“Ryterband was older than Craycroft, far more worldly. He had the normal lexicon of social graces; he had a pleasant personality, a good family life, a normal quota of friends and acquaintances. Business contacts tend to characterize him as having been ‘a little big lightweight, maybe, but certainly not shifty. You could trust him, and his judgment wasn’t too bad most of the time.’
“Yet obviously Ryterband had a blind spot where Craycroft was concerned. Clues to it are scattered; probably the most plausible is found in such observations as this one, again by Richard Tree, interviewed recently at his home in Kansas, where he is now employed by Beechcraft:
“‘Hero worship. Spaulding had it. Ryterband has it, too, for the opposite reason, I think. Spaulding served under Harold in the war, and there’s no question Harold was one of the handful of guys who really contributed something to our winning the war. I mean he was a real legend, to those people who knew. Now, with Ryterband-it’s funny, I never knew him well enough to call him Charlie, but I think I got him figured out all the same-you see, the thing was, Ryterband didn’t serve in the war at all. He got turned down by the draft. Harold went on to become pretty famous among the airmen. Now, that had to have one of two effects on old Charlie Ryterband, didn’t it? I mean either he was going to get jealous and envious and hate his brother-in-law like poison, or he was going to knuckle under and treat Harold with awe. I mean real superman-style awe. And that’s what happened. Mostly because Ryterband wasn’t the kind of guy who hates easy. I rarely heard him ever say a cussword, let alone a nasty remark about any human being. Easygoing as hell, Ryterband. God knows what he had bottled up inside him-maybe he went along with Harold’s wild schemes just because he knew they’d be the ruin of Harold, and he didn’t care if he sank right alongside him as long as he was sure Harold was sinking, too. Maybe. But you’d have to ask a shrink about that. All I know is Ryterband would speak his piece and maybe he’d convince Harold, but if he didn’t convince Harold, then Harold would speak his piece, and that was that. Ryterband was invariably deferential, you know. He never contradicted Harold. Once it was clear Harold had his mind set on something, Ryterband backed him all the way. Always.
“During that same interview, Richard Tree was asked if he recalled the last time he had seen Craycroft.
“‘Sure. It was the day I left Aeroflight. I was just about the last one to go, you know. I stuck it out to the bitter end. I guess I had some of that hero worship myself, if you really want to know. I mean Harold’s-I don’t know, hell, it’s hard to explain. But he’s kind of vulnerable, you know? Kind of fragile. I mean you feel like you want to protect him. You keep rooting for him to prevail, even though you know he hasn’t got an ounce of common sense and he’s doomed to fail. Hell, I was still there two months after they gave out the last paychecks.’
“Asked when that was, Tree replied, ‘March of this year. When I left, I mean. The last paycheck was December’s. I finally had to feed my family, you know, so I got this job offer here and I came on out. But I didn’t really want to. It’s hard to put into words. Harold kind of creates this atmosphere around him, you know? It’s esprit de corps, something like that.
“‘It was like, hell, you know, it was like he was the coach and we were the football team and we’d lost every game the past two seasons because he was still using the old T formation and all the other teams had gone light-years ahead of that, but we went right on loving the old coach and playing the game his way. It was like that.’
“‘What happened to them after you left?’ the interviewer asked.’ Do you know?’
‘“I heard things. I’m not sure how true some of them are. I heard he ended up moving into the Aeroflight offices. Living there, I mean. He gave up his house, of course. He didn’t have much equity in it but he sold it and used the few bucks from the sale to pay some of the creditors or something. I mean Harold wasn’t a shyster. He always meant to pay his debts. He’d been bankrupt a couple times before, I understand-him or maybe his corporations, I don’t know which. But he’d felt demeaned by it, I know that. He hated the idea it was happening to him again. He scraped together everything he could, but it just wasn’t nearly enough. He ended up, I hear, living in the hangar. Sleeping in a bedroll on an army cot under the wing of one of those crazy old Flying Fortresses of his. The one they’d finished converting, with the pressurization and the new instruments and all. That was the only one they rebuilt before the shit hit the fan. Harold used it for a demonstrater, showing it off to potential buyers when they showed up. But nobody ever placed an order for it. I mean nobody wants those old crates anymore. Hell, they’re antiques. The only guy in the world who can still fix them up is Harold. What happens if you’re flying over the Sahara in one of those things and you need a quick tune-up? Nobody knows how anymore. It’s like antique foreign cars. They may be fun, but you can’t use them commercially. That was what Harold couldn’t see. He kept saying they were still the best goddamned four-engine planes ever built, those B-17s. Shit, yes, they were, there’s no question of it. But, for Christ’s sake, that old plane was thirty-two years old!
“‘Anyway that’s the last I heard of him. He was barricaded out there. When the lawyers came around to talk foreclosure, they got locked out. He wouldn’t let them in. I heard rumors he had a shotgun, he was threatening to shoot anybody that tried to break in.
“‘That’s the last I ever heard of old Harold. Until now, of course.’”
Harris (Cont’d)
Now, you’ve stated that you were a passenger in the Port Authority helicopter when the pilot received orders to examine Craycroft’s bomber at close range. What time did you make the initial study of the plane?
Must have been around twelve forty, twelve forty-five. I know we landed at one o’clock. It must have been maybe fifteen, twenty minutes before that when we made our pass at him. As I said, we got a good look at the plane. We could see there was only one man in the cockpit compartment. We couldn’t distinguish his features, of course. At least I couldn’t. I took some film of the plane.
Was that ordinary cinema film?
No. It was teletape-TV tape.
So I was told. Now, when you hovered over lower Manhattan to have a close look at the bomber, did Craycroft show any reaction to your surveillance?
I guess he did.
You guess?
I didn’t think he did it out of reaction to us. Not at the time. There was no obvious connection. But afterward, I realized, he was reacting to the threat we implied.
Can you explain that? What did he do, exactly?
He opened the bomb-bay doors. I got film of it. He was in the middle of his turn, vectoring north.
After that he left them open, didn’t he?
Yes. And that’s quite a feat, you know. The airplane gets harder to control with the doors open like that. You’ve got drafts in the bomb bay.
I see. Now, did anything else happen that struck your attention at that time?
No. He continued on the same circuit he’d been flying before. Up toward the northern end of Central Park, then a tight U-turn over the wide part of Manhattan and back south along the west side. Looking at him from below, he was making a clockwise circle.
How long did you remain hovering there?
Maybe five, six minutes. He hadn’t finished that circuit when we got orders to land and report in. The pilot did, that is. I was just along for the ride, as I said, trying to get news footage of the highway job.
Where did you land, and when?
One o’clock. I made a note of it. I was making a lot of notes. I mean you don’t see a bomber at treetop level opening its bomb-bay doors over Manhattan every day. With bombs in the racks.