Authors: Harry Bingham
‘We used to run these little launches up and down. They were cheap to run, only we lost some to the Coastguard, some to hijack. There’s plenty of activity off the coast these days. Fishing boats, rum-runners, you name it. Everyone’s carrying rods. Tense. Things happened. We lost boats and men. Costs kept riding up. So we changed things around. We got a coupla freighters, barge-type things, enough cargo space to take three thousand cases of drink. They’re heavily armed and there’s not many fishermen fancy the look of ’em.’
‘Freighters, though?’ said Willard.
‘Too slow, you mean?’
‘Well, aren’t they?’
‘They didn’t tell you?’
‘Didn’t tell me what?’
‘Mr Powell and Mr Lambert have operations all over this great country of ours. You honestly don’t know why they picked you to look after this one?’
Willard shook his head, feeling irritated.
‘You’re going to like this. They picked you, ’cause you’re a birdman. America’s favourite ace and all.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Airplanes. That’s our secret. We got airplanes looking out for us. They check out the coast, tell us if it’s clear. We only go in if we get the OK.’
Willard gaped. ‘You have observation planes?’
‘Two of ’em. DH-4s, if that means anything to you. It’s just a box with wings to me.’
Willard got control of his astonishment. The airplane engine, the grass strip, the whole improbable set-up seemed to get both stranger and more explicable in an instant.
In the meantime, Mason was running on to other subjects. There was the railroad, for starters, and Mason wanted to be able to load up ten or twenty railcars at a time. That meant complex negotiations with railroad officials – negotiations that Willard would need to handle from New York. Everyone needed their bribe. The thing was getting the payments right. Not too little. Not too much.
‘And the police, presumably? These freight trains have to move through a lot of states.’
Mason shrugged. ‘We take care of county officials. You guys take care of the state and federal side of things. Don’t seem like any of us have a lot of problems these days. That’s who’s making the real money. You wanna make a little dough, be a bootlegger. You wanna get rich, be a cop. Ain’t that the way?’
‘County law enforcement? Down here I guess…?’
‘Yeah, you guess right. We ain’t on no road. Our railroad line’s a dead end. We ain’t in anybody’s faces. Sometimes I’ve been with operations where the cops are friendly, only they think every now and then they’ve got to make a bust ’cause otherwise folks think they ain’t behaving like cops no more. That’s not like that here. There’s only one regular cop in the whole of Okinochee County. We make sure that cop is very, very happy with us. A couple of times a year, he gives us a call, says he’s gonna come and bust us. He gives us plenty of notice. We clean things up, invite him in. He goes away saying he ain’t found nothing aside from a load of bananas. After that’s happened a coupla times, it kinda takes the pressure off.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘And aside from that, there ain’t too many folks in the state that even know we’re here.’
Willard looked out of the window. Up on a low hill, not more than a mile away, stood a cluster of low wooden-built houses, poor-looking, suffering.
‘Your neighbours there?’
‘Independence.’
‘Huh?’
‘Independence, name of the town.’
‘You have any trouble with them?’
Mason grimaced. ‘No, not really, only that’s a way of saying, yeah, a little bit. It’s a funny kinda town, Independence. It’s one of those real old-fashioned places. A slice of old-time America. Independence was dry way before Volstead. Most likely they’ll be dry a century after. And some of the folks there are mighty keen on their principles. Caused us trouble. Called the cops. That didn’t do a lot for them, but then they shook things up with the county newspaper men. Wrote letters to State Congress in Atlanta. Got a meeting with the state governor. We sorted everything out, of course, but those kind of things don’t come cheap. And you’re always worried that one of these days, something’s gonna spring a major leak.’
‘So? How do you manage things now?’
Mason shrugged. ‘Some of ’em we buy. The farmland round here is poor as hell. You don’t see a lot of autos on the roads here. Shouldn’t think most of the houses up there even have an indoor tub. But we’ve got money. Jobs. We’re generous. Mostly people are on our side because our dough talks louder than their principles.’
‘And the exceptions?’
‘Some of them have taken their precious principles straight up into heaven.’
‘Yes.’ Willard gulped, still not entirely used to Powell Lambert’s approach to business.
‘And some of them we’re working on. We can’t just go into town with a couple of Tommy guns, like we could in Chicago. There’s not a lot of homicide round here. People get kind of upset about it. But we apply pressure. A broken leg here. A fire there. I wouldn’t say we got ’em licked, but we got ’em hemmed in, defensive. The town’s dying to be quite honest with you. Another few years and there’ll be nothing much there, ’cept for poor folks on our payroll. Meantime, we keep an eye on the main troublemakers. If they start to kick up stink, we’ll go do what we gotta do.’
They continued talking. Detail. Detail. Detail. Modern industrial organisation and fanatical attention to detail was what kept Powell Lambert fifteen miles out ahead of the chasing pack. Willard was searching in his questions. Mason was efficient and thorough in his answers. Eventually, Willard reached out for his glass of rum, found it empty, and stood up.
‘It’s a fantastic business unit you have here. I’m impressed.’
Mason grinned. ‘You haven’t even heard the best of it. This bit’ll really crack you up.’
‘Yes?’
‘You wanna guess who I’ve got flying observation for me?’
‘Who?’
‘Go on. Guess.’
‘How should I know? Charlie Chaplin. Shoeless Joe. Jack Dempsey. Mary Pickford.’
‘He’s here now. Out there. Fixing up his engine. A pal of yours.’
‘A pal of mine?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Willard shook his head. A friend of his? He doubted it.
‘Rockwell.’
‘Rockwell? Captain Rockwell? The guy who…?’
‘Yeah. The guy you flew with. The guy who shot down around two million Krautheads.’
Mason grinned like he was training to wrap a smile right around the back of his head. Willard knew he was expected to respond with something similar. But he didn’t.
‘Out there?’
‘Right there, out on the landing field, unless he’s done already. You wanna go along, say hi?’
Willard was about to let out an appalled ‘No!’ when he realised that Mason had been joking. The precise connection between Marion and New York was unknown to anyone except Mason, and possibly also Frank Lambaugh in Cuba.
But Willard’s feelings were still in tumult. Having been standing, he sat back down. His hands gripped the side of the cane armchair so tightly it began to creak. He had one of those episodes, where the world suddenly goes buzzy and distant, where it feels like you’re seeing things from down the end of a long, dark tube. Leaning forwards and with deliberate emphasis on every word, he said, ‘You cannot use Captain Rockwell to fly for you.’
Mason laughed. Sure this kid had theoretical responsibility in New York, but he, Mason, was the man who ran things. ‘He’s a good guy. You oughta know that.’
‘Captain Rockwell is one of the best men in the world. That’s why you can’t use him.’
Willard wasn’t even quite sure why he was saying what he was saying. Was it that he didn’t trust Rockwell’s motives? Or was it that he didn’t want one of the few true heroes of the last war to be sullied by contact with a grubby reality? He didn’t know, he didn’t care. He just knew he didn’t want Rockwell within a hundred miles of Marion. The buzzy feeling had gone, but he still felt hot discs glowing high up on each cheek.
‘He’s OK,’ Mason persisted.
‘So you say.’
‘He never even wanted to join us. I practically had to go on my knees.’
‘Maybe he just wanted to see you on your knees.’
‘And we tested him. He came through two hundred per cent.’
‘Tested him?’
‘We gave him an opportunity to blab to the cops. Encouraged him. Did everything we could to make him.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘We offered a little bit of carrot, then a little bit of stick. I’m sorry. I know you like the guy.’
Willard jerked his mind away from Mason’s ‘little bit of stick’.
‘And?’
‘He didn’t say nothing. Not a word. He’s probably the best value guy on our payroll.’
‘You said you had two planes. Who flies the other one?’
‘Aw, now this bit I don’t like so much. We got a girl, would you believe it? Rockwell insisted on her. She can fly some, so it seems. Our freighter captains think the world of her.’
‘I don’t like it.’ Willard’s watch ticked loudly on his wrist. He thought of Rosalind. He needed to catch the next train down the coast if he were to arrive at Palm Springs first thing tomorrow. He moved restlessly in his chair. ‘It stinks.’
‘It’s working a million dollars.’
‘Can’t you get some other fliers?’
‘Why? Why would I? Besides, you’ll know more about this than me, but it ain’t so easy flying out over the ocean, is it? One of these days, one of those airplanes is gonna fall out of the sky and make a big splash. Not to mention the storms we get down here.’
‘Well, they aren’t going to fly in bad weather, are they?’
‘They do.’
‘They do?’
‘Yeah. All except the worst.’
‘Even the girl?’
‘Yeah, her too.’
Willard fidgeted some more. ‘D’you watch them?’
‘Yeah. Some.’
‘That’s not good enough. Jesus Christ! This is Captain Rockwell you’re dealing with.’ Rockwell had shot down nineteen German machines. He’d been able to do that by being invisible when he wanted to be, lethal when he didn’t. ‘I don’t care what it costs, we need to watch him.
Twenty-four hours a day. See where he goes, who he sees, what he does. Everything.’
‘You wanna do that, you’d better get your insurance department involved. We normally only handle the little stuff ourselves.’
‘No!’ Willard’s answer was explosive.
‘No?’
‘No.’ Willard repeated the word more quietly this time, surprised by the force of his own reactions. ‘I want to keep this as quiet as we can. If we get the insurance men involved, we may find it hard to get them uninvolved.’
Mason nodded. It was a reason he could sympathise with. ‘OK.’
‘And you’ve got guards on the office buildings now? I mean, if he’s here at night…’
‘Sure. Least, I send a guy around every hour or so. We’ve never had a problem…’
‘Every hour? That’s nowhere near enough. I want two men around the perimeter all night. I want another man inside. And a fourth guy to prowl around and check that those three are doing their job. This is Rockwell you’ve got outside.’
‘This isn’t the first night he’s been here, not by a long stretch.’
‘Then you’d better hope he hasn’t taken advantage before now.’
‘The doors are all locked. We’re strict about who gets keys.’
Willard puffed scornfully at the idea that his old commander might be stopped by a set of locks. He wouldn’t budge until Mason had picked up the phone and given the necessary orders.
Willard nodded. ‘And his phone? His home telephone? You can listen in on it, I assume?’
‘Sure…’ Mason’s tone was uncertain.
‘Sure? What does that mean? Yes or no?’
‘He don’t exactly have a home phone. He lives in a shack behind the airplane hangar. There’s a phone in there, though, and we listen to that… He lives kind of rough for a guy on his income.’
‘Oh, and that gives you a lot of reassurance about his motives, does it?’
‘He’s bought his parents their farm back from the bank. Every month it’s a new tractor, or a harvester, or whatever. I guess maybe the guy plans to make his bundle then retire there.’
‘Sure. I can just see Captain Rockwell planting string beans and going to bed happy.’
The two men stared each other out. Willard was, in theory, the boss. Mason was twenty years older and a million times more experienced. At last, Mason grunted.
‘OK. You want us to track him, I guess we can sort something out.’
‘Good.’ Willard relaxed. ‘And don’t trust him. No matter what. Don’t trust him. He’s a pursuit pilot, remember. One of the very, very best. If you let him get close, close enough so you can see him, then it’s too late. By that point, you’re already dead.’
They hadn’t done it, hadn’t got close.
Abe had got inside the office building, but he hadn’t taken two paces inside before there was a repeated owl call behind him – the agreed warning signal from Pen – and Abe himself heard the tread of a guard further on down the block. He’d left the building ultra-cautiously, blessing the dark night that surrounded them. He found Pen and the pair of them waited outside for two hours, watching the block, waiting for an opportunity to enter safely. But the building was always guarded. Tightly, seriously guarded. The weird thing was that, inexplicably, it seemed as though security had just been radically tightened; literally that night, that hour almost. There seemed an extra tension, an extra sharpness in the movement of the guards.
Eventually they gave up and crept away into the shelter of some thick scrub.
‘Sorry to ask,’ said Abe, ‘but I think it might be a good idea if you lay down and kind of messed yourself up a little.’
‘You want me to …?’ Pen began to ask, then she realised what he meant. ‘Oh.’
She lay on her back in the dirt and rolled around until her hair and clothes were muddied up with dirt and leaves. Abe knelt down and got dirt on his elbows and knees. They both undid some buttons. The darkness hid Pen’s face, which was blushing hotly.
‘Sorry to ask,’ said Abe, ‘only if they wonder where we’ve been, then –’
‘Right. You’re right. Don’t worry.’
Embarrassed, they made their way to the boarding house which Mason operated for themselves and the freighter crews and anyone else who passed through Marion without staying long. As the booze volumes had increased, Mason had increasingly avoided bringing any gambling business into the town, but a couple of villas still housed gaming rooms, and there was a beat of loud gramophone music and alcohol-fuelled laughter from some of the doors they passed. When they reached the boarding house, they stood outside and brushed some of the dirt away, as any furtive couple would have done. As Abe swept the dust from Pen’s back, bottom and hair, he realised that, having almost never touched her before today, he had now touched her twice in one evening: the first time in the tool shed when she’d put her hand on his shoulder out of sympathy for his feelings and kept it there, with tears damp in her eyes; and now this. Her body felt shockingly slender, shockingly warm. It felt like the most intimate thing he’d ever done.