Because the Long Beach naval station already knew what Mr. Rofrano was now announcing to the reporters gathered in the makeshift press room of the airfield cafeteria, while they ate their grilled cheese sandwiches and smoked their cigarettes, passing the time before the scheduled return of the Centauri from its test flight.

The Centauri would not return to Burbank that day, after all. Sam Mallory and Irene Foster had just begun their historic flight to Sydney.

Hanalei, Hawai’i

October 1947

What I didn’t tell you about that Spanish fellow, the one who told me where to find Mallory’s wreckage, was that we were lovers. Or maybe you’ve guessed? I mean, it wouldn’t be out of character for me, and in times of war we are all prone to do reckless things, like take lovers we know will probably die.

We met at an airfield outside Paris, not long after the Allies retook the city from the Nazis. Those were heady days. The journalists all found digs at the Hotel Scribe (and they say the press doesn’t have a sense of humor) where we proceeded to drink the bar dry. That’s another story. I did try to refuse the assignment to photograph Allied airplanes landing and taking off from this French airfield, which only last week belonged to the Luftwaffe, but that didn’t work out so well and Raoul Velázquez de los Monteros was the officer assigned to show me around.

Naturally I was curious about the name. It turned out he’d flown for the Republican Air Force during the civil war in Spain, and when the game was up in early 1938, he fled over the Pyrenees to France and offered his services to the French air command, vowing revenge on Fascists everywhere. Two years later, when the Fascists overran France, he was forced to flee again, this time to join the Royal Air Force, and that was more or less how he wound up escorting an American photographer around the Orly Air Base, ten miles southeast of Paris, on a beautiful early September day in 1944.