Hopscotch

He pocketed the PBY key and got back in the car and drove it out the runway, racked it alongside the Catalina and got to work. He checked the fuel gauges and found it full; that was standard procedure—you filled after you landed, not before you took off; that way you were ready to go on short notice. He took out the three logbooks—by regulation there was one for the airframe and a separate one for each engine—and left them askew on the floor by the right-seat rudder pedals. He didn’t care what shape the plane was in but it had to look as if he did. Cutter wasn’t going to give him any help if he left too many doors open.

He put the suitcase in the plane, belt-strapping it onto one of the pry-rigged passenger seats in the midships blister. The manuscript was in the suitcase. He had to give it up to them or they wouldn’t buy any of it; and it had to be the real manuscript, not a fake and not a partial—no tricks, nothing withheld.

He took the clochard out of the trunk and laid him out on the grass under the high wing. He stripped the clochard to the skin. There were scars here and there—it hadn’t been an easy life for the clochard—but none of that would matter. He brought the four-liter can of gasoline out of the Peugeot and bathed the corpse with the stuff to get rid of any telltales that might have adhered. The clochard’s filthy rags had to disappear; Kendig bundled them up and set the bundle aside.

He poured the acid solution out of the Vittel bottle onto the clochard’s face. He wasn’t cold-blooded enough to do it without a cringing nausea. When the acid had done a fair job of eradicating features he washed it away with gasoline. Then he dressed the body in his own old underwear and socks and Oakley’s suit and topcoat; he put Oakley’s identification and wallet in the clothes along with the passport photo of himself that he’d rescued from the London police sergeant’s desk. Then he added the Alexandre Vaneau passport—again with his own photo in it—to the contents of the dead man’s pockets.

The clochard was stiffening with rigor by now and that was all to Kendig’s advantage. He dragged the corpse forward, closing his mind to the ghoulishness of it and the reek of gasoline. He propped the body in the pilot’s seat and belted it in.

Outside on the grass he opened the bundle of filthy clothes and spread the coat out flat. He piled into the center of it the rest of the clothes, the empty Vittel bottle and his own spare pair of shoes. He tied up the arms and skirt of the coat and carried the bundle into the plane together with the can of gasoline. Then he went back outside again and explored in the trunk of the Peugeot. It was slightly redolent of the dead but that would dissipate. He found a combination windshield-scraper and brush; it would do. He used it to rake the grass where he’d been working. He left no sign in the earth except a set of vague foot-impressions to show he’d walked from the car to the plane; he left the trunk lid ajar with the keys in it both to air it out and to indicate he’d been in a hurry.

When he climbed in the waist door he latched it shut behind him and went forward up the steeply tilted companionway into the cockpit. He tested the clochard’s limbs but they hadn’t stiffened quite enough yet. He couldn’t bear the thought of sitting beside the ghastly dead man for any length of time; he went back into the fuselage and sat under the blister watching the night. Along the edge of the field bare branches were silhouetted against the dark sky, as jagged as cracks in a porcelain surface. Scarves of cloud hung low in the southwest but the clear intense cold held.

He felt a vague urge: the impulse to communicate his gratitude to Carla Fleming. He remembered her soft self-assured voice, her long-boned Modigliani features. He’d never get in touch with her; he couldn’t take the chance.

More than half his money was in the clochard’s money belt and the suitcase but he had about forty thousand dollars in his own belt and pockets and when it ran out he had the talent to make more. He had no papers of any kind but that wasn’t a problem either. This would be a poor time to try to make long-term plans. He’d drift a while and think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his years. There was plenty of time for it. He wouldn’t get bored; he’d got over that, he’d changed too much to fear it. He was capable of life now; perhaps even capable of love—he’d find out about that someday.

He stripped Oakley’s watch off his wrist. After six now; he couldn’t wait longer. He moved at a crouch into the cockpit and got the watch onto the dead wrist. The joints were so stiff he had a lot of trouble moving them; that was how he wanted it.

It had to be done with great caution because if there was a spark at the wrong moment it could incinerate him. He threw all the windows wide open before he began to splash the gasoline around. He poured it liberally around the cockpit, over the corpse and the upholstery. Then he capped the gasoline can and stuffed it into the bundle of things he couldn’t leave behind. He took the candlewick fuse from his shirt pocket and wedged it into a metal seam by the edge of the soaked carpeting. Now he had to wait again while the wind carried the fumes off and evaporated the surface petrol and the rest of it soaked deep into things.

It was a risk but he had to take it and when he judged enough time had passed he turned the ignition switch on and pressed the Mesh button for the Number One engine. The flywheel spun with a grinding effort but the engine didn’t catch right away and he pushed the mixture control to full rich. No sparks in the cockpit; this wouldn’t have worked with a plane that had the engine in the nose of the fuselage. Both engines were in nacelles high on the wings and outboard of the cockpit.

The flywheel struggled and he heard the cylinders catch; he revved it a bit and then got the star-board engine ru

He unlocked the brake and ran the engines up and the PBY started to bounce, rolling slowly out of its parking space onto the strip. He kicked the pedal hard and she turned sedately to the right; he lined her up on the runway and taxied slowly to the far end and made the U-turn wide and slow. Now he had the length of the runway in front of him and a row of high trees at the far end. He remembered the strain with which the instructors regarded student takeoffs; if you didn’t get the nose up fast enough you’d go right into those trees or the power lines beyond.

The emergency hatch was in the bow forward of the windshield; you had to crawl under the dashboard to get to it. That wouldn’t be fast enough. He broke the half-window out of its frame on his right and judged he could work it from there. He set the bundle on his lap and ran up both engines against the brakes. When the plane began to shudder and lurch he released the brakes. It rolled forward and he throttled back; this had to be done precisely and he couldn’t have a lot of speed at first. He bounced forward at twenty miles an hour or so, steering with his feet while he leaned across the aisle and fixed the clochard’s dead fingers to the crescent wheel. He locked both the fists onto the control yoke and jammed the clochard’s feet under the rudder pedals so that they couldn’t kick back and send the plane into a ground loop.

Bumping along on the uneven ground he had a hard time climbing out the window but finally he was hanging there with both shoulders wedged into the opening so that he wouldn’t fall out before he wanted to. The starboard propeller was frighteningly close behind him but he could avoid that easily enough; it was the wing strut and the landing gear he’d have to worry about when he made his drop.

He had two matches in his left hand, pressed together. With that hand he reached the throttles and thrust them all the way forward to emergency speed. There was about a quarter mile of runway left. He struck the two matches and touched the flame to the gasoline-soaked tip of the candlewick. The flame soared bright; he had only a glimpse of it and then he was hunching his shoulders, clutching the dead matchsticks in his left hand and the bundle of oddments in his right.