“She was an aviator. First woman to fly a helicopter. First woman to compete in the world gliding championships. Huge celebrity in her lifetime. Kennedy invited her to the White House. Nehru flew in a glider with her over New Delhi. In the sixties she lived in Ghana where she had an affair with Nkrumah. Died in seventy-nine. Anyway, Julia turns out to have been a big fan of hers, and it seems she wanted to write a book about her. This was after her TV career had gone belly-up. Ditto her return to radio. She’d had a spell as partner in some short-lived gallery, then I think a brief debacle in PR, and then some time in the nineties she decided she was a writer. She did some magazine articles, fluff mostly, but then she got interested in this Hanna Reitsch woman, and started researching a biography. You’re sure you don’t know the name?”
“It does ring a faint bell.”
“You never saw that Carlo Ponti movie Operation Crossbow?”
“No.”
“Or Hitler: The Last Ten Days?”
“Nope.”
“How about Downfall?”
“With Bruno Ganz? Yes. Oh, right.” It came back to me: “She was Hitler’s test pilot.”
“Bingo. So Julia fires off a proposal for this book. The proposal gets read by a friend of hers who used to read for a publisher back in the nineties. Our investigator tracked this woman down and she told him about this proposal and the report she’d written on it. He found copies of both in the publisher’s archives in Croydon. They make fascinating reading. It seems this new heroine of Julia’s was an unrepentant Nazi—Kennedy and the rest notwithstanding. She wore the Iron Cross with diamonds that Hitler gave her, to her dying day. In her last interview she said, quote, ‘I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism.’ ”
“Julia didn’t know that?”
“Oh, she knew it. That’s the point. She appears to have found the woman’s, uh, constancy altogether admirable. She positively gushes about it. Let me read you the last paragraph of her proposal: ‘I want to tell the tale of this heroic woman whose physical courage and astonishing technical skills were matched only by her refusal to betray her own principles. She was no more reluctant to acknowledge her belief in National Socialism, than she was to test-pilot a V-1 Flying Bomb; no more afraid of denouncing modern-day Germany as a “Land of bankers,” than she’d been to fly General von Greim out of the bunker under enemy fire in order to deliver the Fuhrer’s last commands to the Luftwaffe. I hope to write a book that will do justice to this brave, stubborn, uncompromising, altogether extraordinary individual.”’
“Christ,” I said.
“Unbelievable, right? Our old friend Julia Gault, a Nazi sympathizer!”
I chafed a bit at that.
“Well, as you said, it’s the constancy she’s admiring, not the principles themselves.”