Authors: Harry Bingham
‘America’s bigger than you are, Mason. I know people who are flying the border from Mexico. There’s plenty of border with Canada. Every inch of it flyable.’
Mason blew a puff of air from his mouth, like a deaf-and-dumb imitation of a laugh. ‘Mexico? It’s too hot and the food gives you the trots. Canada? It’s too cold and you have to sing
God Save the King.’
‘I won’t be threatened.’
‘Who’s threatening you, Captain? I’m not threatening you, I’m sharing a drink.’ Mason waved his glass. ‘I told you my friends and I like your business. We’d like to see if we can work something out. Think of it like a partnership.’
There was a long silence. Nowhere fills with silence like an aircraft hangar, no matter how many creaks may hide in the roof. Eventually Abe leaned forwards and pulled aside Mason’s jacket. Snug in a holster beneath his armpit, lay a gun, black and squat. Mason pulled it out between finger and thumb and dropped it on the table equidistant between himself and Abe. ‘I mean it. A partnership.’
And then, and only then, did Abe relax.
‘No promises,’ he said, ‘but I’ll hear you out.’
Monday evening, six o’clock, and Willard had already left work, feeling reckless. Through fast-fading sun, he walked quickly uptown to the edge of Central Park. Passing a drugstore, he stepped inside. He asked for a phone and a sad Italian nodded him to a dark corner booth, lined with dirty red cotton. Willard entered and asked the operator for a local number. In the short delay, Willard could hear the operator complaining in the background. He had sudden doubts.
Too late.
The call came through, and Willard was already speaking.
‘Good evening. My name is Thornton, Willard Thornton. I was hoping to be able to speak to Miss Rosalind Sherston.’
Willard held the line as Miss Sherston was sought. His doubts increased and only the unbreakable code of East Coast politeness kept him holding. Then a woman’s voice: ‘Rosalind Sherston speaking.’
‘Rosalind? Willard Thornton. I’m the gentleman whom you attempted to burglarise the other day.’
‘Yes. I know who you are.’ She sounded embarrassed. ‘Thank you for calling. Did you find anything?’
‘Your sister’s things? No, I’m afraid not. They must have been cleared before I came.’
‘Yes, I suppose they must. Well, thank you for letting me know.’
‘Listen, I was wondering if you were free any time.’
Tree…?’
‘Yes. To go out somewhere. I thought maybe we could stroll down Park Avenue and see if we could bust our way into one of those big modern duplexes. You could handle the jewellery, I’d take care of fine art and antiques. Cash and securities we’d split down the middle.’
‘I suppose you know you’re sounding a bit peculiar. I don’t just mean about your proposed entertainment.’
‘Am I? I
am
a little light-headed actually. They shouldn’t let me out of the office so early.’
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘No. Coffee and water. Nothing else all day. I’m pretty much of a monk in that way.’
There was a long pause. Willard almost thought he had lost the line, except that the crackle was still there. Eventually Rosalind spoke again.
‘Listen, Willard, I think you may be a very sweet man, but I think perhaps it would be better if we didn’t meet. I’m not over-fond of your employer.’
‘Well, perhaps it would be better if we did meet. I’m not sure
I’m
over-fond of my employer.’
There was another long pause, only this time Willard was very sure that Rosalind was still there, still listening. Speaking very intently now, he added, ‘I went for a drive in the country the other day. Up towards New Haven. I found a long straight road. It looked like a very safe one to me.’
Rosalind’s voice slowed right down. ‘Yes. It was a safe one, I believe.’
‘Rosalind, I have no idea what happened to your sister’s fiancé, or why. I also have no idea what happened to a former colleague of mine, who is currently in prison on a false charge of bootlegging. It really isn’t any of my business, except that I’m not marvellously keen to follow in their footsteps. On top of which –’ he paused. He wanted to say something about his debt, about his desire to join the family Firm, about the sort of life he thought he deserved and the sort of life he actually had.
‘On top of which?’ she prompted, the soft warm tones of her voice losing nothing over the wire.
‘On top of which, I would like to take you out to dinner.’
Sometimes you can hear an expression. A smile. A look of sadness. A hint of attraction. Willard heard it now.
‘How soon can you get here?’ she asked.
‘How soon can you get downstairs?’
That afternoon, Abe dug an oblong trench, slip-sided in the sandy soil. He mixed concrete by hand in the heat of the sun and filled the trench. The globby grey mixture, already beginning to dry, would form the foundations of his new house. The next task was to lay a floor and Abe began work on the shuttering, ready for the following day.
The sun was just flirting with the tree-tops in the western sky, when a dirty truck with blue canvas sides bumped off the Tarmac beach road and swung across the airfield. The truck’s canvas sides were marked ‘Peterson’s Pies – My, How Delicious!’. Abe dropped his handsaw and wiped his hands free of sweat, though not the spatters of grey concrete. The hangar had a tap on its back wall and Abe drank thirstily before walking around to meet his visitors. The sloping metal roof caught the heat and radiated it, so the warm air in its shadow had the glow of an oven door.
‘Hey, Birdman!’
The man leaning out of the passenger window was Bob Mason, an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a box of matches in his hand.
‘Mason.’ Abe nodded.
Mason slid out of the cab, lit his cigarette. He put out a hand to Abe, but Abe showed the muck on his hands and declined the shake.
‘Been working?’
‘Building. Poll’s getting too old to share her bedroom.’
‘You want a builder? I know some people.’
‘I like building.’
‘Then you build away. You build the Eiffel Tower for all I care – that
is
a building, right?’
‘Kind of. Its walls aren’t too good and I don’t remember it having a whole lot of roof.’
‘That don’t sound like much of a building.’
‘It looks pretty.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘It’s for looking pretty.’
‘Then I guess it works just fine.’
As they were having this dumb conversation, Mason walked through into the hangar, without asking or getting Abe’s permission. Abe kept pace. The truck driver, a huge silent man in blue overalls, followed a couple of steps behind. In the, darkest corner of the hangar, tucked out of sight of Poll’s looming wingblades, a pile of boxes was stacked under a dirty cotton sheet. Mason pulled the sheet aside and counted the boxes: nearly forty cases of booze. It was the haul of booze from one week’s flying.
Abe’s flying, Mason’s booze.
Because Abe had done it. He’d cut the deal, made the trade. He carried booze and not only that. Smuggling was smuggling, after all, and Abe was entrusted with the most valuable items coming through Mason’s pipeline: securities, jewellery, gold, cash, even boxes of women’s dresses all the way from Paris. In exchange, Abe got a quiet life, plus four hundred bucks a week cash.
The money was welcome. Except for a short while on the racing circuit, Abe had never earned a whole lot. The income he’d been receiving from booze – first from De Freitas, now from Mason – was the best he’d ever earned. Most of it he was sending to his parents, whose Kentucky farm had been sliding inexorably into the hands of the bank. Digging them out of debt would be the best possible way of spending his cash.
And yet, the whole thing nevertheless left him uneasy. He was taking Mason’s money. He was allying himself with an organisation for whom bullying, thuggishness and murder were a regular part of business. And that would be fine, if Abe were certain that he meant to do what he could to smash Marion and save Independence. But he wasn’t.
He hadn’t been before, when he’d said goodbye to Brad Lundmark on the beach outside Brunswick. He wasn’t now that he was already halfway inside the organisation. Most of him still wanted to quit. One small but stubborn part of him refused to let go of the picture of Brad Lundmark’s pile of flying souvenirs, and of the boy’s mother, burned, blinded and widowed. Silently to himself, and not for the first time, Abe cursed the storekeeper’s shrewdness and persistence.
Mason inspected the pile of booze, then nodded approval. He handed four hundred bucks to Abe and growled ‘Load up,’ to the driver. Then he strolled over to Abe’s living area to find himself a glass of water. On the small wooden table which served as Abe’s dining table, there was a deck of cards lying face down.
‘You a card player?’ he asked brightly, as though hoping to have located a normal human characteristic in the airman.
‘Not really.’
Abe picked up the deck, fanned it open, picked out the ace of spades. He held the card up, then flicked his hand and made the card disappear. It reappeared again, then vanished, then appeared in the other hand, then, just as Mason was sure he’d seen the card transfer back to Abe’s right hand, the ace reappeared on top of the deck.
‘Sheez!’
‘It’s all hokum,’ said Abe, inserting the ace back in the deck and shuffling. ‘As a kid, I always knew I wanted to work on engines. I worried maybe I was clumsy, so I bought a book of card tricks and made myself practise until I figured I had enough dexterity.’
‘Jeez, you take life kinda seriously, buddy.’
Abe shrugged. He fanned the pack open, holding the cards face up towards Mason. The mobster glanced, then stared. He took the pack and leafed through it one by one. The ace of spades had disappeared.
‘Where’s it gone?’
Abe ignored him. ‘Later on, I discovered that card tricks weren’t a bad way of understanding war in the air. Trickery, misdirection, concealment, deceit. They’re all transferable techniques. There were other commanders who thought that type of thing not quite “sporting”.’ Abe spoke the word in a British accent, then dropped it instantly. ‘I wouldn’t know. I never played those type of sports.’
‘Misdirection?’ queried Mason.
‘Listen, I’ve got something for you.’
He went to the office at the side of the hangar. The door, little used, had begun to stick and warp. He kicked at it, opened the door, picked a newspaper off the desk. A colony of brown-legged spiders had extended itself from an out-of-date Cuban calendar to the light fittings. Abe ignored the spiders and came out, passing the newspaper to Mason.
‘Army Air Service Gazette, huh? You think you could cut it in the army?’
Abe shrugged. ‘They still send it.’ He tapped a small news item at the bottom of the page, circled in blue. The item was a short report indicating that the army was about to sell some of its war-surplus fighter-bombers. ‘DH-4. Good plane. We’d be getting it cheap.’
‘A DH-4. They sure think up some swell names.’
‘It’s a de Havilland. A British plane, built here under licence. It’s a bomber. Fourteen thousand pound load capacity.’
‘A bomber, huh? If we ever want to drop bombs on somebody, that’d be a real good idea.’
‘Allowing for my weight and the weight of fuel, I calculate we could carry thirty-five cases of booze every day. That’d be nearly six times as much as now.’
‘Booze?’ Mason’s face looked wide-eyed and innocent. ‘Booze? No booze here I hope.’
‘You talked about a partnership. I’m not too keen on being treated like a junior employee.’
‘Junior, buddy? No way. Believe me, we think highly of you. We ain’t never had a real live fighter ace working for us before.’
‘The plane, Mason. What do you say?’
‘Say? Say to what?’ Mason raised his eyebrows. The truck driver had got the booze loaded up and was sitting in the cab, with the engine turning noisily over.
‘We buy a plane. We load her with booze. I bring her in.’
‘Booze, you’re always going on about booze.’ Mason climbed inside the truck, grabbed one of his meat pies and took a gigantic bite. ‘Peterson’s Pies,’ he mumbled. ‘Oh my, how delicious!’
The driver had the truck in gear and the clutch down. The engine was in need of tuning, and it ran too fast and too heavily.
‘Misdirection,’ said Abe. ‘It’s the art of making a person look one way when they ought to be looking the other.’
‘Huh? Back to conjuring tricks, right?’
Abe didn’t answer directly, but stood tapping the shirt pocket over his heart. Mason didn’t figure it out immediately, but then he did. His gaze dropped down to his own jacket pocket. ‘Aw, shit,’ he said, then pulled out a playing card: the ace of spades. He passed it out of the cab window and was still chuckling as the truck bounded away in a kick-back of sandy dust.
The mirror reflected this: a sandy-haired man, strong-jawed, very handsome, very carefully turned out in immaculate evening dress; a woman, dark-gold bobbed hair, aquamarine gown dropping hardly any distance below the knee; and in the background, a single black jazz singer, with a battered, southern, bluesy face, his eyes half-closed as he bobbed hypnotically on the melodic disorder of the four-piece band behind him. Willard paused to relish the sight, his gaze returning three times to his face for every two times it touched on Rosalind’s.
‘Best cocktails in midtown,’ he murmured, still looking in the mirror. ‘The music’s good too, you know. Don’t worry if you don’t like it at first. It’s the sort of thing –’
‘Oh, I love jazz. I listen to it whenever I can. Did you catch Mo Johnson at the Alabama Club last week? I thought –’
Rosalind’s enthusiasm turned Willard quickly off the subject.
‘Your coat,’ he said, ‘we need to check it.’
He checked her coat then steered her to a table in the dim room. He liked things modern, and how much better could it get? Himself: as handsome as anything, a beautiful woman at his side, the thrill of a speakeasy, the illegal taste of alcohol, the strange, clashing rhythms of jazz. They sat down. While Willard fussed over getting seated just right – he hated it when the chair back interfered with the proper fall of his jacket – Rosalind sat easily, cocking her head to the music. Willard got things arranged as he wanted, ordered cocktails and pretended to listen too.