Authors: Harry Bingham
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?’
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…’