But, at last, Richard had felt confident enough to leave them to get on with it. Hard hat and security vest in place once more, he followed one of the few officers not involved with loading the ship back down the walkway towards the gangplank. Now, on his right, instead of that vacancy with its Rubik’s cube floor there was a wall of red, lead containers, ridged for strength, battered but still strong, stinking of oil, metal and rust. And this time, the vacancy was on his left hand, for the dockside was slowly being cleared of the first of the containers that had been choking it.
Normally it would have taken little more than a minute to lift a container from the dockside and position it aboard, but the process was slowed by several factors. The major’s containers were not well placed and had to be moved from the side of the rail tracks before the cranes could lift them. They had also been offloaded from the trains that brought them down here without regard to contents or, crucially, weight. Furthermore, because they were going on to a vessel that was fundamentally unprepared to receive them, there was often an unusually lengthy discussion between the longshoreman and the lading officer as to precisely where each container should be deposited. A one hundred minute task, therefore, was threatening to stretch out to five hours and more. It was out of the question that Richard should have to wait until the better part of midnight to see everything completed here. Especially as Captain Sin and his crew were perfectly capable, if less than happy. Major Guerrero was able to take any decisions regarding National Guard matters and Antoine — a bachelor gay in the old-fashioned use of the term — had no calls on his time and was content to stay aboard and oversee any unexpected legal snags.
When Richard clambered aboard the Bell it became immediately clear that Nic had been more than generous in offering him a lift. The six seats in the passenger compartment were filled. Nic himself, Robin, Liberty and the crew of Katapult8 were packed in tight. Richard hesitated, feeling a little like a mackerel invading a sardine tin. But Nic waved him forward with a grin. ‘You’re riding shotgun,’ he shouted over the roar of the Pratt and Whitney motors. ‘The co-pilot’s seat’s still empty.’
Richard folded himself as tightly as he could and oozed into the cockpit like toothpaste sinking back into the tube. Even so, the wiry pilot had to squeeze hard against the side window to let him through. Richard gingerly unfolded himself into the co-pilot’s seat and buckled his seat belt tightly. The Bell jumped into the air. Richard had seen enough of the docks for one day, so he looked across at the man in control.
And blinked.
The pilot’s skin was darker than Antoine’s Creole colouring, but not quite dark enough to be African-American or West Indian. Her hair was curled thickly enough to camouflage the headpiece of her earphones. The stem of the built-in microphone almost touched the fullness of her chiselled lips. She shot him a glance from eyes that were unsettlingly like Major Guerrero’s — long lashes framing milky whites and black-coffee pupils almost as dark as the irises at their centres. Her nose and cheekbones were sharp, as was the intelligence behind those arresting eyes. ‘All secure, Cap’n?’ she growled.
‘Yup,’ was all he could say.
And the Bell went up like a rocket lifting off.
TEN
The cab dropped Richard and Robin outside the Sky Room on South Locust Avenue at seven fifty-five p.m. and they hurried through the increasingly humid atmosphere under the bright thrust of the awning and into the restaurant section of the Spanish baroque fantasy of the Breakers Hotel. They crossed the lobby and entered the lift, which obligingly whisked them upwards almost as fast as Biddy McKinney, Nic’s chopper pilot, had done.
Richard had watched, fascinated, as the pilot sent the Bell soaring across the docks and down into the Island Express helipad. Robin held a pilot’s license and was a gifted helicopter pilot. He was well used to watching her taking control of a range of helicopters, but Biddy seemed to him to have something extra. A special gift — almost an ability to become one with her machine. It was at once fascinating and faintly disturbing. Like something out of the long discontinued X-Files.
‘What’s the matter, Cap’n?’ she’d growled after a moment or two under his piercing stare. ‘Ain’t you never seen a woman of colour fly?’
His answer had begun a brief but intense conversation, during which he’d discovered her name and a great deal more about her. Not least that she was born and raised in Enterprise, Alabama, educated at the Enterprise Ozark Community College before joining the army and eventually transferring to the First Aviation Brigade at nearby Fort Rucker — Mother Rucker to those who knew and loved it. Among her other duties there, she’d worked her way up to warrant officer and served with the Aviation Technical Test Centre as a test pilot for choppers, so there were hardly any she didn’t know her way around. She loved army life, flying and working under the command of Major General Magnum but, when her last tour of duty had come to an end, she’d discovered with some surprise that her reputation had spread beyond the realms of the aviation brigades, the state of Alabama and the United States Army Air Service — so much so that there were men willing to make her offers that were hard to refuse.
Mr Greenbaum had made the best of them, so here Biddy was. And, she had to admit, spending much of her time in corporate luxury in her quarters aboard Maxima — which were hardly less lavish than the guest suites — and pottering around in a pretty little new-generation Bell 429 was more like a long vacation on full pay as far as she was concerned. Moreover, she was off to Mexico tomorrow for a three-day cruise followed by a week or so in the most well-appointed building she had ever come across. As she had flown the chopper from which they had shot much of Mr Greenbaum’s Dahlia Blanca video, she’d known exactly what she was talking about. The weather up here in California might be darkening down, but the future looked bright to ex-Warrant Officer Biddy McKinney.
The elevator doors opened several seconds and eighteen floors later. Richard and Robin stepped shoulder to shoulder into the Sky Room and Biddy vanished from Richard’s mind, overwhelmed as he was by his immediate surroundings. The maître d’, who introduced himself as Mario, greeted them and, at the mention of Nic’s name, led them to a table in the corner. As they followed him, Robin looked around, caught between amusement and surprise. The whole place was like Queen Mary’s younger sibling. The ship’s 1930s Art Deco fittings were echoed here in the stylish restaurant by furnishings every bit as palatial, but from the 1940s. And Mario’s quiet speech of introduction and orientation mentioned the later cohort of Hollywood stars. In place of Greta Garbo, the Astaires and their generation, famous in the pre-war years, he talked of post-war regulars like Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and Cary Grant, who had famously come here to sip their cocktails and look down over Long Beach in the company of Elizabeth Taylor, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner. Robin glanced across at Richard and shook her head. His grin was just as wide as it had been aboard the Queen Mary last night. Any wider, she thought, and the top of his head would fall off.
‘This is Mr Greenbaum’s table,’ announced Mario as he pulled out a chair for Robin. ‘Here in his favourite corner.’
But this corner was no hideaway, no secluded spot, Robin thought. Two long picture windows met to form it, offering a breathtaking view across lower Long Beach towards the ocean, from the cranes standing tall under the security lighting above Sulu Queen right the way round past Queen Mary to Grissom Island and White Island in the outwash of the Los Angeles River, to distant Seal Beach beyond. Under a low grey sky that looked like the roof of a squat mineshaft, the city spread out like the strike of a lifetime in a diamond mine. Like the sales tray in Tiffany’s — points of jewel brightness beneath a coal-black cover of velvety darkness.