open. Eddie could see he was a handsome fellow, even though his face was covered in sooty, greasy oil. A shock of dark hair, a strong jaw, not much older than him. They even looked quite alike. But his clothes were badly burned and half hanging off him.
Eddie had seen dead bodies before – some of them burned to a cinder and others so badly mutilated they were unrecognisable. This death was one he was personally responsible for and it had particularly touched him. The fellow he had shot down and killed could have been his kith and kin. If his parents’ families hadn’t left Germany for New York forty years before, that dead man could have been his comrade-in-arms. He could have been him.
Eddie had walked towards the body, unsettled by the stillness of death. He knew the man had had a terrible end. He had seen his body jerk forward when Eddie had fired into the plane. That hadn’t killed him – that would have been a merciful death. Instead, the fellow had struggled to put out the flames around his engine, beating at them with his gloved hands. The fire went out – more through luck than the efforts of the wounded pilot, Eddie suspected – but the engine had died and the man had made a gallant effort to guide his aircraft down to earth. He nearly made it, but the plane stalled close to the ground and crashed with a great grinding crump.
Eddie knelt over the body, unnerved by the man’s sightless gaze. He almost expected the eyes to follow him or for the pilot to suddenly cough or breathe.
He reached down and took the man’s identification tag from a chain on his neck. That was part of the flyer’s code – pilots took it upon themselves to notify their enemies who had died and who had been captured. They would drop the tags and a wreath on the nearest enemy airbase. Flyers on both sides did it. Then he closed the man’s eyes. He was still warm, of course. Ten minutes ago he was as alive as Eddie and all the others standing there gawping. Some of them were thawing themselves by the blazing machine. That annoyed Eddie. It seemed discourteous.
‘Hey, get away,’ he yelled at the soldiers. ‘That thing might go off again. Or the ammunition might ignite.’
‘You can piss off, Yank,’ came a voice from the other side of the plane, obscured by smoke. The others laughed. Eddie half recognised the accent – they certainly weren’t British – probably Australians or New Zealanders.
He had expected them to greet him as a hero. Instead, they looked on him as some sort of curiosity. ‘Off yer go, mate,’ said another soldier – a barrel of a man with sergeant stripes on his sleeves – and placed a firm hand on Eddie’s shoulder. As he turned to leave, the same fellow said, ‘Well done, but as yer soar off back into the sky, and then back to yer comfy little bed, spare a thought for the poor bloody infantry.’
Eddie got back into his aircraft and took off, feeling a little foolish. As he banked over the scene, none of the soldiers below paid him any attention. So much for all that ‘Knights of the Sky’ crap he had read about in the newspapers and magazines back home.
That dead man’s face haunted him now as he tried to get back to sleep. Eddie’s fourth victim. One more, if he lived that long, and he’d be an Ace. That would make his mother proud. He tried to turn his thoughts back to Céline. Her silk scarf hung over a chair, still with a hint of her perfume. He recognised it. Quelques Fleurs. The scent hung in the air like a ghost. Eddie rolled over and pulled the blankets over his head. ‘One day, when this is all over, I shall take her back to New York,’ he told himself. ‘One day I might even ask her to marry me!’
How could she refuse? A rich, handsome American – was there a more eligible man in the whole of France?
As Eddie drifted half a world away, his mother Else Hertz drew back a thick velvet curtain in the grand living room of their Upper East Side apartment so she could look down over Central Park. It was a cloudy night, but for a moment the moon came through and the trees were lit with a silver glow. A lone