Authors: Harry Bingham
For two weeks, Willard thought things through and came to a conclusion. On arrival back in New York, he took up his new place in that hallowed space, the Investment Bureau. He arranged his desk, fussed over his furniture, began to order new lamps, new deskstands, new fountain pens, all now without any regard at all for cost.
And he placed a call. The call was to Bob Mason. Willard issued an order and gave it immediate effect.
The effect of Willard’s instructions was immediate and overwhelming.
Security, which had been tight before, just got a whole lot tighter. Armed men, with weapons loose and eyes watchful, paired up on the road, the rail line, and the river, both upstream and down. And Mason, at Willard’s specific request, did another thing too. He told Abe that he wanted the flying team to relocate to Marion. ‘Keeps it in-house. Things’ll be safer that way.’
‘We’ve never had a problem down in Miami,’ said Abe.
‘Right, and I don’t want to wait around for that to change.’
‘Why should it? Have you heard something to make you worry?’
Mason shook away the question with a punch on the shoulder and an affable, roguish grin. ‘Nothing, pal. Only I got worry as a kind of medical condition.’
‘We can’t relocate. Pen needs to keep in touch with your freighters in Havana, plus that mail route is still perfect cover for us. How else are you gonna explain having planes into Cuba and over the ocean every single day of the week?’
‘So she stays. And that mechanic of yours can stay.’
‘Me? That’s what you mean? You’re relocating me?’
Mason grinned and punched Abe again. ‘We’re pleased to have you, kid.’
It was the blue light of first dawn. Stars still twinkled in the west, where the night was thickest. It was early to leave, but Pen hadn’t been able to sleep and loved nothing better than watching dawn break from high overhead. She took off alone, unwatched. She made her take-off so fast, she had a hundred feet of air clear beneath her by the time the low scrub of the airfield boundary flashed under her wing. She soon hit the rumble of coastal turbulence, but the big plane rode the bumps uncaring. The throttle was open and the plane climbed fast.
Beneath her nose, the ocean spread out, like finally it had room to stretch. In contrast to the whitening east, the land below was dark blues and browns, spangled here and there with the glow of electric lights. She climbed higher and higher, far above her normal altitude. The altimeter reeled around, grimly committed to its single truth-telling task.
Pen was not flying like her usual self. There were no difficult winds, no bands of weather to avoid. She could have made a long, slow, steady climb to her normal cruising height of three thousand feet, and flown direct to Havana, with no need to do anything but check her course and keep an eye on her instruments. But not today.
You’ll have a copilot, I assume
. It hadn’t been a dumb thing to say. Alcock and Brown had flown as a pair. Most of the fliers who’d tried to follow had done the same. And Abe hadn’t been unkind. Far from it. His voice had gone soft and sympathetic. But his sympathy had only made it worse.
A copilot
. Pen realised she had already written herself into that role. For the Orteig Prize for certain, but also for life. The simple truth was that she was in love with him. Catastrophically so. Head over heels. Spinning like a plane without a pilot.
Her brain muzzy with the oxygen-poor air and the abruptness of her ascent, Pen forced herself to think things through logically. Perhaps, this was just the first rush of feeling. In a way, on meeting Rockwell, she’d been prepared to fall in love. She’d got herself ready for it, more than half-expecting it. After all, what else should have happened? They were two of the leading fliers of their generation, both committed to their pursuit, both single, both with a passionate love for the soaring freedoms of the air. So she’d been ready to love him. What else should have happened?
But then there had been the chain of disappointments, her mounting anger at Abe’s aloofness, his stonewall ability to keep her away from anything which threatened his masculine isolation. But their conversation in the tool shed had broken all that. She could even now hear his unadorned admission. ‘You’re right. You’re completely right.’ She could feel his head on her shoulder, the tears that were really his sparkling in her eyes. She could sense the presence of all the men whom Abe had once commanded to their deaths. And she had understood. From that point on, her tumble into love had been headlong, unstoppable.
But his answer had been remorseless.
I fly solo.
Over the Atlantic and in life.
And perhaps he was right. Perhaps Abe was made differently from other folk. Perhaps he felt nothing at all of the tumult in Pen’s own heart. Never had, never would. Forcing herself to think things over in a light as cold and empty as the air she was flying through, Pen was compelled to admit that there was nothing at all to give her hope.
The air continued to brighten. It had become bright enough to read by. Pen picked up the US Post Office mailbag down by her feet. It was stuffed with mail, five or six pounds of it, a big load by their paltry standards. Pen began to riffle through the letters, looking for mail it might be valuable to open and read.
As luck would have it, she found it almost straight away.
The fifth letter in the pile, postmarked Jacksonville, was addressed to Marion’s bank in Cuba. Pen steamed the envelope open. Extracting the letter with care, Pen clipped it to her mapboard and began to read. The letter was signed by Bob Mason himself and it contained just five lines: an instruction to alter the signatory arrangements on Marion’s principal Cuban bank account. Instead of Frank Lambaugh’s signature alone being sufficient for funds to be paid out of the account, any such disbursements would in future require both Lambaugh’s signature and Mason’s personal authorisation by telephone. That was all.
But the more Pen thought about it, the more she was certain that there was more to the change than met the eye. Lambaugh was a cocky, aggressive, domineering man. He liked to show off his big American cars, his gold jewellery, his big villa, his latest imports. He hated her, she’d realised, not just because she was a woman, but because she saw his ostentatious displays of money and was deeply, utterly unimpressed.
She turned back to the letter. Just for a moment, Pen’s love for Abe and the impossibility of it ever leading anywhere dwindled into the background. Perhaps, just perhaps, this letter held a solution to their problems.
Abe stared at his new bedroom.
Twenty feet by twenty, it was somewhat larger than the house he’d been born in. The bed was an enormous affair, all polished wood, sprung mattress, fancy counterpanes, and matching nightstands. The bathroom opened right off his bedroom and contained a huge tub, a shower, two basins, and (to his impressed astonishment) a bidet. The house had central heating, air conditioning, a fridge, a freezer, marble tiling in the front hall, a two-car garage, telephones in three different rooms and – of course, because this was Marion – a built-in bar in the living room with enough booze to light up a city.
‘OK?’ said Mason, grinning at Abe’s dumbstruck reaction. ‘It’s a little small, but we figured there was only one of you.’
‘You’ve got places bigger than this?’
‘Oh sure. This one’s just two bedrooms, plus it don’t have no pool, things like that. But don’t worry, pal, we think highly of you. You’ve got one of the nicer pads all right.’
Abe led Mason into the gigantic living room, where a huge fire threw its unnecessary heat straight up the towering chimney.
‘Drink?’ said Abe, playing host.
Mason didn’t just nod, he went behind the bar and poured himself a glass of Jamaican rum, taken on the rocks, and poured a smaller glass of whiskey for Abe. The airman couldn’t guess if Mason’s action was deliberate, but it made the point all right. Though Abe might get to live in the house, he did so because Mason let him. This was Mason’s house, Mason’s booze, Mason’s town.
‘How come you brought me here?’ asked Abe, once they were settled across two vast white couches that faced off across the fireside.
‘You bring the boats in here, it makes sense for you to base yourself here.’
‘Only I start watching the boats fifty or a hundred miles south of Jacksonville. Miami made every bit as much sense, and that way I could cover more easily for Pen and vice versa.’
‘Yeah, well, we’ve made the decision, ain’t we? Oh, and I meant to say, an extra hundred bucks a week, for you and Hamilton, kind of a thank you.’
‘Thanks.’
Mason held his drink up, so the glass obscured everything of Abe except his head. To Mason’s eye, Abe was just a head atop a whiskey glass.
‘I’ve been figuring it all up,’ he said at last.
‘Huh?’
‘How much we’ve paid you since you started with us.’
‘Must be a lot by now.’
‘Ten thousand bucks. More than. More than ten thousand bucks.’
‘That’s a lot.’
‘Yeah, only you haven’t exactly gone crazy with it have you? How many suits you got?’
‘Suits? Two. My normal one and my –’
‘Yeah and your one for best. Jeez. Ten thousand bucks in six months and you still have a suit for best. A car? You used to race ’em. You even own one?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it.’
Mason shook his head in disapproval and raised his glass so that Abe’s head dunked below the drink.
‘Why d’you work for us? Most people, I don’t have to ask. They work for money. I give ’em money. They go spend it. Most of the guys gripe about not getting as much money as they think they deserve. Not you. Not Hamilton.’
‘The farm. You know I’ve been –’
‘– digging your folks out of debt. Yeah, yeah, I know, only how many more tractors can your pa use? He’s gotta leave some room for cows.’
Abe held Mason’s gaze for a while. He was being interrogated, he knew. The fireside drink and the big house and the show of warmth didn’t cancel out the fact that Mason was a hoodlum checking out one of his employees. Abe’s tone grew a little more serious.
‘You’re right. It’s not just the farm.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’ve got a project. An aviation project. It’s gonna need money. All you can give me and more.’
‘What’s the deal?’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Buddy, you are my business.’
Abe tensed before answering. Telling Pen had been one thing, telling Mason was quite another. He’d cherished the idea of the Orteig Prize for so long and in such privacy, he had to unclench something inside before he could release it.
‘The Atlantic. It’s never been crossed. Not properly. Not the way it ought to be done.’
Mason goggled a second. ‘You want to fly across the ocean?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘In an airplane? … I mean, that’s possible, is it?’
‘I think so.’
‘And if it ain’t? You gonna have a boat underneath to catch you?’
‘Uh-huh, if I can find one that does a hundred-twenty miles an hour.’
‘Shit. That’s why you’re here?’
Abe didn’t give an answer, but Mason didn’t need one. He began chuckling into his drink, swallowed it, then threw the ice cubes fizzing and spitting into the fire. He poured himself another drink, but smaller this time, no ice. He didn’t sit back down.
‘Hamilton. Why does she fly? The dame’s loaded.’
‘No, of course, not for the money…’ Abe thought he knew what he was going to say. He was going to talk about flying, about Pen’s commitment to aviation, about the difficulty of a rich girl finding something serious to commit to. But he stopped dead before he’d even started.
She loved him
. In the sudden emptiness following Mason’s question, in the huge emptiness of that cavernous room, the fact seemed so obvious it was astonishing to Abe that he hadn’t seen it before. She loved him. How could she not? What else could possibly motivate a woman, no matter how remarkable, to do what she was doing, to run the risks that she was running?
He couldn’t reply. His mouth moved, but nothing came out. He felt dazed by his sudden knowledge. Mason was about to repeat his question, but stopped. His face was intent for a moment, then broke into a wide and friendly grin.
‘OK, buddy, I get it,’ he chortled. ‘I shouldn’t have asked. Least, I
should
have asked, but I don’t necessarily need you to answer. Dames, huh? Ain’t it always the way?’ He held his drink up, then swallowed the lot in a single draught. He belched. ‘Yeah, and maybe you’re a straight guy too. I wouldn’t know. I’ve forgotten what they look like.’
He made ready to go. Abe – still dazed, but somehow still alert – stopped him.
‘If I’m gonna live here, I’m going to need someplace to work.’
‘Huh?’
‘So far I’ve been running the paperwork side of things from Miami. Maintenance schedules, fuel supplies, equipment needs, flight timetables, all that kind of thing. Plus Arnie and I have our little project to work at. There’s a fair bit of paper involved there too.’
Mason swept his arm around the room. The thing about huge houses is they need filling. But once you’ve bought yourself a couple of sofas, a bed, a kitchen table, pretty much everything you need is already taken care of. So big houses fill up with stuff which is darn near pointless. Fancy little tables with polished tops and bendy legs. Dainty little chairs. Desks so gleamingly polished it would be pretty much an insult if anyone used them.
‘You want space?’
‘It’s not space I need, it’s… Heck, Mason, this place don’t look or smell or feel like a place to work. Don’t you have a room somewhere with a desk and a chair and a lightbulb and a window and maybe a file cabinet and nothing much else at all?’
Mason went still.
He wasn’t normally the still-going kind of a guy. His face liked to move. Even when he wasn’t talking, his lips and eyes were signing encouragement, disbelief, enthusiasm, surprise – whatever kept the conversation rolling forward. But now he went still. Abe could see the calculations unfolding behind his eyes; could see the distrust and the promise of violence which lay only inches behind. But, as Abe saw it, the mobster had only one way to decide. If Abe was OK, then he could have his office. If Abe wasn’t OK, then he should be given it anyway, to encourage him into doing something which would end up damning him.