But the mechanics told them that some of the Sirius’s propeller blades were damaged, and they would need the night to make repairs. They flew the Potez instead and just made it back to Bilbao before sunset, and while the commandant had taken his room back by now, Sam found them a private corner in the hangar, no more than a closet, so they could sleep away from the noise of the children and the pilots. The room had no light at all, and as soon as Sam closed the door Irene took off his shirt, unbuttoned his trousers, and the touch of her fingers on his skin was like the striking of a match. There was no room to make love on the floor, so Irene just braced herself against the wall while the frenzy overtook them both. In less than a minute Sam had finished. As soon as he caught his breath, he apologized. Irene thumped back against the wall and carried his wet, slack body on hers. If she could have spoken, she would have told him that he shouldn’t be sorry, that it was sublime to give comfort to your lover when he needed it. That you knew for certain you loved somebody when his pleasure gave you more joy than your own.

Somehow they fit themselves in blankets between the walls and fell into oblivion, which ended abruptly in a crash that rattled the floor at eight minutes past three in the morning. Sam bolted up, wide awake.

“What was that?” Irene said, although it was obvious.

Sam just swore and grabbed his clothes. The room was black, and he couldn’t find his service pistol. Irene discovered it inside her shoe and gave it to him, although she wasn’t sure what he meant to do with it. Shoot bullets at the incoming airplanes? Another crash made the walls shake, and now the children were stirring on the other side of the partition, crying softly, nobody screaming because they all knew what a bomb sounded like, they knew there was nothing to do but hide and pray.

“I’m going to man the guns,” said Sam, meaning the three paltry, aging antiaircraft guns atop the control tower. “Get the kids under cover, all right? As best you can.”

He took an instant to kiss her and ran through the door. Irene shoved her feet into her shoes and followed. The hangar was chaos. The chaperones were not warriors. They didn’t know what to do, whether to hunker down inside or take the children and flee into the farmland. Irene cupped her hands and hollered in Spanish, “Into the cellar!”

Possibly she had the word wrong, but everybody understood when she yanked open the wooden hatchway to the bunker beneath, which had been dug out of the clay some weeks before. Sam had shown her, the first day. It was damp and primitive, nothing but dirt floor and no lights, but it afforded some cover from the bombs that now made the whole building shudder, made such a racket it got into your head so you couldn’t think. Explosion after explosion, each one louder and bigger, so you knew they were getting closer. Irene thought she could hear the rat-a-tat of a gun, in between the blasts, and she hoped to God it was the Republican antiaircraft guns and not the German strafing.

She kept on shooing children down the ladder. There was only the faintest light to see them. The last one scrambled beneath the floor of the hangar, and Irene set her foot on the ladder, but she couldn’t force herself down. She thought, Someone’s missing, I’m sure there’s somebody missing, that can’t be all of them.

She called out and heard nothing except the mad detonation of bombs, the roar of aircraft engines, all of which had grown so loud they drowned out the sound of the guns. Irene ran frantically around the hangar, looking beneath airplanes, behind wheels, in corners, but she couldn’t see a thing, only shadows that might or might not be objects, might or might not be a terrified child. It was just too dark. She thought she heard a whimper. She stood still and closed her eyes. The hangar rocked around her. She turned left, took four steps, and stumbled over a small, warm, sobbing body.

“There you are,” she said, although she couldn’t even hear her own voice. She scooped up the child—he was so light, like a bird, underfed and hollow-boned—and carried him in her arms toward the hatchway, from which the tiniest light drew. She set the child on the top step of the ladder and gave a small push, yelled down below that there was another one coming, and then the whole world turned as bright as day, as hot as the sun, as a bomb dropped right on the southeast corner of the hangar, fifty feet away, and detonated.

Hanalei, Hawai’i

November 1947

It would be romantic and fitting, I suppose, to tell you that Lindquist and I fly to Ki’ilau by moonlight inside the Rofrano Sirius that sits at the back of its hangar, shrouded in camouflage netting. But when we arrive at the airfield, Lindquist makes no move to the hangar that harbors the world’s most famous airplane. We take the company ship instead, the one we flew a few weeks ago, when we went on our picnic.

I am no more inclined for flight tonight than I was then, but what choice do I have? She’s found me out. She knows my weakness, my terrible need. She understands how deeply I require the knowledge inside her head.

I did not lie to you. I never said I wasn’t Sam Mallory’s daughter, did I? Since leaving home, I’ve told only one person, and that was Velázquez. I told him in the last hours I knew him, as we walked around the dusky streets of Paris together. It was my final hope, my single remaining card to play, my ace, and though Velázquez was at first disbelieving, then astonished, and then struck with awe at this evidence of God’s mysterious ways, still he wouldn’t break his promise. He apologized and explained that it was not his secret to tell.

I forgave him for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for misleading you. It’s just that I don’t tell anybody who I am. People have a way of making assumptions about you, when they discover you were spawned by some famous person, some person they think they knew because they read about him in a newspaper. And to reveal your true self to another person, that’s like taking a knife and paring away a section of your own skin, so that somebody else can see the workings of your blood and muscle for himself.

But here is the truth. When I was thirteen years old, as I said before, my mother told me my father had left us for good this time, had taken up with one of his whores and wanted no more to do with us. She packed me in the car and took me to Reno, Nevada, where you could then obtain the most efficient divorce in America. She told me we would move to a new home in Washington State, containing a new father, whose name she adopted for me. She told me that Mr. Everett would take better care of me than Mallory ever had, and I should take him to my heart. I didn’t believe her. I tried to run away and find my father again, but I didn’t get far before my stepfather found me and brought me back and whipped me on my naked buttocks with his belt. He told me that my mother had just been protecting my feelings, that my father was actually dead, he had been killed in an airplane crash like the crazy fool he was, and I should forget he had ever existed.

I don’t think my stepfather quite realized what kind of effect this statement might have on me. He wasn’t a man of much imagination, so he couldn’t have understood what it was like when your father made his living in an airplane, flying stunts, flying races, flying for daring distances over water, just flying, all the time, every day, so that his daughter would lie awake at night and pray and pray that his airplane would not crash, that her father would return to her and cradle her in his arms just one more time, that was all I asked of God. When Mr. Everett told me that my worst nightmare had come to life, that my father’s beloved body had gone to earth and been destroyed, I felt not sadness but relief.

Finally, there was no need to worry that he would be killed, because he was already dead.

Except that Sam Mallory was not dead yet. Just imagine my astonishment when I left home and got out in the world and discovered that he was still alive and kicking in 1936, the year before my stepfather popped my cherry on the Chesterfield sofa of his private office. Just imagine my guilt that I hadn’t succeeded in escaping that day when I was thirteen, that I might have found my father and saved him if only I’d been more intrepid, more clever, more determined.

Just imagine my fury at the woman who had stolen him from me, who had known him when I had not, who had won his heart and kept it for her own exclusive use.

Anyway, I’m telling you now, better late than never. I was born Eugenia Ann Mallory of Oakland, California, daughter of Samuel and Bertha Mallory. My father was the greatest pilot the world has ever known, and I am here to find out how and why he came to die on the badlands of northern Spain, at the exact moment I needed him most.