The next day, he was pleased to see Pishkoff in his hotel room. Pishkoff was some mysterious age between thirty and seventy, tended to lean to one side even at the rare moments when at attention, and could be described as “leathered” if that process included fermentation.

“You’re going home,” Ironside said with enthusiasm.

“Where?” Pishkoff asked.

“Russia.”

Pishkoff sat on an ottoman. “Oh.”

12

It was September 15, and the Battle of Saint-Mihiel was over. The squadron was at work with welding equipment, saws and hammers, miles of canvas, sail-repair kits sent from Nantucket to restitch the DH 4 wings.

Lenore was on the field, nose pointing into the fair but constant breeze. She had been gassed up, and Ripley and Lee ambled along in their teddy-bear suits. Lee’s was too tight and too short, coming to his calves. It was fleece-lined, with a leather shell, and he wore his uniform beneath it, and silk drawers below that. He carried his Springfield.

“Surprising I haven’t taken you up,” Ripley said. “You can’t walk ten feet without someone wanting you to take him up.”

Lee pulled at the yarn roped around his neck, so the puppets came away from his skin and now rode atop the teddy bear. Ripley glanced at them.

“Any idea where you’d like to go?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” Lee said.

“People tend to go souvenir hunting. That would be fun.” Ripley walked until he and Lee were next to Lenore.

Lee knew that Ripley, like most pilots, had made alterations to his cockpit. It was where pilots worked, and it was where they might die, so the officers tended to bring with them pages from the Bible or good-luck charms, or they might paint slogans to cheer themselves up.

But Lee hadn’t paid attention to what Ripley had brought with him—he had just a vague impression of newspapers shellacked to the framing. Now Ripley asked him to sit in the pilot’s seat. Lee straddled it carefully. Rudder bar, throttle, control stick—yes, he had known these would be here. What did Ripley want him to see? He was submerged to the shoulders in a collage.

All around him were French postcards and models cut from the racier editions of L’Etude Académique. There were cyanide prints of nude dancers in mid-jump from Alo Studios and Alta Studios, smuggled via international mail, and exquisite silver-tint odalisques in harem poses, breasts bare above beaded midriff corsets, in postures of supplication.

All of them looked just a bit sad to Lee. He had seen—especially since his trip overseas—nude models who seemed excited or shameless or frozen in the staid spirit of classicism, but Ripley had not chosen these. His models had children at home. They knew they had to walk home after dark. They worried what their parents might think.