Instead I climb out of bed and prepare my makeshift darkroom. I move as silently as possible, the way I learned to do when I was small. I remove the film and clip the ends and load the reel; I sink the reel into the tank and fill it with water from the sink and swish it from side to side. Then the developer, the stop bath, the fixer, the rinse. Hang the negatives on their clothespins and clean the trays.

But despite these comforting rituals, I’m still restless. Something nags me. I’m thinking about that airplane I saw today, and about that last flight from Alexandria, and the search for Irene Foster that dragged on for weeks.

I find my way to the little table that serves as my desk, and I pull out the stacks of articles sent to me in batches by my old friend Bill at the Associated Press, in response to my saucy telegrams. He’s been a good sport, Bill Cushing, and I owe him a drink or two. I’ve organized them in neat manila folders, according to subject, and I take out my penlight so I can read the labels. Alexandria, reads one.

It’s now three o’clock in the morning. I climb back into my cold bed with a stack of decade-old newsprint and read without comprehension until my eyelids droop, until I can’t go on. I set aside the clippings on the nightstand and that’s all I remember, until some erotic dream takes shape in my sleep, as it often does.

But this time it is not Velázquez who fucks me furiously in the grass of some airfield, while a series of propeller engines scream over our heads, one after the other, each louder than the last.

It’s Leo.

In the morning, I bring the prints and the negatives to Lindquist and set them down on the tablecloth next to her breakfast plate.

“There you are. Now talk.”

IV

The first lesson is that you can’t lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can’t win a war if you haven’t.

—Jimmy Doolittle

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

April 1937: Egypt

Having reached Alexandria just before midnight, Irene was now a full two days ahead of the next competitor. She’d been lucky, of course, but she had also flown with the kind of cool, single-minded confidence she hadn’t felt in years. The monsoon in Delhi, for example. When everyone else had remained on the ground, Irene had taken off in her gleaming, rebuilt Rofrano Sirius, tore right through the rain and clouds to the calm above, and built a lead that was essentially insurmountable, barring accident. You might even call it a classic Foster maneuver: the gutsy, calculated risk, relying on a thorough knowledge of geography and meteorology, allied with her characteristically precise piloting and sound instinct. The old Irene was back.