Glory Boys
Harry Bingham
A riveting novel of friendship, adventure and love against the odds, set in the early days of flight in Prohibition-era America.Abe Rockwell and Willard T. Thornton are famous fighter pilots together in World War I. Willard returns to a hero’s welcome in America and launches a film career. Abe just wants to fly – and he has no rich family to support him.When he crash lands in small-town Georgia, the locals recognise Abe and appeal to him for help. Alcohol-smuggling gangsters are trying to oust them from their own homes. But Abe can’t see that his one patched-up aircraft can make much difference.Slowly, a plan forms and Abe needs help himself. Enter another tremendously skilled pilot – but it’s a woman. Abe doesn’t want to take her on, but she’s the best there is and brave with it. Neither of them can predict exactly what they’ve let themselves in for.Willard, meanwhile, forsakes films for banking and rises fast – only to uncover some very dodgy business at the core of the company. He’d like to turn a blind eye but eventually he’s in so deep that he can’t. The firm is under serious threat, from a devious and resourceful attacker. Which is when Willard realises who it must be, and how he’s going to have to team up with someone he’d always overlooked.
HARRY BINGHAM
Glory Boys
DEDICATION (#ulink_a4bfbf89-b0bc-5bce-bed5-1b54299805ea)
To my beloved N, my writing partner
‘But it is beautiful to unfold our soulsAnd our short lives’
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_9661ee6a-5664-56c8-a85a-64bf467606d5)
Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
It’s filled our land with vice and crime,
It don’t prohibit worth a dime,
Nevertheless we’re for it.
From F. P. A., New York World
‘The aeroplane was very easy to fly and very forgiving to pupils’ mistakes, even to the extent of (usually) not killing them when they spun it to the ground… To start off with, and for some reason I could never understand, [it] seldom seemed to catch fire after a crash.’
Allen Wheeler, Flying Between the Wars
CONTENTS
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Dedication (#ulink_b0b019e1-01b1-5b0e-8c91-724a28b01d0c)
Epigraph (#ulink_760c48f3-9974-5a17-b07b-78e0de029159)
Prologue (#ulink_f4086f9b-a865-5326-b20a-be6428be9e69)
Part One: Beginning (#ulink_661851ad-a305-5b3b-97d6-7699b9e81eba)
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Part Three: Thrust (#litres_trial_promo)
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Part Four: Control (#litres_trial_promo)
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Part Five: Height and Speed (#litres_trial_promo)
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Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_a039c3b5-e8f7-5fb8-aa0f-7399910c8fb7)
To begin with, it looked like nothing. A nick on the horizon. A moving dot. A speck of red and white against the smoky Georgian blue.
Herb Johnson, standing bolt upright on his wagon, followed it with his eyes. The little plane was flying low, carving an unsteady course between the twisting hills. Every now and then it rose sharply upwards, before beginning a slow glide earthwards again.
The town could boast four war heroes, but Herb Johnson was the only one to have seen the front line in France. Consequently, he was also the only guy in town to have seen an airplane. He wanted to hang on to the sight alone; be the only man in town to see it. He looked for a while, then sat back down on the wagon board and settled his hat back on his head.
‘Good God in the morning!’ he hollered. ‘Airplane! Airplane! Airplane!’
Something was wrong.
That much was obvious. The plane, now directly overhead, was gasping for breath. The engine would fire properly for a couple of beats, then choke, then fire again, then cut completely, then spurt back into temporary life.
‘That feller didn’t oughta stay up there,’ remarked Jeb Holling, with a considered tobacco-speckled spit on the ground. ‘That engine ain’t holding him up too good.’
The machine was a biplane, with red wings, a red nose and a clean white fuselage that seemed too bright in the sun. When the plane banked a little, they could see the pilot, no more than a leather-helmeted head and a pair of shoulders. Some of the kids waved, but the pilot must have been a surly type, because he wouldn’t wave back, not even to say hi to a bunch of kids who’d never seen an airplane before, let alone right up close, floating over their town like a giant dragonfly.
‘Ain’t so easy,’ said Johnson, who had quickly and delightedly established himself as the town’s aviation expert. ‘Them planes need an air-eo-drome. In France…’
The plane came back again, lower this time. They could see the pilot’s face better. They could see his lips moving, and he was waving this time, one leather-gauntleted hand gesticulating out of the cockpit, though in an angry kind of way, hardly the way to wave at kids. The engine was still bad and when it cut out, you could almost see the flashing propeller blades slow down.
‘Like to see it come down on my place,’ said one farmer from out of town. ‘Terraced fields like mine, it’d be like landing on a flight of steps.’
‘There’s the woods round by Williams Point,’ said another man. ‘That’d be the place all right. Come down into the trees…’ His words petered out, as he realised that his picture of airplanes roosting in the treetops probably contained more than an ounce or two of inaccuracy.
It was a kid who saw the truth first. Little Brad Lundmark, a red-headed kid, looking a couple of years younger than his fifteen years, yelled it out. ‘He wants to land here. He wants to come down right here!’
The kid was right. The pilot was criss-crossing overhead and waving. The plane continued to bob crazily in the air, pulling upwards when the engine was sound, drifting down when it sputtered. And when you thought about it, Main Street in Independence was about the only hard flat place for miles around. If you excluded those places which were dotted with cows or drainage ditches or trees or houses, then you might have to cross right over into Anderson County before you could find a better place to land.
‘Quick,’ said Johnson, anxious to regain his ebbing leadership. ‘Clear a space there, will you?’
Everyone pushed and shoved, until they had cleared a circle some forty or fifty feet wide. Herb Johnson winked and waved at the pilot, inviting him to come on down. Once again, the kid knew best.
‘He needs the street,’ shouted Lundmark. ‘He needs the whole street.’
Instantly, the street was cleared. Horses were led down side alleys. A couple of buggies were hauled and pushed to the side of the road. There were only five cars in town, but the one belonging to Gibson Hennessey, owner of the General Store, didn’t start too well in the heat of the day, so it was decided to leave them all. Men, women and kids, ran indoors to watch from windows, or stood in the shade of the verandas, until the whole town was lined up in two long rows that quivered with expectancy.
The red-winged plane banked for a final turn. Right overhead, the engine roared into life, then cut. There was an anxious-delicious moment when it seemed the plane must surely crash, but the engines fired again, strongly enough for the pilot to get his machine under control for landing. For a moment or two, the plane disappeared behind the two-storey warehouse belonging to the Agricultural-Mercantile on the edge of town. People craned forwards, desperate to see it again.
Then, when they did, they leaped back again in shock. The plane was headed right at them, diving towards the road from no distance at all. The propeller was a flashing disc. The plane’s nose was a fat red bullet aimed straight at the town.
Somebody screamed. The plane plunged. Wheels slammed hard into the earth.
Then everything happened at once. The plane tore down the street. For a few moments, it looked as though the impossible landing would take place without mishap. Then the tail-skid snagged on a pothole. The plane’s motion altered suddenly and drastically. The fuselage slewed violently round. An axle or a wheel-strut broke. One of the wingtips hit the ground and splintered. The plane skidded sickeningly along the ground, crunching up the end of its lower wing as it moved. It came to rest with the nose four feet from the barber’s shop window, as though about to pop in for a shave.
The pilot’s cockpit was lost in the dust he’d kicked up. The engine was silent. The propeller blade began to slow. Somewhere a piece of wood cracked loudly. The airplane sank.
For a moment, just for a moment, everything fell silent.
PART ONE (#ulink_fe2f4f1c-ab11-5462-a6a6-68392f670861)
Beginning (#ulink_fe2f4f1c-ab11-5462-a6a6-68392f670861)
Afterwards, people like to sit and figure out when it all started.
Mostly people talk about the crash landing, the hot May day in 1926 when an airplane fell clean out of the sky. But there are others who look a little further back. They talk about when the troubles in town first started. They talk about the Volstead Act, the law which prohibited the sale of alcohol the length and breadth of America. They talk about politics and the good old days and the general decline in moral values.
But when you think about it properly, you can see that there is no beginning. Not really. If it hadn’t been for the Great War, there wouldn’t have been Prohibition. If it hadn’t been for the Wright brothers, and Santos-Dumont in France, and all the other guys who spent their lives coaxing chunks of wood and metal to jump into the air and fly, then there wouldn’t have been airplanes, and everything in this story is to do with airplanes.
But if you want to talk about beginnings, then you have to go back to the start. Right to the start. And that wasn’t Santos-Dumont or the Wright brothers, or even Langley and his doomed experiments over the gloomy Mississippi.The beginning was an English guy, name of Sir George Cayley.
Cayley was born in 1773, when George Washington was still a British subject and the good folks of Boston were filling their harbour with forty-five tons of best Bohea tea. Cayley was another one of these guys who ought to have been born with feathers. He wanted to fly. He spent his whole life working on the problem. But unlike all those who had gone before, Cayley got a whole lot of things pretty right.
Up until Sir George, anyone designing a flying machine thought about birds. Birds flap their wings and that’s the whole deal. They get their lift from wings. They get their forward motion from wings. Most of what stops birds rolling around in the sky like corks in a waterfall is built into the wings as well. Lift, thrust and control. All in the same neat instrument.
But that’s birds. Sir George’s particular spark of genius was to see that what worked for birds would never work for humans. So he split the three problems and tackled them separately. He conducted careful scientific experiments on lift, drag and streamlining. He tackled the issues of stability, pitch-control and general aircraft design. He did some tough mathematics and some solid science.
And he got there. He designed the airplane. For lift, he chose a pair of fixed wings, shaped like an aerofoil. For thrust, he chose an airscrew – what we’d call a propeller. And to give his flying machine control, he designed a tail fin and rudder, not a whole lot different from what you see sticking to the ends of airplanes today.
If you want to see the first ever drawing of a working airplane, you’ll find it in the notebooks of good old Sir George. Of course, the gallant knight only had steam engines to play with. There was no way a steam engine of his day would develop enough horsepower to lift itself, an airplane and a human being all together. But he built glidersthough, good ones. You want to know when the first true airplane flight in history took place? Answer: in 1853, when Sir George ordered his coachman out of his coach and into a glider. The glider soared happily into the air, flew five hundred yards across a Yorkshire valley, then came to a bumpy rest. The coachman, already the world’s first airplane pilot, wasn’t too keen on becoming the world’s first airplane casualty and he handed in his notice. Cayley, an old man now, quit building gliders and died almost fifty years before the Wright brothers left earth at Kitty Hawk.
So, if you want a beginning, there it was.
Lift, thrust, control. Three problems. Three solutions. The start of everything.
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The pilot lifted his goggles and removed his helmet, all in the same motion. He let helmet and goggles drop to the floor. The air was still cloudy with dust and his eyes pricked.
With an automatic hand, he checked his switches (all off) and the cockpit fuel pipes (all sound). He sniffed to detect any escaping gasoline. The air stank of petrol, but the pilot had never been in a crash where the air smelled any other way. The pilot flexed his left leg, then his right leg, then both arms, then ran his hands over his back, neck and head. His left foot was sore where the rudder bar had snagged it, but apart from that, he seemed to have escaped uninjured. His left arm struck the instrument panel a couple of times softly.
‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ he muttered.
He lifted himself to the lip of the cockpit and stepped down to the ground. The movement made him grimace. Not because of the pain in his foot, but because the undercarriage should have been lifting the fuselage well clear of the ground. But the plane no longer had an undercarriage to speak of, and the fuselage was lying prostrate on the ground like a beached sea animal.
The pilot undid his flying jacket, wiped his forehead on his arm and stepped, blinking, away from the dust and the plane wreck into the brilliant glare of the sun.
And that was how they saw him first. Long afterwards, that was how most of them would remember him as well. A man a little less than medium height. Not big built, but light on his feet. Poised. A sense of athleticism held a long way in reserve. Fair hair very closely cropped. Skin deeply tanned. Eyes of astonishing blueness. His face lined but still somehow young. Or perhaps not young exactly, but alert, watchful. And smiling. That was how they first saw him.
Smiling.
The pilot was used to being stared at, but even for him this was something new. Independence, Georgia boasted a population of 1,386 and right now the pilot was being given the chance to inspect almost every last one of their number.
He wiped his forehead again. Leather flying clothes make a whole lot of sense six thousand feet up in an eighty-mile-an-hour wind. They make a lot less sense the second you touch earth. He shrugged off his jacket and advanced a few more paces. The town had grouped itself into a semicircle around him and was staring at him, like he was something out of the Bible.
‘Hi, folks,’ he said. ‘Seen better landings, huh?’
He laughed. Nobody else moved. They were still staring, still in awe.
‘Thanks for clearing a way for me. Things were getting kinda tough up there.’
There was a bit of shuffling amongst the townsfolk and one of them was pushed to the front.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said. ‘My name’s Herbert Isiah Johnson, and on behalf of Independence and Okinochee County and on behalf of … of … everyone, we’d like to welcome you to Georgia.’
Johnson’s mumblings broke the spell. People surged forward.
‘Gee whizz, Ma, did you see the wing go pop…?’
‘Spark plugs, was it? I once saw that on a Model-T. Lousy sparks…’
‘You OK, pal? You shouldn’t be walking any, not after…’
‘He didn’t take a left. You go past the Ag-Merc, you have to jink a little to the left…’
‘I said them things weren’t safe to use. If the good Lord…’
But amidst the crush of people, there was no one more determined than Brad Lundmark, the red-headed kid who’d first understood the pilot’s need to land. Within seconds of seeing the pilot emerge safely from the wreckage, Lundmark was running. First he ran hard, round a corner, into a simple two-storey house on Second Street. He was inside for about twenty seconds, then came racing out again. He tore back the way he’d come and hurtled into the thick of the crowd. Doggedly, he fought his way to the front.
‘Excuse me, sir. Sir, excuse me, please. Please, sir…’
There was something in Lundmark’s single-mindedness which made other people quit talking, until he found himself talking into a vacuum.
‘Sorry. Sorry. Just…’ He held out the things he’d fetched from the house. They were a well-chewed pencil and a photo. The photograph had been neatly clipped from the pages of a boy’s magazine. It was unmistakably a picture of the pilot, a few years younger and stiffly dressed in military uniform. ‘Captain Rockwell, sir, I wonder if I could have your autograph.’
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‘Oh for God’s sake!’
Willard Thornton, a dazzlingly good-looking actor of twenty-something, felt sick.
It wasn’t the plane, a neat little Gallaudet, that upset him, but the take-off site. The Gallaudet had been precariously winched up on to the roof of the Corin Tower, twenty-five storeys above ground. The tar roof was flat, a hundred feet square. A low parapet had run round the outside, but had been removed for filming. The place where the blocks had been wrenched away showed up white against the tar. A camera crew stood sullenly, underdressed for the wind that flicked across from the mountains. The cameraman jabbed a finger at the sky.
‘We oughta go. We’re losing light. But what do I care? It’s your picture, buddy.’
Willard scowled again. The cameraman was right. This was his movie. He was actor, writer, director, producer, financier – and right now there was a decision to be made. He thought of the stunt he was about to pull and felt another bout of nausea rise towards his throat.
‘OK, OK,’ he commented, ‘only Jesus Christ!’
‘Jesus Christ is about right, darling,’ said Daphne O’Hara, taking a cigarette from the cameraman’s mouth and smoking it down to the butt. O’Hara (or Brunhilde Schulz, to give her the name she was born with) was dressed in a silver evening gown, with enough paste diamonds to bury a duchess. The wind was wrapping her dress hard against her legs and her carefully set hair was beginning to unravel.
‘The light,’ said the cameraman.
‘Forget the light. It’s my hair, sweetheart.’
‘Oh for God’s sake! Let’s do it.’
Willard felt angry and out of control. The cast and crew were on their thirteenth week of filming their feature, Heaven’s Beloved. They already had enough film in the can to make a six-hour movie. But Willard was a realist. He’d seen the rushes. And they were bad. Badly done, badly shot, and dull. Deadly dull. The script had been hastily revised. Stunts had been shoved in in a desperate effort to lift the story. Willard had grown to loathe any mention of the budget.
And now this. The Gallaudet stood in one corner of the roof, with the wind on its nose. They’d selected the plane for its low take-off speed, but even so, Willard guessed, they wouldn’t be fully airborne by the time they reached the edge. Would he have enough lift and forward speed to keep his tail clear as he left the roof? He didn’t know. If the tail caught, would it hook him downwards, or just give him a fright? He didn’t know, but felt sick thinking about it. In the past, he’d preferred to hand the tough stunts over to professional stuntmen, but his last two stuntmen had quit on him after rows over money. In any case, it was only flying wasn’t it?
‘OK. Ready?’
The camera crew positioned themselves. The production guys fussed over the Gallaudet. Then Willard and O’Hara burst from the steel doorway onto the roof. Willard pointed dramatically at the Gallaudet, then the two actors raced across to it.
O’Hara struck a pose by the rear cockpit, which meant, ‘No! Surely not!’ Willard stuck out his chin and looked darkly resolute. ‘But we have to!’ Willard stepped behind O’Hara to help her in. ‘Keep your hand away from my fucking ass,’ she said.
The two actors clambered inside. It was the sort of move which Willard found difficult. He hated the idea of looking bad on camera but could never quite get the hang of making an ungainly move, such as swinging his leg over the cockpit rim, in a way that made him look good. He tutted with annoyance and said, ‘Again!’
They got out and in again. Willard’s second attempt was worse than his first, and what’s more he grazed his hand in the process. Willard wanted to do it over, but was aware of O’Hara behind him, smoking like a steam train and swearing darkly in her native German.
‘That’ll do,’ he said, annoyed.
The camera crew took a few shots of them in the cockpit. The wind rose. Willard knew he ought to cancel the shot and wait until conditions were better. But O’Hara was being wooed by United Artists – Douglas Fairbanks himself had lunched with her – and Willard knew it was only a matter of time before she quit. There was another, stronger flutter of wind. Ten knots gusting to twelve or thirteen. Wind was good because what mattered in take-off was wind speed, not ground speed. But too much wind was bad, because of the risk of the airplane being blown straight back into the side of the building. Willard’s sickness came back, stronger.
The lead production guy said mildly, ‘Thornton, I think…’
‘Yes. Get her started. Jesus Christ!’
The production crew swung the propeller. The engine roared into life. The propeller flashed into a blur. The cameramen positioned themselves. O’Hara stopped smoking and swearing, and flashed a dazzling smile at the cameras. Beneath the wheels, Willard could feel the wooden chocks being pulled away. The graze on his hand was red and angry. He hoped it wouldn’t show on film.
He jammed the throttle forward. The pitch of the engine rose into a full roar. The little plane began to roll forwards. The edge of the building rushed towards them. The Gallaudet’s wheels reached the edge. Her tail was lifted, but the main gear was nowhere close to being airborne. She plunged sickeningly over the edge and was lost from sight.
3 (#ulink_ccdd2206-59cd-5f11-a04d-d585960dba69)
The wall at the end of the barn wasn’t solid, but built of vertical wooden slats to allow the entrance of light and air. The golden evening sunshine poured in and lay in bars across the floor. In the middle, amidst a debris of straw and spilled grain, the airplane sat. It looked oddly at home, like an obsolete piece of agricultural equipment or perhaps an exotic animal lying down to rest. It was a peaceful scene, but somehow sad. The plane looked like it had been shut away to die.
For the first time since his unconventional arrival, Captain Abraham ‘Abe’ Rockwell had a moment alone with his plane. He walked slowly round the battered craft. The hull was badly scraped and there were patches where the plywood had been smashed away completely. Aside from that, there was damage to one of the propeller blades, damage to the lower left wingtip, and the utter destruction of the plane’s undercarriage.
But Abe’s manner wasn’t simply the manner of an equipment-owner attempting to quantify the damage. He didn’t just feel the plane, he stroked it. He ran his hand down the leather edging of the cockpit and brushed away some cobwebs that were already being built. When he got to the nose of the aircraft, he pulled his sleeve over his hand and cleaned up the lettering that read, ‘Sweet Kentucky Poll’. Dissatisfied, he went to the engine, fiddled with a fuel-pipe, pulled it free and dribbled a little fuel onto a rag. Then he set the pipe back in place and scrubbed at the name with the gasoline-soaked cloth. This time, he got the name as bright as he wanted and he straightened.
Straightened and stopped. He turned and spoke directly into the heap of straw that filled the opposite end of the barn.
‘It’s rude to stare.’
Seeing that the straw made no answer, Abe picked up an axe handle from the floor and tossed it onto the top of the heap.
‘Ow!’
The straw wriggled and a red head emerged.
‘I said it’s rude.’
‘Sorry, sir. I…’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
Abe waited a short moment, then shrugged. ‘If it’s nothing, then you won’t mind leaving.’
‘No, sir.’
The red head attached itself to a skinny kid, who slid down the straw pile and landed with a soft thwack. ‘Sorry, sir.’ The kid, whom Abe recognised as the autograph-hunter from earlier, glanced across into a corner of the barn, then brushed himself off, ready to leave. Abe followed his glance. There was a bucket of warm water there, soapy and still steaming, a bath sponge floating on the surface.
‘Wait.’
The kid stopped.
‘You came to clean her?’
The kid nodded. ‘Doesn’t matter, sir. I can do it later. Sorry.’
Abe shook his head. The gesture meant: Don’t leave yet.
‘D’you have a name?’
‘Lundmark, sir.’
‘Your ma and pa think of giving you a first name to go along with that?’
‘Yes, sir. Bradley. Brad.’
‘Mind if I use it?’
‘No, sir.’
‘OK, Brad, now I’m not over-fond of this “sir” business. I’m not in the army now and I don’t want to be. If you want to call me something, I’m happy with just plain Abe. If that’s too much for you, you can call me Captain. Understand?’
‘Yes. Yes, Captain.’
‘Good.’
There was a pause. The slatted evening light was moving round, bringing new parts of the airplane into view and hiding others. Abe found a cobweb he’d missed before and brushed it away absent-mindedly.
‘We’ll start at the nose.’
Abe brought the bucket over to the plane and the two of them began to wash her, nose to tail, removing the dust and the flaking paint and the burned-on oil and the scatter of straw-dust and insects. For about fifty minutes they worked mostly in silence, changing the cleaning water from a pump in the yard outside. Then, as the light began to fade, Abe threw down his sponge.
‘Hell,’ he said. ‘That’s not too bad. For a moment back there, I thought the landing was gonna turn out rough.’
Still clutching his sponge, the kid turned to Abe. ‘You’ve smashed up worse ‘n that?’
‘Yeah, plenty worse.’
The kid’s eyes, which had been large before, grew moon-shaped and moon-sized. Abe, irritated with himself, added sharply: ‘Anyone who flies enough will have a few bad smashes. Most machines fold up pretty easy. The accidents mostly look worse than they are.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Captain.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘You ever been up in a plane?’
Brad Lundmark shook his head, the way he might have shaken it if the Archangel Gabriel had asked if he was acquainted with Paradise.
‘If you got some time to help me out here over the next week or two, I’ll give you a ride. What d’you say?’
‘Oh, yes! Sure thing, Captain! Gee! I promise I’ll –’
‘Hey, hey, it’s OK. It’s only a plane ride. If I’ve got any cash left after we’ve fixed her up, I’ll give you a couple of bucks a day as well, but no promises.’
Abe rummaged in the rear cockpit and brought out a fur-lined sleeping roll which he threw out under the wing. Lundmark looked shocked.
‘Captain, there’s a boarding house just down the block. You can’t –’
Abe pulled his shirt off, took the sponge and the bucket of water, and scrubbed himself hard all over. He sluiced water through his close-cropped grey-blond hair, until it stuck up in spikes, and rubbed hard at the back of his neck, where there had been a line of sweat and grime.
‘That’s better.’
Abe fiddled in his luggage for a spare shirt, which he pulled on. Lundmark noticed that the cuffs and collar were old and worn.
‘Brad?’
‘Yes, Captain?’
‘I gotta have food. Poll here’s gotta have fuel. She’s got some pretty bad hospital bills coming up. One thing I can’t afford to spend money on is a bed.’
Lundmark shook his head. ‘That ain’t right. If you explained who y’are to Mr Houghton at the hotel, why I’m sure he’d –’
‘He’d tell me to pay for my bed just like anyone else. Brad, I’m gonna lie under the wing of my airplane. Can you think of a better place for a guy to sleep?’
Lundmark shook his head.
‘No, Captain. Say –’
But what he was about to say, Abe would never know. There was a minor commotion in the yard outside. Somewhere a small dog barked angrily. Then four men appeared in the barn door against the violet air. They were dressed in dark suits and ties, which they wore with Sunday stiffness. One of the men – six feet plus, mid-fifties, lean, intelligence in his face, moustache – spoke.
‘Good evening to you, Captain Rockwell. My name’s Gibson Hennessey, owner of the General Store down there. On behalf of the town, I’d like to apologise for being so neglectful earlier. I want to assure you that we didn’t mean no disrespect. It wasn’t ’til the kid here informed us who you were, that we realised we had a hero of the United States in our midst.’
Abe’s blue eyes gave nothing away, but his mouth possibly hardened a little before he answered. ‘I didn’t feel no disrespect, Mr Hennessey. I didn’t exactly let you know I was coming.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘And I’m plenty happy with the barn here.’
The second of the men laid his hand across his chest. He was a plump man, fat and buttery. “Low me to introduce myself. Ted Houghton’s my name, proprietor of the Independence Hotel and Bar, only these days I ain’t got a bar. I’d be only too honoured, if you’d accept my hospitality for the duration of your stay.’
‘Right, and any assistance we can give in getting your airplane all fixed up, you just ask.’
The two sides fought gently for a minute or two. Abe wanted no fuss. He just wanted to fix up his plane and move on. But there was no escape. Surrounded by the four dignitaries, Abe was escorted back to the centre of town, feeling like a prisoner on his way to the jailhouse.
‘The folks here wanted to show their appreciation…’ murmured Hennessey, as a crowd of two hundred people stood and cheered Abe’s arrival. A collection of schoolkids performed a rendition of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. A man, whose name Abe didn’t catch, made a truly dismal speech of welcome. Abe was expected to reply at length, but he just stood on the hotel steps and said, ‘I’m mighty grateful to you all. Thank you.’
There was another round of applause. Half the schoolkids thought an encore of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was in order, but luckily the effort sputtered quickly out. Abe was bundled into the hotel where he was the guest of honour at a five-course dinner, ending with a vast sponge cake in the very approximate shape of an airplane.
By eleven o’clock, Abe had finally escaped to his room.
He rooted around in his bags for a tattered pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, then stretched out on his bed and lit up. With the oil lamp set low, he lay on his back and breathed smoke at the ceiling. His face was tired and he looked ready to sleep.
For ten minutes, he lay and smoked. Then a couple of circular marks on the wall high up behind the wardrobe caught his eye. Swinging his feet lightly to the floor, he took a chair over to the wardrobe and examined them.
The marks were gouged right through the plaster through to the room next door. The top of the wardrobe still had a little white dust beneath the marks, indicating either that the hotel didn’t dust very often or that the marks were relatively recent.
Captain Abe Rockwell had earned his rank as a pursuit pilot in the United States Army. Before the war, he’d been an auto mechanic, then a racing driver. When war had broken out, he’d decided to switch trades. He’d thrown in his job racing cars. He’d wangled his way out to France as a mechanic attached to one of America’s newly formed flying squadrons. He’d fixed planes by day, and by evening more or less taught himself to fly. Despite being over-age and lacking either a commission or a college education, he nevertheless persuaded the authorities to give him a chance in the cockpit. He’d repaid their faith. His first victory over a German machine had come within two weeks. Another three months had seen his fifth victory – and his official recognition as one of America’s few fighter-aces. By the end of the war, he’d been promoted to captain, had command of a squadron, and had had nineteen victories officially confirmed. Of the American pilots to have survived the war, only Ed Rickenbacker had shot down more enemy planes.
Abe was a military man who’d seen plenty of combat, plenty of action. He knew what bullet holes looked like, and these were bullet holes.
4 (#ulink_4e39b5dd-6ced-510a-8e20-cd5ca732ab9a)
Willard didn’t get headaches. He didn’t get them from heat. He didn’t get them from noise. He didn’t even get them after a jugful of martinis, when everybody else was looking as white and fragile as a porcelain teacup. But he had one now.
He stepped inside. The shades were down and the interior was cool and dim. Reflections from the pool outside trembled on the ceiling. Willard closed the door, and the voices grew small and distant. He had been holding a letter in his hand, which he let drop on the carpeted floor. The letter was from his accountant. A stunt plane they’d used but hadn’t insured had just smashed up. Another eighteen thousand bucks had slid uselessly down the pan.
He sank into a deep chair and sat slumped, hardly moving.
Willard felt lousy, when all the time he knew he should be happy. After all, he was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.
His great-grandfather had begun it all, manufacturing handguns and rifles for sale to the country’s wild frontier. The business had prospered. The Civil War had turned Thornton Ordnance into one of the country’s biggest profit-makers, one with international reach. The nineteenth century had been a good one for wars and the firm had benefited from every one. When the Great War had broken out in Europe in 1914, Thornton Ordnance entered its most profitable phase. Junius Thornton – Willard’s father – made money hand over fist. On America’s entry into the war, profits had doubled, then doubled again.
But it wasn’t just Willard’s family which had been touched with magic. He had been too. Willard had been a student at Princeton when Germany, in a fit of lunacy, began unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, thus propelling America into the war. Willard’s studies hadn’t exactly been going badly, but they certainly hadn’t been going well. Willard happened to meet a British pilot and saw the way the man had used his war stories to pull any girl he wanted.
And so, one sunny autumn’s day and with almost no prior consideration, Willard had taken the plunge. He’d joined up. He sought a pilot’s commission and got it. Within three months of that sunny October day, he was in France, a lieutenant in the US Army Flying Corps.
He hadn’t been there a week before he regretted it.
On his first flight over enemy lines, he was almost killed. On his second flight, he returned with bullet holes plugging his upper starboard wing and the tail mounting. Within three weeks, Willard could count four lucky escapes – and not one time when he’d even got a shot away at the enemy.
That had to change and it did.
By a fluke, Willard was transferred to the Ninety-First Squadron, under the command of Captain Abraham ‘Abe’ Rockwell.
Before letting his newest recruit out on patrol, Rockwell ordered Thornton to take to the air, twenty-five miles behind the lines, to take part in a dummy patrol and dogfight. Willard thought he’d done OK, but Rockwell had torn Willard’s combat-flying to pieces. Over the next two weeks, he’d reassembled it, from the ground up.
When Willard was allowed back into the air, he scored his first kill on his very first patrol. He wasn’t the best pilot in the sky, but he was no longer a dangerous novice. By October 1918, he’d brought down three German machines – just two short of the magical number, which would turn him from a fine pilot into an officially recognised flying ace.
Rockwell had seen the younger man’s desire and, in the first week of November, assigned him to fly against the enemy Drachen – gas-filled observation balloons, that rose from fixed steel cables a mile back from the collapsing German front. The assignments were simple and dangerous. Simple, because there was nothing easier than shooting at a giant inflammable balloon. Dangerous, because the Germans curtained their precious balloons with intense and accurate anti-aircraft fire. Willard accepted his assignment gravely. Before each flight, he was so afraid, he vomited secretly in the hangar toilet. But he’d hit his targets and escaped being hit himself. On November 8, three days before Armistice was declared, Willard downed his second Drache. A Drache counted the same as an airplane. By the time peace broke out, Willard Thornton was a flying ace. He returned to America, a hero.
He hadn’t been the bravest pilot, or the best. He hadn’t scored anywhere near as many kills as Rockwell or Rickenbacker. But none of that mattered. He was an ace – and he was stunningly good-looking. Up-close, far away, carefully staged or thrillingly informal: there just wasn’t an angle that made him look bad. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, wide-chinned, strongly built. His smile was terrific, his eyes enticing, his mouth full and kissable. He was dazzling to look at and he knew it.
Hollywood saw the potential and was quick to move. The studios fought to get his signature on a movie deal. One of the studios had a guy literally follow him round with a blank contract. Willard rose to the bait and signed.
His first picture had billed him as ‘Willard T. Thornton, America’s favourite ace’. A movie-going public, still enchanted with its war-time heroes, flocked to see it. For a few brief weeks, Willard’s had been one of the most recognisable faces in America. The second picture had sold well. The next two movies had done OK. The last two had sagged, flopped, sunk from sight.
But Willard had grown up a little. He knew enough to make a picture of his own – ‘Heaven’s Beloved, a picture of class’. He’d asked his father for finance. His father had put him in touch with Ted Powell, a Wall Street banker. Willard had made his pitch – and Powell had bought it. And although the picture was over-schedule, although Daphne O’Hara had just quit right in the middle of filming, although costs were out of control and his precious stunt plane had just crashed, Willard’s luck was staying the course.
Ted Powell continued to believe, continued to come up with cash. The original sixty-thousand dollar loan had mushroomed. First to eighty, then to a hundred, then to one-twenty, then to an ‘open-ended loan facility’ – banker-speak for don’t-even-ask.
Willard was a lucky man, born into a lucky family.
5 (#ulink_a7b2a5d9-7c97-5a29-a496-932aeb3d83c3)
The Lundmark kid showed up at seven o’clock sharp, with a pot of coffee and a couple of rolls.
‘Feeding me, huh?’
Abe had been up at dawn, and found nobody yet awake at the hotel. Sooner than wake anyone, he’d come directly to the barn. He’d shaved in a can of hot water brewed over a primus stove, then stripped to the waist and washed under the yard pump. Right now, he was stretched out on a bale of straw, rubbing soft wax into his flying boots and mending a small tear on his jacket.
‘I just thought … if you don’t want it, I can…’
‘No, Brad, I want it. There are a couple of mugs in there,’ said Abe nodding at the rear cockpit of the broken plane. ‘Green canvas bag.’
Lundmark approached the plane like it was holy, and came away with a single mug.
‘Don’t drink coffee? You’re missing out.’
Abe sipped his coffee and took a bite of the bread roll.
‘We’ll get to work shall we? We’ll need to send away for a new blade,’ Abe indicated the busted propeller. ‘Aside from that, if we can find some timber and a forge, I haven’t seen anything we can’t fix.’
‘Really? Wow! You can get it going again, Captain?’
‘Careful, Brad. She’s a lady.’
‘Huh? Oh. I mean, her. Sorry.’
‘Reckon we can. First thing is to send a wire to my friends at Curtiss. Get a new blade out here. There a post office in town?’
‘Sure, Captain…’ Lundmark’s reply wasn’t exactly confident.
Abe was silent for a minute. He’d flown over the town, searching the ground for landing sites. He brought the view to mind. There are an infinity of obstacles that can smash up an aircraft. A cow. A ditch. A rickety fence with a single strand of wire. A boulder. A pothole. A tree stump.
Or telegraph wire. During the war, a friend of Abe’s had been shot up in a dogfight over enemy lines. With fabric streaming from one wing and controls mushy from German bullets, the plane had limped home. Struggling in to land, barely skimming the tree-tops, the plane had struck a line of telegraph wire. The wheels had snagged. The nose had been yanked down. Pilot and plane had dived into the ground at seventy miles an hour.
Abe thought back to his view of the town from above. No wires. ‘There’s no telegraph, is there? Where we gotta go? Brunswick?’
A tiny hesitation. Then: ‘Yeah, Brunswick. Joe Borden takes his cart in on a Tuesday. I guess we could ask him.’
‘Good.’
Abe paused. He’d seen something else from the sky; something that had puzzled him then and was puzzling him even more now. ‘A mile south of here,’ he said, ‘there’s another town.’
‘Uh-huh.’ The kid was non-committal, but evasive. He began cleaning invisible muck from a side of the aircraft which enabled him to keep his expression concealed.
‘There’s no other town marked on my map. It’s Rand McNally, 1921. I’ve never known ’em to be wrong before. Not that wrong anyways.’
‘It’s called Marion. It’s kind of new. Grew up a lot the last couple of years.’
‘That’s a lot of growing.’
‘I guess.’
The kid clearly didn’t want to talk, and, though Abe’s intense blue-eyed stare held the boy a few moments longer, he allowed the matter to drop. But it was a puzzle. It wasn’t just that Rand McNally hadn’t marked the town. It was where the town was and what it was.
What it was, first of all. From the air, Abe had seen large white houses, big yards, motor cars, even a couple of swimming pools. The contrast with the sun-bleached timbers and dusty streets of Independence was even stronger when darkness fell. Whereas Independence couldn’t boast a single electric bulb, the town below had been a blaze of light. The thump of oil-fired generators had thudded softly through the night.
Then there was the matter of where it was. Independence stood in a low range of hills on the edge of the Okefenokee swamps. Between Independence and Jacksonville there were salty marshes, mangrove swamps, a maze of creeks running out to the ocean. Independence was connected to the rest of the world only by a single-track unpaved road, plus the railway which ran just inland from the coast.
Why on earth had a slice of the brash new America wound up in these back-of-beyond swamp lands? Where was the money coming from to finance those new houses, the big cars? And why was the kid Lundmark lying to him about having to hike in to Brunswick to find a telegraph?
Abe could remember the view from the sky perfectly well. Marion, Independence’s mysterious new neighbour, had a line of telegraph wire running directly into it from the south. If Abe wanted to send a telegram, he only had to stroll a mile downhill.
6 (#ulink_bba71dbd-a408-573a-8b5f-ea9689685234)
The cigar smoke hung blue-grey in the projector beam. The first reel snickered to an end and the screen filled with light. Willard jumped up to change the reel.
‘That dame,’ said Ted Powell, prodding the air with his cigar, looking every inch like the Wall Streeter that he was. ‘Is she meant to be the same as the first one?’
‘Brunhilde Schulz? O’Hara?’
‘Blondie back there. The one who just got kidnapped by the bank robbers.’
‘O’Hara quit on us. Right in the middle of filming. Breach of contract. We found a girl who looked OK from a distance, but all the close-ups are of O’Hara.’
‘Is that why the backgrounds are funny?’
‘They’re not that funny.’ Willard fiddled the second reel into place, poking the fragile celluloid through the little rollers. The lamp inside the projector was burning hot and the whole apparatus was scorching to the touch. ‘Ow! Here. You’ll like this next bit.’
The next bit was the skyscraper scene.
‘That’s me in the plane. I did this stunt myself.’
‘Funny place to park an airplane.’
Willard and the girl who really was O’Hara bounded out onto the roof. They looked dramatic – tragic – resolute. Then they bounded into the plane. The next shot had the propeller whirling and Willard clenching the muscles in his jaw.
‘Plane that starts itself,’ commented Powell. ‘Nice.’
‘She’s only a Gallaudet and she didn’t start herself. We’re doing things cheap here, Powell. Cheap as we can without … without…’
‘I was kidding, Will. And call me Ted.’
The plane rolled to the edge of the building, then plunged out of view. The next shot, taken from a neighbouring rooftop, showed the little Gallaudet dive nose-first for the ground. After falling ten or twelve storeys, the nose had come up and levelled out. There was another close-up of the hero: resolute – victorious – defiant. Then a shot of the Gallaudet flying out of sight, while a group of hoodlums poured out onto the roof and began shaking their fists at the sky.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Powell.
‘Pretty good stunt, isn’t it?’
‘Looks like you just fell clean off the edge.’
‘We did just fall.’
‘Something wrong with the airplane?’
‘No. It’s a question of air speed. You have to build speed before you can climb. And it was a dive, not a fall. Saying “fall” makes it sound bad.’
‘I saw a picture recently where they pulled a stunt like that.’
‘Breaking Free. They had it in Breaking Free.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Only there, the airplane flew, it didn’t just fall. You sure your plane was OK?’
‘They had a catapult. We thought about using a catapult, only it wouldn’t have been very realistic.’
‘Realistic…?’
The two men watched in silence to the end of the reel. They watched the girl be captured twice more by the hoodlums and be rescued back both times. The best stunt showed the girl being snatched by an airplane from a speeding car. The girl didn’t look too much like O’Hara and the pilot didn’t look too much like Willard, but it was a good stunt all the same.
The second reel snickered to its close. Willard got up again, tweaking the cuffs of his shirt from his jacket sleeve so they showed up better. He’d just spent four hundred bucks on a set of silver cuff-links and it annoyed him when they didn’t show. Powell stood up to flex his back. The cigar smoke filled the room like a migraine.
‘How’s distribution coming along? If I was going to be picky about it, I’d have to remind you that your first repayments were due last week.’
‘Distribution?’ said Willard. ‘Don’t you even want the third reel?’
‘Oh, there’s more? Sure…’
The reel ran on in ugly silence. Willard watched it with new eyes and found himself hating every frame of it. A picture of class, indeed! The picture was pitiful, truly pitiful.
He owed Ted Powell one hundred and ninety-four thousand bucks.
7 (#ulink_31fc2584-2221-553c-84a7-6a0831a27f0a)
There was plenty to do.
The first thing was to cut away the ruined fabric and assess damage to the wooden structure beneath. Using knives sharpened in a little engine oil on the step of the barn, Abe and Brad cut away the torn cotton and piled it up in the yard to burn later.
As the ship’s frame began to come into view, Abe was relieved to see that the main wing-struts were scuffed and cracked, but basically intact. The plane looked more like a skeleton now; but there was something fast and hungry in her look as well. He whittled splints for the cracked spars and screwed them carefully into place, wrapping twine round the joins for extra strength.
Then Abe stripped the engine, so he could clean, oil and reassemble it. As he’d known from the outset, it had been a faulty valve in the fuel-line which had created a blockage in the feed. It had been the work of five minutes to locate the problem and fix the valve. Most engine problems were like that. Little tiny niggles, which sometimes killed you, sometimes didn’t.
As the first week merged into the second, the new undercarriage began to take shape. Abe had some ideas on putting a cowling around the wheel base to reduce drag. By stretching cotton tightly over an arrangement of hoops and battens, he succeeded in putting his ideas into practice. Poor old Poll looked like she was wearing her winter stockings, but he promised her that she’d like them once she was airborne.
When the structural work was all done, he and Brad wound swathes of cotton around the exposed frame, pulling it tight so the fabric was hard and taut. Then they painted her: red and white, the colours Abe had used ever since his days as a barnstormer. Then, to protect the paint and fabric, they painted her again with cellulose dope, a kind of aviator’s varnish.
The battered airplane began to look herself again; perhaps better.
Abe usually worked alone – he usually did pretty much everything alone – but he liked working with the kid. The kid’s enthusiasm was uncanny. His aptitude too. Again and again Brad reminded Abe of himself at the same age. It was almost like working with a version of himself plucked from twenty years into the past.
As the days passed, Abe had counted another twenty-three bullet holes in the buildings around Independence. The glossy boomtown down the hill still seemed to be invisible. There was still no explanation of why Independence was the only town in America which still treated ex-army pilots as descended demi-gods. Abe kept his eyes open and his mouth shut.
On the evening of the tenth day, Abe was sitting alone in the hotel dining room, eating cold pie and potatoes. Then, just as he was finishing, Gibson Hennessey, the tall storekeeper, wandered in. The two men nodded a greeting.
‘Ed Houghton looking after you OK?’
Abe thought of the mountainous puddings he’d been subjected to – each one of them ‘in his honour’.
‘Yeah. Sometimes even better than that,’ he commented.
‘Ted’s right hospitable when he wants to be, especially in the pudding-making department.’ Humour flickered round the storekeeper’s mouth, before his voice changed again. ‘You won’t take this bad, I hope, but there’s a little whiskey to be had, if you were a whiskey-drinking man.’
‘From time to time.’
The storekeeper wandered over to the shelves where the glasses were kept. He helped himself to a couple and led the way upstairs, clearly knowing which room Abe had been given. At the door, he stood back politely and let Abe open up.
The room was the best in the hotel, but simple enough for all that. There was a deep and comfortable bed, a dressing table and chair, a wardrobe, and a small green armchair which emitted puffs of dust if anyone sat on it. There were a couple of oil lamps, grown smoky from needing their wicks trimming. A thin curtain moved sluggishly in front of the open window.
‘This OK for you?’ said Hennessey, looking around. ‘I got a better room over at my place if you want it, only I figured you’d be happier without a troop of little Hennesseys yelling and screaming the whole time.’
‘You figured right.’
‘I’d probably be happier, matter of fact.’
Abe pulled off his boots and stretched out on the bed. Not satisfied with his first attempt at getting comfortable, he pounded and pummelled his pillows into shape, before lying back with a sigh. Hennessey put the two glasses on the table and produced a pint-bottle wrapped in brown paper from his coat pocket. He poured the whiskey and handed Abe a glass.
‘Local moonshine. Been going long before Volstead, keep going a long time after. It’s always had quite a following in Independence.’
Abe sipped. The whiskey was good and he drank again. They’d been varnishing again today, and, though Abe liked the smell, it always made him dizzy. The whiskey helped.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ Hennessey produced a packet from his pocket and offered them to Abe. The pilot shook his head, but told Hennessey to go ahead. For a while, the two men were silent together, Hennessey smoking by the open window, Abe lying, eyes half-closed, on the bed. Eventually the storekeeper broke the silence.
‘Being a famous man and all, I guess you get a lot of attention? Even when you don’t announce your presence by putting your machine right down on Main Street.’
Nothing in Abe’s manner changed, except that beneath his lids, his eyes grew more alert.
‘Truthfully, Hennessey? I haven’t been received like this for five years.’
The storekeeper smiled. ‘No shortage of patriotism in Independence. That’s the trouble with this country, see. Short memories. People ought to remember more.’ He finished his cigarette and tossed the glowing butt in a wide arc out onto the dirt street outside. He watched it go.
‘That’s the trouble with America, huh?’ said Abe softly. ‘And what’s the matter with Independence?’
The tall storekeeper turned from the window. ‘What makes you think there’s anything wrong?’
Abe closed his eyes and rested the glass of whiskey on his chest. ‘Only everything I’ve seen since coming. That’s all.’
Hennessey nodded. Some of his pleasure in their little drama left his face. It was replaced by something sadder and older.
‘What’s wrong with Independence?’ he repeated. ‘Everything’s wrong. Everything bar the whiskey.’
8 (#ulink_6277b88f-552a-5bef-b44c-8f8e548f90e5)
‘Two hundred thousand dollars? Two hundred exactly?’
Junius Thornton, Willard’s father, named the figure. You need to be a rich man to name a sum like that and show no feeling aside from a businesslike care for arithmetical exactitude.
‘One ninety-four. I rounded up.’
‘One ninety-four, I see.’ The older man nodded. He had his son’s strong face and broad bones, but whereas Willard looked handsome, Junius just looked heavy. He looked the way a boxer might look, if he’d been hauled out of the ring and given five thousand dollars to spend at Brooks Brothers. ‘I had no idea pictures were so expensive.’
‘It’s not just the actors. You need the cameramen and the stunt guys. We used a lot of airplanes and … it adds up.’
‘Yes, I see. I’d never thought about it.’
There was a pause. Willard flicked at his trouser leg with irritation. Whoever had last pressed them had put the crease in the wrong place, so that the old one was still showing up like a shadow of the new. Willard wished he’d noticed before dressing that morning. The silence ran on.
‘Well, anyway,’ said Willard eventually, ‘Ted’s on at me about his money. I can’t help admitting I feel a little peeved. He’s not being quite gentlemanlike. I mean he can’t possibly think there’s a problem, can he?’
‘I don’t know,’ said his father. ‘I don’t know the nature of your arrangement.’
‘It was a loan, of course. But I mean to say, the understanding was always…’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, he never said anything about chivvying me, like some Lenox Avenue rent collector.’
‘But perhaps you never said anything about failing to repay him.’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake! Don’t take his side. It’s not like that.’
There was another pause, an even longer one this time. Sometimes, silences are shared. They belong equally to both people in the conversation. But not always. This one wasn’t. This one was strictly the property of the older man. Willard’s scalp tightened. Noises from the street outside seemed like an invasion. Eventually, the older man lifted his gaze.
‘You haven’t made it very plain why you wanted to see me. But, if I have it right, you are asking me to settle your debt with Ted.’
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ Willard had been intending to ask for some money in addition. It had been a long time since he’d seen any income, and after selling his Hollywood villa and settling his other debts, he’d only have around twenty-five thousand dollars in the world. To ninety-five per cent of Americans, twenty-five thousand dollars would have felt like an impossibly large fortune. To Willard, it felt like the breadline.
‘You seem equally confident that I shall agree.’
‘And I should hope so! Lord, it’s not as though I’ve ever asked for money before.’
‘No. No, indeed.’
His father slid open a drawer and drew out a slim case in unmarked black leather. Inside, Willard knew, there was a chequebook issued by the Morgan Bank; America’s most prestigious bankers – and ones who offered their services only to the very, very wealthy. Junius picked up the fountain pen from his desk, uncapped it, examined the nib, dried it carefully on the pink blotter, then wrote out two cheques. He examined the nib again and frowned before screwing the cap back on the pen. He placed the chequebook back in the drawer and closed it.
All this time, Willard was silent and sulky. But if he’d been honest with himself, it hadn’t been too bad. His father had been difficult, but not nearly as bad as he might have been. He’d known some fellows back in college who’d had the most furious fights over money. All in all, he’d got off lightly. His headache drummed away, but wasn’t any worse.
His father took a dry sheet of blotting paper and held it down over the cheques, rubbing from side to side with a thick forefinger. He didn’t say why he’d written two. He didn’t say anything about how much he’d written the cheques for. They stayed invisible beneath the blotter.
‘Willard, in a way I’m pleased that we should be having this conversation.’
‘Yes, Father,’ his son responded, not quite clear what conversation it was they were having.
‘I am fifty-seven, as you know. I expect I shall have another thirteen years or so at the Firm. Perhaps less. I shan’t attempt to push myself if my health turns poor.’
‘No. Quite right. Worst thing to do. Did you ever meet poor old Noggy Edwards’ pa? He…’
Junius waved a finger. ‘Your concern for my health is creditable, but is not what I wish to discuss.’
‘No. Quite. Sorry.’
‘It has always been my expectation that you should succeed me. My hope, I should say. My hope.’
‘Well, of course! I mean, after all –’
The older man didn’t so much interrupt as simply continue, trampling whatever Willard had been about to say. ‘But the Firm is a very demanding organism. It turns a profit because I compel it to turn a profit. Making money is never just a question of holding your hat out.’
Willard shook his head. His headache was squarely back now, like an angry bruise. He sat with his hand pressed to his temple.
‘It isn’t clear to me yet if you have the…’ the businessman groped for the correct word. He couldn’t find it and shook his head. ‘If you have what it takes. Brains. Guts. Desire. Ambition. Everything it takes to be a man.’
Willard opened and closed his mouth. ‘Lord, Father, I’ve just turned twenty-five. I’d say I’ve accomplished rather a lot. Not just during the war, but in Hollywood…’
‘Your time in California has been an unmitigated disaster.’ Junius held one of the two cheques up and shook it. ‘I have the proof of that here. You did well enough as a pilot although, as I remember, you decided to serve your country at much the same time as Princeton was wondering if it had done wrong in allowing you a place.’
‘Oh heavens! Mr Rooney and his conic sections! I…’ Willard’s hand dropped away from his head. He jutted his chin. His manner was defiant, but also cowed. He didn’t argue.
‘I don’t wish to belittle your accomplishments. You are my son and I continue to have faith in you. I suggest we let the past dwell in the past and instead look to the future.’
Willard nodded agreement. ‘Oh, yes. Give me half a chance and I –’
His father interrupted. ‘I have always assumed, perhaps wrongly, that in due course you wish to lead the Firm. I have thought you would wish to do this, because I have been unable to believe that a son of mine should wish for anything else. But it is a decision you must make for yourself. Do you wish to lead the Firm? Yes or no?’
Willard stuttered for a second or two. He stuttered because he hadn’t expected the question and because he was never entirely comfortable in his father’s presence. His father hated people who mumbled or repeated themselves or didn’t complete their sentences. Willard had a tendency to do all these things and his bad habits grew worse under his father’s gaze.
But the answer itself was as clear as day. Of course he expected to lead the Firm. Willard was a Thornton, the only son, the natural and rightful heir to the family throne. Of course he would one day lead the Firm.
‘Gosh, yes, Pa. As a matter of fact, I was about to say, isn’t it time I began? I mean, the movie business is one thing, but it’s hardly… I’d like to start, Pa. I think I’m ready.’
Willard hadn’t come into the room with any intention of getting started at the Firm. But now that his father had raised the issue, the answer seemed obvious. The movie business had turned sour. It was time he started at the Firm. He was the heir anointed. He was ready to lift his crown.
His father nodded massively.
‘Good. I should not have wished your answer to be any different.’
Willard began to feel a surge of relief. His father would never want him to start work with a two hundred thousand dollar debt around his throat. His father could cancel the debt, give him a position, get him started. Willard supposed there would be hard work to put up with, but, for all his playboy past, he wasn’t afraid of hard work.
‘That’s wonderful, Papa, I –’
The businessman raised a finger, stopping his son in mid-flow. He placed the two cheques face up on the blotter and pushed the blotter across the desk so Willard could see them both clearly.
The first one was written out for twenty-five thousand dollars and Willard moved his glance aside with a flicker of irritation. The second cheque was better. Much better. ‘One million dollars precisely.’ The figures were so many that the older man had had difficulty fitting them into the space designated. Willard felt an almost overpowering urge to reach out and take the money.
But first there was a question. He lifted his eyes.
‘Father?’
‘You may take whichever cheque you choose. You may take the million dollars. You can pay off Ted. You can make pictures. You can do whatever it is you wish to do. But you will have nothing to do with the Firm. There are professional managers available these days, who will conduct business in a first-rate way. As for the future, I shall treat you as I propose to treat the girls. I shall give each of them a large gift upon marriage. That’s this, in your case.’ He tapped the million-dollar cheque in front of him. ‘Thereafter there will be nothing further during my lifetime. When your mother and I pass on, you and the girls will inherit everything in equal fifths.’
‘Or?’ asked Willard in a whisper.
‘Or you may take the smaller cheque. You got yourself into debt. You must get yourself out of debt. If you succeed in doing so, I believe you will have the wherewithal to make a creditable leader of the Firm.’
‘But two hundred thousand dollars, Pa. I…’
The businessman didn’t soften his expression at all.
‘You may come to whatever accommodation with Ted Powell you can. I would not expect him to make any special allowance for you because you are my son. But he is a good finance man. He’ll be reasonable.’
Willard stared back at the cheques. The large one and the small one. Both, in their different ways, represented a life sentence of a sort. Willard’s headache thundered in his temples. He felt like a small boy asked to do a man’s job.
‘As I say,’ said the older man, ‘the choice is yours.’
9 (#ulink_903a8d1e-2900-555c-b08e-75e8002cc63f)
Hennessey finished speaking.
It was gone midnight. Outside, a few dogs howled, a few birds called, the breeze set up a low murmur that ran from tree-top to tree-top. Abe’s blue eyes, the brightest thing in a dingy room, had been fixed on his companion for the past hour and a half. Hennessey had smoked twelve cigarettes, Abe just one. Though the pint bottle of whiskey stood within easy reach of both men, it was still nearly full. Abe hadn’t even finished his first glass.
There was a long silence which extended beyond the two men out into the whispering night beyond.
‘That’s a hell of a story, Hennessey.’
‘You can call me Hen. Everyone does.’
The story was this.
Four or five years back, Independence was like every town the length and breadth of America. It wasn’t too good, it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t too rich, it wasn’t too poor. The sheriff was busy now and again, but so was the preacher. Folks made money, they made love, they made merry, they made out.
Then, in the early days of 1921, things began to change. At first, it was nothing so extraordinary. A big block of land down in the river bottom was sold to out-of-towners. Up the hill in Independence, people laughed. The land down by the river was marshy and prone to flooding, pretty near useless for farming. There were jokes made about cows learning to swim, about harvesting corn from a rowboat.
But the laughter died. Construction crews were brought in. The land was drained. The river was contained behind concrete walls. Houses and villas were thrown up: big, lavish affairs with oil-fired generators, electric lights, air conditioning, indoor bathrooms, one for every bedroom. That part of it was exciting – unsettling maybe, but exciting.
Then people began to arrive. The houses became occupied, the villas filled up.
‘There’s gambling down there,’ said Hennessey. ‘Blackjack, poker, craps, roulette, the lot. And booze too, of course.’
‘Gambling? It’s hardly Palm Beach down there, Hen.’
‘Different type of customer. Palm Beach is for rich guys on vacation. They take a swim, they take the air, they take in a casino. Marion ain’t like that. It’s for serious gamblers. Folk who like the fact that there are no cops in shouting distance. The town is run by hoods, for sure, but I’d say that their clients were mostly just as rough.’
Abe thought again about the view of Marion from the air. There was a single-track rail spur linking the town to the coastal express line and a single-track dirt road heading out towards Brunswick. Neither route looked like it carried a lot of traffic.
‘Marion’s tough to get to, isn’t it?’
The storekeeper nodded. ‘They run a kind of buggy service out to the railroad and back. But hard-to-get-to is part of their pitch. They attract the kind of folks who don’t get on with cops.’
‘And they haven’t been the best of neighbours, right?’
The question had made Hennessey reach for another cigarette, which he lit before answering. ‘I guess we didn’t make a great first impression. Certain parties up here in Independence feel mighty strongly about old John Barleycorn and the whole Prohibition thing. Those parties called the cops, the county government, the County Gazette, generally made a bit of a noise.’
‘And?’
‘The cops came, took a look, said far as they were concerned Marion was full of law-abiding citizens going about their law-abiding business. They told us to shut up.’
‘And?’
‘And that night a couple of cars came up from Marion full of goons and Tommy guns. They shot us up. They weren’t really trying to kill anyone, just trying to let us know how they felt about things. We had four people hurt, plenty of damage to property. So then a bunch of people made a complaint not just to the county but to the state Capitol in Atlanta.’ The storekeeper dragged on his cigarette until a quarter-inch glowed red on the tip. He stared at it as if it held an answer to all the problems of the world. ‘The cops never came. The letters never got answered. But the folk who’d signed those letters had their houses torched, shots fired at them, livestock shot dead in the field, crops burned. Two men were beaten so badly they could hardly see.’
Abe looked intently at the storekeeper. ‘The house behind the store has a new front, Hen.’
‘Yes, I was lucky. I got to the fire before it had done too much damage. I don’t give a damn for Prohibition. I don’t see why federal government should meddle in county business. But then again, I don’t like the idea that some goons could go buy themselves the laws they wanted. I don’t like the way they take out their guns at the first sign of trouble.’
‘And now?’
‘They want us gone. That sound crazy? But it’s true. They just plain don’t want us as neighbours. Course they got jobs down there. Poor folks’ jobs. Would be coloured jobs, ’cept we never had too many coloureds round here. Cleaning floors, mending roads, that type of thing. But aside from that, they want us gone. It’s little things, but it’s all the time. Farmers wake up, find somebody’s fired their hayrick. Houghton here gets his place smashed up ’bout once a year. Me, I’ve had my own problems. If anybody even whispers about resisting, it isn’t long before they’re jumped on and beaten to a pulp. We’ve had one person blinded, six hurt so bad they can’t walk without help, and one very brave man killed. And people are leaving. There are easier places to live, easier places to make a buck. They want us gone, Captain. They’re killing the town.’
Silence filled the room. The breeze outside had fallen almost silent and the thumping beat of the electricity generators down in Marion could be heard.
‘That’s one heck of a story, Hen.’
The older man nodded, reached for his pack of cigarettes and found it empty. ‘The hell with it,’ he said, flinging the pack away from him.
‘Sounds like you don’t plan on quitting.’
Hennessey made a gesture with his hands, which could have meant just about anything. ‘I have a steel plate on my door and bars over my windows. I have a gun in the shop and another one by my bed. I’ve stayed because I don’t like quitting, but not everyone feels that way. No reason why they should.’
Abe blew out. ‘Sheez, Hen… Listen, tell me more about the booze.’
‘What’s to say? You want a drink, I’d say the bars in Marion were pretty nicely stocked.’
‘I didn’t mean that. The way you tell the story, the gambling came first and the booze came second. I don’t figure it like that.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Think about it. If you wanted to make money out of gambling there are plenty of places you could pick. Marion doesn’t look like the most obvious choice. On the other hand, if you were thinking of making money from booze, then Marion looks like a million-dollar bet. It’s connected to the sea by a few miles of river. The coast is quiet and open. It’s as close as you want to Bimini and the other islands. The local coastguard has its hands full trying to keep booze out of Miami and Jacksonville. How much time will they spare trying to keep it out of Marion?’
Hennessey nodded. ‘Yeah, they bring it in all right. They’ve got a big shed on the river. But still, how much can one bunch of hoods and gamblers drink?’
‘There’s a rail line. A spur running right down to the coastal express.’
‘Yeah. Twenty, thirty years ago some folks from the north found kaolin upriver from here. They built a rail line, then the kaolin ran out and the business folded. But the line’s still there.’
‘I don’t think Marion drinks all the booze it brings in.’
‘They load it onto the railroad, you think? Could be. I wouldn’t say no. Hell, who knows what goes on in a goon’s mind?’
Abe didn’t answer that. Still lying on the bed, he stretched like a cat, right down to his toes. Then he rolled over, reached for his glass of whiskey and swallowed what remained.
‘What I’m wondering,’ he said, ‘is what goes on in a storekeeper’s mind. And specifically, why a storekeeper should go to a lot of trouble to tell a beat-up pilot a lot of things that aren’t any of his business.’
Hennessey picked up the whiskey bottle, thought about pouring himself another glass, but thought better of it and set it back on the table. He looked suddenly old, tired and unshaven. When he spoke his voice had none of its earlier guile or subtlety.
‘We need your help,’ he said. ‘We need you to save us. You’re all there is.’
10 (#ulink_01ffc64c-844f-50ef-a9a4-c30f96cea8a3)
Ted Powell was six foot, an athletic mid-fifties, and had a face that smiled almost constantly. The smile was deceptive. That was a thing Willard would learn to remember. Ignore the smile. Look at the eyes. The smiles were like a gentleman’s agreement. They looked nice and meant nothing.
‘Welcome to Powell Lambert,’ said Powell, as they strode along to his corner office. ‘Your first time on the Street, I imagine. You get here OK? No trouble parking?’
‘Parking? I came by cab.’
‘Oh! Cab?’
‘Sure. I –’
‘And I assumed you’d come by airplane! What? Our roof isn’t good enough for you?’
‘I – uh –’
Willard smirked in embarrassment, but Powell had begun to laugh away at his own joke. ‘It’s a good roof. Nice and flat. Or have you decided to quit falling off skyscrapers? Ha, ha, ha! Hell of a stunt that.’ He zoomed his hand vertically down like a stone. ‘America’s favourite ace! Ha, ha, ha!’
‘I guess we should have paid for the catapult.’
‘That was a stinker of a movie, eh, Will? A stinker.’ Powell’s face didn’t change as he said this. It was still smothered by smiles and tobacco smoke.
‘Well you know, I wouldn’t quite –’
‘You want to know my favourite bit? It was the bit where Blondie has to jump off the clock-tower and there you are right underneath in an airplane. You know –’ Powell leaned forward. His face grew serious and he wagged his finger for extra emphasis. ‘You know, I think you were right about the catapult. I just don’t think that would have been realistic.’
Willard leaned back. He prided himself on a sense of humour, but Powell was pushing things too far. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t like the movie,’ he said stiffly.
‘Ha, ha, ha! I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I said it was a stinker. I liked it. Boy! I liked it.’ He roared with laughter, a series of guffaws that subsided into chuckles and then into silence. ‘So … you’re six weeks late on your first repayment. Second instalment due in two and a half weeks.’
‘Yes. That’s what I wanted to come and talk about.’
Powell’s cigar had run into some kind of problem, and he was puffing away over a lighted match to get things started again. ‘Hmm? Eh? Oh, needn’t have done, Will. No need.’
‘Well, obviously, our income fell rather short of what we’d hoped.’
Powell was shaking his head. It wasn’t clear if he was taking issue with Willard’s words or the disobedience of his cigar. ‘No, no… Not our income. Your income.’
‘Very well, if you prefer, but in any case –’
Powell was done with his cigar. He waved it at Willard. ‘I made you a loan. If I’d been dumb enough to come in for some equity, then you could say our income. That’s the beauty of lending. I don’t care if the movie was a beaut or a stinker, you pay me back just the same.’
‘And I fully intend to.’
‘Right. Otherwise you end up bankrupt.’ Powell was still smiling.
‘I hardly think you need to speak to me in those terms.’
‘I’m calling in the loan. The whole of it. Due in two and a half weeks. Margaret, my secretary, will give you written notice before you leave.’
‘But I have eight months. We agreed. There were to be at least eight months.’
Powell wagged a finger. ‘You’re in default. The rules change. Read the contract.’
Once again the suggestion of migraine came to press on Willard’s temples. Somewhere in the last few weeks and months, his world had changed. Not for the better. Very much for the worse.
‘Powell, may I be candid?’
‘Call me Ted.’
‘Ted, I’d like to be candid.’
‘Nothing to stop you.’
‘I haven’t any money. Nowhere near enough.’
‘Bad thing to tell your banker, my boy.’
‘I guess I figured you already knew.’
Powell smiled. He was very calm for a man owed almost two hundred thousand dollars by someone with no money. Willard noticed this and felt even more unsettled.
‘I guess you could run along to Pappy. From what I hear, it’s been another great year for guns and bombs.’
‘Yes.’
Willard knew that Powell was right. After a sharp collapse in profits after the end of the war, the Firm had begun to rebuild. ‘Strengthen the Old; Build the New’ was Thornton’s watchword. By 1922, Willard’s father had proudly announced that the Firm’s profits would equal those of 1916. Since then, each year had continued better than the one before.
‘Look, I have spoken to Father and he’s offered to bail me out if necessary. Most handsomely, as a matter of fact.’
‘Excellent. Money in two and a half weeks, then.’
Willard shook his head. Up until a few weeks ago, life had seemed simple. He had looks, he had luck, he had charm, he had money. But things had grown complex; horribly so. Life had come to seem like a puzzle with a million moving parts and only one correct solution.
He hadn’t simply accepted his father’s ultimatum. The choice of cheques and the conditions that rode with them felt humiliating and unfair. But all his arguing had been useless – and, as a matter of fact, it hadn’t really been an argument. An argument takes two and the businessman hadn’t even bothered to raise his voice. Willard might as well have been throwing sand against granite for all the difference he’d made.
So the scene ended as it had begun, with a choice. Willard could bail himself out and give up his future throne. Or he could take the smaller cheque, extricate himself from his mess with Powell, and take his proper place beside his father, the heir anointed.
‘Listen, Ted, my father has offered to clear my debt, but I’d sooner, if I can, clear the debt myself.’
Powell stopped puffing, stopped smiling. His face was suddenly very cool, very still.
‘You wish to clear the debt yourself?’
‘Yes. Yes, Ted, I do.’
‘I see. And how do you propose to do that, may I ask?’
11 (#ulink_6d51c9df-34d1-5cc5-ac9b-3b0e6dde5cb9)
Abe said no.
What else could he have said? A foxy old storekeeper wanted Abe to save the town from a bunch of gangsters down the hill. From all Hennessey had said, it was clear that the gangsters were well-established, well-organised and well-financed. Even supposing that Abe felt like playing the hero – and he didn’t; he truly didn’t – what could one man do in such a situation? The cops, the county, the state had all proved useless or worse. How could one man, working alone, do anything to help?
So he said no. Positively, certainly and finally no.
Hennessey had accepted his answer, or pretended to. But the next day, Hennessey returned to Abe’s slatted barn-cum-workshop, warm and cordial as ever. The storekeeper’s ostensible mission was a concern about getting Main Street ready for Abe’s impending take-off.
‘The street’ll be fine. I just need everyone well clear,’ said Abe.
‘There are some potholes. I’m getting ’em filled. Should be done by the end of today.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And them trees at the end of the road. They ain’t gonna be in the way?’
‘I’ll wait for the right wind. If I get the conditions right, I’ll either clear the trees or have room enough to slip left of them.’
Hennessey shook his head. ‘That ain’t right. We owe you a proper send-off. I’ll have ’em felled. The worst ones, anyhow.’
Abe felt caught between two feelings. On the one hand, he was pleased to get Main Street properly cleared for a take-off. On the other hand, friendly as Hennessey was, Abe suspected him of ulterior motives.
‘Didn’t you hear me last night, Hen? I said no.’
‘Sure I heard.’
‘Listen, I know how to fly a plane. I can fix an engine if it breaks. And if my plane happens to have a gun on it, I’m a pretty good guy for shooting at other airplanes. That’s it. That’s me. That’s all.’
‘Sure, I understand. Probably I was dumb for asking.’
‘You knew that before. But you still went ahead and asked.’
‘It wasn’t because you can fly a plane, Captain. It’s because you’ve got it here.’ The storekeeper struck his heart. ‘And here.’ He tapped his forehead.
‘I reckon you’ve got plenty in both those places yourself.’
‘Hah!’ Hennessey made a hacking noise in his throat. ‘My wife’s got a sister over in Atlanta. If things get bad enough here, we got another place to go. Things being how they are, I don’t see I’d get a lot for the store, but –’ he shrugged ‘– there are others who lost a whole lot more.’
‘I’m sorry, Hen. I’d have helped if I could.’
‘I expect you’re right. Probably nothing you could do for us anyway.’
‘I don’t think there is.’
‘OK, then. You can’t blame me for asking.’
‘No blame.’
The storekeeper shook his head, dismissing the subject. ‘Say, though, before you leave, why not take supper with Sal Lundmark tomorrow? She’d love to have you round. Brad wanted to ask you, but was kind of shy. You’ve got yourself one heck of an admirer there.’
Abe looked sharply at the storekeeper, whose face was a picture of innocent friendliness. Abe suspected him of being up to something, but didn’t know what. In any case, Brad had been a terrific helper and Abe wanted to find a way of saying thank you.
‘Sure. He’s a good kid. I’d like that.’
Hennessey got up to go. The plane still sat in the barn, as she had done since the first day, but there was nothing sad about her appearance now. The plane was trim and clean. Her engine smelled of fresh oil and gasoline. The fabric over her wings was hard and taut, a series of gleaming curves, that seemed only waiting for the command to leap into the air and ride it.
‘There much more to do here, Captain?’
Abe nodded out towards the yard. He’d nailed a long roofing batten to an old horse-hitching post. On the top of the pole, a ribbon of white silk hung limply in the breeze.
‘The take-off site’s kinda short. Lowering the trees will help, but I’ll still want a bit of breeze in my face before starting out. And I’ll probably want to go not long after sun-up, before the air’s heated too much.’
‘Hot air’s a problem?’
‘A plane needs lift to get airborne. Cold air’s got more lift than hot.’
‘So that’s all you’re waiting for? A wind from the south and a bit of cold air?’
‘Uh-huh. Aside from that, we’re ready to go.’
The storekeeper was taken aback. He’d seen the way the plane had smashed up on landing. He hadn’t realised Abe could be ready to move on again so fast. But he controlled his expression and nodded.
‘You’d best go over to Sal Lundmark’s tonight, then. Wouldn’t want to keep you here unnecessarily.’
‘No.’
‘I’ll tell her to expect you.’
‘Thanks.’
Hennessey walked to the barn door and the white dust and beating sun outside. He looked back at the barn, the plane and the pilot. ‘Don’t mention it,’ he muttered. Then he headed out, back to Main Street and his store. He had a cigarette between his lips and was searching his pockets for matches when he heard a movement behind him. It was the airman, a strangely troubled expression on his face.
‘Hen, last night you asked me to do something for you. You asked me to help you and the town here out of a fix, a real bad one. I said no.’
The storekeeper nodded, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat from the fierce overhead sun.
‘I said no for two reasons and I only told you one of them. The reason I told you about had to do with the jam you’re in. It’s not clear to me – as a matter of fact I don’t think it’s clear to you – what one man could hope to do. Even if I wanted to, I don’t see as I could do anything to help.’
‘Uh-huh. And the other reason?’ Hennessey spoke slowly as though the sun was stealing energy from his words. The storekeeper’s cigarette was still between his lips, still unlit.
‘The other reason is me. Before the war, I was a racetrack driver. When the war came, I did everything I could to get out to France, because I thought I’d be able to fly planes and fight them. And I was right. I was right about that part. But I hadn’t understood something then, which I understand now.’
He stopped speaking. His jaw actually locked and he looked as though he wasn’t going to speak another word. It took Hennessey a moment or two to realise that Abe hadn’t simply paused, so it was only after a few seconds that the storekeeper stepped closer and prompted, ‘Yes?’ When Abe spoke, his answer was so quiet that only the baking stillness of the air allowed Hennessey to catch it.
‘A man’s got to want to play the hero. And at first I did, I guess. I was crazy for it. But then they promoted me, gave me a squadron. And I changed, or maybe the war changed me. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. But I had no choice. I was a serving officer with orders to carry out. What I did, I did because I had to. To the best of my abilities. But I’m not the man you thought I was, Hen. I’m sorry.’
The storekeeper nodded, his mouth slightly open and a dark crease running between his eyebrows. He looked surprised or disbelieving. But the look was only temporary. He held up his cigarette, still unlit. He smiled like a man who looks around for his glasses and finds them on his nose. He lit the cigarette and inhaled.
‘I’ll tell Sal Lundmark to expect you. You’ll be getting a pot roast, I expect.’
‘Pot roast sounds good.’
‘And you should ask to see the kid’s collection of flying stuff. He’s nuts about it.’
‘Yeah.’
The storekeeper looked up at Abe’s makeshift windsock. The strip of white silk still hung down, as if in surrender. The two men nodded. Words still unspoken drifted just beyond them, out of reach. Then the storekeeper turned and walked away, shoes scrunching in the dazzling dust.
12 (#ulink_513e6306-24c7-57fb-af51-ad594dab8017)
Powell accepted Willard’s offer.
It was an offer that gave everything to Powell, nothing to Willard. Under the terms of the contract – drawn up by Powell’s chief lawyer, then and there, under Willard’s nose – Willard would begin work at Powell Lambert. He’d be a junior employee in the trade finance division, earning a handsome fifteen thousand dollars a year.
Only not.
Of the fifteen thousand dollar salary, Powell would withhold ten thousand in interest payments on the loan. As for the principal, almost nothing was said. Willard wouldn’t even remotely be able to repay the loan from his earnings. When he tried to ask Powell about salary hikes and promotions, Powell dismissed the subject with a brusque jab of his cigar. The only thing Powell did say was, ‘This is Wall Street. There’s money to be made. If you have the gift, you’ll make it. If you don’t…’ He shrugged.
And the meaning of the shrug was obvious. With the contract as it was written now, Willard was a virtual slave. If he couldn’t find two hundred thousand bucks, then he’d be forced to work for Ted Powell for the rest of his life. During the war, Willard had been almost as frightened of capture as he had been of injury. But the barbed wire of a German prison camp could hardly have been more permanent than the contract he had just signed.
And why? Why was he doing what he was doing? Why not take the million, clear the debt, go back out West, get on with life?
Two reasons.
The first was money. A million bucks sounded like a lot. But Willard was a realist. He owed Powell two hundred grand: so a million became eight hundred thousand. And what would Willard live on? In Hollywood he had spent more than a hundred thousand bucks a year. Eight hundred grand would run through his hands in six or seven years, maybe less. And after that, what? To most people, a million dollars would have seemed like the vastest fortune in the world. To Willard, it felt a hair’s breadth from poverty.
But the second reason was the bigger one. He didn’t know how to put it into words. It had to do with pride, with Willard’s sense of himself.
From earliest childhood, he had understood this much: he was the son, the only son, the natural inheritor of the family kingdom. It had always been hard to convey to outsiders the intensity of that feeling. The name for one thing. No one in the family ever called the family business by its name, Thornton Ordnance. It was just the Firm, one word, implicitly capitalised. Willard’s great-grandpa had made it. His grandpa had nourished it. His father had expanded it. It was Willard’s destiny to do the same, to follow in their footsteps, to prove himself worthy of the family name.
And that pointed to a deeper reason still. Willard’s father. Junius Thornton might speak as though it were entirely up to Willard whether or not he joined the Firm, but both men knew that was a lie. It mattered entirely, completely, utterly. If Willard had chosen not to fight for his place at the Firm, Junius wouldn’t have excommunicated his son, but any respect would have vanished completely. Willard already knew too well how bruising his father’s savage, iron-bound silences could be. A lifetime of such silence would have been too much to bear.
And so, as Willard picked up the pen that would sign away his freedom, somewhere in his deepest consciousness he understood this: that everything he was about to do, he was doing for his father.
13 (#ulink_914a9ebf-4988-5ed0-9c58-8af0a74610d6)
The Lundmarks’ home had a double door. A screen door closed shut against evening insects and a green-painted wooden door that was folded back inside the room. Inside, the room was lit by a single oil lamp. What with the wire mesh and the dim light, Abe hadn’t been able to see very much of the interior. He knocked at the door, but out of politeness only, to let the folks inside know he was there. Without waiting, he went on in.
And he saw this: the kid, Brad, staring at him with those big wide-open eyes.
And this: the mother, Sal, her face and neck violently disfigured by red burn marks, her reddish hair growing thin and patchy through the burns on her scalp. And her eyes: pale blue, pretty, and completely blind.
And finally this: a photo on the mantelpiece, framed and spotlessly clean. It showed a man’s face, nice looking and strong, Brad’s father. Beneath the photo, an inscription: Stanford G. Lundmark, A Hero of Independence, 1881–1923.
Right away, Abe knew the nature of the storekeeper’s game – a game perfectly calculated to change Abe’s mind, if anything could. Muttering darkly, Abe assumed a smile and advanced. Sal Lundmark had dinner ready. She asked Abe to say grace, which he did, stiffly and out of practice. ‘Let us thank the Lord for these His gifts of goodness. Amen.’ Abe used the grace his father used to say, but finished wondering whether Sal had been expecting something longer and more ornate.
‘Thank you, Captain.’
The conversation began awkwardly. Sal Lundmark had some kind of idea that Abe had to be treated a little better than royalty, maybe not quite as well as a procession of angels. She asked him if it were true that he’d met President Wilson – which he had. She asked him if the Prince of Wales had been as handsome in real life as he looked in his pictures – Abe said he had. She asked what the food had been like the time he’d been a guest of the French Prime Minister.
At that point, Abe had put his knife and fork down.
‘Ma’am, I did a little flying in the war. Right afterwards, I met a few people, got given some medals, had a big fuss made of me. And you want to know something? I hated it. I like my airplane, I like any place that has airplanes in, and I like places that feel like home.’
There was a pause.
When Sal wasn’t using her hands to eat, she rested them on the edge of the table so she could keep her orientation in the room. ‘And your home,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Your home, I guess…’
‘The place I grew up was a little farmhouse in Kentucky.’ He looked around the cluttered room, which was about thirty feet long by fifteen wide. ‘I’d say it was a little bit smaller than this, and we didn’t have that fancy lean-to affair at the back. But don’t worry,’ he added, ‘although this place feels kind of grand, you’ve made it homey. It’s a pleasure to be here.’
She laughed. Abe laughed. Brad laughed with pleasure at seeing the ice broken. The conversation ran easily after that. Stanford Lundmark had worked as a carpenter and, when work was hard to come by, a farm labourer. Abe knew plenty about farming from his childhood, and they talked about good harvests and lousy employers.
Little by little, Sal opened up to speak about her husband’s death. He’d been one of the men who had first reported the Marion mobsters to the police. Their house had been burned to the ground, blinding Sal and almost killing her. Stanford had rebuilt the house, plank by plank. For a time things had been quiet, but then there had been more unprovoked assaults on Independence. Lundmark had had enough. He’d ridden down into Marion, aiming to sort things out, ‘once and for all’. He’d got his wish, in a manner of speaking. He was gone for two days, before he was found with his head smashed in down among the cornfields on the north side of town.
‘He must have been a hell of a man,’ Abe murmured softly.
Sal nodded. Her eyes couldn’t see, but they could still cry. There was a short silence.
‘You must have been very proud,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Very.’
Abe let the silence run a little longer, then changed subject. He asked Brad if he had collected any flying stuff other than the photo of Abe. He might as well have asked the Pope if he had an interest in prayer books. In an instant, the kid ran upstairs and came down with a whole boxful of photos, news stories, scrapbooks, pages torn from boys’ magazines, movie posters.
Abe laughed. ‘Sal, you know your son is a bit of an obsessionist?’
She smiled and wiped her eyes, but Brad was impervious to irony. He had a small mountain of material relating to Abe; vastly more than Abe had ever wanted to keep himself.
‘And that’s your Croix de Guerre,’ said Brad, slapping down one photo. ‘And that’s your Légion d’honneur –’ another photo ‘– And that’s your Congressional, no, wait, that’s your Distinguished Service Cross, the first one, three oak leaves, then I should have – yes – the Glory Boys piece. Boy! I used to know that article by heart.’
Brad dropped a newspaper article on the table. The article was a syndicated reprint of a piece that had first appeared in the New York Times. Abe had been asked to do an interview with a war correspondent. Abe hadn’t wanted to do it – he didn’t like or approve of the way the press treated the war – and he had given a grudging thirty-minute interview to the journalist in question. That had been all. He’d forgotten the whole thing within five minutes. But then the article had appeared, splashed beneath a huge photo of Abe, ‘Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys’. The piece had caused a sensation. Nothing in it was untrue. Abe couldn’t even claim that his words had been twisted or distorted. But if Abe had sought to avoid any possible glamourising of his unit and the war in the sky, he couldn’t have failed more completely. The article made Abe out to be America’s hero of heroes; his men to be the bravest of the brave. And it was good. Much though Abe hated it, the article was a superb piece of writing, syndicated, so it seemed, to every newspaper in America. And the name for the squadron had stuck. Abe was never just Captain Rockwell any more, he was always Captain Rockwell of the Glory Boys. The men in the squadron had been intensely proud and had painted the title on the nose and tail of every plane. Abe dated his true and abiding hatred of the war from the moment that article first appeared.
Brad went on digging out items from his collection. Abe rubbed his face, in deep discomfort. He did his best to change the subject.
‘I hope it’s not all me.’
‘No, I’ve got everyone here. Everyone. I mean,’ he added hurriedly, ‘you were always my favourite. You and…’
‘Me and Rickenbacker. Good choice. Rickenbacker was the best.’
Abe felt better now that the kid’s interest was deflected onto other subjects, but one photo of himself as a young man was still visible on the top of the pile. He was wearing a lieutenant’s uniform. He’d only just been commissioned, hadn’t yet shot down a single plane, hadn’t yet experienced a minute in combat. The photo was monochrome, of course, but somehow you could see the startling blue of the young man’s eyes, just as startling as if a piece of sky had fallen down and got lodged there. The young man looked out with confidence and eagerness, as though knowing the place that history had written for him. Abe looked sharply away, as though allergic to the sight. When Brad happened to unfold a newspaper cutting that fell over the photo and covered it, Abe pulled his glance away with an almost visceral feeling of relief.
Sal stood up to make coffee. Abe wanted to help, but she said, ‘You stay where you are. I don’t need eyes to find the blamed coffee pot.’ Meantime, Brad had dug out something that amused Abe. A folded movie poster advertised ‘America’s favourite flying ace’, Willard Thornton.
‘So he’s the favourite,’ laughed Abe. ‘Hear that, Brad? America’s favourite! What’s all this about Rockwell and Rickenbacker?’
‘Oh, him! I don’t really… But say, Captain, he was ninety-first squadron as well. You must have –’
‘Sure, I knew Willie Thornton, all right.’
‘Wow! … I saw one of his movies once. In Jacksonville. I used to quite like him, but the picture was dumb. He shot down about eight machines in one fight.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never watched ’em.’ He smiled. Will Thornton had arrived in the squadron much cockier than his flying skills warranted. But Abe had seen through the bluster. He’d put time into Thornton’s training and the effort had paid off. Abe had come to trust his ability in a fight. If the young man had been able to get his instinctive selfishness under control, he’d have a fine future ahead of him.
‘You keep in touch with him?’
‘Not now, no, these movie actors, I doubt if they’d have time for an old beat-up flier like me… Say, though, if you wanted me to ask him to sign that movie poster for you, I expect he’d be happy to oblige.’
‘Really, Captain? Gee whizz, I…’ he trailed off, caught between his excitement at the idea and his desire to make sure that Abe knew he didn’t have a rival for his admiration.
Abe took the poster. ‘I’ll mail it to him with a note. No promises, mind, but I expect he’ll help out.’
Sal came to the table with the coffee. Abe forced the subject away from the war, back to farming and the price of corn. After twenty minutes, he pushed his chair back. ‘Say, Sal, thanks for dinner. It was real good. Nice to eat home-cooked food once in a while.’
‘You couldn’t be more welcome, Captain.’
‘Brad, I’m gonna be leaving town tomorrow. The takeoff could be a mite tricky and I wouldn’t want to carry a passenger, but I’ve heard there’s a stretch of beach just south of Brunswick with room to land.’
‘Oh, sure, Captain. A real good beach. Flat and wide. Not too soft neither.’
‘Well, what d’you say you meet me there tomorrow? Say around noon, if you can get there. We’ll do a little flying together before I head off south.’
‘Oh boy! Mom, can I…?’
‘Oh no, Captain, you don’t want to do that. Brad doesn’t need to –’
‘D’you know what, ma’am? I think as a matter of fact he does.’
And that was that. Abe fixed the date. Poll was ready. Meantime, Hennessey had had the trees felled, the road levelled, any obstacles removed. Main Street, Independence looked almost like a real runway. Abe walked slowly back to the hotel. On the four wooden steps leading up to the hotel’s verandah, there was a man visible only as a bunch of shadows and a red-tipped cigarette.
‘Evening, Hen,’ said Abe.
‘Well, good evening to you. You’re leaving tomorrow I guess?’
‘Yep.’
‘Enjoy your dinner?’
‘You mean, did Sal Lundmark’s blindness make me change my mind?’
‘Either way.’
‘I enjoyed my dinner, Hen. But as for changing my mind, I told you already.’
The storekeeper pulled the cigarette from his mouth and stared at the tip. Then he flicked it, still glowing, out into the street.
‘A man’s gotta try, though.’
‘Sure.’ Abe hesitated. He liked the storekeeper. The man had guts and honesty: characteristics which Abe prized above anything. ‘If things work out, Hen, I’m going to be doing a little flying in these parts. I’m hoping to make a little money flying between Florida and the islands.’
‘There money in that?’
‘Don’t know. Not much. Any case, I aim to find out.’
‘Yeah, well, good luck.’
‘Maybe I’ll get in touch again sometime. If things work out. Any case, if you ever get a postcard from your Auntie Poll, you don’t forget who sent it.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Goodnight, Hen.’
‘Goodnight, Captain.’
‘And thanks. I’m only sorry I couldn’t help.’
PART TWO (#ulink_88b93c2b-c31f-5f6f-9ff5-92cc65d4d4ea)
Lift (#ulink_88b93c2b-c31f-5f6f-9ff5-92cc65d4d4ea)
Heavier-than-air flight sounds impossible – and it is. People get confused because they think that planes must weigh a lot. But that’s not true. Not true at all.
On the ground, of course, aircraft weigh something. But on the ground, they aren’t really airplanes, they’re just big chunks of metal with wings. The magic happens when the plane begins to roll forwards and air starts to move over those wings. At first, nothing much happens – nothing visible anyway. But, as the airspeed increases, the wings begin to experience lift. They’re pulling upwards, cancelling gravity, making the plane lighter.
The airspeed gets faster. Once again, the lift on the wings increases. Invisible strings are pulling the plane upwards. As the airspeed goes on increasing, the lift begins to equal gravity. Push the plane through the air just a notch or two faster and the plane rises from the ground, not by some miracle of nature but because it’s helpless to do otherwise.
And that’s it.
That’s why heavier-than-air flight never has been possible and never will be possible. Imagine the biggest, heaviest plane you’ve ever seen in your life. Imagine it one thousandth of a millionth of a millisecond before take-off. The plane may look like it’s sitting on the ground, a clumsymetal skyscraper that’s fallen over. But that’s all illusion. That entire plane – pilot, passengers and all – has become absolutely weightless.
It’s so light you could pick it up and throw it over the moon.
14 (#ulink_08b72a25-4837-5ecc-9447-88a91d6cacdd)
Abe quit, he turned his back.
One bright and breezy dawn, with a cool wind a steady ten knots from the south, Abe took Poll to the end of Main Street, opened her throttle, and roared upwards into the eggshell-perfect sky. He dipped his wings, once, twice, then flew away.
As the red-and-white plane danced away towards the ocean, the knots of onlookers broke up, back to their daily business or their morning grits. The last person left squinting into the morning sun was Hennessey Gibson. ‘A nice guy that,’ he muttered. ‘Just a shame he wouldn’t stay.’
Abe kept his date with Brad Lundmark. The Curtiss Jenny had been built as a trainer. It had two cockpits, front and rear, with full controls in each one. Abe took the kid up to fifteen hundred feet, then let the kid take over. Rudder bar left and right. Control stick up, down, port, starboard. Throttle full open, half-off, then full power again. Abe gave the kid two hours in the air. They did a couple of landings, a couple of take-offs. It was the best two hours of Brad Lundmark’s life. Abe dropped the kid back on the sand and filled the tank with gasoline from a red tin fuel can.
‘So long, Brad.’
‘So long, Captain.’
‘You mind you look after your mom, OK?’
‘Sure, Captain. I will.’ On the last two words, Brad’s voice twisted a little and rose half an octave. It was the sort of verbal stumble which probably means nothing. The boy immediately got his control back and added something else in a voice which was completely level and smooth. Only he’d looked away too. He’d darted his eyes quickly out to sea and kept them there ’til his voice had recovered.
The conversation ran on a little. Abe still needed to stow the empty fuel can and clear a few stones away from his prospective take-off site. But the flier had become suddenly gruff, almost angry. They said goodbye again and shook hands. Then Abe took off, climbing aggressively. He headed south, long enough to be sure that Brad had already set off for home, but inside himself the flier was at war.
On the one hand there stood Hennessey and the blind Sal Lundmark, her dead husband and the stricken town. There stood the redhead Brad, the engine-obsessed image of the boy that Abe had once been. And on the other hand, there stood Abe himself; everything he was now, everything he’d ever learned about himself. The two sides struggled for mastery. Neither side won.
Angrily, treating his controls with uncharacteristic roughness, Abe brought Poll round in a long curve that would bring her back up the coast, five miles out to sea and a mile and a quarter above it. Then holding himself directly in between the Marion coast and the eye of the sun, he circled. The mouth of Okefenokee River, a few miles east of Independence, was marked by a cluster of ragged green islands and the branching tongues of a little delta.
Still angry, still grim, but always careful, Abe began to study the sea below. At first glance, the ocean seemed littered with vessels of all sizes, ploughing the violet-blue with trails of random foam. Abe watched until the shapes gradually resolved themselves into a pattern. The smaller ones were mostly fishing boats, tracking shoals of fish. Further out to sea, bigger ships were cruising, paralleling the coast. Abe looked at the whole pattern of shipping, but kept the Okefenokee River always in view.
He didn’t see what he was looking for on that flight, nor any time that day. He felt relieved. The war that had been raging inside him had resolved itself in this way: he had given Hennessey and Brad and all the other figures in his head twenty-four hours exactly. If he found what he was looking for in that time, he’d continue to investigate. But if he didn’t… Waves of relief, of freedom, washed through him at the thought. Abe thought of flying Poll out over the ocean to the islands. The blue ocean with its alternate tints of purple and green, its crests of white, the far horizons, and only the sky above… Abe hoped against hope, that the sea would stay empty.
When darkness fell, he unrolled his sheepskin sleeping roll on a beach a little way north of Brunswick. An hour before light the next morning, he woke up, walked waist-deep into the sea, where he dunked his head and scrubbed himself clean. Then he returned to shore, dressed and took off. By the time the sun nudged over the horizon, he was in position, lodged invisibly in the glare of dawn.
He watched the coast, watched the boats, searching for what he knew had to be there.
Searched, then, with a sinking heart, he saw it.
Two boats, the size of launches, broke from the green-fringed islands. They could have been fishing boats, only these launches were faster, sharper, lighter, keener. The two boats chugged out to sea, then headed south. Abe, holding his position in the eye of the sun, his stomach churning with a feeling that he couldn’t put into words, turned to follow.
15 (#ulink_129c76d7-3fbe-5097-953b-5e60358e73ed)
It was 31 May 1926.
Willard stood, face washed and shoes shined, in Ted Powell’s eighteenth-storey office. The banker was on the telephone and held up a finger, indicating that Willard should neither move nor speak. The call ran on for six minutes before Powell hung up. He stared at Willard.
‘It’s eight-thirty,’ he said.
‘You said I should come by first thing.’
‘We start at eight.’
‘Oh.’
‘Never mind. Tomorrow. I’ll show you around.’
Brusque and unfriendly, Powell shot his newest recruit around the premises. Powell never knocked on any door. He just threw them open and snapped out the name of each department or office as he did so. ‘Typing Pool’, ‘Mail Room’, ‘Mr Barker and Mr Grainger, in charge of our trade finance operation’, ‘Legal’, ‘Letters of Credit’, ‘Settlements’, and so on. Powell Lambert occupied four floors of its building. Although Willard saw everything at too great a speed to take it in, he was given the impression of a purposeful, dynamic, dedicated business enterprise. The more routine areas of the bank – the Typing Pool, the bay where the settlement clerks went about their business – were neat but functional. The parts of the bank open to clients or reserved for senior officers were kept immaculate and expensive: thick carpets, colonial period clocks, large mahogany desks, crystal light fittings.
The only time when Powell slowed down was in the Investment Bureau. The Bureau was lavishly furnished. It would have given off the air of a gentlemen’s club, except that the undercurrent of a steely dedication to making money was stronger there than anywhere. Desks sat at long distances from each other across a wide green carpet. Young men, a couple of them no older than Willard, murmured into phones or sat at one another’s desks calmly chatting. Unlike the less favoured areas, Willard witnessed no stiffening into silence when Powell walked in. He greeted his employees by their first names. They greeted him back, not bothering to rise, not ending their phone calls, sometimes greeting him with nothing more than a look and a nod.
Willard felt the difference in atmosphere instantly. If he’d ever imagined working behind a desk, then this was the sort of desk he’d like to occupy. Thus far on his tour, he had felt the cold chains of his contractual imprisonment rattling louder and louder with each new depressing stride. Here, it was different, brighter, hopeful. He looked up expectantly and Powell seemed to confirm his rising hope.
‘Every part of Powell Lambert is important,’ said Powell, ‘but the Investment Bureau is worth everything else in the bank put together – good morning, Freddie. D’you get your revenge on the golf course, then? Ha! Thought as much. This is where the substantial profit-making activities of the firm are concentrated.’ As he spoke those words, ‘substantial profit-making activities’, Powell’s face screwed up as though he were speaking of something sacred. He paused, before adding in a different tone, ‘That loan of ours.’
‘Yes?’
‘If you are ever to pay it off, it will be through your ability to earn exceptional returns on assets entrusted to you by the firm.’
‘Gosh, you’d give me a chance in Investments one day?’
‘I didn’t say that. Your record in the moving picture business does not inspire confidence.’
Willard winced. He felt the crushing weight of his debt, his failure in the movies, of his father’s doubts. Then, noticing that there was a part of the top, twentieth, floor that they had not visited, tried to win back some credit for himself by pointing it out.
‘What’s through there, Ted? Anything important?’
‘That depends on what you consider important.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s lifting machinery. It drives the elevators. It means you are not obliged to climb seventeen flights of stairs on your way in to work. Does that strike you as important?’
‘No.’
Powell made no answer, except to say, ‘You will start out in Trade Finance. Downstairs.’
He strode downstairs, and marched Willard along a corridor to a door, marked ‘Trade Finance’. He flung it open. Inside was a good-sized room, thirty foot by twenty, mahogany panelled to waist-height, painted dirty cream above. A big map of the United States was the only decoration, aside from a large black-and-white clock set in a frame of dark wood. The room was less bleak than the factory-conditions of the Typing Pool, but a long way from the studied luxury of the Investment Bureau. Looking at his new workplace, Willard felt his throat tighten with nerves.
There were five desks, plus a circular well-shaped one in the middle. A secretary sat in the middle of the circular one. Four young men sat at theirs, on the phone, bent over paperwork, or yawning and reaching for coffee. But as soon as Powell’s frame was visible in the doorway, everything changed. The yawning man reached for his pen instead of his coffee. The secretary rolled her chair closer to Powell. The man on the phone finished his call. The room went still.
‘Trade Finance,’ said Powell, ‘our main activity. This is the engine room of Powell Lambert, an important place. And these are your colleagues.’ Powell grinned meaninglessly, letting his grin linger as his eyes patrolled. ‘Hughes, McVeigh, Claverty, Ronson.’ Powell named the four men in turn, jabbing at them with his finger as though they were bullocks at market. He didn’t look at the secretary, let alone give her a name. ‘You’ll get on with them all. They’ll tell you what to do. If you have any questions…’ Powell tailed off, as though already bored.
‘If I have any questions, I’ll come to you. Sure. Thanks for the introduction, Ted.’
Powell’s gaze flicked sharply around to Willard.
‘If you have any questions, you will not so much as think of disturbing me with them. These men here will sort you out.’
‘Certainly. Sorry. Of course.’
‘And you will not call me Ted.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Powell, I thought you said I should call you…’
‘When I said that, Thornton, you were not my employee.’
‘Yes, Mr Powell.’
The silence lasted a second or two longer than it should have done.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing, sir. Thank you.’
Willard went to the empty desk and sat down.
16 (#ulink_9d365501-76ce-52c6-bb2c-6415f044995d)
Down in the swampy heat and dirt roads of southern Georgia, a little red-headed kid, aviation crazy as he was, got an envelope through the post. The letter contained a movie poster signed by Willard T. Thornton. It wasn’t Lundmark’s battered old poster, but a brand new one, large and glossy, with an extravagant signature in thick blue pencil that came pretty near to deleting the smaller figure of Willard’s leading lady and co-star. Along with the poster there was a short note in a separate envelope addressed to Captain Rockwell. Brad didn’t know where to find Abe, but he put the envelope aside in case.
And the poster?
There Brad had a problem. His main hero (by a long way) was Abe Rockwell. Next on the list was Ed Rickenbacker. A long, long way after that came some of the other names from the American war in the air and, definitely on the list but a fair way down it, came Willard Thornton. If Brad had just put his poster up, slap-bang on the wall of the sitting room, it would have looked as though he ranked Thornton right up with the best of them. The idea outraged Brad’s sense of decency. So in the end, he compromised. The poster was too good not to be displayed, but Thornton didn’t merit a place in either the sitting room or Brad’s attic bedroom. And so Thornton’s handsome face found itself in the lean-to. But the walls of the little room were covered with shelves, so Brad tacked it to the ceiling instead, where it hung upside down, looming down as though the movie star were about to come diving to earth. In the meantime, Brad had got out his father’s old carpentry tools and built a frame for the photo which Abe had signed minutes after his abrupt arrival in Independence. The photo of Abe went on the mantelpiece, only a few inches sideways from the photo of Brad’s father.
Abe in the living room, Thornton in the lean-to. Brad figured he’d got it just about right.
17 (#ulink_1092fb18-1b95-5c73-be59-843ca25bcdb6)
‘Heck, Rockwell, nice to see you again. Darn nice. Very dang darn nice.’
General Superintendent Carl Egge of the Air Mail Service of the United States Post Office puffed up and down, pumping Abe’s hand. The two men had known each other from two or three years before, when Egge had been in charge of the St Louis–Minneapolis sector of the transcontinental route and Abe had been his senior pilot.
‘Nice to see you too, Egge.’
‘Carl, please! Lord’s sakes! Can you think of anything sounds dumber than Egge? Lord! I once worked right alongside a fellow with quite a name too. Can you guess what he was called? Huh? Give you a hint there. We made quite a famous pair.’
Abe knew perfectly well the name of Egge’s former coworker, because Egge had told him on a dozen occasions in the past.
‘No idea, Carl.’
‘Jimmy Bacon. Bacon. Egge and Bacon. How about that?’
‘Very good.’
‘I’ll say! Boy! Egge and Bacon! Quite a pair!’
Egge puffed and hooted his way into something like quietness. They talked a little about Egge’s plans for the Air Mail Service, before Abe brought up the subject he’d come to discuss.
‘Say, Carl, you ever thought of opening up an international route?’
‘Hoo! Boy! Do you ever come up with some queer ideas! International? I should say not.’
‘It’s the next step.’
‘Yeah, but you ever been to Canada?’ Egge leaned forward and whispered confidentially. ‘It’s kinda snowy.’ He leaned back. ‘That’s difficult flying, Captain. Heck, they’re only letters.’
‘Cuba.’
‘Cuba? Coo-ba?’
‘It’s only ninety miles off the coast. In time, you could push the service on into the islands.’
‘Cooo-ba? Habana, Coooooo-ba? Could be. Neat idea. Don’t know how much mail there is.’
‘I’d fly the route. Carry passengers. Take a little cargo. I just need the mail to get me started.’
‘Heck, Rockwell, there’s other routes I might be able to find for you. Not Cuba though.’
Abe shook his head. He couldn’t say so, but it was Cuba that interested him, nowhere else. When he’d followed those two green-painted launches south from Marion, they’d headed down the Florida coast, skipping Bahama, Bimini and Andros, and made straight for the Puerto del Ingles, a little harbour a mile or two west of Havana. He’d continued to watch. In one single week he’d counted fifteen launches running south from Marion to Havana – and that meant the same number returning under cover of night. Fifteen launches, a hundred cases of booze on each, and a raw profit of thirty or forty bucks the case-load. Carry that on for fifty weeks a year, and there was a million-dollar racket running right under Gibson Hennessey’s nose.
‘Cuba would be a good start. You’d have your first international route right there.’
‘No. No authority. Looks likely Congress will put airmail routes up for tender some time soon. But domestic ones. Boston–New York. Chicago–St Louis. That kind of thing. International? Who knows?’
‘You don’t get things if you don’t push for them, Carl.’
‘No, siree, you don’t. And don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a good idea. You know me. I’d like all letters to go by plane. Stony Brook, North Dakota – whoosh!’ His hand soared off the desk, like an airplane in take-off. ‘Muddy Creek, South Dakota – whoosh!’ His hand landed again, nose first, very fast. ‘Your letter, ma’am. US Post Office at your service.’ He saluted. ‘Congress. It’s Congress is the problem. Those guys can’t think beyond costs. Look.’ He held up his hands, wrist to wrist, in the shape of a cross and waggled them. ‘My hands are tied. Sorry, pal. We got smart people in this country, only you know our problem? We got the government we got.’
‘Cost? That’s the problem?’
‘Just a wee little bitty of an itty-bitty problem.’
Abe struggled with himself again. The temptation to quit was always there, never fading. If Egge denied him a route, then Abe could maybe give up on his plans with an easy conscience… But with Abe, the black dog Conscience never lay quiet for long.
‘I’ll do it for free,’ he said, in a low voice.
‘Beg pardon? For free?’
‘It’s the validation I want, not the revenue. I figure I’ll get business more easily if people see Uncle Sam is happy to ride with me.’
Egge nodded solemnly. For all his fooling, he was a smart man, with an inflexible determination to build the US Air Mail Service. His nods grew slower and deeper.
‘For free? A daily service?’
‘Yes.’
Egge thought for a moment, then grinned. ‘Correos del Estados Unidos. Sounds good, huh?’
18 (#ulink_3dc81b8d-197e-53e0-a4c9-e3f81401b6e8)
Willard sat down. Powell left the room. The door closed. Nothing moved.
Then one of the young men broke the stillness by standing up. He was below medium height, with dark curly hair, quick eyes and a look of amusement.
‘“When I said that, Thornton, you were not my employee”,’ he quoted. ‘Don’t mind Powell too much, old fellow. He likes to be a bit fierce.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Larry Ronson, by the way. Most of us do have first names around here, though it’s easy to forget it at times.’
The other men came over too.
Leonard McVeigh was a bull-necked red-head, with a strong grip and a look of military directness. He mangled Willard’s hand, grunting ‘Good to have you with us.’ He held Willard’s eyes for a second, as though checking to see how much competitive threat the newcomer might pose, before dropping back and letting the last two men come close.
‘Iggy Claverty,’ said one, as tall as Willard though not as broad, olive-skinned. ‘And before you dare to ask, Iggy is short for Ignacio. And before you dare to speculate, yes my mother is Spanish but no, I am not secretly a Catholic; no, I do not stink of garlic; and no, I do not have three hundred poor relations living in Spain. Finally, before you decide what to call me, you should know that any use of the name Ignacio will buy you a kick in the seat of your pants.’
‘OK, Iggy, I’ll remember.’
The last man was Charlie Hughes. Right from that moment, Hughes struck Willard as a misfit. The other men – Ronson, Claverty, McVeigh – were the sort of fellows Willard had roomed with at Princeton. They were smart enough, good-looking enough, well dressed. Men like these had been the life-blood of Princeton, standard issue for the East Coast social scene. Willard’s four sisters flirted with men like these. They petted with men like these. One day they’d marry men like these.
But not Hughes.
Hughes was no shorter than Ronson and not much lighter. But where you could imagine all the other men playing tennis or a game of ball or messing around in boats or on the beach, Hughes was different. He stood out. His hands were fidgety and nervous. His spectacles were thick and bookish. His clothes were decent enough, but the cut wasn’t quite right, the fashions weren’t quite of the moment, the poor fellow’s tie wasn’t even tied right.
‘Hughes. Charlie Hughes. Hello. Nice to have you join us. Really.’
He nodded once too often, shook Willard’s hand once more than he should have done.
Willard, whose instinct for these things was immaculate, instantly placed Hughes at the bottom of the pack. The pack-leader he guessed was probably Larry Ronson, for his intelligence and likeability, though Willard couldn’t see Leo McVeigh being bossed around by any of them. That left Iggy Claverty, court jester to Ronson’s prince. Willard’s colossal debt and his bootblack-style income was a disaster whichever way he looked at it. But at least his new work colleagues were ones he was sure he’d get on with. His nerves began to recede.
‘And allow me to introduce you to the sun of our little solar system, the flower of our garden, the lovely Miss Annabelle Hooper.’
Larry Ronson took Willard over to the secretary’s circular desk. Miss Hooper, blushing, stood up to shake Willard’s hand. She was mid-twenties, brunette, light blue eyes, freckled, petite. She was pretty, but unspectacular, the sort of girl you’d be happy to kiss, but not the sort you’d want on your arm anywhere important.
‘Just Annie, for heaven’s sake. Don’t listen to Larry.’
‘What, never?’ said Willard. ‘You’re very stern.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Oh yes!’ said Ronson. ‘Powell barketh, but Miss Hooper biteth. And if she says she don’t, then she speaketh not the truth. See this?’ He held up a brown manila folder, perhaps half an inch thick. ‘This may look like office stationery. It may feel, smell and – for all I know – taste like office stationery. But all that’s a snare and a deception. These files will consume your life. They’re the curse of Powell Lambert. Mr Claverty, if you please…’
Ronson handed the file to Iggy Claverty, who took it with an air of exaggerated ceremony. Bringing the file over to Willard, he held it out with both hands, as though the file were a precious gift being handed to a king. He bowed his head.
‘May the torture commence.’
19 (#ulink_d9f830f8-ba5e-58d6-95fd-805bb94dc36b)
Abe sat at the back of a café on the waterfront. On the drink-slopped table in front of him, he had a glass of brown rum and a plate of rice and fish. A cheap mystery novel lay half-read by his elbow. Outside the café, ocean and sunlight combined to scrub the air so clean it sparkled.
Abe was a mail pilot now. For the Havana end of his business, he had rented a field a little way inland from the Puerto del Ingles. In Miami, he’d persuaded the city authorities to release land for their very own international airport. The Miami field was hardly less basic than the Havana one: comprising an oblong of sandy grass, three hundred yards at its longest, and a tin-roofed, steel-framed hangar. Each day for four weeks now, Abe took off from Miami not long after dawn with a bag of US mail for Havana. He washed off, walked down to the Puerto del Ingles, and took an early lunch, before returning to his airplane in the hope that the Cuban postal authorities wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours late in bringing the US-bound mail. When it finally arrived, Abe flew it to Miami, job done.
Abe sipped his rum and went back to his novel. In the corner of the bar, a bunch of bootleggers from Marion were on their way to getting drunk. And they were bootleggers, of course. Here, in free and easy Cuba, there was no need to disguise the fact. True, the wooden crates they loaded into their boats were marked ‘Maís de Aranjuez’ or ‘Jamón Serrano de Cuba’. But the markings meant nothing. Often enough the crates weren’t even lidded properly. The bottles of Johnny Walker or Gordon’s Gin shone out as plain as day.
Behind the bar, a home-made radio set tried its hardest to pick up a station from Miami. Mostly the set couldn’t get a signal, just the whistle and crackle of empty space. Abe read. The bootleggers drank. The radio whistled.
After an hour or so, one of the bootleggers lurched up from his seat and came swaying past Abe’s table. The bootlegger’s bleary eyes focused on Abe’s grey mailbag, and the leather helmet and goggles looped around the handles. The man stopped, stared – then inspiration struck.
‘Hey Birdman!’ he said, flapping his arms. ‘Birdman, Birdman.’
He stopped and grinned again, as though expecting Abe to declare that was the first time he’d heard that joke in all his ten years of aviation. Abe did and said nothing. The bootlegger revved his brain to full throttle and came up with something else every bit as funny.
‘Hey, Birdie. I wanna send a postcard, you gotta stamp?’
The man leered at his friends for applause, and got it. Abe said nothing, did nothing. The man cast around in the cavernous emptiness of his skull for anything else funny, but came away with nothing. He lingered a second or two, then headed off to get drinks.
That was that.
But then, just three days later, Abe was back in the same bar with the same bunch. The radio had, for once, found a jazz tune and was holding to it with a kind of feeble determination. This time another one of the bootleggers approached. Not drunk this time, and not offensive.
‘Hey, pal, sorry about the other day. That birdman stuff. Guess that ain’t funny, huh?’
‘Not too funny, nope.’
‘You ain’t sore?’
‘No.’
The bootlegger looked down at Abe’s mailsack. It was a small bag. Mostly Abe carried just a few pounds of mail each way. At a commercial rate of a few nickels a pound, he’d have been a million miles from profit. Flying as he was for free, he was a million and one miles short.
‘You carry mail? That’s all?’
‘Cargo, passengers, anything that pays.’
‘You do OK at that?’
Abe shrugged.
‘Guess you must.’
Abe shrugged again. A shrug wasn’t a statement, so it couldn’t be a lie. But the fact was that Abe hadn’t had a single customer since starting business.
‘You’re sure you ain’t sore? You didn’t answer us today.’
‘Answer you?’
‘We signalled from the boat. We saw you coming in. Fired off a handgun. Da-da-da-da-da-dum. That didn’t do nothing, so we shot off the rifle. Boom, boom.’
‘I sit six feet from a ninety-horse engine in an eighty-mile-an-hour wind.’
‘You didn’t hear nothing?’
‘Use a mirror. You want to signal, you need to flash.’
‘Huh, OK.’ The bootlegger shifted his weight from leg to leg. ‘Sorry about the other day, OK?’
Abe shrugged.
‘Listen, buddy, if you’re a man for liquor, just let us know, OK? We can let you have some cheap. Wholesale, you know.’
‘I’m OK. Thanks.’
‘Right.’ Chatting with Abe wasn’t always easy, not if you wanted your conversational balls returned over the net. The bootlegger shifted his weight again. ‘A mirror, huh?’
20 (#ulink_4e24dec0-4fde-5cd8-8842-7fe592f6fe8d)
The torture commenced.
Powell Lambert’s main business activity was trade finance. What this meant was that a manufacturer in one part of America – St Louis, say – might want to sell some goods to a buyer somewhere else completely – Seattle, for instance. The Seattle buyer would want the goods on credit, but the St Louis manufacturer would want his money right away. That was where Powell Lambert came in. As soon as the buyer and seller had agreed a purchase, Powell Lambert would promise to pay the St Louis men upfront, and collect payment in due course from Seattle. In exchange, Powell Lambert would charge a fee, half a per cent or thereabouts.
And that was it. The more trade Powell Lambert financed, the more the fees they earned. Every transaction had its own folder. Every morning, more folders arrived on Annie Hooper’s desk for her to deal out to her five young men. She was nice about it. Sweet and understanding. But remorseless. Ruthless. The folders kept pouring in. She kept handing them out. There was no other way.
And the folders!
Each transaction sounded simple, but there were a myriad details to be attended to on each one. Insurance had to be arranged, transport arrangements checked, funds transferred, receipts obtained. Each time Willard thought he’d disposed of a file, another vicious little complication would rise up and drag him back. His working hours grew longer. His weekends vanished beneath the landslide. His prospects of repaying his debt seemed negligible. His hope of succeeding his father seemed laughable.
‘Yeee-aaargh!’
It was five-thirty on a Friday afternoon. Larry Ronson’s head disappeared beneath his desk with a long drawn-out liquid gurgle. After pausing a second for effect, he poked his head out around the corner and said, ‘Miss Hooper, will you marry me?’ Annie tutted and pulled her eyes away from him, a slight blush rising into her freckled cheeks. ‘Silence will be taken to mean yes.’
‘Larry, don’t be silly.’
‘Elope with me then. We’ll live in sin in some crumbling Mexican palace with our sixteen children and spend our time writing rude postcards to Ted Powell.’
‘It’s five-thirty, anyway,’ said Annie, looking around for her coat.
‘That doesn’t settle the question.’
‘I’m off home, I mean.’
‘Women today! So practical! Whatever became of romance? I’ll dance with you down Broadway by the light of the silvery moon.’
‘It’s raining.’
‘Streetlights. Silvery streetlights.’
Annie had her bag and her coat, and was settling a little cloche-style hat on her head. ‘I’ll see you Monday.’
‘OK, how about a drink? I want to get so boiled I won’t be able to find my feet.’
Willard had been expecting Annie to refuse one further time, but this time she paused. ‘Well…’
‘Excellent. Anyone else? Leo? No? Can’t tear yourself away, I presume?’ Leo McVeigh’s massive red head peered briefly up from his paperwork. He looked at Ronson, unblinking and expressionless, the way a butcher looks at a bull, the way a bull looks at anyone. He said nothing, just put his head back to his work and continued writing, his heavy black fountain pen moving evenly across the paper. Ronson opened his hands in a kind of what-can-you-expect-from-football-players gesture. ‘Ignacio, old chap?’
Iggy Claverty glanced up briefly. ‘You know an Ignacio, do you?’
‘Iggy, you chump, I was asking if you wanted to come and toast the Eighteenth Amendment in a sea of alcohol.’
‘Can’t. I’m already drowning. Sorry.’
He waved his hand at the stack of brown files on his desk. He’d had a bad day that day. Willard had heard his swearing and sweating over some transport problem in one of the Dakotas. The stack of files in his ‘out’ pile was still much smaller than the stack of those on the ‘in’ side.
‘Mr Thornton?’
Willard was about to echo Claverty’s refusal and for the same reason, but the thought of an evening getting royally drunk was more temptation than he could handle.
‘I’m in,’ he said. ‘Just let me get these damned things bundled up for the weekend.’
He swept the files that still needed to be dealt with into his briefcase – then glanced at Hughes, then at Ronson. So far Ronson had asked everyone to come except poor old Charlie Hughes, who was blinking away behind his spectacles, watching everything. Ronson clearly had no intention of asking Hughes. Hughes, equally clearly, had no intention of asking to come.
‘Charlie,’ said Willard, ‘want a drink? Annie and Larry and I are going to get pickled.’
‘Thanks, no, it’s OK, I need to finish up, then get home. You folks go. Enjoy!’
Willard winced. Hughes always managed to get things a little bit wrong. People like Willard didn’t use phrases like ‘enjoy!’. He couldn’t have explained why not, but the right sort of people never said that, the wrong sort of people did. But Willard was glad he’d asked. He was irritated by the way Ronson treated Annie Hooper as his own property. Annie would appreciate Willard’s courtesy to the less fortunate. She had already made a handful of admiring comments about Willard’s glamorous past, to which he’d responded with carefully offhand modesty.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
They went. First to a hotel that Willard knew about, where you could get anything you wanted as long as you didn’t mind it served in a coffee cup. Then to a speakeasy off Broadway, where the drink was cheaper. To get in, you had to walk down a set of grimy, unlit steps to a shuttered steel door. Just inside, a watchman peered out to check the new arrivals weren’t cops, before the door was unbolted and Willard and the others whisked inside. Once in, they drank cocktails because they wanted hard liquor, and because the cocktails were a way of disguising the taste of the grain alcohol, the industrial alcohol, and the under-brewed green moonshine which invaded every bottle of ‘honest-to-God, straight off the boat’ Scotch whisky in New York. Then finally, drunk as Irishmen on payday, they stumbled out into the street.
‘I must say, Annie, you’re a very good sport,’ mumbled Willard. ‘A very damned good sort. Ha! A damned good sort of sport! A sporting sort with a sort of –’
‘There!’ said Annie, pointing. ‘A burger place. Joe’s Burgers. Aren’t you starving?’
Ronson followed her unsteady arm with an unsteady eye. ‘Not necessarily a burger place,’ he objected. ‘Maybe that’s the fellow’s name. Mr Joe Burger. I should think the poor old gooseberry gets rather annoyed with people knocking him up and asking him for burgers. Poor old Mr B.’
The three of them swayed over to the burger stand. Annie hadn’t drunk as much as either of the men, but she was every bit as sozzled. Willard and Ronson fought over which of them would be allowed to take her arm, and only declared a truce once Annie gave her left arm to Willard and her right one to Ronson.
Willard had enjoyed the evening, but he’d enjoyed it the way a prisoner on death row gets a kick out of a postcard from outside. Even now, drunk as he was, Willard felt his lack of freedom. Willard’s salary, net of Powell’s deduction for interest, left him hardly any better off than Annie. Unlike her, he had the use of a company apartment and the part of his father’s twenty-five thousand he hadn’t already spent. But he wasn’t an Annie, a mouse content with crumbs. With a kind of reckless defiance, Willard had changed his spending habits almost not at all. In the past two weeks alone, he’d spent six hundred dollars on clothes, thirteen hundred dollars on new furniture, another few hundred dollars to have the seats in his Packard re-upholstered in pale calfskin. Before too long, his bank account would be as dry as a busted fuel tank. What he’d do then, he didn’t know – he refused to think about it.
And that wasn’t all. Six weeks since starting work, he was no further ahead. His loan was not a nickel smaller. His chance of repaying it not a hundredth of a per cent higher. All his life, Willard had known there were two sorts of people: the rich and the not-rich, the free and the unfree. He had always been of the first sort. Had been. He was the second sort now. He and his two colleagues stood in line, under a light July rain, belching and privately regretting their last cocktail.
‘I must say,’ said Ronson to Willard, ‘you’re a lot better than our last fellow.’
‘Hmm?’
‘You know. Martin. Our late-lamented colleague. Esteemed and lamented.’
Even in his drunken state, Willard pricked up his ears. Arthur Martin had been the fifth member of the Powell Lambert ‘engine room’ before Willard’s arrival. Willard had inherited his desk, his paperwork and even his company-owned apartment. All Willard really knew of the man was that he had been killed in an auto accident shortly before Willard’s arrival at the firm.
‘So, when was the auto smash? When did the poor fellow die?’
‘Eh? You know,’ said Ronson. ‘You know.’
‘Gentlemen, please,’ said Annie, using her chin to point to a gap that had opened in the line ahead of them. The two men frog-marched Annie forwards until they had caught up.
‘I don’t know,’ said Willard. ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t ask, would I?’
‘Well…’
‘It was only…’
Annie and Ronson both spoke at once, then stopped. Then Annie spoke alone.
‘He died the Thursday before you arrived. We thought you knew.’
Willard felt a tiny prickle of something run through him. Afterwards, he thought maybe it was fear or the first premonition that something was wrong. But perhaps it was only the underbrewed moonshine talking. Perhaps the prickle was nothing more than a simple shudder in the rain. In any case, when Willard answered, he suddenly felt less drunk, less stupid.
‘But that couldn’t be. Powell had already told me which apartment I’d be staying in. He couldn’t have done that, if the poor devil Martin was already there.’ He didn’t mention it, but the same was also true about the ‘engine room’. There were five desks there, plus Annie’s. The room couldn’t have fitted another one. If arrangements had been made for Willard’s arrival, wouldn’t someone have thought to introduce an additional desk?
‘It was, though,’ said Annie. ‘The Thursday before you came.’
‘Powell must have been in a muddle. Good job in a way. You wouldn’t have wanted to arrive with all your boxes and find… I mean, not a good job the fellow died, obviously. What I mean is, good job the place was empty.’
‘Powell wasn’t in a muddle,’ said Willard, argumentatively. ‘It wasn’t just him, I mean I had to phone and confirm and collect keys and everything. It wasn’t just a case of turn up, mister.’
‘Then Martin must have been moving somewhere else, mustn’t he? Couldn’t have the two of you living on top of each other. Any case, Martin wasn’t a decent sort, like you. Didn’t appreciate the merits of a fine bottle of…’
The line moved forwards again but neither of the men had noticed. Annie wriggled free of their arms and stood ahead of them, asking them what sort of burger they wanted.
‘Good old Joe Burger,’ said Ronson. ‘A veritable prince of gooseberries. Ruining his Friday evenings to help the starving.’
‘Willard, what are you having?’
Annie turned to him, her fine brown hair damped down against her cheek. Willard stared at her blankly.
‘Old chap, your mouth is hanging open. Mr B here will probably have to stuff it closed with one of his excellent pickled gherkins.’
Willard shook his head. How had Ted Powell known that Arthur Martin’s apartment and Arthur Martin’s desk would be empty in time for Willard’s arrival? The question had no possible answer.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not feeling hungry.’
He pulled away from them and walked fast uptown, hatless through the pattering rain.
21 (#ulink_6b832205-6a65-5491-9b1a-b2a22318eeae)
Abe ran through the little belt of turbulence over the Florida coast, turned, applied a side-slip with the nose into the wind. Then, just before the ground came up, he levelled the wings and kicked Poll straight with the rudder. The wheels came straight and touched down. As Poll began to shake her speed off into the grass, he let the tail float down as the elevator lost authority. He was a little later than he’d expected, partly because of headwinds, partly because he’d overflown one of the Marion launches on its way south. These days, he’d got into a routine with the bootleggers. They’d flash to him, signalling their presence and he’d flip into an aerobatic routine: loops, spins, barrel-rolls, dives. Once he came so low over the water at the launch, that by the time his undercarriage flashed over their heads, one of the bootleggers had been scared enough to jump overboard. The stunts were much appreciated. In the café in the Puerto del Ingles, Abe was a mini-celebrity. His drinks were always bought for him. He was showered with gifts: cigars, booze, chocolate. His routines grew more elaborate, more complex.
For now, though, Abe just taxied over to the hangar and stopped. The blur of propeller blades slowed to a flicker, then to a halt. Abe climbed wearily from the cockpit, pulled helmet and goggles off, scrubbed his head, face and neck under a cold tap. The hangar wasn’t just a place for Poll to come in out of the weather, it was Abe’s home too. As well as room for Poll and room for all the maintenance equipment she needed, Abe had set up a camp bed and thin mattress. He also had a sheet, a blanket, a coat rolled into a pillow, a small table, two chairs, two enamel mugs and plates, a primus stove, and a bag which contained his entire wardrobe. Aside from what was in the hangar or on his back, Abe owned nothing in the entire world.
He dried off with an end of towel. The beat of an airplane engine still thrummed in his ears, but it sometimes did after a long flight. He rubbed the sides of his head with his palms and listened again. The thrumming was still there, and it was a sound different from Poll’s. It was stronger, racier, deeper, cleaner. Abe jumped on an oilcan to get a better view, then saw it.
A plane was coming in from the south. She was flying low, steel-grey bodywork glinting in the sun. She was the most beautiful machine Abe had ever seen: a gloriously streamlined, squat-tailed biplane with stubby little wings and an engine asnarl with power. That she was a racing plane was obvious. That she was in trouble even more so.
The engine had a problem. It was running foul, firing wrong, missing beats. And there was another problem. Abe’s airfield had been designed for Poll. Because Poll was slow, she didn’t need much room to land or take off. And when the Miami authorities had approved the grant of land for an airfield, they had approved enough for Poll and not an inch more. The little racing plane didn’t have room to land.
The little plane howled overhead, its engine note all wrong. Abe watched, helpless. The longest strip of clear space on the airfield was on the diagonal, but a line of telegraph poles ruled out that approach. The little plane came to the same conclusion. It buzzed off towards the southwest, but Abe knew that the south-west held few options. A beach was fine for Poll’s slow and sturdy ways. But a racing plane could easily smash up on a beach. No. Abe corrected himself. Not could, would. Would smash up. Abe stared another moment, then ran to Poll. If he could get airborne fast, he could follow the pilot, and be on hand for the coming catastrophe.
But he was too late. The little plane came again. She was flying desperately low to the ground, tree-skimming and dune-hopping. Abe breathed slowly and evenly through his mouth. He silently urged the pilot not to do what he was about to do.
In vain.
The little plane sank lower. It was flying just twenty feet off the ground, dead level with the telegraph poles, dead level with the wire. It was an insane way to fly in any case, but here on the coast, with the turbulent ocean breezes making any manoeuvre vastly more difficult, it was beyond lunatic. The plane kept coming. Heading for the telegraph wire, heading for extinction.
The plane got closer – closer – closer – then at the last possible moment dipped its nose down. Like a terrier easing under a gate, the little plane scuffed its way beneath the wire. Its wingtips were so close to the telegraph posts on either side, Abe could virtually hear them twang. The pilot held his four feet of altitude another half second, then touched down on the airfield within mere yards of the boundary.
It was precision flying of the highest calibre, but the danger wasn’t over.
The pilot had already cut his approach speed to the bare minimum, but the plane was still running too fast. The aircraft tore across the airfield, kicking up a storm of dust from its wheels, its tailskid digging into the sand. Slowly – too slowly? – the racer lost speed. The pilot was using fullback stick, to drive the tail down and maximise drag from the wings. All the same, the little plane bounded three-quarters of the way across the field – then four-fifths – then nine-tenths – then ended up, engine still running, just fifteen yards from a three-foot ditch.
After a short pause, the racer made a cautious turn and bumped slowly up to the hangar.
Up close, the machine was beautiful – stunning. Abe recognised the plane as one of the Curtiss R6 series of planes, purpose-built racers, winners of all the flying competitions in 1922 and 1923, and holders of the world speed record before the Europeans had snatched it back. The plane was power and force and beauty and speed. Abe was open-mouthed with envy and delight.
The plane came up and stopped. The air emptied of sound, huge and hollow after the noise.
Abe looked at the pilot, whose head poked out from a cockpit screened by a low windshield raked back hard from the nose. The pilot was only just visible in the cramped cockpit, dust- and oil-stained, still helmeted and goggled, but obviously young and boyish. The pilot caught Abe’s glance and raised a gauntleted hand.
Abe nodded in answer.
The hand fell back and thumped the edge of the cockpit twice. The gesture meant ‘Thanks, old girl’, or maybe, ‘Thanks and sorry’. It was a gesture Abe had used often enough. He knew the pilot’s feelings: a mixture of relief, exhaustion, happiness, shock – a bubbling brew which took hours to settle.
The pilot took another few moments to gather himself, then pulled a face. The face might have meant something about luck and close shaves and being relieved, or it might just have been that his heart was still pounding in his chest and he was too tired to say anything sensible. Abe stood back, didn’t try to rush things.
Then the newcomer pulled off his goggles and dropped them in the cockpit. He was young, terribly young, reminiscent of the boys who had served with Abe in France. Served and died, in so many cases. He stood back as the pilot got ready to jump out. For a second – or less, perhaps just half a second – the pilot paused, as though expecting Abe to step forwards and offer a hand. But maybe not. Shock could make even the most familiar things seem strange. In any case, the pause ended. The pilot put his hands to the side of the cockpit and rolled his body out and onto the ground. He was around Abe’s height and, as far as you could tell anything about a person wrapped head to toe in sheepskin, thin.
‘That was a heck of a landing. One of the best bits of flying I’ve ever seen.’
The pilot smiled and puffed out with relief. Then he put his hand to his head and removed his helmet.
Or rather, not.
Not his head, his helmet. But her head, her helmet. Abe goggled in astonishment as a pretty sandy bob emerged into the strong Miami light. The pilot’s face was boyish, but it was boyish the way that the fashion plates in the women’s magazines were boyish, fine-boned but unfussy, clear-skinned, fresh and direct. It was an attractive face, the sort of face a man could like straight away and never change his mind about.
The woman smiled.
‘Hi.’
22 (#ulink_f8257bca-30ff-549b-90ad-7c98e0c2ed85)
As problems went, it ought to have been a small one.
The Association of Orthodox Synagogues was expecting a consignment of ‘Sacred Books and Sacramental Materials’ from a Long Island based import-export outfit. The documents were in good order. The goods were in Long Island, ready for delivery. Insurance and transportation arrangements had been settled. But there was a problem.
The customer named on the delivery note was the Association of Orthodox Synagogues. But the beneficiary named in the insurance documentation was the Associated Synagogues of New York. Did it matter? Maybe not. But if there was a screw-up and Powell Lambert took a hit, then it would be Willard who suffered, no one else.
Larry Ronson wasn’t around at the time Willard ran into the issue. Willard didn’t like Leo McVeigh and didn’t want to ask him. Iggy Claverty and Charlie Hughes were both there, but Willard guessed Claverty was bound to be flippant and Hughes fussy and nervous. Sunshine cut across the room, hurting Willard’s eyes, reminding him of his time in the cockpit, when throwing the plane around in the sky made the sun bob and spin like a wild thing…
He strode across the room and pulled down a blind. Annie caught his eye and smiled at him. She smiled at him more than at Ronson now. Willard noticed and was pleased. He went back to his desk. The problem was still there. Sunshine still swam in through a flaw in the blind. The Association of Orthodox Synagogues? The Associated Synagogues of New York? Which? Willard dialled a number, got no reply. To hell with it.
The documents both contained the same address, which was only a short walk away on the Lower East Side. Willard jumped up.
‘I’m going out, Annie. Shan’t be long.’
She smiled at him again and tucked a strand of light brown hair behind her ear. It was a menace that strand: always falling loose and needing to be put back, especially when she knew he was watching her. Willard didn’t flatter himself that she was flirting, but he knew that she was very aware of his presence.
In a rare good mood, he strode north, but as he got closer, his mood evaporated. The neighbourhood was a poor one. There was something edgy in the air: smells of bad plumbing, decaying masonry, conversations that fell silent as he approached. He found the address: a shabby doorway at the bottom of a concrete staircase. A domestic argument droned angrily from a nearby room. There was no plate on the door. Split green linoleum rippled underfoot – Willard noticed it particularly, because he had just taken delivery of half a dozen pairs of handmade shoes. He was wearing a pair now, and his feet were sore and uncomfortable in the stiff new leather. He rang the bell.
No answer. He rang again. Then, just as he was about to give up and go, an Irishman, unshaved, wearing trousers and his undervest came to the door.
‘Yeah?’
‘Oh… Excuse me, I believe I must have the wrong address.’
‘Who d’you want?’
‘I understood that a Jewish religious organisation was based here. As I say, I must –’
‘Huh? Kikes?’
There was a muffled shout from the dark interior beyond the Irishman’s shoulder. ‘Uh … wait a moment, will you,’ he said, and disappeared.
When he came back, he’d found a shirt from somewhere, but hadn’t bothered to button it.
‘Sure, you’re right. At least, they’re not here exactly, but… What d’you say your name was?’
‘My name is Willard Thornton, representing the Trade Finance department of Powell Lambert.’
Willard handed the man a card, who blinked at it, and stuffed it into a greasy pocket. ‘Jesus!’ He pronounced the name the Irish way, Jay-sus.
‘You can get a message to them?’
‘I can, sure. There’s a fellow, black coat and that, a rabbi. I guess he’ll give you a call, maybe. Is that all you’ll be wanting? OK.’
The door slammed shut. From inside, a burst of laughter crashed against the shabby plywood. Willard was suddenly angry. Whatever had just happened, he had the sense of being made a fool of. He folded his fist, wanting to smash it through the door, wanting a fight.
He didn’t, of course, but when he got back to Powell Lambert, he sought out Ronson. Willard explained the problem in angry, affronted tones. Ronson looked serious.
‘You think there might be a problem with this outfit?’
‘It was no place to find a bunch of…’ Willard swallowed the word ‘kikes’ and used the word ‘rabbis’ instead. ‘The place was a shithole, Larry, honestly.’
‘You worry somebody’s playing us for suckers? That’s your worry?’
‘Well, good Lord, something didn’t add up.’
‘Maybe. On the other hand, there’s no law against shitholes. And the thing with the insurance note, I’ve had that before. The insurance clerks just scribble down whatever the hell they want. No attention to detail. Now what I’d do if I were you…’
The conversation drifted into the comforting detail of paperwork and insurance forms. Willard was grateful to Ronson for his help. Iggy Claverty came over and helped out too. The problem seemed resolved.
And that was all.
Or almost.
Going home that evening, Willard happened to ride in the same elevator as McVeigh. The two men exchanged a couple of words, then fell silent. The elevator moved slowly, people got in, got out. The compartment emptied. All the time, Willard felt McVeigh’s heavy gaze pressing on him. When Willard turned, the big man, with his cropped red hair and football player’s neck, was looking squarely at him, unblinking.
‘Yes?’ said Willard.
McVeigh shook his head.
‘You’ve been staring at me all the way down,’ Willard persisted.
McVeigh paused a second, then stepped half a pace closer. His head was too close. Though Willard weighed in at an athletic one hundred and eighty pounds, McVeigh must have had another forty pounds on him at least. There was something directly threatening in his attitude. Willard’s anger flared. Whatever McVeigh’s problem was, Willard had no intention of backing down.
‘Careful,’ said McVeigh. ‘Asking questions, like you were today.’
‘What d’you mean?’
McVeigh shrugged.
‘What d’you mean? Why the hell shouldn’t I ask questions?’
McVeigh came a little closer still. He had small blue eyes, lost beneath a broad expanse of forehead. ‘Just be careful what you ask and who you ask. You wouldn’t want to…’
The elevator hit the ground floor. Willard clanked open the inner door, then the outer one. The two men held their pose of near-aggression a second longer.
‘I’ll ask who I want, what I want, and I don’t suppose I need to ask your permission, Leo.’
‘That’s up to you.’ McVeigh looked like he was trying to take some of the heat out of the situation, but a muscle continued to clamp and unclamp in his jaw. ‘You do what you like. Just remember … anyhow, goodnight.’
McVeigh turned and walked away. For a big man, he was light on his feet and fast. Willard found himself thinking that man could be dangerous. For the second time that day, he found his fist curled into a ball, wanting to thump something.
23 (#ulink_6c4a4887-7904-5402-80f1-d374e6249a0f)
‘I’m Hamilton, Pen Hamilton. Short for Penelope only no one ever calls me that.’
Abe shook her hand. ‘Abe Rockwell. Welcome to Miami.’
‘Abe Rockwell? Captain Rockwell? … Oh, gosh, what a way to meet you! Gee!…’ The woman flier was briefly flustered by finding herself in front of one of the two or three most famous aviators in the United States, but Abe was used to this reaction and brushed it away. ‘I can land the normal way too, you know,’ she added.
‘I bet you can.’
‘I was lucky the sand was soft.’
‘You were lucky you knew how to fly.’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t sure I needed to land. The engine was missing beats, but I still had power. Maybe I could have gone on.’
‘It wasn’t just the distributor blocks, maybe?’
Pen pulled an apologetic face: the first really girlish thing she’d done. The face said, ‘I couldn’t tell a distributor block from a humpback whale.’
‘The distributor blocks on the magnetos,’ Abe pursued. ‘They get coated with carbon when the engine’s running. But they were cleaned before you took off, right?’
‘I’m sorry, Captain. I’m sure I ought to know, but I don’t. They told me she was OK to go.’
Abe felt a jolt of irritation. During the war, he had no time for pilots who couldn’t strip, clean and reassemble an engine. The reason why Abe’s squadron had the best serviced airplanes in the American Army was that Abe made his pilots responsible for the airworthiness of their equipment. It was an attitude he regarded as sacred. And by those standards, Pen Hamilton’s ignorance was shocking, an insult to aviation.
And yet… Pen Hamilton was a woman. She had handled her machine with a rare combination of courage, force and delicacy. She had made a horrendous landing look almost easy – and was now handling herself not with bravado but with modesty. Abe let his irritation pass.
‘The problem sounded to me like your magnetos. If so, you could have gone on to wherever you were going. I’ll take a look, if you want. And please, Miss Hamilton, there’s no need to –’
‘Oh no, call me Pen, please.’
‘Then I’m Abe. No Captains around here, if you don’t mind.’
They grinned at each other, suddenly comfortable.
‘You’ll want to come in and get cleaned up. And something to eat or drink? I was about to have something myself.’
They went in.
Abe could see Pen noticing Abe’s camp bed in the corner of the hangar, his makeshift kitchen, and his barren wardrobe, the logo on Poll’s fuselage: a mailbag in the very approximate shape of a shield with the words ‘US Mail’ stencilled across it. She noticed something else too. Above Abe’s crowded workbench ran a shelf at head height. The shelf was crowded with metal castings, polished, clean and free of dust. Pen looked at the collection with curiosity. The castings were models of aircraft, but not necessarily complete ones. Only four of the castings had nose cone, fuselage, tail, and a full set of wings, upper and lower on both sides. The rest were simply airplane pieces. A fuselage without wings. A wing without a body. A nose cone. A lot of nose cones. She picked up a few of the castings, ran her hands over them and put them down.
‘You make these?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘They’re beautiful.’
‘Yes.’
‘And unusual. Beautiful and unusual.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Since Abe didn’t exactly seem full of chatter on the subject, Pen turned to a different topic. She indicated the mailbag stencilled on Poll’s side.
‘You’re flying the mails?’
Abe nodded
‘I didn’t know there was a route… To Cuba, I guess?’
Abe nodded.
‘Havana?’
Abe nodded.
‘Every day? Over water?’ She took in the information like a professional pilot, calculating the hazards, the safety margin, the rewards. ‘You must hit quite some weather at times.’
Abe gestured at Poll. ‘She’s a strong girl. We get through.’
‘Still…’
Pen washed her face and hands. Abe offered to walk out of the hangar so she could take a proper wash, but, since the washing facilities consisted of a cold tap and a tin water-scoop, Pen managed to resist. By the time she was done, Abe had laid out the only meal he could provide: bread, cold meat, some tomatoes, water. She came over to his little table. First she said she didn’t want anything, then, when Abe pressed her, she ate hungrily.
A moment’s awkward silence was covered by eating.
Abe wasn’t shy of girls. True, he didn’t see much of them. True, he’d never had a relationship that had lasted longer than a couple of months. But he wasn’t shy, nor even inexperienced. He’d dated girls, petted girls, slept with girls. The reason why his relationships had quickly fallen apart was that he’d never really wanted them. Abe knew his priorities and they had never included women. So, aged thirty-six, he wasn’t shy of girls, but he didn’t spend much time with them either.
Pen bit into a tomato. It was overripe. The skin split and spurted juice across the table and down her chin.
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Abe gestured at his linenless table, his bare accommodation. ‘Sorry I haven’t got anywhere better.’
‘You …?’ Pen began to ask the obvious question, then dropped it, embarrassed.
‘Yeah, I’m living here for now. While I get the business started up. In time, I’d like to build a little. Extend the place at the back.’
Abe gestured at the cement block wall at the rear of the hangar. He knew enough about construction to be able to fix something up. It wasn’t something he’d thought about before, but now that Pen had put him in mind of the idea, he liked it.
‘You just carry mail?’
‘Passengers too. If I can find any. Also cargo.’
‘You get many passengers?’
‘No.’
‘Cargo?’
‘I don’t advertise much. I guess I ought to do a little more.’
He wasn’t being candid. He had only ever placed one advertisement for business. Next door to the hangar, Abe had tacked on a tiny wooden lean-to which he had designated his office. The office held one chair, one table and – pinned to the door in sun and rain – a notice saying ‘Passengers and cargo carried. All enquiries welcome’. Nobody had ever come to the office. Nobody had ever seen the advertisement.
‘What d’you call yourself?’
‘Huh?’
‘The business. It’s got a name, right?’
For a half-second, Abe struggled to remember what he’d written on the notice. Then he got it. ‘Florida International Air Travel. Fancy, huh?’
‘You’ve got an office in town or …?’ Pen trailed off. She was getting the picture. ‘People need to apply here, right? I’ve got friends down here. They’re always running up the coast, or down to Key West and the islands. I’ll have a word. Maybe I can send some clients your way.’
Her glance slid out of the empty hangar to the dusty grass. Aside from her own beautiful machine, there was only Poll: clumsy, old-fashioned, graceless. Abe could see Pen wondering how Abe thought he could recruit passengers without advertising and with only Poll to fly them.
Something in Abe hardened. He changed subject.
‘That your plane?’
Pen’s eyes were still focused out of the hangar door. At Abe’s words she swept her gaze across to her own machine, her eyes softened, then she brought her gaze in, her pupils dilating as she took in Abe’s face. She took a moment to answer and Abe ended up looking longer into her eyes than he’d expected. It was a curious sensation. The eyes were like his eyes: too blue, too clear, the face around too tanned to hold them. Only it wasn’t that. There was something in the way Pen looked at him. It wasn’t the way a woman looked at a man. Her look was direct, frank, open, unembarrassed. There was nothing flirtatious, but nothing modest either. She wasn’t sexless, but she didn’t have to bring her sex into the look that passed between them.
She dropped her eyes.
‘Yes. Lovely, isn’t she?’
Abe nodded. He’d done some test flying for Curtiss once, only got out once things had proceeded a little too far with a girl that lived nearby. But he said nothing about that, just, ‘Beautiful. Nobody makes ’em better.’
‘I’m lucky.’
Abe looked at the plane again. It was a hellishly serious machine, fiercely fast, a machine which demanded speed, strength and decision from its pilot.
‘You fly her for fun, or…?’
‘For fun, yes, I guess. I race her.’
‘Pylon racing? Competitively?’
‘I race her anywhere I can. The Arberry Cup once. The Burlington Medal. The Conway.’
There was a tiny flicker around her eyes when she named the last race. The flicker jogged a memory for Abe. He didn’t follow aviation gossip much, but he’d raced a little right after the war and had kept an interest in the major events. Her name, Hamilton, rang a bell…
‘The Conway? Hold on, you didn’t just fly in that.’
The flicker transferred from eyes to mouth, where it broke out into a smile. ‘Last year. Bertie Acosta had to drop out with engine trouble. I was able to take advantage.’
Abe smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Pen, a win’s a win. Nothing to do with another guy’s engine. Any case, the Conway’s the only one to win, right?’
She returned his smile. The Conway Cup had been inaugurated in September 1920. The first name engraved on the silverware was ‘Captain A. Rockwell.’
They laughed together. Their eyes touched and didn’t move away. The moment didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough for them both to feel something. Something shared, something mutual.
Abe held Pen’s gaze a moment longer, then felt suddenly uncomfortable. He stood up abruptly and went to make coffee, suddenly angry at his spartan accommodation. Almost deliberately, he made the coffee too strong, too gritty. He made it so nobody could possibly like it, probably not even drink it. Pen attempted more conversation, but Abe had closed up. Some women would have needed to talk into the vacuum, but not Pen. Quietness didn’t bother her, nor the coffee. She seemed relaxed. But time was running by. She would need to find accommodation in town. Abe offered the name of a couple of hotels that weren’t too dear. Pen took the information like she didn’t need it, but was too polite to say so.
‘I’ll send a truck,’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘A truck. For the plane.’
Abe was puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘You said there was a problem with distributing something. The blocks? I thought…’
Abe was annoyed again, but tried not to show it. ‘Pen, the blocks need cleaning, nothing else. It’ll take twenty minutes at the outside.’
‘Oh.’ There was a pause. ‘I guess I ought to know that.’
‘I can show you how if you want.’
She hesitated. ‘I…’
‘Yes?’
‘Captain, I can fly ’em, I can’t fix ’em. I’m not about to try.’
Abe’s annoyance fluctuated uncertainly. On the one hand, her attitude was something he hated. On the other hand, there was something amazingly uncomplicated about her. And she could fly. She could certainly fly.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve been wanting the City to move that damn telegraph wire for some time. I’ll call ’em. Tell ’em they almost got themselves a fatal accident. If they don’t move the wire, then I will. I’ll fly your plane back for you. Just let me know where to bring her.’
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t ask you to do that. If you tell me when the wire’s gone, I can come by and –’
‘Pen, I hope you’re not going to stop me flying her.’
‘You want to?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
She grinned. When she wasn’t smiling, her face was withdrawn, quiet, thoughtful. It was the sort of face you could easily overlook, glance at and not properly notice. But when she smiled, she changed. Everything in her face became open and welcoming. When she smiled, her face called out to you like a bonfire of straw on an autumn day. She put a hand inside a shirt pocket and pulled out a simple white calling card. It bore her name and an address in South Carolina.
‘Thanks,’ she said, and walked away.
24 (#ulink_3d94f2bc-fb7b-5cda-af4b-59f9a3160d0c)
Willard waved goodbye and watched his guests go volubly down the hall. They’d enjoyed martinis with Willard, now were going on to the Algonquin for dinner and would be off to a jazz club in Greenwich Village before eventually rolling into bed.
Not Willard.
The pressure of work never let up. Willard spent his day chasing shipments, checking freight manifests, sending confirmations, arranging fund transfers. He needed the evenings to catch up with the days. Every time he felt he was getting on top of things, Annie would hit him with a stack of new files, crammed with deadlines and vicious complications.
But it wasn’t only that. Willard’s friends were big-drinking, free-spending. They had no idea of Willard’s impending poverty. Willard still had a little money, but it was running out fast and he had already borrowed two thousand bucks from Lucinda, his eldest sister. An evening spent working alone was a cheap one at least.
But that was small consolation. Because, so far, twelve weeks in, all his hard work had been for nothing. The loan wasn’t getting smaller. How could it? On Willard’s first day, Powell had said, ‘If you are ever to pay it off, it will be through your ability to earn exceptional returns on assets entrusted to you by the firm.’ But the company never entrusted him with money. Not a dollar. Powell hardly seemed to remember he still existed. Willard felt locked in a cell whose key had long since been thrown away.
The corridor fell silent. Willard went back into his apartment.
He took some cold chicken from the refrigerator and ate it in front of the open door, letting the clear, precise light fall in a block across the white tiled floor. A burr of traffic from Madison Avenue rolled down the canyon of East 60
Street and in through Willard’s kitchen window. He drank a glass of milk, rinsed it, and decided to clear his head with a shower before resuming work. He walked through to his bedroom and began to undress. He was sitting there, untying his shoe laces, when he heard the metallic click of a latch. His latch. For a moment there was silence, then the sound of feet moving quietly over the carpeted floor.
Willard eased his shoes off, then crept noiselessly to the bedroom door. There were more footsteps and the sound of a chair being moved. At his feet, there was a heavy brass weight used for a doorstop. Willard picked it up and hefted it. It would be a clumsy but effective weapon. He put his hand to the door and jerked it open.
There, in the middle of his living room, was Willard’s intruder, caught in the act.
His intruder was slim, pretty, stylishly dressed in a knee-length low-waisted blue evening gown in an ultra-fashionable artificial silk. On her face was a look of total surprise. Willard’s face was the same.
He was first to recover.
‘Good evening,’ he said.
The woman let go of the chair and swallowed. Her eyes fluttered quickly all over Willard, trying to assess the nature of the threat he presented. She must have seen something which calmed her down a little. ‘Good evening,’ she responded gravely.
Willard showed her his brass doorstop. ‘I picked this up to hit you with, in case I needed to. Do you think I’m going to need to?’
A smile plucked at the corners of the woman’s mouth. ‘Probably not, but you’d be wise to keep it handy.’
Willard set the weight down on a side table. ‘I’m not quite certain of the correct etiquette with burglars, so you’ll have to forgive me if I get it wrong – but would you like a drink?’
‘I think your manners are simply perfect. And yes, burglars always like to be offered a drink.’
‘What can I get you?’
There was a moment’s awkward pause. The awkwardness arose not because of their peculiar situation but because of Prohibition. Nearly everybody drank alcohol – but not absolutely everyone. It was still an illegal substance and it could be awkward to ask for it from somebody you’d never met before. Willard recognised the familiar embarrassment and said, ‘I intend to have a large glass of brandy. If I do have to batter you, I should like to be well primed for the job.’
‘And if I’m to be battered, I’d certainly like some brandy first.’
Willard tapped his bare chest (pleased that his intruder should have had the chance to see it). ‘I was just about to have a shower when you began burgling me. If you’ll excuse me…’
He went back to his bedroom, and dressed quickly in dinner jacket and tie. When he emerged, his burglar was politely standing by a bookshelf, pretending to be interested in the books. Willard poured them drinks. His burglar was medium-height, hair of dark gold, dove grey eyes and a pretty, darting smile. Willard felt the quick frisson of attraction.
‘Tell me, do you burglarise places professionally or is it more of a recreational activity?’
She pulled an apologetic face. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I thought the apartment was empty. There were some things here that someone I know had left behind. I was passing. I thought I’d just pop in and take a look for them.’ She dangled a key in the air. ‘I guess you should have this really.’ She tossed the key over.
You lived here before me? I thought…’
‘Not exactly.’ She sighed, and Willard saw something else in her face: something grim and unhappy. ‘The apartment was occupied by my sister’s fiancé, Arthur Martin. It’s my sister’s key.’
‘I’m so sorry, I don’t know your name. I’m Willard Thornton, by the way.’
‘Rosalind Sherston. My sister’s name is Susan. It would have been a little bit less embarrassing if she had come, but she was too upset, what with everything.’
‘I do understand. I’m at Powell Lambert myself, of course. I never met Mr Martin, but I’ve heard a lot about him. Only good things, naturally.’ This was quite untrue, incidentally. Nobody at Powell Lambert ever seemed to mention the name. ‘What a terrible shock it must have been.’
‘You never met him?’
‘I’m still very new. I’ve only been at the bank a few weeks.’
‘A few? How few?’
Sherston’s voice went suddenly weak, though she didn’t at all strike Willard as the weak-voiced sort of woman. Willard realised that she was shocked to find the dead man’s apartment so quickly reoccupied. He told her when he’d joined, but adjusted the date by two weeks, so the bank’s callousness seemed less extreme.
‘I see.’ Sherston gulped her brandy, suddenly anxious to be off. The mood, which had been sunny, had darkèned for no reason Willard could explain. ‘Thank you for not battering me. You would have been within your rights.’
Willard shrugged apologetically and pointed to the carpet which was quite new and pale cream. ‘It’s not the battering, it’s the cleaning up.’
She got up to go. ‘You’ve been very sweet.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Willard, anxious to extend her visit. ‘Your sister’s things. I haven’t come across anything, but if you know where they might be you’re welcome to take a look.’
Rosalind hesitated. The chair was still out where she’d left it. Willard remembered how Rosalind had been dragging it when he’d burst in on her.
‘The cupboard? Did your sister mention that cupboard?’
Again that momentary hesitation. Then a nod. ‘Yes. It was the cupboard she mentioned.’
The cupboard in question was a large built-in affair, flush-fitted to the alcove next to the doorway. The bottom half was mostly full of bed and table linens. The upper half was full of Willard’s collection of flying and movie memorabilia. He wasn’t at all unhappy to have to root through it with Rosalind watching. He began pulling stuff out: movie posters, photographs, a medal, a leather flying helmet scored along its outer edge by a German bullet.
‘Oh, Willard Thornton,’ she said. ‘Gosh! Aren’t you …? Of course, you are. Silly me. I suppose I should have recognised you.’
‘Not at all, not at all.’
Willard knew for a fact that the cupboard had been bare on his arrival, but wasn’t going to let that stop him emptying it under Rosalind’s inspection. Selecting carefully, but appearing casual, he made sure that the choicest artefacts ended up in the pile closest to Rosalind: a condensed history in objects of his life as he liked to think of it. She picked up a model Nieuport, made in silver, a gift from his father to mark Willard’s first aerial victory. ‘They seem so fragile.’
‘Not really,’ he answered, with studied casualness. ‘Good plane the Nieuport. Wing struts had a tendency to come apart in a dive, but it wasn’t a danger if you knew what you were doing.’
‘Do you mind me looking?’
‘Not at all. It’s junk, really. I ought to throw it away.’ She shook her head.
The cupboard was obviously empty. Willard swept the back with his hand.
‘Your sister’s things aren’t here, but I’ll keep an eye out. What should I be looking for?’
‘Oh… I’m not sure. Some papers, I think. It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have come. Sorry.’ She opened the apartment door. ‘Goodbye. Thank you.’
‘Wait!’
Rosalind stopped.
‘If I find anything, how do I get in touch with you?’
‘Oh, yes, of course. You can call me.’ She gave him a Manhattan phone number. ‘But don’t worry about it. Really.’
Her eyes flicked around the apartment, back to the cupboard, then to the mess on the floor.
‘And now I’ve put you out. I’m so sorry. Thank you. Goodbye.’
25 (#ulink_6eb6588a-aeb6-5eea-9028-15b939107034)
The shadow of Poll’s upper wing shifted slowly with the sun. At the moment, most of the shadow fell on the ground, but there was still a long bar of shade lying down the trailing edge of the lower wing. Abe lay with a cigarette in his mouth, his back warm against the fuselage. The Cuban boy who brought the mailbag for Miami was late again. Abe decided that, bag or no bag, he’d leave as soon as the shadow of the upper wing had left the lower wing completely.
The sun slid slowly down the sky. The shadow moved. Abe finished his cigarette and stubbed it out.
Another minute passed. The shadow had almost completely shifted now. Abe got up, ready to leave, when a big black American car drew up outside the airfield gates. A dark-suited man climbed out, leaving one man at the wheel and a second one in the passenger seat behind. The man who got out was bulky, jowly, tough, but also friendly. Abe recognised him as an occasional passenger with the Marion bootleggers – and their obvious superior. The big man came over.
‘You Rockwell?’
Abe nodded.
‘Hi. Bob Mason.’ The man pointed at his chest, as though he might have meant someone else.
Abe shrugged.
‘You going back to Miami?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I need a ride.’
Abe shrugged again.
I’ll pay. How much d’you charge?’
‘Can’t. I’m full. Sorry.’
‘Full? With a packet of letters?’ Mason snorted. ‘Say fifty bucks? I never taken a plane ride before.’
‘I thought you went by boat. You’d be more comfortable.’
‘Fool sailors left the choke wide open. Engine flooded. In this heat, too.’
Abe shrugged. Since he’d swum out to the boat that lunch-time and opened the choke himself, the news wasn’t a big surprise. He’d also undone the nut holding the propeller blade, so if the Marion folk had got the engine started, it would have lost its blade within seconds.
‘Too bad.’
Just then the Cuban kid came at a slow trot with the mailbag. Abe took the bag and buckled it behind his seat in the rear cockpit. The American came closer, tilting his head up to speak.
‘Fifty bucks. We got a deal, right? Where do I get in? Here?’ He made as if to climb into the front cockpit.
‘Hey! Out of there. I’m full, I told you. I’m not some kind of railroad service.’
Mason stopped where he was, half-in, half-out of the cockpit. He held Abe’s gaze square on.
‘A hundred bucks.’
‘I’m full. That’s the last time I’m telling you.’ Abe checked his instruments, before jumping out of the plane to swing the propeller a couple of times. On a cold day, it could take a few turns to bring enough fuel into the piston heads. But in the heat, Abe could tell by the smell that the pistons were already primed. He walked back to the cockpit.
‘Bullshit, that’s bullshit.’
Abe shrugged. ‘My machine, my route.’
He reached inside his cockpit, flipped the ignition, and set the throttle low enough that it would keep the engine turning without sending Poll skittering out across the field. Then he went back to the propellers, ready to spin the blades into action.
Mason let Abe pass him, then said in the same low voice, ‘Fuck you.’ He picked a hundred dollars from his wallet and threw them into the rear cockpit. Then he grasped the edge of the front cockpit with both hands and jumped up, before swinging his legs down and into the plane. A grimy blue curtain would have blocked his view of anything lying forward from the seat. Expecting empty space, he moved too fast and barked out loud in pain as his feet struck something hard and solid. He swore loudly, then grabbed at the curtain to pull it aside.
And saw it. Six cases of booze, Gordon’s Gin still in the original boxes, strapped tight against Poll’s wood and fabric hull.
Mason stared – stared – then began to roar with laughter.
‘Full! Ha! I’ll say you are. That’s a sweet little business you got yourself there.’
‘Right. So as you see, I got no space for you. Now scram.’
Mason shook his head. His eyes smiled but there was an unruffled confidence in his manner which hinted at something a whole lot tougher. ‘I’ll squeeze up. I promise not to snitch a drink on the way.’
‘It’s not a question of squeezing, it’s a question of weight. The plane won’t take off overloaded.’
‘Then lose the booze.’
‘I’d sooner lose you.’
Mason paused. His manner was still very easy, very calm. He looked inside the curtain and counted the cases. ‘Six cases. And twenty, twenty-five bucks turn on each one. I was underpaying. One fifty.’ He counted out another fifty bucks and handed them down to Abe, who didn’t reach to take them.
‘Sorry, pal. I’m not in the passenger business.’
‘My men will get you unloaded.’
Mason glanced over at the car which had brought him and made a gesture. Two men stepped out, not exactly threatening, but not exactly meek either. Abe watched them come.
‘Where do you store it?’ said Mason.
‘If I take you this time, it’s the last time, OK? I got people who rely on me.’
‘I get it.’
‘And it’s two hundred.’
‘OK.’
Abe spun his reluctance out another second or two, before pointing at the little locked shed, where he kept the bits and pieces he needed to service Poll. ‘In there. And your guys had better break a sweat, unless you want to try a landing by moonlight.’
‘OK.’
Mason handed over a further fifty dollars, gave brief, precise instructions to his men, then chuckled to himself as the booze was unloaded. And it was true: ever since beginning the mail flight, Abe had been transporting six cases of alcohol a flight, every flight. He bought the stuff from a wholesaler in Havana. He sold the stuff to a poxy little Miami bootlegger, named De Freitas. The booze came in wooden cases, nailed shut and sealed with the manufacturer’s mark. To begin with De Freitas hadn’t believed the stuff was unadulterated, but as time had gone by, he’d changed his mind. De Freitas paid good prices. Abe’s costs, gasoline mostly, were low. Each and every trip he cleared around a hundred bucks’ profit.
Mason supervised his men, but didn’t help. He jigged up and down, enjoying himself.
‘You got Gordon’s on the box. I like that. Booze you can trust.’
Abe said nothing.
‘You ain’t worried about the good folks from customs?’
Abe jerked his thumb at Poll’s fuselage, with its stencilled mail logo. ‘Interference with the mails. It’s a federal crime. Besides, why would Uncle Sam want to stop his own airplanes?’
Mason stared at the logo an instant, transfixed by the sight. Then his face creased into a bellow of laughter. ‘Ha! You got it figured out there, pal! Good ol’ Uncle Sam, huh? Looks after his own, hey?’ He laughed some more and shared the joke with his two pals, who had got the last case unloaded. They laughed too, but were sweating too hard to laugh loudly.
‘OK, hurry it up,’ said Abe tetchily. ‘You want to go to the can, go now. Otherwise, get in. There’s a helmet and goggles behind the seat. Put ’em on. Keep ’em on. Sit still. Don’t touch anything. Miami in three hours. Got it?’
Mason nodded, still chuckling, and complied. Abe got Poll started, and bumped across the airfield until he was downwind of the sea breeze. Then he opened the throttle and let her roar into flight. Abe pushed her upwards at two hundred feet a minute, until he hit her ceiling, seven thousand feet or so. He kept her pushed up against the ceiling all the way to the Florida coast, raising the altitude as the fuel load lightened. Up at those heights, the air was icy, the cold multiplied by the hundred-mile-an-hour wind.
By the time Abe set Poll down in Miami, Mason was half blue with cold, his hands shaking, his face pinched and tight.
‘You have to fly her as high as that?’
‘Nope.’
‘Then why the hell did you?’
‘I run a business, but it’s not a passenger business. Next time take the boat.’
Mason left, heading off towards town, flexing his fingers to get them warm.
Abe watched him go. It was his first serious contact with the gangsters of Marion. But it wasn’t too late to quit. He was committed to nothing, he had promised less. Few people knew where he was, and no one knew what he was doing. Abe stood watching, ’til Mason had long passed out of sight. But the hesitation that had gripped him since the moment when a lanky storekeeper in Independence had asked him for help still gnawed inside. Should he fight or quit, stay or run?
He didn’t know. He still hadn’t made up his mind.
26 (#ulink_c9291cd8-fc44-5156-928a-873709251cee)
One Friday afternoon, Willard had had business with the bank’s archive on the twentieth floor. He’d deposited one file, collected another and was just about to leave, when he happened to see Leo McVeigh and Charlie Hughes through the glass-paned door. McVeigh had Hughes pushed up against the wall. Hughes was white, obviously terrified. McVeigh was standing too close, speaking intently, his big hands half-curled into fists.
Willard stared for a second, then banged the door open. McVeigh stepped back. Charlie Hughes put his hand to his face, checked his tie, began muttering nervous hellos. Willard already loathed McVeigh and was angry enough to welcome a confrontation.
‘Hello, McVeigh,’ he said icily, before turning to Hughes. ‘You all right, old chap? You’re looking rather blue.’
‘I’m fine, honestly, Will, please don’t worry.’
‘I do worry. You’re not looking at all well.’
‘Spot of tummy trouble. Maybe something I ate. I’ll be OK.’
‘Have you drunk some water?’
‘Water?’ Hughes repeated the word as though unfamiliar with the substance.
‘Water. You ought to drink something. Maybe go home and lie down.’
Hughes caught McVeigh with his eyes. He’s asking that bastard for permission, thought Willard angrily. McVeigh nodded slightly and stepped away.
‘Yes, good idea,’ said Hughes. ‘I’ll drink something. That should help.’
He made no move to come with Willard, as though still spellbound by McVeigh’s presence. The big one-time football player stood a pace or two back, kneading his hands and breathing silently through his mouth.
‘Good. I’ll walk you to the bathroom,’ said Willard firmly. He put a hand on Hughes’ shoulder and steered him away. In a deliberately loud voice – loud enough that McVeigh would be sure to hear it – he said, ‘You always feel free to come to me if you need help, anything at all.’
‘Yes, of course, thanks, Will-o.’
Feeling distaste for the man he’d just rescued, Willard turned and stared McVeigh straight in the face. For a second or two, their gazes locked. Hostility flickered in the air. Then Willard, pulling some of his Hollywood moves, curled his lip, turned on his heel, and stalked off.
Speaking about it later with Larry Ronson, Willard said, ‘I’d swear he was threatening Hughes. The poor chap looked white as a sheet.’
Ronson was sympathetic. ‘He’s an ugly sort, McVeigh. He’s never even attempted to join in with things. I mean, at least Hughes tries.’
‘Yes… Look, you probably think I’m being absurd, but you don’t think … Look, I don’t even know what I think, but have you ever wondered if there’s anything strange going on at times? You remember that business with the Orthodox Synagogues?’
‘Irish rabbis. That’d be something.’
‘McVeigh threatened me in the elevator. Told me not to ask questions.’
‘He did? He did that? Jesus! Have you told anyone else?’
‘No. I’m not quite sure who I would tell.’
‘There’s Grainger, I suppose. Or Barker.’
‘Yes, but what if they’re in on it too?’
‘In on what?’
‘I’ve no idea. None at all.’
‘Look, you know Powell a little, don’t you? Or at least your pa does?’
‘Father and Powell are Yacht Club buddies, that sort of thing. Trouble is, I don’t really know the man and, in any event, I wouldn’t know what to say.’
Ronson looked at his watch. It was four thirty-five. ‘I trust you’re intending to keep New York’s bootlegging community in proper employment tonight?’
‘Love to, but I’m bursting to get out of the city, to tell the truth. Take a weekend in the country.’
‘The delights of Martha’s Vineyard, eh? Lucky dog.’
Willard smiled. His father owned a thumping big estate facing south over the ocean. What was more, Willard’s four sisters were all going to be there this weekend, with girlfriends in tow. Willard had enjoyed happy hunting with his sisters’ friends in the past, and could think of nothing more welcome in the present. Willard stared at his desk and its cargo of detested manila files.
‘To hell with it,’ he said, feelingly. ‘To hell with everything. If Messrs Grainger, Barker, McVeigh or Powell want me, please tell them to go to hell too.’
Grabbing coat, hat and briefcase, Willard strode for the door.
27 (#ulink_b94c4130-8f42-5bb8-8b8b-16790ce57704)
The shop was dim compared with the street outside, but then again since the street outside was a blaze of white dust and air so hot it practically buckled, dim wasn’t a bad way to be.
The kid kicked around at the back of the store, waiting while Hennessey finished serving an old lady customer at the front. The kid was down in the hardware section, fingering the metal pans full of nails, weighing the hammerheads and axe handles. The old lady left the shop. Lundmark approached.
‘Afternoon, Mr Hennessey.’
‘Hey, Brad. Fancy some candy?’
The storekeeper pulled a jar of Brad’s favourite candy from the shelf behind him. The kid looked embarrassed, sticking his hands in his pockets.
‘Oh, gee, no, it’s OK, I didn’t mean to – I didn’t come out with any –’
‘This candy’s a treat between friends. I didn’t mean for you to pay.’
‘Oh, gosh, Mr Hennessey, thanks.’
The old man and the young one went silent as they chewed on the pink and white candy. Brad was still of school age and his mom’s blind eyes didn’t let her earn a living. The two of them lived off the town’s charity and the poorer the town got, the poorer the Lundmarks became.
‘Good candy.’
‘Yeah.’
Hennessey could tell the boy wanted to ask something, but wasn’t sure about doing so. The older man let him take his time. Another customer came in, asked for a bolt of cloth, was told it hadn’t come in yet. The customer left.
‘Say,’ said Brad, who had plucked up his courage, ‘I keep telling Mom it’s time she let me earn a little money. Schooling don’t bother me none, only it don’t pay nothing either.’
‘That’s a problem with it,’ said Hennessey, hoping the boy wasn’t going to ask him for a position.
‘She thinks I ought to become a carpenter like my pa.’
‘He was good with his hands, your pa.’
‘Yeah…’
‘And sometimes you know those things run in the blood.’
‘Yeah…’
‘Only if I’m guessing right, you don’t fancy the carpenting line of work over much.’
‘Not so much.’
Hennessey was more sure now that the boy was going to ask for a job – a request which Hennessey would absolutely have to refuse – and his manner stiffened as he waited.
‘But I reckon you’re right about them things running in the blood, though.’
‘Yes?’
The boy looked up, suddenly bold. ‘Oh say, Mr Hennessey, it ain’t carpenting work I want, it’s mechanics. I am good with my hands, even Captain Rockwell said so. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, really. There are four auto shops in Brunswick now. I’ll bet one of them needs an apprentice around the place. I could come home every Sunday. I wouldn’t need hardly nothing to live off and Ma could have everything else.’
He stopped abruptly and the storekeeper finished for him. ‘Only your ma wants you to stay at home. She doesn’t like the thought of you heading off to Brunswick.’
The kid didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. It was the same all over Independence. Ever since Marion had begun its war of attrition against their neighbours up the hill, the town had been dying. Kids left, not to come back. Businesses folded. Farms went under. Hennessey was an Independence man born and bred, but he couldn’t deny that the kid spoke sense. There was no use in trying to hold the youngsters back. They had their own lives to live.
‘I’ll speak to Sal,’ said Hennessey. ‘I expect I can talk her round.’
‘Gee, would you? Gosh, thanks! And I promise –’
Hennessey raised a hand. ‘No promises, Brad.’ He hesitated. Under the counter, he’d kept a newspaper from a couple of months back. The newspaper had contained an item about the inaugural Miami–Havana mail flight, about Captain Rockwell and his new airfield in the south.
‘Autos. That’s your thing, huh?’
‘Oh sure. You know Captain Rockwell started out as a racing car mechanic. One day, I’d love to do that, but meantime
‘How ’bout airplanes, Brad?’
‘Airplanes?’
The air turned still. The silence turned holy.
Hennessey produced the paper. ‘Now don’t you dare tell your ma I showed you this. It ain’t autos, Brad, but if you don’t mind slumming it, there’s a guy working down in Miami who might have a job for the likes of you.’
He handed over the newspaper. The kid read the article, his eyes shining.
‘Gee, Mr Hennessey, do you really think he’d –?’
‘I’ve no idea. You’d best ask him that yourself. And, listen up, Brad, mind you don’t tell him I said you go see him.’
‘I shouldn’t?’
‘No, son, better not.’
The kid looked back at the newspaper, doubtfully. ‘But, you know Mr Hennessey, Miami’s a whole lot further than Brunswick…’
Hennessey suddenly felt bad about doing what he’d just done. He couldn’t have said why, but he felt like he was a man betraying a trust. He grabbed the tall glass jar of candy, tipped some out into a brown paper bag and thrust the bag over the counter, restoring the jar to its place on the shelf with his free hand.
‘I’ll speak to your ma. I’ll ask her about Brunswick. I won’t say anything about Miami, let alone airplanes. If you choose to jump on the eight o’clock freight train when it slows down just this side of Williams Point and ride it all the way down to Miami, then that wouldn’t really be my business now, would it?’
A couple more customers came into the shop, one of them Jeb Gibbs, a seventy-five-year-old man whose sweet-tempered moonshine whiskey had kept him one of the wealthiest men in town for as long as anyone could remember. Gibbs was a customer Hennessey did a lot to keep sweet. The storekeeper greeted the newcomers and flashed a last glance at Lundmark. The kid had grabbed his bag of candy and stood with it held against his chest like something precious.
‘Williams Point, huh?’ he breathed.
‘I’ll talk to her,’ said the storeman, ‘but no promises.’
The kid left. Hennessey watched him all the way into the dazzle of the street and the deep indigo shadows of the further side. He hadn’t done anything so bad, had he? And if he hadn’t, then how come he felt like such a louse for doing it?
28 (#ulink_b6af6467-bfca-540a-b129-4215667c40d3)
The weekend was everything that Willard’s life once used to be and now wasn’t.
Although he carried twelve hours’ worth of paperwork in his briefcase, he touched none of it. Deliberately choosing to ignore the difficulties that hemmed him in, he didn’t think about his debts, didn’t think about Powell Lambert, didn’t think about his future. Instead, he did all those things he had once taken for granted. He played tennis, sailed and swam. He was outgoing, charming and easy. He didn’t ‘score a confirmed hit’, as he expressed it to his eldest sister, Lucinda, but he ‘winged one or two machines, for sure’ – his phrase for petting that stopped just short of the bedroom door.
‘One or two?’ she teased him. ‘You don’t know?’
‘Two then.’
‘Must have been some very slow machines then. Slow and ugly.’
He laughed. ‘Fast and pretty. And exceptionally keen for me to call on them in New York.’
But all too soon the weekend ended. On Sunday evening, as the light began to ebb, Willard found himself on the station platform with his father. The train, headed by a steam locomotive painted a sombre black and purple, groaned its way into the station. The two men, travelling first class, found a compartment empty but for one other traveller, a man absorbed in his leather-bound Bible.
Willard, who always found time alone with his father awkward, was relieved at the third man’s presence. The two Thorntons settled into seats opposite each other. The older man produced some business papers, and began to read. Willard, loathing the thought of touching any of his hated paperwork, reached his bag down arid did so anyway. The train lurched off into the twilight.
The silence in the compartment and the clattering darkness outside began to knit together in one clotted mass. The thoughts Willard had kept at bay all weekend began to swarm in on him: his debts; his lack of prospects; the hopelessness of his situation. He also thought about those other things: the man whose death had been so conveniently timed, the Irish rabbis, Willard’s strange but beautiful burglar. Without premeditating his action, he dropped his papers and said, ‘Father?’
Junius Thornton and the other traveller lowered their reading matter at the interruption. Then the Bible-reader rose, claimed his bag from the rack, and left the compartment. On the way out, he gave Willard a look which implied that if speaking on a Sunday weren’t illegal, then it certainly ought to be. Junius Thornton stacked and bookmarked his papers, but didn’t put them away, as though to suggest that any break in the silence were only provisional.
‘Yes?’
Willard didn’t know what he intended to say. If he could have undone his first impulsive exclamation, he would have. But since he had now to say something, he said the first thing that came into his head.
‘You know Powell fairly well, I think.’
‘Certainly.’
‘And you’d trust him, of course? I mean, you don’t believe he’d do anything that a gentlemen shouldn’t?’
Junius Thornton stared at his son. The older man’s thick features were hard to read at the best of times; still harder in the moving carriage and the uncertain light. ‘I believe Powell to be a reliable man, yes. Am I to know what makes you ask such a peculiar question?’
‘Oh nothing!’ Willard threw himself back in his seat, annoyed at himself for asking. ‘Just one or two odd things have happened lately. Things Powell might not have liked if he’d known about them.’
Junius Thornton continued to examine his son, waiting to see if any further explanation was forthcoming. It wasn’t. The old man shrugged slightly. ‘Powell likes money. He likes it very much. As far as I know, that’s the only thing he likes.’
Willard stared sulkily from the window. ‘Well, it’s a good job he runs a bank then.’
‘Yes,’ said his father, deliberately mishearing, ‘he does a good job.’
‘And do you think…?’
His father, impassive, waited for Willard to finish his sentence. Willard made no attempt to do so, and the older man let his glance stray back to the documents he’d abandoned. The glance prompted Willard to continue.
‘Well, I must say, I’m not at all sure he’s playing quite fair with me.’
‘Oh?’
‘I mean it was understood – quite plainly – I mean, that was the point of the whole arrangement – that I’d work off the loan. Not just pay interest for the rest of my life.’
‘I see. You were clear about the matter with him, of course?’
‘He said…’ Willard struggled to remember what Powell had said exactly. It had been vague and general, for sure, but the tone had been optimistic and reassuring. ‘He said there was money to be made on Wall Street. Plenty of it. He said those with the gift would always make money.’
‘Indeed. Those propositions seem true enough.’
Willard said nothing, just sat back, petulantly folding his arms and jerking his chin. His father stared for a moment, then tried a different tack.
‘And what was stipulated in the contract?’
‘Oh nothing – nothing that helps. But it’s not just about contracts. It’s about – I don’t know – I thought he was a gentleman, that’s all.’
The older man’s expression was never easy to read. Sometimes, Willard thought, it was because he didn’t have an expression. Just because somebody owns two eyes and a mouth doesn’t mean they register emotions in the normal human way. But that wasn’t the case now. There was something alive in the businessman’s face. There was a flicker of something in his mouth, some fleeting look in the shadows of his eyes. But the moment didn’t last. The older man didn’t let it. He clamped his lips and picked up the waiting stack of papers. But before he closed the discussion, he looked squarely at his son and said, ‘You ought to know that Powell is pleased with you. He tells me you’re doing good work. Well done.’
‘Gosh! Thank you, Father.’
Willard was astonished that Powell had noticed his presence in the bank, let alone found favour with it. But his astonishment was doubled by his father’s rare administration of praise. Hope leaped unreasonably up. Willard thought about the Firm; renewed the strength of his desire to live up to the family name, to claim the family crown. He felt elated and clasped the feeling in silence all the way to New York City.
His mood lasted until eight twenty-seven on Monday morning. When he arrived at work, he found everyone already there, except Charlie Hughes. The atmosphere was silent and heavy. Willard tried to lighten it. He stood by the hat stand.
‘What’s this revolting object?’ he said, picking up Claverty’s pale grey fedora. ‘Miss Hooper, kindly dispose of it.’ He threw Claverty’s hat across the room and hung his own in its place. Nobody smiled, nobody laughed. Annie Hooper picked up the fallen hat and came over.
‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Charlie Hughes. He was arrested last night.’ Her voice trembled. ‘It seems he was found with sixteen cases of gin in his apartment. They’re charging him under the Volstead Act. Oh, Willard! He’s going to prison…’
Her tears burst forth. Willard put his arm around her and felt her nestle in like a little, lost bird. He wanted to press his lips to the top of her head, but didn’t. He held her as she cried. Charlie Hughes! A bootlegger! It was impossible.
When Willard looked up, he found Leo McVeigh staring at him: dark, brutal, intimidating, fierce.
29 (#ulink_ff7e53b8-24ef-508c-9728-a4b384644bb2)
You want to check a person out? Start from the air. From up there, you see the whole thing for what it is: for better or for worse.
And Abe saw. From two thousand feet and travelling at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, he saw. He saw Pen Hamilton’s home: a vast white house, maybe twenty bedrooms, maybe forty. Plus there were a number of cottages sprinkled around the grounds. And stable blocks. And servants’ quarters. And English-style lawns and rose gardens. And well-established stands of timber. And a lake, artificial but beautiful. And thousands of acres of plantation land. And, of course, an airfield, Pen’s own private paradise.
‘Jesus Christ!’
Abe didn’t actually speak the words, but he certainly mouthed them. Although it was early, Abe had intended to land the plane, clean up, then go up to the house, to say ‘hi’. But plans change.
A bunch of roses lay squashed in the racer’s cramped cockpit. The blooms were pale pink and had looked nice in the florist’s shop, only when he had been in the florist’s shop, he hadn’t seen the one acre rose garden or the glittering curves of glasshouses beyond.
His face moved in a hard-to-interpret expression. Regret? Uncertainty? Loneliness? Even fear? Abe let the plane fly itself, letting the perfectly tuned controls find their own balance, and looked at the roses. The colours were pretty, but an open-air cockpit is a tough place for roses. The blooms weren’t at their best and there was already a scatter of petals on the cockpit floor.
Abe’s face moved again: the same expression as before, only stronger. He took the flowers and held them out of the cockpit. As he did so, he slammed the throttle open and the control stick down. The hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour wind rose into a two-hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour roar. The wind took one look at the roses, then tore their pretty pink heads off. The leaves snickered, then shredded. Abe levelled off. The roses were now just green sticks dotted with thorns.
He felt a stab of regret. Maybe if he had the last minute over again he wouldn’t have done it. But maybe he would. And minutes never come again. He glanced out of the cockpit and threw the sticks away.
Some people have money. Some people have none. The two sorts of people sometimes look like they live in the same place, but they don’t. They live in different countries, different planets.
30 (#ulink_50dad0ce-5e0a-5d90-a46c-729b06e2180a)
The prison smelled bad, looked worse. The cells were big steel-barred affairs, with prisoners four to a cell. Bright lights hung from steel chains in the roof. The long hall rang with noise, obscenity and the smell of violence.
Willard watched as Charlie Hughes was picked from his cell and marched up to the visitors’ room. The room was cream with a dark-green band around the base. A single electric lamp hung from a wire in the ceiling. Hughes was brought in and sat down at the table. A smell of vomit entered with him. Willard waited for the guard to leave, then realised he wasn’t going to. He loathed having the guard there – it was like having a servant present while seducing a girl – but there was no choice.
‘Lord, Charlie, are you all right?’
‘Oh, Will-o, yes! Thanks for coming. Shouldn’t have, but, gosh, really, thanks!’
There was a pause. Hughes stank. Willard was wearing a new suit, hand-made in a lightweight charcoal-grey worsted, and he worried that Hughes’ smell would penetrate the cloth and infect it. He inched his chair back and, for a moment, was too overwhelmed with the awfulness of the place to know what to say.
‘I probably smell, do I? An Irishman chucked up on me last night. It’s kind of hard cleaning up in here. But, you know…’ He shrugged, as though being puked on by Irishmen was one of the inconveniences of city life.
‘God, Charlie! Isn’t it awful! You’ve got a lawyer, of course?’
‘Awful?’ Hughes sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Well, you know, I’m out of it now. I probably won’t get more than a year or so. And you know, I’ve got two sisters. It’s rather a relief really. It could have been worse.’
‘What have your sisters got to do with it? How could it have been worse?’
‘Well, you know…’ Hughes made a vague gesture, which Willard couldn’t interpret. But he suddenly remembered Arthur Martin, the car-crash victim whose death seemed to have been so conveniently timed.
‘Look, I’ve got the name of a chap if you need one,’ said Willard. ‘I don’t know him myself, but I know my father uses him.’
‘Pardon?’
‘An attorney. Someone to get you out of here. I can’t see them giving you a year, not for your first offence and everything.’
‘Oh, no! No, that’s quite all right. I don’t want to cause a fuss. I mean, it’s quite a let-off really.’
‘Charlie, can I ask you something?’
‘’Course, Will-o, anything.’
‘Were you really selling booze? They said you had sixteen cases in your apartment.’
Hughes laughed. ‘Sixteen cases! Gosh! Was it really that many? But, no, I mean, of course not. Can you see me bootlegging the old hoochino for a living? Not really my type of thing, that.’
Willard felt his familiar sense of distaste where Hughes was concerned. This stupid little man had allowed himself to be framed for something he couldn’t possibly be guilty of, then refused to make a fuss about it. Quite the opposite. If anything, Hughes appeared grateful.
‘Well, look, Charlie, I can’t stay long. If there’s anything I can do…’
‘Oh, I’m OK. I’ll be OK.’
‘Yes.’ Willard hardly bothered to conceal his dislike for anyone who could be OK in a place populated by puking Irishmen.
‘Thanks awfully for coming, Will-o. You will be careful, won’t you?’
‘What do you mean, careful?’
‘You know, the best thing would be to leave. I mean, they couldn’t do anything to you. It’s not as though you know too much, and your father being a pal of Ted Powell’s and all that.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
Willard’s question was brutally frank and Hughes looked a little shocked. Willard could see he wanted to answer, but he kept shooting suspicious glances at the guard who was standing painfully close. Hughes bent forward and said in a low whisper, ‘Get out, Will-o.’
The guard stepped even closer and clattered the table with his night stick. ‘No whispering. Sit back. Hands on the table. And wind it up. You’ve got a minute.’
‘I can’t quit. I owe Powell two hundred thousand dollars.’
‘What!’
‘You heard. He financed a movie I made. We had problems with distributors.’
‘Jesus, Will-o! Jeez! You got a … you… Heck, I thought I
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