Authors: Harry Bingham
‘Yes. I think I have.’ His voice abbreviated and tightened. He sounded like a military officer handing out orders. Perhaps it was that which prompted Pen to switch tack abruptly – or appear to switch tack, anyway.
‘I’m
not
in the army. You are
not
my commander. This is
not
the war,’ she said.
‘It
is
a kind of war.’ Abe leaped up from his stool, found the shed too small to go anywhere and sat back down again.
‘It isn’t! In the war, your men weren’t free to choose. They were there to fight or be shot for desertion. I’m here because I choose to be. I know the risks.’
‘Do you? Do you?’ Abe had caught Pen’s fever. His eyes were burning. ‘Mathematically, perhaps. In terms of flying, then certainly. But do you really know what it’s like? Because I
do.
I
do.’
‘This isn’t the war.’
‘It isn’t? Pen, you don’t know death until you’ve lived with it. Lived and lived and lived with it. I became squadron commander on May 18th, 1918. In less than six months, the war was over. In that time, I lost three quarters of my men. Killed, wounded, captured, missing or too shattered and exhausted to fly another mission. Three quarters! And each man lost meant a new face in the cockpit. A boy. A novice. A child who could turn a plane and thought he knew how to fly. A child whom I sent out to face the enemy because he had no choice and I had no choice and the poor goddamn enemy had no choice.’
‘So that’s it. I’m right. You think you’ll keep me safe. You’ll keep me out of it. You’ll take the risks yourself, get killed yourself, sacrifice yourself because you still feel guilty for staying alive.’
‘That’s not it.’
‘Horseshit. That’s horseshit. I’m just so right you can’t admit it.’
Then suddenly, and for no obvious reason, something changed. The heat had gone out of Pen’s anger. She had surrendered not an inch of ground, but her manner changed. She put her hands to the back of her head and scrunched up her sandy bob. It was a gesture she used little. Her hair was hardly even long enough to be scrunched. But the unconscious action, just for one short moment, made her look positively short-haired,
boyish.
Abe remembered his very first sight of her, sliding out of her cockpit, half-expecting a male hand to help her, pulling her helmet off and shaking her hair free of the grimy sheepskin. She had looked boyish then. Boyish, in the same way that Abe’s eighteen-year-old recruits had been boyish.
Abe gaped at the sight. He almost literally didn’t know if he was looking at Pen Hamilton in peacetime America or a pursuit pilot in wartime France. The two times and places began to merge in his mind. The commotion in his mind subsided – or clarified. A huge sadness rolled over him. He nodded, suddenly tired.
‘You’re right. You’re totally right.’
‘Oh!’ Pen was taken aback by the speed and completeness of her victory. She floundered for a moment, then simply put her hand to his shoulder and said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I did the best I could. I have never reproached myself for not doing more. But all the same. I was their commander and they died. I felt like the overseer, the factory foreman, tending a conveyor belt of death. And you remind me. I hadn’t realised that you did, but you do. From the first time we met. I never knew.’
Pen was profoundly moved, her eyes full of the tears that Abe was too much of a man to shed. Outside, the airplane engine continued to beat. Inside, Abe remained seated, Pen standing close, her face damp with the tears that were really his. Time passed.
After a long while, Abe covered her hand with his and pressed it. ‘Thank you.’ She shook her head, brushing aside thanks or apologies, content to remain in the silence. Eventually, they pulled away. Abe grinned at her: a ghostly, hollow grin.
‘It was a pretty lousy plan, any case.’
Pen nodded. ‘The worst.’
‘All action, no preparation. The way to kill people.’
‘Right. What happened to “Prepare, Observe, Manoeuvre, Destroy”?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. In the war, most of my fellow squadron commanders preferred, “Rush In, Be Brave, Shoot Like Hell, Then Die”.’
They smiled.
‘Listen,’ said Abe, ‘Maybe we can do something smarter. Suppose we make tonight just a reconnaissance trip? I won’t go further than is safe. You can watch out for me all the time. I won’t aim to take any documents, just find out if I can get to them. I’ll call Bosse from the airfield and tell him to back off.’
‘You can do that?’
Abe nodded ‘Pre-agreed code. I’ve got a number where I can reach him.’
Pen fixed Abe with her gaze. Like Abe’s, the silence and steadiness of her stare could be disconcerting. Abe guessed she was trying to evaluate if he was fit to do anything dangerous tonight.
‘I’ll be careful,’ he said. ‘If I smell any trouble, I’ll back off.’
‘OK. In that case, OK.’
Abe looked at her again. The woman-flier and the boy-soldier merged once more. He still felt the sadness that had come over him, but beyond the sadness there was something else, like sunlight glimmering on the edge of cloud.
‘They were only kids,’ he said. ‘Just kids.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re sure you want to do this?’
‘I’m sure.’
Abe took a deep, shuddering breath. Outside, it was dark, but in another couple of hours it would be inkier still. He picked up the bad cylinder from the worktop.
‘OK. Well, we’ve got an engine to fix, then an office to burglarize.’
Pen grinned, wide and white in the gloom.
We,
he’d said,
we.
Said it and meant it.
Mason escorted Willard through the office building to a big white stucco villa compound at the back, to a big easy room, nice rugs over tiled floors, cute reed furniture dotted with sage green cushions, big windows screened by Venetian blinds, heavy air conditioning, and a smell of cigar smoke and whisky.
‘Trip down OK?’
‘Yes, thank you. I must say, I wondered about the train stop. I could see myself waiting on the track-side for ever.’
‘Privacy. We like it.’
‘I can see.’ Ted Powell’s office had taken care of all the arrangements for the Florida trip, but had booked tickets which brought Rosalind and Willard south from Charleston by different routes. Willard had given her some excuse to do with meeting up with old acquaintances – but Powell’s real purpose, he now saw, was to maintain the near perfect cloak of secrecy which covered Marion. When he met up with Rosalind in Palm Springs first thing the following morning, she’d have no idea that her lover had had any business in a place so far from anywhere that most deserts were better connected.
‘Drink?’
Mason pulled down the lid of a folding bar affair at the side of the room. Every possible sort of alcohol was on offer, from Italian grappa to Southern sour mash whiskeys. Willard chose a white Jamaican rum with a splash of soda and helped himself to a thick Cuban cigar. Mason took a shot of whiskey, no ice, no water, and sat down.
‘So,’ said Mason, ‘you get the pleasure of looking after us?’
‘Yes. Just promoted.’
‘You’re kind of young-looking, if you don’t mind me saying. You been with the Firm long?’
‘Long enough,’ Willard said, thinking that really he’d been part of the Firm all his life. But it was true about the promotion. He was now an Associate Banker in the Investment Bureau. ‘The Bureau houses everything important in the Firm,’ Powell had told him. ‘It’s the only area where there are no secrets, where everyone’s in the know.’ And though Willard had joined the Bureau as its most junior citizen, he was also the boss’s son, a possible leader of the Firm.
But Willard had done a lot of growing up since Hollywood. Willard knew that though he was a possible leader of the Firm, he had only passed the first test of many. He had to prove himself and was aching to do so. And Powell Lambert being what it was, its two leaders hadn’t wasted much time in getting Willard started. When Powell had suggested bringing Rosalind down to Florida for a vacation, he’d had an ulterior motive. And his motive had been to bring him here.
Every large import channel (or cluster of smaller ones) was looked after by an individual officer in the Investment Bureau. Willard was to be given this: the Marion import route. He would be responsible for supervising Mason, for liaising with clients, for arranging transportation, for coordinating the whole complex network of alcohol, finance, transport, and bribery on which the Firm depended. How well Willard discharged his new responsibility would do a lot to determine whether he’d ever be trusted to lead the Firm. There couldn’t possibly be a bigger reward for success. There couldn’t possibly be a bigger penalty for failure.
‘And by the way,’ Willard added, ‘I should say that New York is very happy with the way things are run here.’
‘They oughta be.’
‘As a matter of fact, there’s a notion going around that we need to pick our import channels, then build them. At the moment, we’ve got alcohol coming from all over. It’s not efficient.’
‘You’re saying more business is going to be coming our way?’
‘At the moment, we have twenty-two import routes active on the east coast. Fifteen more coming in from Canada. More in the west. More in the south. More than fifty active routes all told.’ Willard recited the figures as though they were the most familiar facts in the world.
‘That don’t sound too efficient.’ Mason’s voice went still and careful, as though not wanting to interrupt Willard’s stream of thought.
‘No. We built things that way in the beginning for safety reasons. If we lost a route or two, if we lost a consignment or two, then we had plenty of others to cover the loss. That made a lot of sense while we still had a big problem with hijack. It made sense before our relationships with the law enforcement services were put on a proper professional basis.’ Willard continued to speak, almost exactly as his father had put it to him.
‘Right,’ said Mason in a whisper. ‘But now there ain’t a cop in the country that doesn’t want our money. There ain’t too many hijackers who want a crack at our booze.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So?’
‘So the idea in New York is that we should eliminate most of our import routes. We should concentrate on the best.’
‘Including this one?’
‘I’m here to tell you that Marion is the most important route we have. Mr Powell himself asked me to come down here. He wants me to verify that everything is being run in the proper way. A security check, if you like. A double check on all your excellent work. But assuming that I’m happy – and I expect to be – then we’ll expand.’
‘Expand? Any idea of… Any clue at all as to…?’
‘We’d aim to treble the quantities you handle within a year. After that, maybe the same again. After that, who knows? Powell wants this route to be the largest entry point for alcohol anywhere in the United States.’
Mason had held his breath as Willard spoke, then went on holding it for a second or two more. Then he breathed out, and his face broke into a smile, bigger and bigger, until his whole face seemed consumed by that one huge, sunny, criminal smile.
‘And you’re gonna be the guy in New York helping us do it, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You have sole responsibility, or are you reporting to someone else on this?’
‘Sole responsibility. I report directly to Mr Powell.’
‘Powell? Shit, pal, someone likes you a lot.’
‘I guess.’
Mason rolled his whiskey glass around in his hand. His face was twinkling with a rising pleasure and excitement. He punched Willard softly on the shoulder and said, ‘If we do things right here, I figure there are gonna be a few bonuses flying around. Some for you, some for me.’
‘Mr Powell told me to tell you that there is virtually no limit to the rewards available.’
Mason smiled and raised his glass. ‘No limit. I like that. No limit.’
They got down to business.
Willard knew the way things worked at Powell Lambert in general terms. He knew about the import, transport and distribution of alcohol. He knew about the extra smuggling which made a further profit on the side. He knew about the bank’s careful financing and organisation of the trade. He knew something, not much, of the close relationship between the bank and its clients, the way the Firm had almost overnight become sole banker to the elite criminal fraternity of America. He knew, again in general terms only, about the way the Firm set out to bribe anyone who mattered, from federal law enforcement down. But he knew nothing about the specifics of Mason’s operation. Ted Powell had been careful on that point.
‘No reason for you to know, Will. I want you to go down there with an open mind. Come back. Tell me what you like, what you don’t. If I brief you too hard in advance, I’m gonna make it harder for you to see things fresh.’
And that, almost, had been that. But Willard had noticed something. That ‘
I
’ which Powell always used. And it wasn’t just the way he spoke. It was Powell who came into work on Wall Street every day. It was Powell who was there when daily operating decisions were made. It was Powell who oversaw the insurance department. It was Powell who, as far as Willard could see, ran the Firm. Willard had asked his father about it.
‘Oh, you know, it took two men when we were getting things set up. These days, I spend most of my time with the armaments business. Thornton Ordnance is still a dependable profit-maker, but it needs attention. Too much damn peace-making.’
Willard had found it odd, but no more. In the meantime, he had plenty else to worry about. Mason began talking about the operation under his command. He talked about the Havana purchasing agent, the principal suppliers, the current state of prices. Outside, a humid Georgian evening rolled over into a humid Georgian night. Over the air conditioning and the burr of conversation, Willard once fancied that he could hear the sound of an airplane engine. Not in the air, but on the ground. But the thought was an idiotic one, and he shook clear of it. The sound was probably just an electric generator or a car engine idling. The conversation ran on, until they reached the topic of transportation.