Last Message (9 page)
I sat down and took a deep breath.
I tried to stay positive. And soon I was thinking about Vanessa again. I could make all this sound awfully good to her. I took out my cell and started emailing her. But then I stopped. What if I wrote her a letter, an old-fashioned letter? She'd find that awfully romantic. There was lots of stationery in the room, fancy stuff with the hotel's name on it, looking very artistic, with lots of yellow. Very Van Gogh, very French. She would think that was really cool.
It was hard going. The last time I'd written a letter was for a pen-pal thing when I was a little kid. But I worked hard, tried to find the right words, the ones I imagined a girl would like to hear, and got it done, making sure it was several pages long. I told her that I had found the Noels and the painting and that I was about to reveal its value to them. I made it sound pretty dramatic. I'd figure out a way to tell her the truth later on. I sealed it and wrote her address on the outside of the envelope in my best handwriting. I would ask the concierge for a stamp later.
I knew I should write to Shirley too. I could almost hear Leon's squeaky voice telling me that she was the best girl for me. I'd only sent her that one quick text when I arrived. I should ask her how Leon was making out too. I was sure she would be checking on him, and that made me feel good.
But I never wrote her that email, because when I reached for my cell, I happened to glance down at the open suitcase. Sitting on top of my clothes, dug up from the bottom where they once had been hidden, were the other two manila envelopes and the small white one.
That was when it occurred to me that in all my excitement I hadn't even given another thought to the fact that, in essence, I had reached the next level in my assignments. It really seemed to me that no reasonable person could have expected me to have done any more with my first task. Could they?
I picked up the second envelope and opened it.
Dear Adam,
Congratulations. You did it! I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are a better man than me.
I almost stopped reading at that point. I set the letter down, feeling terrible guilt. But soon those arguments rose inside me again, telling me that I had done what I could and that there was no turning back. So I read on.
As I've already mentioned, this second task, believe it or not, is even more difficult than the first. I wouldn't blame you if you simply read what I have to say here and then joined your Mom and Dad for a nice vacation before heading home. You have done enough.
But if you choose to go on, here is your next challenge.
During the war, Corsica had seventeen American airbases on it. In fact, they used to call it the “USS Corsica.” But not all of us who flew reconnaissance missions from that Mediterranean island were from overseas. French fliers, who had bravely fought the Nazis for as long as possible, had formed a Free French Air Force and many were stationed near us.
The problem was, the Americans didn't like them very much. The Yanks had their way of doing things and, more importantly, they resented that many French had collapsed at the beginning of the war and worked with the Nazis. The Americans didn't respect their flying abilities either. So the two sides kept their distance and sometimes were even hostile to each other.
But not me. Maybe it was because I was Canadian, I don't know. But I thank God today that I wasn't bitter toward them because my attitude allowed me to befriend the most extraordinary man I ever met. He is at the heart of your second task.
You will recall that I often read to you from a novel entitled The Little Prince when you were a child. It was always my favorite, and your cousins may have mentioned that I read it to them too. You probably forget the story now, but it is one of the greatest ever written, the tale of a pilot who crashes in a desert and meets a strange little person who appears out of nowhere and changes his life.
Le Petit Prince
, as it's known in French, is one of the bestselling novels of all time; the Harry Potter books took a long time to catch up. But there is something that I never told you about that novel. I wanted to keep it a secret, which fits the book's air of mystery. I knew the incredible man who wrote it.
I met him in Corsica. His name was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, or as his friends knew him, “St. Ex.” He was a legend in France, even before he wrote the book. You wouldn't have thought that if you'd met him. He was a big man, very tall and a bit chubby, who walked with a lazy, loping gait and had a little turned-up Mickey Mouse nose and sleepy black eyes with lids that seemed always about to close.
But he had a giant spirit and a giant heart. He was an adventurer, a hero, a matchless storyteller, with a charisma that women, children and even the odd grown man, like me, could not resist. I feel deeply honored to have even spoken with him.
He was one of France's earliest aviators, taking to the air in the days when that meant taking your life into your hands. And when the French decided that they wanted to fly mail from Europe to Africa and South America, across deserts and oceans and jungles, only the greatest swashbuckling fliers were used. He was one of them. That first airmail service made its pilots into national heroes, who flew by sight and often crashed in desolate places. Everyone in France was astonished at their feats. The very name of their companyâAéropostaleâbecame a symbol of courage and adventure.
“Aéropostale?” I looked down at my shirt. “So that's what that's all about.”
The great “St. Ex” was their biggest star. He would land his plane anywhere, in any conditions, to find and rescue his comrades. But he was different from the rest. He not only accomplished these feats, he could retell them too. Speaking in desert tents or Parisian restaurants, he could rivet audiences, his magnetic presence lighting up his surroundings.
Then he began writing, his stories set in the skies. Within a few years he was one of France's greatest authors.
But he couldn't stop flying, and the danger increased. As he headed toward his forties, many of his fellow pilots had been killed. His own accidents, some particularly gruesome and spectacular, began to take their toll on his body and mind.
And then the war came. He immediately volunteered to fight and was in the first plane to spot the Nazi panzer divisions thundering toward Paris in the evil blitz that started World War II. When he described it in print, it was poetry.
After Hitler overran a divided France, Saint-Exupéry was devastated. A romantic who was angered by the brutality of war, he was fed up with the bloodthirstiness on all sides. He wanted to side with humanity. He fled to New York City. He was soon criticized as a traitor who was staying out of the battle.
And so he came back, to fight the Nazis the only way he knew how.
But he was well past his prime, battered and bruised by his horrific accidents and ill-equipped to fly new-fangled planes with complex instruments. His friends feared that he was giving his life away for France and freedom.
He soon found his way to Corsica.
But while living in the United States, he'd written
The Little Prince
, a children's story often read by adults, about imagination, friendship and the human spirit, about what was possible in a time of hatred. It appeared in print just as he landed in the Mediterranean, just as I came there too.
I soon heard stories about him from French pilots, tales that were by turns thrilling, sad and hilarious. The great man had been grounded more than once by the powerful American air command. They couldn't believe that his request to report had even been allowed. He was ten years too old, broken, so large that he had to be shoehorned into cockpits, almost incapable of operating the smoking-fast Lockheed P-38 Lightning planes that were the pride of the US Air Force. Americans guarded these expensive flying weapons as if they were gold, and “Major X” (as they called him) often crashed them. He seemed to the Yanks like someone from outer space: he would forget to wear his oxygen mask at 30,000 feet, write while flying, read while flying, take photographs of parts of France he loved instead of what he was supposed to be spying on, knew little English so he couldn't understand the men in the control towers (Americans who didn't know a word of French) and often let his wheels down only seconds before landing, bringing ambulances hurtling to the airstrips. He once circled the airfield for nearly an hour after a dangerous mission while he finished reading a gripping mystery novel.
But the French loved him. He gave them hope and courage, a walking monument who could describe life and what was truly important in it like no one had done before.
I knew him for a short while, a precious while. In the summer of 1944, just before I left on the mission that ended in my being shot down over Arles, I was stationed in Bastia in the northern part of the island, close to where he was. I had just read The Little Prince almost fresh off the press. Not one of my American colleagues even knew it existed.
But I loved it. I even loved the ending, when the Little Prince, this amazing miniature man from another planet, dies. It was so sad that I had to stick my head under the covers in my cot and cry.
I desperately wanted to meet St. Ex, so I got permission to take a jeep the six miles from our base to the beautiful village of Erbalunga, where his famous squadron was living. I was greeted with surprise. Americans never visited the French, unless they were commanders telling them what to do (despite the fact that the French pilots were often more experienced than the Americans). When I arrived, St. Ex was holding court outdoors after a picnic breakfast that looked and smelled delicious. He was telling a story and the others were listening with rapt attention, their mouths actually hanging open. He noticed me approaching and though I think he knew I couldn't understand a word he was saying, put a finger to his lips and motioned for me to sit down and listen. He held me spellbound too. I felt I was in the sky with him, soaring with him, crashing with him. When he was done, there was silence. Then he stood up, produced a deck of cards from his sleeve and went through a series of tricks that had us all in stitches. But I noticed that he had scars around his eyes and one that snaked up from his mouth, and I could tell that it was hard for him to stand.
Every day that week in early June, I went back to visit him. He was enchanted by my interest and signed my book. We talked and talked, me in English, he in French, laughing and hugging each other, two citizens of the world communicating with our souls.
I became so enthralled with him that I decided to give him a gift. I liked to carve in those days and found a remarkable glowing pink rock on the beach. I'm not even sure what kind of rock it was. But it was a pretty good size and I carved into it one of his beautiful passages about friendship from
The Little Prince
, using a little stone chisel and a club hammer from back at the base. When I gave it to him, he was moved to tears and told me that he would keep it with him on every flight he made. He said this as if it were an important promise.
The very next day, I went on my fateful mission over enemy territory and lost touch with St. Ex for more than a month. But when I was rescued, I was taken back to Corsica from Spain for a short while for debriefing. And as soon as I could, I went to see him. I was shocked by his appearance. He seemed to have aged terribly. His body was finished with the world, though his spirit remained. He greeted me with a smile.
The next day I saw him go up on a mission. I had the sense that he was sneaking up, had not been properly cleared to fly. His friends had to tie his shoes for him and help him into the plane. He reached down before he took off and waved to me, holding my rock aloft.
When he was in the air, a French pilot who spoke English remarked to me, “St. Ex has come here to die.”
And so he did.
The following week, on July 31, he took off at about 8:30 am to photograph and map enemy-occupied land in southern France. Some say he had been grounded the day before but went into the skies regardless.
He never came back.
There were many myths about what happened to him. More than one German claimed to have shot the legend down. But no trace of him was found. It was as if he had vanished, age 44, in 1944. In the single saddest day of the Little Prince's life, there had been 44 sunsets on his tiny planet.
St. Ex had returned to his home in the skies.
I remember my extreme sadness. I remember the anger I felt too, when I heard an American pilot report, about midafternoon, after St. Ex had been gone for too many hours, that a “Frenchie,” who was apparently a writer, had not returned. I wanted to bust him right in the chops.
Within weeks the Allies landed on the southern coast of France and began to squeeze the Nazis from the north and south.
When I got back to North America, I kept waiting to hear news that St. Ex had been found. But Paris fell to us, and then we marched into Germany, found the horrific extermination camps, the coward Hitler killed himself and finally his villains surrendered, but St. Ex never reappeared.
Then, more than half a century later, in 1998, a miracle happened. A fisherman working off the coast of Marseille found a rusted old 1940s bracelet in his net. It bore the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. After a few years of underwater searches, the wreckage of his Lockheed P-38 Lightning was discovered on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea nearby, 250 feet deep. The plane's fuselage, propellers, landing gear bay and all sorts of other bits and pieces formed a line of debris nearly half a mile long.
His plane had dropped straight down into the water.
Did he decide to leave the earth? Was he hit by enemy fire? No one will ever know. And that seems fitting.
But there is something else that I would like to know, that I need to know.
That fatal day, was St. Ex carrying the gift I gave him? Did my extraordinary friend actually take the mark of our friendship with him to his death?
