, but I got a lot for making the Chesterfield endorsement and for selling my story to Life, and I had a lot of paid speaking engagements—Mr. Holmes hired me a speechwriter. My half of the Park Avenue apartment was free, and I never had to pay for a meal if I didn't want to. I got large sums for articles that were written over my name, things like “Why I Believe in Tolerance” and “What America Means to Me,” and “Why We Need the U.N.” Hollywood scouts were making incredible offers for long-term contracts, but I wasn't interested just yet. I was seeing the world.
So many girls were visiting me in my room that the tenants' association talked about installing a revolving door.
The papers started calling Earl “the Black Eagle,” from the 332nd's nickname, “the Lonely Eagles.” He didn't like the name much. David Harstein, by those few who knew of his talent, was “the Envoy.” I was “Golden Boy,” of course. I didn't mind.
EFD got another member in Blythe Stanhope van Renssaeler, who the papers started calling “Brain Trust.” She was a petite, proper upper-crust Boston lady, high-strung as a thoroughbred, married to a scumbag New York congressman by whom she'd had three kids. She had the kind of beauty that took a while for you to notice, and then you wondered why you hadn't seen it before. I don't think she ever knew how lovely she really was.
She could absorb minds. Memories, abilities, everything.
Blythe was older than me by about ten years, but that didn't bother me, and before long I started flirting with her. I had plenty of other female companionship, and everyone knew that, so if she knew anything about me at all—and maybe she didn't, because my mind wasn't important enough to absorb—she didn't take me seriously.
Eventually her awful husband, Henry, threw her out, and she came by our apartment to look for a place to stay. Mr. Holmes was gone, and I was feeling no pain after a few shots of his twenty-year-old brandy, and I offered her a bed to stay in—mine, in fact. She blew up at me, which I deserved, and stormed out.
Hell, I hadn't intended her to take the offer as a permanent one. She should have known better.
So, for that matter, should I. Back in '47, most people would rather marry than burn. I was an exception. And Blythe was too high-strung to fool with—she was on the edge of nervous collapse half the time, with all the knowledge in her head, and one thing she didn't need was a Dakota farm boy pawing at her on the night her marriage ended.
Soon Blythe and Tachyon were together. It didn't do my self-esteem any good to be turned down for a being from another planet, but I'd gotten to know Tachyon fairly well, and I'd decided he was okay in spite of his liking for brocade and satin. If he made Blythe happy, that was fine with me. I figured he had to have something right with him to persuade a blue-stocking like Blythe to actually live in sin.
The term “ace” caught on just after Blythe joined the EFD, so suddenly we were the Four Aces. Mr. Holmes was Democracy's Ace in the Hole, or the Fifth Ace. We were good guys, and everyone knew it.
It was amazing, the amount of adulation we received. The public simply wouldn't allow us to do anything wrong. Even die-hard bigots referred to Earl Sanderson as “our colored flyboy.” When he spoke out on segregation, or Mr. Holmes on populism, people listened.
Earl was consciously manipulating his image, I think. He was smart, and he knew how the machinery of the press worked. The promise he'd given with such struggle to Mr. Holmes was fully justified by events. He was consciously molding himself into a black hero, an untarnished figure of aspiration. Athlete, scholar, union leader, war hero, faithful husband, ace. He was the first black man on the cover of Time, the first on Life. He had replaced Robeson as the foremost black ideal, as Robeson wryly acknowledged when he said, “I can't fly, but then Earl Sanderson can't sing.”
Robeson was wrong, by the way.
Earl was flying higher than he ever had. He hadn't realized what happens to idols when people find out about their feet of clay.
The Four Aces' failures came the next year, in '48. When the Communists were on the verge of taking over in Czechoslovakia we flew to Germany in a big rush, and then the whole thing was called off. Someone at the State Department had decided the situation was too complicated for us to fix, and he'd asked Mr. Holmes not to intervene. I heard a rumor later that the government had been recruiting some ace talents of their own for covert work, and that they'd been sent in and made a bungle of it. I don't know if that's true or not.
Then, two months after the Czechoslovakian fiasco, we were sent into China to save a billion-odd people for democracy.
It was not apparent at the time, but our side had already lost. On paper, things seemed retrievable—the generalissimo's Kuomintang still held all the major cities, their armies were well equipped, compared to Mao and his forces, and it was well known that the generalis-simo was a genius. If he weren't, why had Mr. Luce made him Time's Man of the Year twice?
On the other hand, the Communists were marching south at a steady rate of twenty-three point five miles per day, rain or shine, summer or winter, redistributing land as they went. Nothing could stop them—certainly not the generalissimo.
By the time we were called in, the generalissimo had resigned—he did that from time to time, just to prove to everyone that he was indispensable. So the Four Aces met with the new KMT president, a man named Chen who was always looking over his shoulder lest he be replaced once the Great Man decided to make another dramatic entrance to save the country.
The U.S. position, by then, was prepared to concede north China and Manchuria, which the KMT had already lost barring the big cities. The idea was to save the south for the generalissimo by partitioning the country. The Kuomintang would get a
chance to establish itself in the south while they organized for an eventual reconquest, and the Communists would get the northern cities without having to fight for them.
We were all there, the Four Aces and Holmes—Blythe was included as a scientific adviser and ended up giving little speeches about sanitation, irrigation, and inoculation. Mao was there, and Zhou Enlai, and President Chen. The generalissimo was off in Canton sulking in his tent, and the People's Liberation Army was laying seige to Mukden in Manchuria and otherwise marching steadily south, twenty-three point five miles per day, under Lin Biao.
Earl and I didn't have much to do. We were observers, and mostly what we observed were the delegates. The KMT people were astonishingly polite, they dressed well, they had uniformed servants who scuttled about on their errands. Their interaction with one another looked like a minuet.
The PLA people looked like soldiers. They were smart, proud, military in the way that real soldiers are military, without all the white-glove prissy formality of the KMT. The PLA had been to war, and they weren't used to losing. I could tell that at a glance.
It was a shock. All I knew about China was what I'd read in Pearl Buck. That, and the certified genius of the generalissimo.
“These guys are fighting those guys?” I asked Earl.
“Those guys” —Earl was indicating the KMT crowd— “aren't fighting anyone. They're ducking for cover and running away. That's part of the problem.”
“I don't like the looks of this,” I said.
Earl seemed a little sad. “I don't, either,” he said. He spat. “The KMT officials have been stealing land from the peasants. The Communists are giving the land back, and that means they've got popular support. But once they've won the war they'll take it back, just like Stalin did.”