Chapter 13: Subtle Hints

The rest of the flights were actually quite uneventful, except for that spot of clear air turbulence we hit on the way from Wick to Jersey airport. Ira had suffered a bruise on her lower abdomen, courtesy of the seat belt buckle not caring much about the fact that the outfit she was testing at the time was not exactly of the substantial variety.

Of course I could hardly be held accountable for the capriciousness of Earth’s atmosphere, but I had to grovel nonetheless, and make up for it at night using her preferred method of showing deference to her – kissing her senseless and shagging her silly afterwards.

Normally we could have made a bee-line from Wick in Scotland straight to Emden in Germany, crossing the North Sea, but both Fred and I had agreed that we would take the longer route across land. After all, our preferred maintenance partners had not yet given this plane the once-over and we wanted to minimise the risk. The long stretches of water between Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Scotland had been enough. We didn’t really need to push our luck any further.

Celebrating Christmas in Germany was quite an experience. First of all, they started a day early. Presents were handed out on December 24th, which was called Heiligabend – holy evening. The next two days were the actual Christmas days, usually spent visiting relatives or taking long walks. For some reason Germans absolutely loved taking long walks for no other reason than actually just walking.

My assistant Bea had invited all of us on what the Germans creatively called First Day Of Christmas – December 25th, although Christmas had actually started for them the day before. Let it not be said they don’t have a sense of humour. All of us, that were Fred, Jack, Sofia, Ira and I.

What we were presented with at lunch time was a rather large roasted goose, and I was in the process of learning that the rather British inspired cuisine of my late parents had perhaps not been quite up to scratch. Germans had a lot of problems, like dealing with their history, but the quality of their cooking was definitely not one of them.

Now I also started to understand their penchant for long walks. The womenfolk had been rather modest in what they had eaten, so it was left to Fred, Jack and myself to make the rest of the large and ridiculously delicious bird disappear. Bea explained that Germans called it Verdauungsspaziergang – a ‘digestion walk’ – yeah, I definitely understood where that word had come from as my innards tried to work through the massive amounts of goose meat I had consumed.

“Have you really made this legally tight?” Bea asked me on one of our first days back in the office after New Year’s Eve. “You could be accused of a conflict of interest. You basically approved as a member of the board of directors of one company to give a contract to your other company.”

I rubbed the palms of my hands across my face.

“I’ve thought the same,” I admitted. “But we’ve done everything by the book. We’ve had a public tender, open to all companies from EU member states, and we won it fair and square. The Spaniards would have beaten us on price, but their planes are too small to satisfy the contractual obligations. Don’t forget, eight other directors agreed with me unanimously. As of now, January 10th, we’ll have two weekly flights to Berlin in the morning and back again in the evening.”

“He’s right,” Fred agreed with me. “It was all above board.

“I just don’t want Ian to get into trouble,” Bea said. “I quite like this job and I would hate to lose it if we were accused of any skulduggery.”

“Don’t you worry, ma’am,” Fred replied with a chuckle. “There was a reason why I ran the whole process and not Ian. He recused himself on this side of the negotiation, as per the law, so there is no underhanded dealing involved.”

“Well now, your very first revenue flight,” Fred said after I had set the plane down nicely at Berlin-Tempelhof airport.

“The first of many, I hope,” I told him and grinned while we were rolling along the taxiway towards the stand on the apron.

“It’s a nice little earner,” he agreed. “But you need other customers too. I’ve had a little chat with the Volkswagen people. They have a plant in Emden, and they seem to be interested in regular flights from Emden to Braunschweig and – what’s that city in Hungary called?

“Györ,” I answered. “Peculiar, that’s an Audi engine factory and Emden is a VW plant. They build the Passat there. Why would they need to fly people back and forth between those two places?”

“Do we really care as long as they’ll pay for it?” Fred asked with a chuckle.

“You’re right – silly me,” I agreed with a laugh and started to turn off the engines. We had arrived on the apron. “Didn’t you say there was another charter company already flying for Volkswagen? The ones who scooped up all the Dorniers?”

“They scooped up five, but it looks like that isn’t enough” Fred said while we could hear the door open and the familiar noise of passengers leaving the plane. “Looks like they promised more capacity than they can deliver because they also didn’t get as many 328s as they would have needed. Right now there’s only two other German companies who have thirty-seaters in service – Cirrus Airlines with their Dash8-100s and we with our two JS-41s.”

“Right, do whatever you need to get us that contract,” I said with a chuckle. “Do you know the fleet of every company around here?”

“Pretty much,” Fred said. “If you want to beat other airlines at public tenders, you need to know what they have and what they don’t have.”

Ira opened the cockpit door. “Cabin is secured, all passengers have left.”

“Well, she certainly has the pax in order,” Fred said after Ira had left again. “Not every FA gets twenty-eight people out of a plane this orderly.”

Of course that had mostly to do with the fact that she was a trained flight attendant and unlike on some flights we had planned for the future, she had been fully clothed. These regular charters were pretty much run-of-the-mill airline flights with no fancy additions to the service.

That, however, was about to change. We would fly back to Emden in the evening – with a fully clothed stewardess again – but for the next day our first ever flight with a topless FA was planned.

We could of course not just advertise that sort of service in the papers, so I had used the tried and trusted method of letting it get around in business circles by word of mouth. Esther had given me a few contacts last year and planting a few strategically placed rumours had made sure that the wealthy of central Europe had learned by now that there was a little airline with some rather interesting aspects in terms of the service they were providing.

A middle-aged business man from Essen in the Rhine-Ruhr area had booked a flight to Venice on the JS-31 and was interested in being served by a rather scantily clad flight attendant. Not wanting to get involved in any female competition, I had left Sofia and Ira to decide among themselves who would go first. In the end they couldn’t come to an agreement, so – as the Germans say – if two argue, the third is the winner. Ludmilla, our latest recruitment, would have the honour of being the first topless flight attendant in German skies.

Ludmilla was a petite Russian doll who had spent the last three years working in a rather dubious brothel in Germany. Think of wealthy business types what you will, but they usually had a rather solid understanding of personal hygiene and some basic manners, so Ludmilla was only too happy to choose a job that would allow her to live a sexually active lifestyle while not having to deal with guys who came to her already hopelessly drunk or with a substantial deficit of recent visits to a shower.

Knowing the business, Ira had insisted that she went through several health checks, but Ludmilla had passed them all, and since it was winter, any flights to Esther’s hotel in Hungary weren’t on the table anyway ... yet.

In February, a few days before our first revenue flight to Berlin, and the flight to Venice the next day, a friend of Mark’s had shown up in my office. Unsurprisingly it had been a woman – one could only speculate just how many very attractive lady friends that lucky sod actually had. The woman in question was Femke Ten Hage, the Dutch cyclist who had saved Sofia and myself from getting stuck in the Netherlands last year.

The gist of the lengthy talk was that she was hell-bent on being a naked stewardess for a day, just to give Mark one hell of birthday present. She would even subject herself to the mandatory training course to do so. I wasn’t too enamoured to the idea at first, after all her idea carried several safety risks, especially for herself, but in the end she made her case quite competently and I could hardly deny the request of such a cute lady. Even my best attempts at trying to sound as posh as possible had probably not managed to hide that she had made me a little hot under the collar. Damn and blast – Mark sure had a knack for picking the cute ones. Although cute was perhaps not the right term, considering that she had enough muscles on her to break me in half. But she was very beautiful nonetheless.