Authors: Harry Bingham
‘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.
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.
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
had a problem!’
Hughes began laughing nervously. Willard stood up angrily. Suddenly he loathed the little man.
‘If there’s a problem with Powell Lambert, I think you ought to tell me what it is. If there isn’t, I’ll ask you not to make insinuations.’ He stood over Hughes, demanding an answer. ‘Well?’
Hughes looked anxiously at Willard, anxiously at the guard.
‘I can’t, Will-o. Not now. Not now that I’m out of it. I’m sorry.’
Willard said nothing. Hughes stayed quiet. The guard moved impatiently. ‘OK, let’s break it up.’ He pushed Hughes on the shoulder. ‘Time to go, buddy-boy.’
Hughes stood up and let himself be hustled back to his cell: a small man with bookish glasses, trailing a stink of body odour, vomit and fear. Willard watched him go. Arthur Martin: dead. Charlie Hughes: imprisoned. Who would be next? And why? That was the worst of it.
Willard still hadn’t the slightest idea of why.